M.A.D. Issues Podcast
Transcript: Episode 3, "Scar Tissue"
Summary: Discussing past emotional trauma and scar tissue arising from mother-daughter conflict. Healthy ways to confront pain, reduce the negative impacts of scaring on your life, and change your personal narrative. With life coach Sienna Tarniella.
Summary: Discussing past emotional trauma and scar tissue arising from mother-daughter conflict. Healthy ways to confront pain, reduce the negative impacts of scaring on your life, and change your personal narrative. With life coach Sienna Tarniella.
On Wednesday, June 14th, I posted a very old
black-and-white photo of a very young woman to the MAD Issues Facebook page.
She appears to be sitting down, leaning her back against a painted brick wall. The
angle of the photo is off-center, leaning a little to the left, in sharp
contrast to the perfect center part in her pulled-back hair. The young woman’s
posture looks relaxed, her left arm and just the top of her left hand resting
on her knees, which are just out of view. She is dressed fashionably, but her face is wearing a sober
expression. Her hooded wide-spaced eyes are staring straight at the camera – a
laser beam of sadness, feminine strength, and resignation, blazing at the
viewer from 60 years in the past. I have seen this image before but had never seen or
heard the captioned quote: “I was given away. When your mother gives you away,
you think everybody who comes into your life is going to give you away.” –
Eartha Kitt
The combination of the photo and Eartha Kitt’s words made me
think. Correction: my mind sort of exploded with thoughts and impressions. If
you could visualize my thought patterns at that moment, it would look like a
mind map. For those of you that may not know (or have been out of school too
long to remember) – a mind map is a brainstorming diagram. It has one large bubble
in the middle and lots of smaller bubbles surrounding the large one. All of the
smaller bubbles are connected by short lines to the one in the middle and then to
each other. Each of the smaller bubbles contains a word or idea or phrase that
you associated with the idea or word or phrase in the largest bubble. In my
internal mind map, this quote by the great Eartha Kitt was in the big bubble in
the middle. My word associations went a little something like this: hurt – pain
– wounds – scars – permanent – scar tissue. I had to write something to
accompany this picture, so this is what I posted: “A woman’s relationship with
her mother is the foundation of how she sees herself, values (or devalues)
herself, and forms the basis of the treatment she expects to get from others.
Some of the deepest wounds and ugliest scars are the ones that can’t be seen.”
I added a series of hash tags, one of which was #scartissue.
Today’s topic is scar tissue – not the physical kind, of
course. I’m talking about the invisible kind.
First of all, what exactly is scar tissue? And how is it
different from a regular scar? A regular scar is usually flat and smooth normal
skin that is discolored right in the place where a superficial injury occurred.
A regular scar usually means your skin was damaged but not too badly and not
very deep, so it was able to heal quickly.
Scar tissue, on the other hand, is a fibrous tissue that replaces normal skin after deep
injury. A scar forms when an open wound is so serious it takes at least 3 or 4
weeks to be covered. Scar tissue has the
same collagen of the normal skin it replaces but the composition is different. Scar tissue is tough, stiff, and uneven. It
lacks elasticity so it doesn’t stretch the way normal skin does. Scar tissue is
permanently damaged, so it has no sweat glands and no hair follicles. Because scar tissue can’t sweat, it disrupts the regulation of body temperature.
Too much scar tissue on your body and not enough normal skin can become
a real health problem, not just a cosmetic one.
When I think of scar tissue, I think of rolls and ripples of mangled flesh - too much flesh - knotted together and overlapping in angry reds and purples. I think of keloid scars, like the famous photo of the unknown African-American slave man with his back exposed to the camera. I think of burn victims. This is not to disparage the appearance of anyone who has experienced these types of physical trauma; I'm just painting a picture. Emotional and mental scar tissue is a lot like physical scar tissue. Think about it - it is tough, inflexible, not normal, has the potential to throw your whole system off balance, and it marks the place where some horrific injury occurred. Scar tissue is like the skin trying to defend itself in retrospect by growing purposefully thicker, tougher, and not bothering with "distractions" like the ability to shed excess water or grow hair. Emotional and mental scar tissue feels the same. They are the places in our hearts and minds that sustained tremendous injury and took forever to heal. And when they healed we felt tougher and stronger because the site of the wound was covered over with something thick and impenetrable.
