Why Self-Healing Is Generational Healing with Tracey Yokas

• Why your healing can't be reliant on others, even if they are part of the original harm.  
• What helping your children looks like and why it may not be what you think. 
• Why courage is sometimes necessary for compassion toward yourself and others. 
• Realize that everyone can reconnect with their inherent creativity to process emotions and explore self-expression.  

Tracey Yokas creates stuff. When she isn't writing about mental health and wellness, she can be found playing with paint, glitter, and glue. A former entertainment industry professional, Tracey has an affinity for color coded art supplies and is dedicated to supporting women in the journey towards authenticity and fulfills her mission by creating safe spaces where art, words, and vulnerability meet in dynamic community.

Tracey has a master's degree in counseling psychology and is the author of the book, Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing in which she shares her family's journey with mental illness and healing so that others will know they are not alone and hope is real.

Tracey's website: traceyyokascreates.com

Find Tracey on Instagram: @traceyyokas

Find Tracey's book, Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing here

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*Music by Sam Murphy*
IG: @sammmmmmurphy

Transcript

Why Self-Healing Is Generational Healing with Tracey Yokas

Jessica Hornstein: Hello everybody. Welcome to the No Not Crazy podcast. I am really happy you're here, and I am very delighted to introduce you today to Tracey Yokas. Hello. Hello, Tracey. Thank you for being here. I'm going to introduce you to everybody and then we'll get started on this conversation.

Tracey Yokas creates stuff. When she isn't writing about mental health and wellness, she can be found playing with paint, glitter, and glue. A former entertainment industry professional, Tracey has an affinity for color coded art supplies and is dedicated to supporting women in the journey towards authenticity and fulfills her mission by creating safe spaces where art, words, and vulnerability meet in dynamic community. Tracey has a master's degree in counseling psychology and is the author of the book, Bloodlines: A Memoir of Harm and Healing in which she shares about her family's journey with mental illness and healing so that others will know they are not alone and hope is real.

So I just, before we get into the the serious stuff, I have to just say you and I are definitely aligned because as a former schoolteacher, I also have an affinity for art supplies. So, I get you. 

Tracey Yokas: Yes. Nothing better. Nothing better. 

Jessica Hornstein: Oh my goodness. I know. I know. I really wanted to start with your book, which recently came out.

So, congrats on that. 

Tracey Yokas: Thank you.

Jessica Hornstein: It's about your, your journey and your whole family's journey sparked, I guess we could say by issues that your daughter was grappling with, but that you realized went so far beyond your daughter and what seemed to be right in front of you at the moment.

Can you share a bit about what was going on at that time and where that led? 

Tracey Yokas: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. So, this goes back to 2012. My mother passed away very unexpectedly. It was the summer before my daughter's eighth grade year of school. And, you know, obviously losing someone close to you is very hard for everyone.

And it was a difficult time. We all did the best we could to kind of muddle through. It was a shock. So it wasn't something that we had time to prepare for. So we went about our business. And one day about, I would say three weeks after my mom passed, my daughter woke up one morning and she just wasn't that hungry anymore.

And then days went by and she was eating less and less and less. And then soon she was really not eating anything at all. And we realized pretty quickly that this was going to be a, a diagnosable eating disorder. And that devolved in the course of the journey, which is outlined in the book in more detail, but that devolved into severe depressive episode and self-harm and escalating treatment and all those things.

So. Starting out, it was rallying the forces. This is what we're going to do. You know, I'm the mom, I'm going to fix this problem. That's my job. And over time, as my daughter became more ill, as we ramped up treatment options, a series of things took place, which ultimately led to the painful conclusion, which seems rational, but wasn't at the time, that I actually didn't have control over my daughter's illness. I didn't really understand this at the time, it would take me quite a number of years to really fully understand that, uh, the conditioning I received in my childhood and patterns that had passed down from well beyond my own parents to me from far beyond that were really impeding my ability to support my daughter in the way that I wanted to, so that the best thing I could actually do, what I actually had control over was myself and learning more about me and what was hindering my ability to be there for her and how to take care of myself so that I could also help take care of her in a way that would work for her rather than trying to control her, control the illness, control what was happening because that, as we know, is an illusion.

Jessica Hornstein: Mm. Yes, I think we all, um, wish we had control of her. over everything. 

Tracey Yokas: Exactly. 

Jessica Hornstein: Comes up in our faces a lot that we don't in all sorts of ways. I'm wondering if you could sort of dig in a little more into some of the, the things that really brought that realization home because it is such a hard thing to sort of grasp in those, especially those scary moments. You know, when something like that is going on, we tend to want to hold on tighter and try to control even more, right? Um, so how were you able to sort of, you know, pull back a little bit in a way and see that that wasn't what the moment called for. 

