Join to me to talk about the hard parts of challenging family systems so we can feel less alone. This week: Step 3 in How To Stop Living in Survival Mode - Noticing!
Shannon opens the session with brief greetings, notes she’s not a clinician, and introduces the series theme 'Things we aren't supposed to talk about' and that today's focus is family estrangement and her lived experience.
She defines the term 'family estrangement' as she experiences it, describes growing up in a chaotic family, and explains how she began therapy in her 40s to align her inner values with her external life.
Shannon outlines step one in her process—acknowledging that your internal beliefs and external life don't match—describing how that awareness can show up physically and mentally as a persistent nagging feeling.
She discusses the difficulty and importance of voicing uncomfortable truths, using her example of admitting her mother wasn't the parent she needed and how speaking it dissolves shame and makes the experience real.
The core of today's lesson—'notice'—encourages slowing down to observe how telling a new story changes self-perception. Shannon contrasts old internal narratives with a reframed truth, highlights mutual worthiness, and urges practicing these shifts in challenging relationships.
She closes by noting this process is grief-worthy and shares that the three steps took several years of effort for her, reminding viewers the work is hard but meaningful.
CADRE, I'm so sorry I'm late. Happy Friday. It is Shannon. I am here. Happy Friday on Grief Day on CADRE. I'm so sorry I'm late. I am running around in life as many of you are, so I'm sure you will understand. So I'm going to give you all a minute to join. I am, for those of you who don't know me, I am a person. I'm not a clinician. I'm not a mental health professional. I'm a human. here today to talk about things we aren't supposed to talk about. Family estrangement edition. Things we aren't supposed to talk about comes from my lived experience as someone who lives with CPTSD, anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, and I parent the child of, I parent a child with autism.
But today I am here as a human with a lived experience of having challenging family relationships. The word is family estrangement that people use. It's a weird word. It's a hard word. I've said it before. Really what it is is when you as a human, from my experience, the lens I talk about it through, is my lived experience being part of a family that has a lot of parts, like all families do. And my journey as a person to say some of what's happening in this family system is in alignment with my values and who I am on the inside.
And what do I do with that? How can I get to a place to honor myself so that I'm able to be in this family system in whatever capacity that is that might look different? So that is why I'm here today. You've today caught me on part three. I call it how to stop living in survival mode. This was the process that I went through at 40 years old, I'm 48 now, to say, okay, I'm not living in alignment with who I am. What's on my inside isn't matching my outside. Can I do anything about that? So I started working with a therapist.
I said I have CPTSD, which is complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which comes from living in a chaotic family. So I started to sort of like pull apart all the parts of my life and really think about how can I honor myself and who I am and what I value and what I believe and still navigate within this family system. So the skills that I learned in those eight years of therapy were five things. Today's #3. I'll go through briefly. The first one is you have to know something's not in alignment.
So That happened for me at 40. Hey, the things and what I believe inside isn't matching how I'm living. I have to know that. Something you can feel in your body. I probably don't even have to explain it to you. Hi Steph, it's so good to see you. I probably don't have to explain to you what it means to know that something's not right in your body. If you pay attention to it, you know. It's that nagging thing that you actually sits in your brain and continues to poke at you. But that was step number one is knowing that something's going on.
The second part, the second step is to say it out loud. Saying it out loud is hard. Saying it out loud, I spoke about this last week. Go back and watch that one if you want more depth to it. But saying it out loud puts it and makes it tangible in the world. So for me, in my experience, I had to learn and practice how to say my mom wasn't the mom that I needed growing up. It's not her fault. It's not my fault. And it's true. And so it created a challenging relationship. It created actually some estrangement for us as we worked through it.
But saying it out loud is important because it manifests, right? We all know, I think I'm sure we all know Brene Brown. I don't even know if she's the one that said this, but someone said it. When you shine a light on something, it dissolves fear, it dissolves shame, it dissolves all the things. And so by saying your truth out loud into the world, it dissolves it, right? So when I was able to say my mom isn't the mom I needed, I'm saying it. It's not just in my head. It's tangible. It's manifest.
I can say it to myself, in a mirror, frankly, I could say to a trusted friend, but I'm putting it out there as a thing. And then today is step three. So what is step three of how to stop living in survival mode? For me was notice. Notice, which requires slowing down and paying attention and can be very difficult. Don't know if you can tell through the screen. I have a lot of energy. I talk fast. I think fast. Everything I do is full of action. So noticing means I have to go against my nature and say, OK, I know the truth for me out loud is that my mom wasn't the mom that I needed when I was growing up.
And noticing means now I've said it. So if I notice, what happens when I say it to me? What happens to me when I say it? Meaning I am out in the world with my story and the story that I had before was that a lot of things, right? The story was that I wasn't good enough. I was fundamentally unlovable. A number of things that you can imagine, right? Fill in the blank. But when I said out loud the truth, which was My mom wasn't the mom I needed. It's not her fault. It's not my fault. And it's true.
I start going out into the world with that different story. Do you see how different that feels? Do you see how different those two things feel? I am inherently unlovable. My mom wasn't the mom that I needed. Those are just so different, right? How different is that? How different is for me to walk around saying I am inherently unlovable? Versus my mom was not the mom I needed. Not her fault, not my fault, just the truth. Like look at those two things. And so I think noticing it again, it requires like, oh my gosh, it's different.
Oh my gosh. Think of the power of that, right? And like I said two minutes ago, I move fast, I think fast, I am like this, this, this, this. But noticing the power of that slowing down and saying, I am worthy. And frankly, my mom is worthy too, right? It is not her fault. We're both worthy. And this situation is a challenging one. So I think being able to reframe that relationship, reframe that situation with the lens of I'm going to notice what happens when I tell a new story is so incredibly powerful.
And you can see that I'm getting excited about it. And you see Steph, Stephen Amelia, Stephen Amelia. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I think it's Stephen Amelia. Thank you for the 100%. Jules. Hello, my friend Alec. Hi. You guys can see that I'm getting excited about this because it's powerful. And even if you do nothing else, in any challenging relationship that you have. If you do those three things and you start there, you will start to believe. And the cool thing is you're not believing something that someone else is telling you.
Like I'm not preaching something to you about the right way to do something. Thank you. Thank you, Stefan. Stefan, thank you for telling me your name. Names are important. I'm not telling you that there's a right way to do it. I am 100% telling you go into yourself. You know the right thing. You know the right story. And it's just slowing down, noticing it and saying it a different way. I always do these and then I remember that it's grief day. And why it's grief day with this is that all of this is hard.
All of this is grief worthy. That entire thing, the thing I just talked to you about, those three things, that was probably three and a half, four years of work for me
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