Because mothers are our first relation to ourselves as women, and our first female reflection, they have so much power. They have an incredible amount of power to heal and love and encourage and motivate. And they have an equal amount of power to wound. The wounds that your mother gives you - not the little slights or everyday criticisms - we're talking about real wounds, here - are deeper than any wound that any other person will ever give you in your life. Even if your mother was not there growing up, her absence wounds you, as in the case of Eartha Kitt. She may not have realized it right away, but the moment she did realize, or was told, or found out, that she had been given away - that her mother made a choice to give her away - the deepest wound of her life formed. You can look at pictures of Eartha Kitt throughout the years of her life and watch footage of her interviews and you will see a woman that comes across so aggressively and so eccentric that she is hard to watch and listen to. You almost want to cover your eyes. All that hardness of manner and sharpness of tongue is the result of carrying emotional scar tissue. Sometimes a thing can be so hard that it is fragile, like brittle bones or high-end crystal. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I recognize the fragility in Eartha Kitt because I know it for myself and understand its roots. For me, she is hard to watch when she is being herself. A movie is different because then she is an actress, she is being "Eartha Kitt as..." whoever. You fill in the blank. When you are an actor, you get the relief of occasionally abandoning your own life and being someone else. If you're a successful actress, then you also get the incredible privilege of being paid to abandon your own life, so you get to make a living off of that relief.
I told one of my kids recently that in life you have to be able to bend or you get knocked down. I asked him to think of how the trees look during storms and heavy wind and which ones are still standing in the morning. And, of course, it is the older, larger, seemingly sturdier trees that fall. Not only do they fall, they fall magnificently - literally pulled out of the ground, their roots sticking up in the air and in all directions. In life that is how we have to be, especially if there is major pain that lives between us and our mothers. We have to shed the grown over and over layers of scar tissue, we have to regain flexibility. We have to become vulnerable and penetrable again. Now I'm not saying to just let your mother back into your heart if she is truly toxic for you. Maybe you will never truly let her back into your heart, but maybe you can allow someone else into that sacred space. Things like scar tissue and closed doors don't just protect us from what is bad; they can can also keep out what is good. Being too hard, too brittle, too sharp, too tough can be a very lonely place. We all have pain. Some of us bear scars, some of us bear scar tissue, and some of us have fresh, open wounds still dripping blood. We all have pain, but who wants to be alone with it? I don't believe that life was meant to be lived in a bubble, encapsulated in your own misery and alienated from other people.
I can look at the last 10 years of my own life and see connection after connection. Some of those connections were formed with people that I would expect to connect with while so many others were formed with people I would have never guessed would be an impact to my life. This life was meant to be lived in connection - that's what it's all about. Connections through the bonds of care, love, shared experiences and shared humanity.
The idea for MAD Issues came to me during one of the saddest periods in my life. Sad is not even a good word - I felt so many things. No one word really adequately describes what I was going through as a result of my mother but let me put it this way: I had wounds. My wounds healed over many years. I grew scar tissue. And then I recently received some enlightening information, a revelation of old secrets that felt like a burst of heat that went straight through the scar into the center of the original wound. Inside, my scar tissue felt hot and pulsing. It hurt like hell. I let myself feel what I felt for a few days, almost a week. I hardly spoke to anyone, but I thought, and I sulked, and I cried, Not a lot of tears, but I did cry. Scar tissue doesn't allow for many tears, the hurt goes too deep. Sobbing and crying can seem superficial and melodramatic at the point where your pain surpasses the ability for tears to be any form of release. I prayed. I wrote and wrote. I tried to organize my thoughts and call my emotions by name and define why I was feeling the way I did. And once I felt like I had come to some conclusions, I talked to a couple of people in my life that I truly love and trust, who love and trust me back. Finally, with the help and insight of my support system, I was able to even put myself in my mother's shoes -actually consider her position, thought process, feelings, and maturity level at the time. And at the end of that week, the idea for MAD Issues came to me, whole, in one piece. The concept, the name, starting a podcast - the whole thing. And I went for it, Not just because it was a good idea, but because it is needed. Mothers and daughters need to talk about the issues that we bear and the pain we inflict, knowingly and unknowingly, upon each other. So many times you hear women's problems identified as "daddy issues," when the truth is "mommy issues" are so much more prevalent. And no one talks about them.
This quote about being given away by Eartha Kitt really resonated with me because I have felt largely unwanted the majority of my life. The moment of clarity is the moment that you can step outside the pain your mother has caused you, the deep wounds, the scar tissue - and recognize that she, too, must have deep pain and wounds and scars in order to be able to hurt you the way she did. After all, hurt people hurt people. She, too, is a fallible human being limited by her own experiences up to whatever point in her life that she did what she did - or didn't do what she should have done. The moment of clarity is when you realize what happened to you is often an unintended consequence of the circumstances of your mother's own life. To your mother, the tragedy is hers, not yours. As her daughter, you are just the innocent bystander who accidentally gets killed by a stray bullet from the gun your mom forgot to put the safety on. Is it your mother's fault? Yes. Was your pain a product of her choices and decisions? Yes. Was what happened her responsibility? Yes. But was your death premeditated? Was it murder? The answer is usually, "No." Personally speaking, my wounds were caused less from the actual events and more from my mother's lack of response or acceptance of accountability. In other words, for me, the pain was more about what happened AFTER, How did she handle the situation? How did she treat you? Did she make you feel loved? Did she make you feel accepted? Did she make you feel valued? When the answers to these questions are: nothing, terrible, disregarded, no, no, and no - this is when wounds form.