Tracey Yokas: Well, not to oversimplify the matter, but it definitely took a long time. So I don't want to give the impression that it was just like a couple months later. I figured out, Oh, this isn't working because that's not the case. So when my daughter. got into treatment. When we placed her into treatment, I immediately also sought out therapy for myself because I knew even with my background, my training, um, in fact, I used my training to beat myself up because it was like, oh, you know, I should be able to do something about this.

I got myself into individual therapy. right away as well. So for a long time, therapy, hers and mine was crisis management. So moving from one course of treatment to the next, because whatever we tried next really didn't work. So it took quite a while for me to, and there's so much fear. I mean, when our kids are sick, I just can't stress enough, there's just so much fear that goes along with that. And when someone isn't eating, that's not a sustainable way to move through life. So there was so much fear and we don't make our best decisions. We can't make our best decisions when we're in that frame of mind all of our waking hours. So it was quite a process of slowly realizing over many months that the level at which I was trying to operate like energetically, if that makes sense, and just the way I was moving through the world and isolating myself from my friends withdrawing from my life, that this was not a sustainable way to move forward and actually was not helping my daughter. So that became clear as well over the months that we were on this journey.

But I guess I would say the more my therapist talked to me about what I could do to take care of myself through this process, which really made me very angry when she first kept saying it. I completely 100 percent missed that she was asking me to do what I want my daughter to do at that point. I missed that entirely, but I realized that if my daughter was dysregulated, fancy word for a lot of emotions, I immediately became dysregulated as well, instantly, which is a relational pattern that I learned as a very, very young child. So for a while, I thought that was kind of normal. Like, of course, if your child's upset, a parent's going to be upset. And actually not everybody operates in that way. So therapy really helped me. Understanding that my job was to work on my own nervous system, my own reactions, my own feelings, to be able to be capable of remaining present with her at these times when she was very emotionally reactive, not so that I could do something.

In fact, what was required was just my presence and anyone who has experienced their emotions being hijacked, which I would imagine is all of us, you know, understands that kind of instantaneous fly off the handle reaction. It's very ingrained, so it's hard work to slow the process down inside your own mind. 

I had to kind of develop a mantra. Um, where I would be able to be in the room with her and be like, in my head, I'm okay. I'm okay. I can be here. I can do this. She's upset, but I'm okay. And as simplistic as that sounds, it was the starting point for me being able to, um, Much more quickly over time, regulate my own reaction so that I could be present and know we're going to get through this, it's going to be okay, we'll be able to handle whatever comes next and all the things, but it takes a while to get to that point.

Jessica Hornstein: Well, there's so much in what you just said that I want to go back to. I mean, for one thing, at the beginning, you were sort of talking about how that fear, it moves you really into what you were describing as a constricted state, you know, everything shrinking and tightening, right? And all of that. And some of that, moving out of a dysregulated state, is, is moving into a more open state, right? And, as you said, you know, it's really a shift in, in your nervous system. And creating that space, where it it's not an, it's not a reflexive reaction because it's not, it's not about having too many emotions. It's about what you do with them, how you respond or don't respond or react or don't. How you process them once they come up and whether, you know, they're controlling you? Or you have some, ability to look at them from over here and be like, “Hmm, this is what's going on.”

Tracey Yokas: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And it takes you, for those of us who never learned how to do that, it takes a lot of awareness and a lot of control internal to, to be able to deconstruct that process. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yes. Absolutely. Yes, because as you said about something else, we just think it's normal, right? Like all these things that we do, and I don't mean that to put any—it's not, it's not a judgment or criticism of like normal, not normal, good, bad in that way. It's just like, “oh, not everybody. responds that way. Not everybody lives their life that way. Not everybody would have that same thought that I would have when presented with that same situation.” So it's, it's so fascinating when you're like, “Oh, wow, interesting.” 

Tracey Yokas: I had so many of those moments. Oh my gosh, I can't even tell you exactly. And I mean, that was one of the things I wanted to try to convey anyway, in my book was that when you grow up knowing what you know, thinking what you think, doing what you do, this is just who you are.

So we can sometimes not even have the wherewithal to question those things because we've just never had to question them before. So there were many moments where. I've had a lot of therapy over the years. Let me just say I'm 55. I got into therapy the first time when I was 30, then we had a lot of therapy.

Of course, when my daughter became ill, but there's still insights that are coming. Um, but exactly that. I mean, I thought everybody thought, everybody ruminated the way that I did. Everybody thought the terrible things about themselves that I did. And it just like, now it seems, of course, like, of course, everybody doesn't do that.

