Honesty in Relationships: A Path to True Connection.

Honesty in Relationships: A Path to True Connection.
With Laurie Gerber & Samia Bano

Struggling to #SpeakUp and #TellYourTruth to the people you love?

Listen now to this interview with Laurie Gerber, #Dating and #RelationshipCoach, to learn how you can:

-- Overcome your fear of #HonestyInRelationships (aka your fear of hurting others)

--- Foster a deeper, more #trueconnection with your loved ones, especially your partner

-- #SpeakYourTruth with grace and wisdom

We also offer practical advice on becoming more self-aware and honest with yourself and processing your emotions before addressing #relationshipissues -- this is a critical key to avoiding unnecessary conflict and making your communication more effective and #funandeasy!

Learn more and connect with Laurie at: https://lauriegerber.com/

To Book your Free HAPPINESS 101 EXPLORATION CALL with Samia, click: https://my.timetrade.com/book/JX9XJ

#datingandrelationships #datingcoach #LoveAndDating #Honesty #SelfAwareness #Parenting #MarriageMatters #CulturalNorms #EmotionalWellbeing #CommunicationSkills #effectivecommunication #HealthyRelationships #FamilyDynamics #PersonalGrowth #RelationshipAdvice #IntimacyMatters #FamilyDynamics #MarriageAdvice #CulturalNorms #HealingJourney #BreakingTradition #SurvivorStories #PersonalGrowth #RelationshipAdvice #Empowerment #OvercomingSilence #MentalHealthAwareness #SupportSystems #CourageToChange #BreakingTheMold

Here's the audio version of this episode:

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Full Video Transcript

SAMIA: Hello, Salaam, Shalom, Namaste, Sat Sri Akal, Aloha, Holah, Ciao, Bonjour, Buna, Privet, Mabuhay, and Dzień Dobry! It's really, really good to be with you again, and I know you'll be so happy and excited you have joined us today because we have a very amazing guest with us, and it's Laurie Gerber, who is a Dating Coach. Welcome, Laurie…

LAURIE: Thank you for having me. Good to be here…

SAMIA: Yes. I'm so happy you are here. As I was sharing with you earlier, Laurie, we love talking about relationships on this show because, you know, relationships form the core of our identities, of our existence in some senses, you know. Our whole lives are about relationships… so learning about how to make our relationships more healthy, more fun, more easy... it's like something we really enjoy here. So extra, extra welcome to you.

LAURIE: Thank you. I agree that it is the most important thing.

SAMIA: Yes. And please, Laurie, tell us more about who you are and what you do.

LAURIE: Thank you. I have been a Life Coach for the last 20 years. More recently specializing, when I say more recently, maybe the last ten years, specializing, specifically in love and dating, because I came to coaching, unbeknownst to me, basically ruining my own marriage.  And I was not practicing the art of honesty with myself. So I did not understand the bad shape my most primary relationship was in and how that also affected all my other relationships. So that was such an eye-opener for me that it actually led me to eventually become a coach and eventually to specialize in love, relationships and dating. And so now here I am, 20 years later, 10,000 hours of experience later, having helped countless individuals, daters, couples… you know, worked with Match.com and zoos and dating sites and just gathering a lot of data from the field about what's not working, what is working, what I wish we taught in schools… And I'm here to share. Here to share…

SAMIA: Yes. And thank you for sharing part of your experience and where you're coming from. That is really helpful to know and understand. And I can resonate with that. And I think a lot of our listeners can resonate with that because a lot of us, we are fellow coaches and healers and trainers, and a lot of us that I know, including myself, we have experienced some major challenge in our life and been on a mission to, first of all, heal ourselves from it or find a solution for ourselves. And then you get to that point where you're like, hey, I want to share this with other people. I want to help other people with what I have learned as well. That is really, really cool... And now, you mentioned the aspect of honesty, and you said that you weren't honest with yourself and you didn't realize how that ended up impacting your relationships. Tell me more about that… when you talk about not being honest with yourself… What did that mean? What did that look like for you?