The moment of triumph is when you realize that with the right application of self-love (i.e. be kind to yourself, i.e. let yourself feel what you feel and do what you need to do), self-acceptance (i.e no judging yourself) and a loving support system - no matter how small - you can thin that scar tissue out. Over time, real love works amazingly well on scar tissue - it's like an emotional dermabrasion. Between my own self-loving process and the support and love of my inner circle, that's what I did. And then I decided that dermabrasion wasn't enough - I needed to do something, I needed this ugliness to have a purpose and function. It seems like as soon as I had that thought, the inspiration for MAD Issues came to me. So now that my scar tissue is a little nicer looking and a lot less rough feeling, I am restoring some elasticity. I'm being flexible. I'm rolling with the punches. I'm turning negatives into positives and helping myself and other women along the way. I'm growing and stretching as a woman, and as a person, a little more every day. Skin has this wonderful ability to adapt to what you make a practice of doing. So does your mind and heart. Painful past hurts don't have to take precedence in your life and relationships and you are not required to make them your identity. That being said, here is my prescription for emotional scar tissue: 1. Affirm your needs. 2. Apply love generously. 3. Stretch daily. Stretch the limits of who you think you are and what you think you're capable of - then be prepared to impress yourself. That's how you deal with scar tissue. Until next time, ladies, this is MAD Issues, women coming clean about the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, with Sienna Tarniella, take care.
When I think of scar tissue, I think of rolls and ripples of mangled flesh - too much flesh - knotted together and overlapping in angry reds and purples. I think of keloid scars, like the famous photo of the unknown African-American slave man with his back exposed to the camera. I think of burn victims. This is not to disparage the appearance of anyone who has experienced these types of physical trauma; I'm just painting a picture. Emotional and mental scar tissue is a lot like physical scar tissue. Think about it - it is tough, inflexible, not normal, has the potential to throw your whole system off balance, and it marks the place where some horrific injury occurred. Scar tissue is like the skin trying to defend itself in retrospect by growing purposefully thicker, tougher, and not bothering with "distractions" like the ability to shed excess water or grow hair. Emotional and mental scar tissue feels the same. They are the places in our hearts and minds that sustained tremendous injury and took forever to heal. And when they healed we felt tougher and stronger because the site of the wound was covered over with something thick and impenetrable.
Because mothers are our first relation to ourselves as women, and our first female reflection, they have so much power. They have an incredible amount of power to heal and love and encourage and motivate. And they have an equal amount of power to wound. The wounds that your mother gives you - not the little slights or everyday criticisms - we're talking about real wounds, here - are deeper than any wound that any other person will ever give you in your life. Even if your mother was not there growing up, her absence wounds you, as in the case of Eartha Kitt. She may not have realized it right away, but the moment she did realize, or was told, or found out, that she had been given away - that her mother made a choice to give her away - the deepest wound of her life formed. You can look at pictures of Eartha Kitt throughout the years of her life and watch footage of her interviews and you will see a woman that comes across so aggressively and so eccentric that she is hard to watch and listen to. You almost want to cover your eyes. All that hardness of manner and sharpness of tongue is the result of carrying emotional scar tissue. Sometimes a thing can be so hard that it is fragile, like brittle bones or high-end crystal. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I recognize the fragility in Eartha Kitt because I know it for myself and understand its roots. For me, she is hard to watch when she is being herself. A movie is different because then she is an actress, she is being "Eartha Kitt as..." whoever. You fill in the blank. When you are an actor, you get the relief of occasionally abandoning your own life and being someone else. If you're a successful actress, then you also get the incredible privilege of being paid to abandon your own life, so you get to make a living off of that relief.
I told one of my kids recently that in life you have to be able to bend or you get knocked down. I asked him to think of how the trees look during storms and heavy wind and which ones are still standing in the morning. And, of course, it is the older, larger, seemingly sturdier trees that fall. Not only do they fall, they fall magnificently - literally pulled out of the ground, their roots sticking up in the air and in all directions. In life that is how we have to be, especially if there is major pain that lives between us and our mothers. We have to shed the grown over and over layers of scar tissue, we have to regain flexibility. We have to become vulnerable and penetrable again. Now I'm not saying to just let your mother back into your heart if she is truly toxic for you. Maybe you will never truly let her back into your heart, but maybe you can allow someone else into that sacred space. Things like scar tissue and closed doors don't just protect us from what is bad; they can can also keep out what is good. Being too hard, too brittle, too sharp, too tough can be a very lonely place. We all have pain. Some of us bear scars, some of us bear scar tissue, and some of us have fresh, open wounds still dripping blood. We all have pain, but who wants to be alone with it? I don't believe that life was meant to be lived in a bubble, encapsulated in your own misery and alienated from other people.