But at the time, you know, you just, to your point, you think that's normal. That's just how you think. And this is what you know. And I did not have the wherewithal to question that until much later in the process and just be like, what? I mean, people know, like, what boundaries are? People know they can set their own values before they're in their forties?

I mean, just everything, every aspect of my personality, my interactions with other people suddenly appeared in a new way to me once I realized that maybe there are some things that I learned to think that aren't really extremely helpful, 

Jessica Hornstein: Right? Yeah. And that is such an important point to me because it's not about, beating yourself up either for being programmed that way, or even if it's, you know, even if it's just how you are wired, there just may be some things that that is just kind of, you know, part of, of your makeup. there's a reason why we feel the way we feel, and I think it's important to embrace that and respect it while also, as you said, like, “Hmm, is this helpful?” and I mean, maybe it is, maybe it's fine. And then you keep that part, but maybe It's not really serving you, right?And then, that's when that, that work of what's the alternative here, comes in. 

Tracey Yokas: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I just want to say too, for some of us, and that's one reason, there's many reasons, but that's one reason why these conversations are just so important. Some of us don't see ourselves in any of the trauma discourse.

So we understand PTSD from a certain perspective. We understand, um, you know, adverse childhood experiences that are things that make sense that would lead somebody to have maybe more, um, you know, dysregulation or whatever to have to deal with, like growing up in extreme poverty, sexual and physical abuse, having a parent that's incarcerated, all of these, there's like a list of them that.

are tied to trauma. Well, some of us didn't have those experiences. Some of us had who we know, two parents who loved us, you know, had a roof over our head. We had enough food to eat. We didn't have sexual or physical abuse. And so for me, it was kind of looking around and being like, I don't, fit anywhere else.

I just, you know, I have trouble hanging on to friends. I had all of these more, I don't know exactly the right way to say it, but things that were not just such a big deal in the world of like traumatic literature and all that stuff, but they were a big deal to me. But it just felt like there's just something like, I'm just messed up.

Like there's just something wrong with me. Like not this stuff doesn't make sense compared to these other big things where it doesn't make sense. So it was actually very recently, not long before I finished this version of the book that has now come out that I understood that you can have. Especially as children, because we're, you know, from the time we're conceived, we don't have the cognitive wherewithal to understand what's happening to us.

So there can be relational patterns that are actually very, very harmful. And this is not about a parent bashing, because in fact, I became much more compassionate towards my parents when I fully understood more of the dynamics that. created them that came down to create me. So I don't want this to be like, Oh, she's just blaming her parents because that's not what I mean, but I did learn relational patterns that were very unhealthy and it took a long time and a lot of therapy, even after all the stuff we went through with my daughter, for me to really understand just how harmful some of those dynamics were to my own. adult life. And that I basically was a form of kind of a walking trauma response with the way I was interacting with the world.

And I think there's so much more, as I already said, important dialogue about this going on. But if you're that person who's out there listening to this, like I totally get it because you're not necessarily seeing yourself in other places. That doesn't mean that. You know, there aren't things that will be really helpful to you to work through in the healing process of therapy and then whatever else works.

Jessica Hornstein: Yes. Yes. And I want, I want to get into some of the things you discovered about the historical and ancestral relational patterns but I just want to say to what, to what you're saying now is that, I mean, first of all, I love that you're making that point because it adds insult to injury, right?

When you look around and you know, nothing terrible like the big T trauma happened. So as you said, so it's just, it's just me, I'm just inherently messed up or something, right? It just piles on a whole other level of trauma, because then, you're, you're taking that message in. It's important to recognize the genesis of all these things in order to be able to heal them. 

Tracey Yokas: And that's how we interrupt the pattern. I mean, people ask, like, how do you break the cycle? That's exactly how you break the cycle. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yes. I don't know how far back you went in your stuff, and we'll talk about that in one sec, but, um, it's, it is so fascinating. I mean, all the, this research now. coming out that they've done on ancestral trauma with mice and they can trace back the way, you know, I don't know how many generations, it's like six generations, something like that, where they respond to triggers without having any negative association with them, right?

It's just, their great, great, great, great grand mouse, you know, was exposed to something, right. And I mean, it's just, it's amazing. So I think we need to not underestimate, the power of, of all these things. So, so with that, what did you start to uncover as you delved into your past and your family history and all of that, that you could sort of trace the bloodline, I guess. Yes. 

Tracey Yokas: Yes. Aptly named. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yes. 

Tracey Yokas: Well, you know, I mean, I could not go back that far. Let me just start by saying that because both of my parents were already passed away when my daughter got her diagnosis and neither one of them were super talkative about their histories. Silence around these things is one of the core kind of tenants also of generational trauma because nobody's talking about it because nobody kind of learned how to talk about it. So, but I do know, for example, my father was older than my mother, so he was a child of the Great Depression.