LAURIE: Yeah. Well, I was ignoring that whole area of life. I really wanted to focus… I had young children at the time, I was running a business… I really wanted to focus on those things. And I didn't want to focus on an area where I was suffering. But I didn't think it was dire. But in my coaching method, the one I learned from my coach, it's called the Handel Method, you have to speak about what your ideal is in every area of life. So even if you're coming to work on your business or your health, you have to talk about every area of life… what's the ideal, and then what's the current reality. And you have to give it a quantitative answer and a qualitative. So scale of one to ten. So when I talked about my ideal for my relationship as connected and intimate and close, I couldn't rate it over a four, right. According to the raining scale. I just couldn’t…. It forced me to be honest. It forced me to take what was subconscious and in denial and make it conscious and admit that we weren't doing well. And even though it wasn't dead yet, we really weren't doing well. But I was able to avoid that until that assignment forced it.

SAMIA: Yes. Yeah. Well, that happens also to be such a common experience. It's like there's something wrong. You know, there's something wrong because you're not feeling entirely happy. You know, you might be feeling stressed out… but you can't... You don't put your finger on it… like, you don't know exactly why am I feeling stressed out, unhappy, etcetera. Because either you're avoiding identifying that, or you just have so much going on, you just haven't had the opportunity to do it…

LAURIE: ..that's another way of saying you're avoiding.

SAMIA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes... The distraction that you allow in terms of, ah, yes, business is really important to focus on. So let me focus on the business… or, you know, whatever else that that may be.

LAURIE: Yeah. Work and children are the most famous excuses why you can't work on your relationship. As if the relationship is not the foundation of everything… you know, at least the love relationship.

SAMIA: Yes.

LAURIE: …But it's a pretty trick we play on ourselves.

SAMIA: Yeah. How did you find the tensions in your marriage affecting other relationships, like, with the children or even maybe with your business, etcetera…

(INSERT AD HERE: Min ____)

LAURIE: Well, I think for me, and I think for a lot of people, my relationship to food and my relationship to my partner deeply affects my relationship to myself. So if I'm being the kind of person I want to be in my primary relationship and in my relationship to food, which is my, I think, really my relationship to the divine and to nature and to my own self, my own soul… if that's out of whack, then everything's out of whack. So I really think that's a pretty direct correlation… Just self-esteem, self-confidence… But obviously, the children are soaking everything up. I think that's obvious, right? I think the thing that kids want most, even more than attention, even more than toys, even more than screens, is they want to see their parents happily connected with each other. And they didn't see that. They saw, you know, occasional teammates, but not the kind of love I would want for them. That's not what they were observing. And that was part of what got me to think twice about whether or not I could keep going on that way.

SAMIA: Yeah. It's interesting from my perspective that you highlight this, because maybe partly it's like a culture thing, but I don't think it's just a culture thing at my end. And now I'm thinking about my Indian-Pakistani culture, where one of the things that you constantly hear people saying is, you know, in the context of marriage is, like, you… like, couples are constantly told, no, you have to stay together for the children. And oftentimes, even if the couple is not happy together for various reasons, it's like, no, you must stay together for the children. And that is such a deeply held belief. And you know, like... And so what you're saying is, if you're not happy in your marriage and your children are observing… it's having an impact on them that's not so good.

LAURIE: Right. I think that it's tricky to separate good parenting and religion. And, I mean, I think we're still in a… in a period in history where that's still very much intertwined, but it's changing. And so I think more and more as people become adults and speak out about their experience of being with unhappy parents, which is not something that was done 100 years ago… It just literally wasn't even done, right. Like, nobody was… nobody in any culture was talking crap about their parents. It just wasn't done. It was survival. If you survived, you should be lucky, you should be happy, you should be grateful... So it is very new to even talk about what it's like to be with parents who don't love each other, like each other, hurt each other. But the more that we're starting to hear it from people, the more we can question… is it better for the children or not? So I see advantages of having two adults in a household. Sure. Sure. And disadvantages. But there are obvious advantages to that. But I think it's becoming more and more apparent that if you have one parent who is happy and sets a good example of being happy in relationships, happy in work, happy in health, that is what that child's going to imitate because that's what they have. That's their first language. That's what they're going to learn. If they have two happy parents, even better -- now they're, now it's stereophonic. If they have no happy parents, they don't learn the language or the tools of happiness, they just don't learn it, because you can't learn a language if you're not exposed to it.

SAMIA: Right... Yes, yes. Interesting. You mentioned if you have even one happy parent in the home, they can still be learning. But how does that work in the context of the partners, the adult partners… if one of them is happy and the other one's not so happy, is that even really possible? How does that work?