I can look at the last 10 years of my own life and see connection after connection. Some of those connections were formed with people that I would expect to connect with while so many others were formed with people I would have never guessed would be an impact to my life. This life was meant to be lived in connection - that's what it's all about. Connections through the bonds of care, love, shared experiences and shared humanity.
The idea for MAD Issues came to me during one of the saddest periods in my life. Sad is not even a good word - I felt so many things. No one word really adequately describes what I was going through as a result of my mother but let me put it this way: I had wounds. My wounds healed over many years. I grew scar tissue. And then I recently received some enlightening information, a revelation of old secrets that felt like a burst of heat that went straight through the scar into the center of the original wound. Inside, my scar tissue felt hot and pulsing. It hurt like hell. I let myself feel what I felt for a few days, almost a week. I hardly spoke to anyone, but I thought, and I sulked, and I cried, Not a lot of tears, but I did cry. Scar tissue doesn't allow for many tears, the hurt goes too deep. Sobbing and crying can seem superficial and melodramatic at the point where your pain surpasses the ability for tears to be any form of release. I prayed. I wrote and wrote. I tried to organize my thoughts and call my emotions by name and define why I was feeling the way I did. And once I felt like I had come to some conclusions, I talked to a couple of people in my life that I truly love and trust, who love and trust me back. Finally, with the help and insight of my support system, I was able to even put myself in my mother's shoes -actually consider her position, thought process, feelings, and maturity level at the time. And at the end of that week, the idea for MAD Issues came to me, whole, in one piece. The concept, the name, starting a podcast - the whole thing. And I went for it, Not just because it was a good idea, but because it is needed. Mothers and daughters need to talk about the issues that we bear and the pain we inflict, knowingly and unknowingly, upon each other. So many times you hear women's problems identified as "daddy issues," when the truth is "mommy issues" are so much more prevalent. And no one talks about them.
This quote about being given away by Eartha Kitt really resonated with me because I have felt largely unwanted the majority of my life. The moment of clarity is the moment that you can step outside the pain your mother has caused you, the deep wounds, the scar tissue - and recognize that she, too, must have deep pain and wounds and scars in order to be able to hurt you the way she did. After all, hurt people hurt people. She, too, is a fallible human being limited by her own experiences up to whatever point in her life that she did what she did - or didn't do what she should have done. The moment of clarity is when you realize what happened to you is often an unintended consequence of the circumstances of your mother's own life. To your mother, the tragedy is hers, not yours. As her daughter, you are just the innocent bystander who accidentally gets killed by a stray bullet from the gun your mom forgot to put the safety on. Is it your mother's fault? Yes. Was your pain a product of her choices and decisions? Yes. Was what happened her responsibility? Yes. But was your death premeditated? Was it murder? The answer is usually, "No." Personally speaking, my wounds were caused less from the actual events and more from my mother's lack of response or acceptance of accountability. In other words, for me, the pain was more about what happened AFTER, How did she handle the situation? How did she treat you? Did she make you feel loved? Did she make you feel accepted? Did she make you feel valued? When the answers to these questions are: nothing, terrible, disregarded, no, no, and no - this is when wounds form.
The moment of triumph is when you realize that with the right application of self-love (i.e. be kind to yourself, i.e. let yourself feel what you feel and do what you need to do), self-acceptance (i.e no judging yourself) and a loving support system - no matter how small - you can thin that scar tissue out. Over time, real love works amazingly well on scar tissue - it's like an emotional dermabrasion. Between my own self-loving process and the support and love of my inner circle, that's what I did. And then I decided that dermabrasion wasn't enough - I needed to do something, I needed this ugliness to have a purpose and function. It seems like as soon as I had that thought, the inspiration for MAD Issues came to me. So now that my scar tissue is a little nicer looking and a lot less rough feeling, I am restoring some elasticity. I'm being flexible. I'm rolling with the punches. I'm turning negatives into positives and helping myself and other women along the way. I'm growing and stretching as a woman, and as a person, a little more every day. Skin has this wonderful ability to adapt to what you make a practice of doing. So does your mind and heart. Painful past hurts don't have to take precedence in your life and relationships and you are not required to make them your identity. That being said, here is my prescription for emotional scar tissue: 1. Affirm your needs. 2. Apply love generously. 3. Stretch daily. Stretch the limits of who you think you are and what you think you're capable of - then be prepared to impress yourself. That's how you deal with scar tissue. Until next time, ladies, this is MAD Issues, women coming clean about the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, with Sienna Tarniella, take care.
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