He was a veteran of World War II, so he had things in his living on top of whatever else came down to him and those patterns. And then for my mother, she experienced many significant losses from the time she was young, her father passed away when I think she was seven from a debilitating illness. And then her stepfather, a couple of years later, passed away.

And then another significant, I mean, the losses just piled up as they do for many of us. But the issue is, what are you doing with that? And are you doing anything or nothing? And then, so they brought their individual histories together, and then they had me, and then I was supposed to have a baby sister, and my baby sister was stillborn.

So this is another thing that was never, never, ever talked about. I 99. 9 percent of the time didn't even remember I was supposed to have a baby sister, but I'm certain my parents remembered. So I'm certain regardless of the fact that this was something that was never ever talked about, they certainly remembered and were dealing with grief and mourning and all the things except silently and on their own.

So into this mix, And all of this is going into our home, our living, our relational patterns, all the things. And added on, there were other, again, relational patterns like enmeshment, codependency, some narcissistic issues with invalidation and rejection that, again, these are like big fancy words that just equate to how we engage with one another.

And it's not about blame or shame because you get all that stuff from those patterns. And I think also just from being human, there's a component to, you know, someday they'll identify the shame gene. I hope it's sooner rather than later, just so that can help us all not feel so ashamed all the time. Um, but shame really cannot live in the light and in the discourse. And so if we had been able to talk about those things more openly, who knows what might have changed a lot of things, but being able to be the one through the pain, And suffering of my daughter's illness and trying to help her and understanding the hard way that that was really not within my capability that really all I could do was look at myself and do my own work and understand where my thoughts and patterns and reactions were coming from so that I could, as you said, make more conscious choices about how I wanted to engage with myself, with other people.

That is all the work that goes into breaking those cycles. 

Jessica Hornstein: Were there specific things in your behavior or your responses, you know, once you started to see them in yourself, really directly, you could connect that to, “oh, I'm doing this.” I mean, you touched upon before, your own reaction of getting upset when she was upset. Were there other things that you could really sort of connect to how it was, how it's playing out or manifesting in your relationship with her?

Tracey Yokas: Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that is sort of mind blowing about the whole thing is when you really dig in just how many of the patterns repeat. So it's like, I can look to patterns in my marriage. I can look to patterns with my daughter and see many things. I married someone, for example, just an easy one, who's 18 years older than I am. My dad was 20 years older than my mom. So, but it's not like I met him and went, “Oh, you're 18 years older. You're the one for me.” I mean, it just doesn't work that way, you know, but, but for sure. Once it became more clear to me, and again, I will have to say that the wrestling, it took me 10 years approximately to write the book.

And that's because I had to learn craft. I'm not a writer by trade. So there was that element to it, but that was, that's really the least I could do of why it took so long. I mean, it really took a long time because it can take a long time to unpack all this stuff and wrestling with the words and how I was trying to tell the story and how I was trying to learn compassion, my own self and have it my, I mean, a book we're still characters in a book. So it is my family, but it's, it's, you know, 270 pages or whatever. So it's not our whole life story by any stretch, but wrestling with all of that. And the expression of it really helped me in it's a feedback loop. So it helped me also understand things more clearly about things that were going on with us.

So seeing patterns repeat, like having trouble myself. Hanging on to friendships, for example, and then seeing that start to play out with my daughter as she became older and moving into middle school. And then I mean, weight, body image, food is a huge part of our story that again, goes back to my childhood things I didn't want to repeat with my daughter. So I just did the opposite, which I think kind of energetically is like doing the same thing, just. Um, I don't know. I don't think we're going to be able to put on a different dress because it's just still not conscious pattern. So there are so many ways that these things played out.

So the being too close enmeshment, if someone, you know, doesn't really know what that is, it might be like, well, we're parents. Of course we're close to our kids, but there can be dynamics to that, that are just over-identified with somebody else's emotions. Of course, it makes sense. If our child is upset, it makes sense for a parent to get sad or upset too, because we don't want to see our child sad, but taking that on as like ours that someone else, someone else's emotions are, become ours is actually a very unhealthy pattern. And then that is our work that we have to do. I think a lot of people get stuck in that. Well, I wouldn't be this way if the other person didn't feel this or, you know, the behavior or all those things. And we kind of lose sight of our common humanity in that way.

All the emotion, we have all the emotions and actually we've been sold a bill of goods about being happy all the time. I mean, we have all the emotions, all emotions are okay. But to your point, it's, what do we do with them? You know, when we have them and then how, not only what do we do ourselves, but, you know, as parents, what, how are we helping our kids with those things?