LAURIE: It really depends what you're talking about. If you're talking about somebody in an uncontrolled addiction or a mental illness that's not being treated versus a person who's not, that could be a very irreconcilable difference. But if you're talking about, just over the course of a relationship, people have bad periods. In a good marriage, a good partnership, we compensate for each other and we stay together richer, poorer, sickness and in health and all that. But if you're talking about one person who wants to grow and evolve, and this may be more of who your listeners are, who wants to grow and evolve, who wants to be vulnerable, who wants to make up dreams and chase them, and another partner who absolutely doesn't, that can be an irreconcilable difference. It's not necessarily an irreconcilable difference, but it can be an irreconcilable difference if where the one person wants to go is mutually exclusive to where the other person wants to go or stay. Does that make sense? So sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't... I mean, I have parents who are happily married. They could not be more different. They have different interests, they sleep in different rooms, they vacation differently, they travel differently, they read differently… they have in common that they love their children, they love each other, and they like playing Scrabble. And that's it. And that's plenty... That's plenty, right. So I do not believe that people need to be the same or the same level of happiness to make a successful relationship. But I think more often we deny our incompatibility, especially if we used to be compatible, and then it changes. We don't want to face that, we don't want to do… we don't want to work to either get back into sync or do the work to break up. Either way, it's work... Sometimes it's irreconcilable, and sometimes it's reconcilable.

SAMIA: Yes, yes…

LAURIE: ..on a... It's different than if one person wants it and one person doesn't.

SAMIA: Yeah. Yeah. You know, the example that you were sharing of your parents having very different personalities, different interests, but having a few things that are in common, that turned out to be plenty for them to get along... that really sort of made me think about, you know, the question of… again, coming back to the idea of honesty in relationships… Because if you're going to get to the point of figuring out whether the differences that we have are workable or if they're going to be irreconcilable for us as a couple, I mean, you have to be honest with each other.

LAURIE: So true.

SAMIA: But, you know, one of the biggest fears that I've seen come up in the context of being honest in our close relationships, especially when we care about the relationship, is the fear of hurting the other person. It's like, if I'm honest, I'm afraid of hurting the other person. And so actually, I'm not even going to talk about this thing. How do you even begin to manage or address that fear?

LAURIE: Lot to say about that. So, first of all, your first thought or the thought that you ruminate on about another person is not necessarily the truth, and is not necessarily really what there is to express. Most of us, if we get hurt we get judgmental. So we go immediately… we don't want to feel that we got hurt or disappointed or sad or scared. And we immediately go to, you shouldn't have done that. And then we go, oh, well, if I say you shouldn't have done that, then they'll be offended or they'll be hurt. And the answer is probably, yeah, they might, actually… your instinct is correct that if you just say whatever you think all the time, you will offend people and hurt people, because that's unedited garbage a lot of the time. So in the teaching that I do with my clients, I teach a balance of grace and wisdom. So the grace is like the lubrication. The wisdom is the truth. So the truth is for you to be able to express your experience. The grace is for the other person to be able to hear it and also feel like they can express their experience. Because love is a verb, and the verb is, I care as much about your experience as my own. That's what love is. You can love a friend. You can love a business partner. You can love, you know, you can love an animal, right. It's caring about their experience as much as you care about your own. So if you only care about their experience, that's codependence. And if you only care about your own experience, that's narcissism. And everyone somewhere in the scale and the healthiest, most balanced place is to be in the middle and to take turns, because you can't do both at the same time. You really can't. Because if you're expressing something that upset you… you can couch it properly, you can introduce it properly, but in that moment that you're saying, that thing hurt my feelings… you're taking care of your own experience, and hopefully everything you did at the front and the back takes care of their experience so they can hear it. So I don't recommend carte blanche tell the truth. Say everything you think. Most of it's garbage. Sorry. For all of us. It's not an insult to anyone in particular. But we do need to process what we're thinking. And I have my clients process it into what I call a laundry list. And a laundry list is very specific. It goes, this is what happened. Facts... This was my reaction or my interpretation of what happened. Personal experience, not the truth. This is what I don't understand or what I'm still curious about. This is how I wish it would have gone differently. Now can I hear your perspective? So if you follow those steps, people are very unlikely to be hurt. They might be a little embarrassed if you caught them at something, but they're not likely to be hurt because you're doing it in such a way of taking ownership that they don't feel blamed, they don't feel judged, they don't feel attacked…