And I know for sure. I never learned a language from my parents of them witnessing me having emotions. I think a lot of us a certain age had similar things like, you know, you want to cry, I'll give you something to cry about, or, you know, those kinds of things. Or it's, it's just, it's not okay to be mad, especially for females.

You know, we're not allowed to be mad. So I hope that answers your question, but there, there's just so many, once you start seeing one or two, suddenly it's like, holy moly, there's, , there's patterns and repeating things all over the place. So, but you just pick one, you know, pick the one you need to work on the most in that moment, and that's a great place. There's no wrong place to start. 

Jessica Hornstein: Right. Right. How did you process some of the things that you needed to process? I mean, I'm just thinking as I hear you talk and thinking that really when you came to this place, both of your parents had already passed. So you weren't going to get healing by having some conversation with them or even getting some answers to questions that you may have, wanted to ask. So you really had to sort of go through this process. of healing with them and processing with them, but they weren't there, at least on this plane. 

Tracey Yokas: This is a hard thing for so many people because we do want certain things from someone who may have harmed us and, and those things, but our own healing really truly cannot be conditioned on someone else because whether they're alive or not alive, I mean, we might never get what we think we need from somebody else. So our healing journey is an inside out journey. It's understanding the things that were created inside of us, our thought patterns, feelings, actions, behaviors, all the things that come out of those unhealthy places. And so for me, it was, as I mentioned earlier, hearing my therapist asked me for a year and two thirds, approximately, “What can you do to take care of yourself?” and me getting super angry and pissed off and being like, “What are you even talking about? I have to do this. I have to do that. Like, I can't do that.” to finally be like, “Oh, actually there's kind of nothing else I can do.” Learning how to take care of myself is a gift, not only to me, but it is actually a gift to the other people in my life if I can move through this journey healthier. So for me, I had to stop and be like, okay, I finally understand better what she's talking about. What can I do? And listen to my intuition, which is something else I was never taught how to do. And what was coming, what messages, what was my gut trying to tell me, what was it looking for? What did it need? And the answer I got in the short term was simply a return to a creative practice. I had loved creativity as a child. And like many of us, I walked away from it when I became an adult because I couldn't do it to make a living. So it was frivolous, you know, it was not something that I needed. That's for other people. All those things. And that's, that's just more, more myths, more fallacies. We are all inherently creative. We either use it or we don't, and it doesn't mean all of us can maybe make art for sale. That's not what it's about. It's about honoring your own self and giving voice to parts of you that don't have any other way to communicate.

And so that was the first thing I did was start reclaiming an artistic process that was very simple, like with markers and colored pencils and cause I didn't know what I was doing, but I was expressing things, processing things in a way that I had never done before. And even with all the therapy, it's, it's not an either or situation.

We all need tools in our toolbox as, as kind of icky as I feel and how therapeutic that sounds. It's actually true. So therapy. clinicians were trying to help my daughter have tools. I needed to have my own tools. So therapy is a tool. Creativity is a tool. And really expressing, I dug into messages that were very healing for my journey.

So anti-perfectionism, um, who really am I? What really do I want? What type of person do I want to be? What type of relationships do I want to have? And I was just making art pages and finding quotes and doing things very simply at first, but that was actually a huge step in my healing process. 

Jessica Hornstein: It's also you're, you're tapping into other parts of your brain when you engage in those kinds of activities. So it's also opening up the opportunity to wire things a little differently than they've been wired as well. 

Tracey Yokas: Absolutely. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yeah. So what did you notice coming up for you as you engaged in all that creativity in that, that process of exploring those sides of you. 

Tracey Yokas: Well, I would say fundamentally, I think was the realization that things I thought were the way I should be, like being someone who strove for perfection, those patterns, which so many of us have are actually so harmful.

Striving for perfection is not a healthy thing. We get this all jumbled up. Striving to be our best is of course, something many of us want. We want to do well at our jobs, do well in our friendships and all those things. But this idea that I can be perfect, like this idea that if I just hit a certain weight, or if I find the right workout routine and do it enough, or a lot of things that can be in the guise of self-care can actually be tools that we're using to hurt ourselves, not help ourselves.

So sometimes it's not necessarily about finding a different tool. It's just, how are we actually using it? I mean, I got put on my first diet when I was 11 by my mom and my pediatrician. So I was on a diet for like, I don't know, three decades or something. You know, when my daughter became ill, four decades, maybe whatever it was. Um, feeling like fundamentally, if I could just fix this one thing, somehow I just suddenly fit in and I'd be okay. And of course, now I can look at that and understand how ridiculous it is. But I think so many of us believe that still, and I saw that playing out with my daughter too. It's, it's, also an oversimplification. 

So I don't want to make it seem like it's just as simple as that, but, but really healing those patterns of the striving for perfection, that there's something inherently wrong with me. No, this is a way I've learned to think and I have a very strong inner critic But I can also say no, thank you. I can listen to the messages It's trying to tell me understand that it actually many ways our inner critic has our best interest at heart. It just plays out in a way that doesn't end up helping us or feeling good. So I can say thanks, but no thanks. And over the course of time now I've been working on this for, you know, 12 years and I have a community of women who come together to make our, we're constantly reinforcing for one another when those little messages slip out about, Oh, this is ugly, you know, or whatever.

It's, it's a journey and, um, how we reach our authenticity is in fact, the overused onion analogy, you know, of peeling back those layers that have come on from society, from our parents, from being bullied from all the places. There is a core underneath us that is who we are, that is perfect just the way it is. And it doesn't need to buy into all of these, um, false messages but it takes a while to, to uncover that and to believe that that's true for me anyway. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yeah. Yeah. To really internalize it. When you started healing—and as you said, it's a lifelong process really—it's not, okay, I'm done now. I'm, I'm all fine. I'm healed! 

Tracey Yokas: Woohoo! 

Jessica Hornstein: Yeah. That would be a book. But having said that, you know, you sort of more actively, I guess, had this, very focused time when you were engaged in that. And I'm wondering then what was going on as you were engaging this, then how did you see that in relation to your daughter? How did, you know, how did, what was happening in her process, I guess, in relation to yours? 

Tracey Yokas: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, one of the hardest things to understand, and I probably said this already, maybe in a different way, was that she really has her own healing journey and that was going to look like whatever it looked like. But that the best way I could support her in that was to show her someone doing their own work. So show myself engaging with that process over the long haul because it isn't a one and done. So that I was going to my therapy and she was having to go to her therapy and then it was It took a while, but yes, so that enabled us later after some time to be able to come together and have these conversations in ways that we didn't have them before, but there's just so many layers.

So also, I chronicle in the book, late in the book, because this is a long process, was expressing to my therapist at the time that I was very frustrated. Like, why isn't this going faster. I mean, I knew rationally, but you know, you say these things anyway. You know, I, I just want this to be over. It's so hard.

All the things. I've tried everything. I've done all this stuff. Why isn't it working? All the things. And my therapist looked at me and she's like, now I want to say we had been working together for a while at this point. So if she had said this to me in the first month or two, I don't know what would have happened. But she said, well, you could try some compassion. And I was like, “What? Like what are you even talking about? I'm doing everything. I've given up my life. I'm doing, I'm driving to the appointments. I'm making the appointments. I'm following them. I'm reading the books. I'm, if that, if I'm not the compassionate one in this equation, who is?”

So, you know, long story short, what I realized is again, of course, I misunderstood. I only had a limited understanding of what compassion was based on my entire life experience up to that point. And I didn't know all the things that went into being compassionate to myself, let alone to somebody else. So I thought doing tasks was, and it doesn't mean that doing tasks is not, I mean, of course, you know, helping someone do the things they need to do and get the places they need to get is an important part of the process.

But fundamentally, in relationship to another human being, who is my daughter, I think a lot of us get kind of caught up, parents anyway, in that power dynamic of I'm the parent and this is my child. They should be doing what I say. And that's one way to look at it. You know, I mean, many of us look at it that way, but in the circumstance we we’re in.

At that time, that was not a helpful frame of reference. I needed to look at her as an individual human being that was suffering and acknowledge my own suffering in that process. And how could I help myself and then also help her. So gaining that understanding, which then again, fanned out to other people in my life, particularly my parents, as I mentioned, when we can see people more fully in our shared humanity, which just maybe sounds woo woo. And I kind of probably thought about it that way too, until I actually had the embodied experience of meeting people in my life in a different way, really changed, really changed everything in my friendships and my relationship with my daughter and my relationship with my husband. Nothing is perfect because that's not how life works.

I mean, we still have struggles sometimes or we're human beings, but being able to see behind the facades, understanding all the judgment that we learn how to do just from the earliest time. I mean, judgment, judgment everywhere. And there's more, there's just more behind all of us than that. 

Jessica Hornstein: Yeah. I think compassion is one of the things that most demands us to set aside fear. Right? And that's probably at least a piece of why it's so hard for so many of us, because when we don't have compassion for somebody else, let's say. Yeah, there is that, there's a judgment, but there's also, it's a fear that maybe they're angry at you or you're not doing something right or, like you're responding to what they're doing and instead of responding with compassion, like, oh, they're having a hard time, you know, you're turning it probably towards yourself so, you know, you're, you're not in a place where you can just be open to what they may be experiencing. Right. So we really have to set aside some piece of ourselves. It's not that we can't acknowledge like, oh, the way they're behaving is making me feel like X, Y, or Z. But we can also understand that that may not be what it's about and that they're having their own experience. Yeah. 