SAMIA: Yes. And it's definitely a skill to practice because I know a lot of times… you know, when you think about, okay, this is what happened, facts… and just to distinguish that from this is how I interpreted the facts… A lot of times I see people actually conflating and confusing those two things, and they think about what they're actually saying happened is actually expressing their interpretation, but they think they're stating the facts…

LAURIE: And sometimes they skip both and go right to the judgment... You were a jerk to me, right. You don't care about myself… and go straight to a judgment and accusation, and nobody even knows the facts that we're even talking about… or the interpretation. So we skip a bunch of steps. I think we're, you know, intellectually and emotionally lazy in a way that really, really undermines the intimacy we have with people.

SAMIA: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I hear what you're saying. It's really important to take some time to process things for yourself and make sure you yourself are having a better understanding of what happened, what you experienced… figure out the difference between what your interpretation is and, you know, what  are the facts, etcetera… and where if there's something that you're feeling angry or upset about, there's probably something in there that you need to understand more and better from the other person's perspective. And hopefully, when you understand their perspective, that gets resolved. Because a lot of times, you know, the reason we're upset is because we think the other person did something or intended something that we are finding offensive. But if you can talk through that… your realize… oh, you didn't mean that.

LAURIE: I mean, here's the dumbest example. And this is something… This is the kind of fight I have with my husband all the time. So… I have a way I like to organize the refrigerator, and it drives me crazy when it's not organized that way. I'm sure people have this with the dirtiness of a car or how people pack the dishwasher or whatever. I open the refrigerator, and when I see it disorganized, so that it's not easy to find things and move things around, I go, somebody must be trying to drive me crazy. Somebody must be... Or somebody must just not care about our experience, only their own experience. So somebody must be a real jerk. Okay. Like, that's my mind is going and going, right? But if I sit down and I go, Laurie, you're not right about how the refrigerator should be organized. It's an opinion. It's not a fact…

SAMIA: Yeah.

LAURIE: …Triggered because of your own sense of... Because you're in a rush. You don't have time to find what you need. You want everyone to be caring about your experience, and you have no idea other people's experience. We don't... I don't know what was happening with the person who packed the refrigerator last. So let me just get curious. Let me calm myself down because I'm a grown-up. Let me get curious. Let me care about my own experience, but also care about another person's experience and sit down with my husband and go… hey, is now a good time to talk? I'm having a little bit of an emotional reaction. I want to share it with you. I want to get your perspective. I want to get on the same page. Is now a good time for you? He goes, yes. I say, great, okay, it might be me. I might be cuckoo. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but I have a way I organize the fridge. I think you know that way. What's going on when you don't do it like that? What's happening? What am I not understanding? Please help me understand... And he goes, well, when… first of all, it's my job to unpack the groceries, and that's actually a really hard job. I'd like a thank you for that, because it's actually... it takes a while. And second of all, because you order them to be delivered when we have our family zoom. I'm supposed to be really quiet during the family zoom because we're all in the same room. How might... I can't be reorganizing the refrigerator when you're on a call, like, right nearby. It will make too much noise, and then you'll get mad at me for that. And then by the time the call's over, we're all getting ready for bed, and everything's… And I don't think about it the next day. It's totally gone from my memory as a thing. Plus, by the time I would ever come back to it, you've already rearranged it the way you like it. So he just made four really good points, right, that I was not thinking about at all from the perspective of my experience… By the way, I have not had this argument with him, but now I'm just pretending to have it because I do think that is what he would say. So I'm almost good enough to argue the other person's side also. Yay me... Okay, the minute I hear all that, now I'm human to human, right, partner to partner... Not the red team against the blue team… We’re in a partnership and we're trying to work it out. And I can think, well, maybe I shouldn't order it at that time, or maybe I should help him unpack it, or maybe I should just suck it up. It's my job the next day to rearrange the refrigerator… or whatever... And at the end of the day, if I care more about it, it probably should be my job. So by the end of that back and forth, I can go, okay, there was no personal attack happening. There was no insult. This was not a purposeful, malicious thing. I have my own issues separate from my husband's issues or actions. And now what do we want to agree to going forward? Maybe we want to agree to order at a different time. Maybe we want to agree it's my job to rearrange it the next day. Maybe we want to agree that I just don't get to lose my marvels when I see it that way. We can agree on an agreement, and then we now have a plan going forward. So it isn't just like waiting until the next time it happens again.