Tracey Yokas: Absolutely. Compassion is a skill set, which I did not understand. Um, so courage is definitely one of the aspects. Empathy is one of the aspects. Forgiveness, like you're saying. And I just think we do tell ourselves, we don't even know we're doing it sometimes, but we tell ourselves so many stories about it.

Exactly what you said. What does somebody else's behavior mean? What am I what? What am I telling myself about? About all of that? And I, in fact, I think. We actually do that more with the people we're closest to make more assumptions because we've known them longer, you know, all the things like you wouldn't necessarily for someone you just meet, start telling yourselves all kinds of stories once you shake somebody's hand.

But over time, as you get to know somebody and then you're spending more time with them. So of course, in our families, I mean, I just think we do the same thing. We make a lot of assumptions about intentions, and of course we know that someone's intention doesn't necessarily mean the other person is going to understand what the intention is, because by the mere fact that it's an intention, it doesn't mean you're actually, like, saying it out loud, so there can just be so much misunderstanding that's part of that, and I agree, um, it's, it's just for those of us who, again, didn't necessarily get a lot of role modeling of these things when we were young, it can be so mind blowing to understand how much we don't understand.

And I think it was the Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, who is the one who said, you know, compassion can only exist between equals. In other words, if we're lording for of a better way of saying it, uh, we’re authority over, in my circumstance, you know, my child, because I'm the adult and you are the child, I'm missing a fundamental piece of the fact that we're two human beings who are struggling, maybe in some ways that are similar in some ways that are not similar.

But when you are having this power dynamic, whether you're conscious of it or not, it's inhibiting your ability to connect at some fundamental level. And so it doesn't mean I don't still fall into that trap all the time. Cause of course I do. Um, you know, I'm a person, but then I remind myself sort of, I have to stop.

I think that's one of the parts of the healing journey that people don't necessarily understand is we just keep forgetting all the time. So it can be we know something and then we get triggered or whatever's the right word and we've now fallen into the pattern all over again and we just forget and then we have to when we get that pause, that space, we have to remember, you know, again, and then we do all the things again. And we can just get frustrated with the fact that these things still happen. But yeah, I mean, that aspect that you said in terms of courage and fear and their role and having compassion or not being able to have it, uh, is very important. 

Jessica Hornstein: I think, you know, it can be so much harder with people we're close to, because I , I think we have more expectations of them?

So, we may be quicker to be like, You should be doing this for me or why can't you know, why aren't you. And also, I think the level of investment in those relationships to increases that fear because whether it's somebody that you've chosen to be in a in a relationship with a spouse or, or somebody like that, or somebody that's in your life because they're your parent or child or whomever that, that need, like that desire for, for it to work, and, you know, are mistaken feeling or believe sometimes that that means that they have to be a certain way for that to work. That heightens that lack of compassion, I think sometimes. 

Tracey Yokas: 100%. And I mean, we have for me anyway, I'll only speak for myself, but I had so many expectations again, that I didn't look at as expectations. They just were so like it was expected of me when I was growing up that I was going to graduate high school, go to college, get a job, become independent, take care of myself. It's not like anybody said these things in such a direct manner. It just was. And so it just was. Just was that my daughter was going to graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, become independent, all the things.

And um, Again, it's one of these things where after the fact I can look at that and go, how could you not understand that that was such an expectation? Of course, those are expectations. But when you grow up in a certain way of not being able to question or understand why, and things just are. It took suffering. It took having this experience for me to wake up to the fact that I was assuming, expecting, judging, and of course, to exactly to your point, to the people who were closest to me in my life, because yeah, you have a lot of investment in that relationship and you have a child and you want your child to be successful and you want them to be successful in the way you think they should be, or, you know, whatever, all these things.

And, I mean, there are some ways we probably rankled against those things when we were kids, because that's what kids do but encouraging someone truly to be their own selves to be authentic. I mean, that's where I feel like my daughter's going to be 26 in December and we still have these kinds of conversations, you know, kind of back and forth. Like, are you making that decision? What, like, what are you basing that decision on what your true self wants or what you think other want for you or from you? And I think we just Can't ask that question enough because it's always important we get, we forget. 

Jessica Hornstein: I'm curious, and I know this is, there's no, there's no easy answer to this question, but I'm curious about your opinion as, as a mental health professional, as a mom, as a human who has engaged her own process of healing and, and working on your, your stuff. What do you think, I mean, we've touched upon some of the mechanisms, that, you know, you doing your work, , how that supported and served your daughter and your family. You know, we talked about, the model, like you were modeling for her a different way of, of doing things a different way of treating yourself.