SAMIA: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that example. It always helps to have a concrete example. You actually made me think about, like, in my own family… Well, my parents have, in some ways, very different personalities also. And one of the ways in which they are different is, like, how organized things need to be. Actually, my dad, he's a trained and professional… by profession and engineer. And so he's a very, like, systems person. He likes to have everything, like, set according to system and, you know, everything ordered. And, you know, like, he puts forth a lot of time and energy to not only create systems in the first place, but to maintain the system, then keep updating and improving on them. And I have some of that tendency to… I get it from my dad... Yeah.

LAURIE: ..until you have to live with a slob…

SAMIA: It turns out… Interestingly, I did, I was doing a personality kind of test, and it actually… you determine for yourself on a scale where you are in terms of how much of a systems person you are versus not. But the interesting thing that I learned in doing that test is that actually, there's a relatively small minority of people who are so highly systematic in the way that they like to do things and process and think, etcetera. And most of the people are much lower on the scale. Like, they find when things are.. the very need to be so organized and things that they… They find it burdensome. Their mind just doesn't work like that. So they can find it confusing and, you know, just, like, too much effort, too much work, etc... And my mom definitely is more like that, where she... I mean, it's not that she's completely unorganized, but she doesn't want too much rigidity in the way she does things and she wants to be able to change things around and so forth. And my parents have now been married for over 45 years, so they have figured things out in terms of, you know, how they get along. But one of the things that when you were talking made me think about was… you know, like, definitely one of the things that I’ve seen my parents too, is that there are some areas where my dad just takes charge because those are really important to him. And then he takes care of organizing them and keeping them as he wants them. And then there are some spaces where he just lets my mom do what she wants. Like in the kitchen. In fact, if my dad comes into the kitchen and he tries to organize it, she literally pushes him out. It's like, no, forget it… You're not messing up my kitchen…

LAURIE: Exactly. For all I know, my husband likes the refrigerator the way he likes it.

Yeah… we call that… We call that bodegas, or departments. And the funny trick to teach our couples is that the person who's in charge of it should be the person who's better at it and/or who cares about it more. So 50-50 is not really how good relationships work. Same in business, same in friendships. It's not 50-50. I have a best friend. I call her 100% of the time. 100% of the time. It works great for me. It works great for her. It's not 50-50. It's not 50-50…

SAMIA: Yes, that is so…

LAURIE: Similarly, it's not 50/50 on who handles the children's clothes. It's not 50/50 who handles the car. It's not s just not 50/50. It's who's better at it and who cares about it more...

SAMIA: Yes, I love that.

LAURIE: And then you can ask for help. You're not alone, but you're the CEO if it's your area.

SAMIA: Yeah. You know, that's another thing that I'm really appreciating about your approach. And I think, like, for me, especially, like, growing up… this… Well, my family has moved around. We are now living in the United States. And for sure, a lot has changed for us since we moved here. When we were back living in India and Pakistan, you know, we were part of a joint family system, and our family was more on the traditional side of things. And over there, you know, it's, like, very interesting because there's a lot of, like... you don't choose your role. You don't… like... There's a lot that's just assigned to you based on, you know, like, if you're the son versus the daughter, if you're… your rank and, like I'm the middle child, that makes a difference versus if I was the eldest or the youngest… being a daughter makes a difference. And if then if I'm me, if I'm the son. And in the context of, you know, like, marriage, husband and wife, you know, in a traditional context, there are already ascribed roles and duties. And so you… even if you're not good at something, but it's part of your just job description as it's prescribed traditionally, then I definitely see, like, lots of struggles that happen because of that. Yeah. So I really love this approach that you have. ..

LAURIE: There are two struggles. One is to be able to break free of the cultural norms if you don't fit in with them or ascribe to them. And the other is to uncondition yourself that you should be doing that if you decide you, you don't want to subscribe anymore to that, you still have to uncondition yourself. I mean, my mother was actually telling me recently, you know, I was born in the seventies, and she knew she wanted to work, right. And it was kind of like the first generation of women where it was kind of, I wouldn't say expected, but it was starting to be normal that a woman would work outside the home… starting to be normal. But it was still so on the fringe in America. She was conflicted and she had to ask my dad permission. My dad said, I don't think you should ask me. He was very progressive. He said, I don't think you should have to ask me for permission. But he understood she felt… because she was still reconditioning… that she did have to ask for that permission. And very… it was a very culture, norm-breaking decision for her to work outside of the house and for them to split the parenting.

SAMIA: Yes. Yes. Actually, I've seen that happen with my parents, too… because, like, especially, like I was saying, since we've come to America, so much has changed for us because here, you know, we don't have that extended family system that we were living as part of in India and Pakistan …here is just us. And so in some ways, not only a lot of the things that worked over there, they don't even… it's not even possible to make them work here because just things are so different and interesting... Yeah. And so to learn to renegotiate how your relationship is going to be, and again, how important honesty is in that context… And one thing that I saw my mom struggle with is, you know, similar to your dad having the more progressive attitude… My dad also had that more progressive attitude. My mom is very traditional in her thinking, very traditional... And so even to this day, even after all the changes that we have experienced, she still has… she tries to cling to doing things the old way. And so she still, you know, will call my dad and ask him for permission for things… he's like, sure, sure. I mean, because he knows her, he's like, sure, he goes along with it. But, like, for my mom, in the context of… one of the challenges in being honest, was or is that in her mind, like, she thinks of her partnership with my dad as my dad's the head and she is the follower. I mean, he's the leader, she's the follower. And so she needs to do things his way and what he likes… the way he likes it and so forth. And so for her to express her own opinion and be like, no, I like things differently. I want things done differently… It's very hard for her because she thinks she's doing something improper.

LAURIE: Right. Well, it's very strong cultural conditioning. It really is like if you grew up speaking French and now all of a sudden someone's saying, speak Spanish, you don't know Spanish, right? You really would have to be around Spanish to learn Spanish. And then you still would dream in French and you would still think in French by habit. So if it's your primary language… it's same thing in changing cultural norms. And that's why that first assignment is so profound, is asking you, what do you think? No, really, what do you think? Because I know it's easier to just think what your parents taught you or what your culture taught, you or what religion taught, you or what your friends are doing. But just take a moment, just pause, see if you can think for yourself. Hold all that in consideration, and then see if you can think for yourself. Is there anything that's really knocking at your heart, saying, you know, like, I might be gay, or I might be trans, or I might want to have a non-arranged marriage, or I might want to work outside the home, or I might want to have my own show…

SAMIA: Yeah.

LAURIE: The exact conversations that are being had, especially with first generation, you know, kids in a more westernized culture, especially when they have more traditional or more religious parents… we're in that moment right now. We are really in that moment where parents and the kids are trying to figure out what's okay, what is me protecting child and protecting my traditions, and what is making sure my child ends up happy and healthy and not suicidal.

SAMIA: Yes, yes. So the starting with the self… Starting with… like, challenging your own self to really think for yourself, to be honest with yourself… and if so, and if you're afraid to be honest with yourself, how do you begin to…

LAURIE: That's a sign of something that…

SAMIA: Yeah.

LAURIE: I mean, that's why it's good to have these podcasts, to have, you know, support groups on Facebook, to have friends, to have community, to have support groups for whatever you're going through. If you've survived abuse, if you have survived addiction, if you're working, dealing with an addiction, if you had an absent parent, if somebody died… you know, there's all kinds of things that where you may not trust your own voice yet. You may need to be around other people who have experienced that, who have worked a few more steps than you have to come out or be public or be comfortable with who they are and what they've experienced. So I would say that would be the first step if you're not ready to be honest with yourself.

SAMIA: Yeah.

LAURIE: Go sit in a room with other people who are and see how you feel.

SAMIA: Yeah, that's interesting approach that you highlight. I actually remember… this is a different context… I don't know if I was having so much trouble in terms of being honest with myself, but I was having trouble speaking up. And this is like back when I was in my late teens, and I was just... I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. And it was right around when I was in my late teens, I started college, and I was in America at this time, and a lot of things were changing for me. And I was, you know, at a time where I was starting to struggle with, you know, being a survivor of abuse… I… And trying to figure out how to help myself heal and so forth. And one of the things that I actually did find helpful… because I couldn't speak about it yet to anyone. I hadn't even told my family. But I did, like, on my college campus, you know, it was… one day I was walking by one of the quads that we have, and there was like this clothesline that was hung up, and it's like, whoa, what's going on? So I just went to check it out. Turns out it's like this whole club that was on campus, and it's actually on many campuses across the US. It's called the Clothesline Project. And what they do is actually raise awareness about issues of sexual abuse, sexual assault. And it's sort of like… what it has to do with the clothesline is, you know, that analogy of doing, like, dirty laundry…

LAURIE: ..airing your dirty laundry.