There were shifts clearly in the dynamic between how you interacted with her, how you related with her and, all of that. I'm curious what other mechanisms you think are at play here that really create this change, you know, that can create this change in a family, have this ripple effect, from you doing your own work.

Tracey Yokas: That's a really, really good question. Um, I would say for one, the idea of self-care, I think, is one of the most misunderstood concepts of our human experience. We have this idea, and I love a good mani-pedi as much as the next guy, but I think, you know, self-care really fundamentally is the number one issue. Because we're all in these, our individual experience and our family experience. And if we don't understand beyond massages and maybe getting some exercise and eating healthy food, which is all important. I'm not saying it's not important, but there's more to self-care than that. And the internal dynamics of things that are going on inside of us and how those things come out is one aspect of self-care. I think that we don't really understand and focus on enough. So having self-care being an embodied sort of point of view in our lives about how we want to take care of ourselves first and foremost, especially, I can't speak to the, you know, male experience, but I think most of the moms I have encountered, especially moms who have kids who have various struggles, whatever they may be, differences, whatever, put a lot of pressure on ourselves and we have now completely fallen off our own to do list because we just don't think we should.

We have the time, all the things, and it's just so opposite of what we actually need to ramp up. Our self-care in those times when life is harder because we need those reserves. We really do. And it's not only about energy. It's not only about having energy for, if someone has a diagnosis of mental illness or anything, this can be a lifelong journey.

So what are we going to never take care of ourselves until, we have a heart attack or whatever. I mean, that's just the way so many people are doing it. And I totally get it. So we have to change that dynamic because we want everyone in our family to take care of themselves, to be putting tools in their toolbox, to be able to say no, to be able to set boundaries, to be able to say, I'm not going to tolerate this bad behavior from somebody else that harms me just because I'm a people pleaser.

So that fundamentally in embracing that for ourselves can play a huge part in our entire family, not only people individually being able to take care of themselves, but how does that play out in the family dynamic in the family system? So I really think that's such a big part of sort of like the trickle-down effect, if you want to, you know, put that language to it.

And there's other things too, like just becoming more educated. So, uh, after my daughter received her diagnosis, even though I had some training in the mental health field, like I didn't know that much specifically about the type of eating disorder she was struggling with or the internal effects of in someone I knew personally, a severe depressive experience.

And so really learning about these things in community. So I went to NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness. There's affiliates all over the country and took their family to family class, which is like their signature class where they throw a lot of information at you, but it gives you the opportunity to, when we were talking about expectations and assumptions and all these things, taking classes, being in community with other folks who are going through what you did, hearing about other people's shared experiences, which we also got some of in treatment, of course, normalizes that we're not the only one who is going through this.

And all of these things have a role to play in how we wake up every day, face the experience, because there can be a lot of chaos. So if there is anything you want to know about this, you know, I've talked to people who have experienced this under your roof at home, a lot of walking on eggshells, a lot of these things when someone's dealing with an illness. That can be very exhausting and frustrating and all the things. So it does help when you know, oh my gosh. We're not the only people going through this. We're not the only people who are struggling in this way and, and being in community can be, I, like I said, I withdrew and isolated for a long time.

And I hope if someone's listening to this, who's in that place right now, they'll think about reaching out because there is much comfort to be had when you realize that you're not alone. And yeah, all of these things play out in the family dynamic in different ways. So it's not like an either or it's kind of like finding the things that really work for you in any given moment and allowing yourself to engage with like giving yourself permission to engage in things that are going to help you because they will help the other people in your family as well.

Jessica Hornstein: Well, that's, I think, a beautiful place to wrap up, although I have about 10 more questions for you. So, Tracey, if people want to find out more about you and your work, because I'm sure this will spark a lot of ideas for a lot of people, where can they do that? 

Tracey Yokas: Well, thank you. Yeah. So the book Bloodlines, A Memoir of Harm and Healing is available everywhere books are sold. And my intention behind the book was same as what I just said, essentially just to let people know that they aren't alone. And then also my website, which is traceyyokascreates.com. So it's just my name T-R-A-C-E-Y-Y-O-K-A-S creates.com. I share some things about our journey. I have workshops and classes I'm working on that really are from the perspective of just someone who has this lived experience and things that have helped me. So those are the two best places. 

Jessica Hornstein: Wonderful. Well, I think your perspective is really important and valuable, and I thank you so much for being here today and sharing it with all of us.

Tracey Yokas: Thank you for having me, Jessica. I really appreciate it. 

Jessica Hornstein: Been a pleasure.