SAMIA: ..airing your dirty laundry... Yes, yes, exactly. So you actually have survivors and allies, you know, people who have had some kind of experience around sexual abuse or sexual assault… they'll write something of their story on these t-shirts. Sometimes the t-shirts are actual cloth fabric. Other times it's paper or whatever, but… And then you hang it up and in, and you do it in a very public space. So, you know, people are forced to see it in some ways. And then they would, every so often, you know, while the clothesline was hanging, they would congregate people and just do, like, little workshops, little talks. And so I just started out by just listening to what other people were sharing. I couldn't share anything myself… but just listening to them… And then I started showing up to their weekly meetings… and again, I was just listening. I didn't tell anyone about what I had experienced. But just being around people who were talking about it, who were sharing about it really started to open something up for me… And it was one of the things that I was then, like, okay, I want to open to someone up… open up to someone about this. And then I actually ended up going to see one of the psychologists on campus because we got free counseling access as a student, which was so amazing. So you know, to start by… by just hanging around people who were actively trying to do something about this challenge or problem was really helpful.

LAURIE: And if I would build on that, I would just say, first you can listen, then you can write your own story for your own self, like share it with yourself.

SAMIA: Yes.

LAURIE: You can pick a trusted professional, like a coach or a therapist. Then you can pick a trusted friend. Then you can see on many friends. And then you can think about going back to your abuser or your family, which will be the hardest one. But until you're really free to tell your experience, it's not the truth, it's your experience… and everyone has their experience… you're not going to be free from that. We call that a haunting. It haunts you, it follows you, and it becomes a secret… the more it’s a secret, the worse it haunts you. And the more it haunts you, the more it’s a secret... So that just… going through the steps of telling…

SAMIA: Yes.

LAURIE: And of course, we want every kid to think they can tell if they're being abused. We want kids to think they can tell if they're being abused when it's happening.

SAMIA: Yes.

LAURIE: Unfortunately, we don't have that culture fully yet, and we are paying for it…

SAMIA: Yes, yes. Oh, my gosh. I could just have a whole another day long conversation with you on that because... But we won't get into it, at least not right now, just because of time constraints and, oh, my gosh, talking about time constraints, I see we are nearing the time and we should be wrapping up for now. Oh, gosh... Thank you so much… Thank you so much, Laurie, for everything that you have shared so far. Is there anything else that's on your heart and mind that you would like to share as we wrap up?

LAURIE: Yeah, I think if you're still listening and we didn't scare you off talking about telling the truth to yourself and telling the truth to other people and really going for your things you're taking to the grave with you, things that are taboo, things you're not allowed to say, things nobody wants to hear, supposedly… if you're still listening, you know, you're a brave soul and you're a pioneer, and you're a change agent. And this is the front lines of being a change agent is telling the truth, whether it's telling the truth about climate change, or telling the truth about sexual abuse, or telling the truth about just what you need to feel loved in your relationships… it is the cutting edge of change-making in the world. So I honor you if you made it this far into the podcast and you are that person, that pioneer who's doing it. I have a TEDx talk that's all about telling the truth. It's 18 minutes like TEDx talks tend to be. So if you are interested in all the ways that we lie and all and why we lie and how pigeons even lie and how ubiquitous lying is and what we can do if we want to become one of those rare human change agents that wants to attempt to live a secret-free life, a truthful life, I would direct you to the TEDx talk. I would direct you to my website, which is lauriegerber.com. L a u r i e g e r b e r.com. There you can find lots of information about dating and love, but you can also find the TEDx talk. You can also find a free quiz. You can also find all kinds of other fun goodies…

SAMIA: Oh yay... Awesome. I'm definitely going to check out that TEDx talk and what else you have to offer on your website. Thanks so much again, Laurie. And for my last reminder to our audience, I'll just encourage you to please make sure you check the show notes because, yes, we will be dropping Laurie's links in there so you can connect with her and continue to learn with her and get the help and support you need whenever you feel ready for it. So until we connect next time, I wish you lots and lots of peace and joy... :)