In Episode #16, Camille and Tanya explore opportunities for silver linings in the many challenges we are all facing this year by radically re-storying 2020.

 

Tanya shares a deeply personal story of her ex-husband’s 19-year struggle with mental illness and recent suicide. Stephen’s death is tragic, but it has also provided a needed release for his family and loved ones, who felt like they had lost him years ago.

 

From mental illness to concentration camp memoirs to activism, over-identifying with the victim or the perpetrator can cause us to lose ourselves in our trauma. When we are out of our power, we cannot help or support each other.

 

In the short term, 2020 may seem like the year from hell, but in the long term it may lead to needed clarity. Tanya and Camille each share what they have lost and gained this year and how the challenges of 2020 have led them to reclaim their wholeness.

 

“When the worst happens...there is still the opportunity for incredible blessing through connection. That's what can't be taken: our connection with ourselves and with each other.” -Tanya Taylor Rubinstein

 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:01] Restoring the Culture is hosted by Tanya Taylor, Rubinstein Story mentor, and Camille Adair, family constellation facilitator.

[00:00:11] In this podcast, these long term friends explore how stories servi lives. Their inquiry meanders into the realms of science, theater, health and consciousness, moving the individual and global narratives forward as they draw upon their relationship as the laboratory for their experiments. In truth, so many of us feel isolated and alone in our deepest longing.

[00:00:38] Each one of us is necessary rediscovering the truth of our human story and listening to what is calling us forward so that we can restoring the culture together.

[00:00:52] Hey, everybody, this is Tonya. And welcome back to another episode of Restoring the Culture with my dear friend Camille Adair and me. And today we are going to talk about radically restoring 20/20 and what that means to us.

[00:01:11] And Camille's going to start with a little passage from Victor Frankel's man's search for meaning.

[00:01:19] But in robbing the prison of its reality there lay a certain danger.

[00:01:26] It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life opportunities, which really did exist.

[00:01:39] Leaves me speechless, right?

[00:01:42] Amazing. Yeah, this speak by leaving us speechless. Sort of not unlike this year. Right.

[00:01:49] There's a lot of speechlessness. And I think I mean, to think if you could find a silver lining.

[00:01:56] And living in a concentration camp, surely we can find silver linings. For 20/20 with.

[00:02:08] The pandemic. With massive fires, with many deaths from the pandemic.

[00:02:17] With social isolation and the wave of depression that's resulting from that increased suicides. Right.

[00:02:27] I mean, we can pay the the dark picture, but what's underneath it that's wanting to get our attention? I'd love to know your thoughts on that. Mm hmm.

[00:02:38] Well, thanks for asking. It's such a huge.

[00:02:42] Such a huge topic that we're biting off here.

[00:02:46] And I just want to say to our listeners, as always, there's no dogma here.

[00:02:51] There's no agenda here.

[00:02:55] We just let you all in on our personal exploration, which is what Camille and I have been doing and our friendship for 20 years. So, I mean, it's it's a humbling thing. It's interesting that you chose Victor Frankl, because I have been moved to.

[00:03:12] I've been rereading Elie Wiesel's night and day, also concentration camp memoirs. I'm thinking about the children at the border and concentration camps and also reading about the forced sterilization of people of color, women of color in Georgia. And you know just what's happening in this moment. Right. So I just want to first acknowledge this moment, September 20th, 2020, a couple days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. That being in the news also. Right. Right after Rosh Hashana. Right after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. So and in the midst of it all were 40, I think 45 or 46 days from the U.S. presidential election. So so why are we both being called to return to Holocaust stories now?

[00:04:06] It's like. Well, I think about Steven. Yeah. If we read story, what's going on personally, right? I mean, that takes me to the personal.

[00:04:15] Well, it's very interesting. So Stephen was my is my was my daughter's father, and he committed suicide.

[00:04:24] This in the last three weeks ago today.

[00:04:30] And he had schizoaffective disorder.

[00:04:33] He was. Jewish.

[00:04:38] From L.A., sort of the nice Jewish boy stereotype or a trope or whatever, but he really was that very, very brilliant and.

[00:04:51] His family had Holocaust drama on his father's side. I think this is what I want to say about all of it. What I want to come back to when you asked me that question. OK. There's trauma. We are a traumatized society where traumatized culture, we're traumatized species. And I think about like the Peter Levine work about in our animal self and our nervous systems, how animals have been attending to their trauma and had because of our mindset and because of things we talk about patriarchy, white supremacy and on and on colonization, all the things that have kept us in boxes and how those things traumatize us individually and collectively. So how do we seek liberation?

[00:05:44] In the camps while holding space to get out of the camps. How do rats, how do we open to liberation in the prison of our trauma? Wow. Walking our way out of that trauma to the best of our ability.

[00:06:02] I guess I'm curious to know in what way have you been released from a concentration camp since Stephen died?

[00:06:10] Such a great question. Well. The love was liberated. The mental illness and his trauma.

[00:06:22] Played into my own trauma when I lost my daughter's father and it was in a very traumatic so circumstance and what it did was it triggered my trauma and I started getting panic attacks. I stopped performing my own. One woman shows I became afraid to speak about my life publicly onstage when that had been my art form before. And I became terrified that something would happen to my daughter. It felt life or death to me.

[00:06:57] When I saw what happened to Schizophrenic's, what I saw, there was no Stephen unknown in his eyes.

[00:07:05] And he was trying to strangle me on my daughter's fourth birthday. And it was that was not who he was in any shape or form. You know, I said to you earlier. He was the least racist. Most feminists that I knew about in the best sense of the word, the least homophobic, white, cis straight man I ever met. He was truly committed to social justice.

[00:07:29] He had been an anti-apartheid advocate when when he was in Berkeley as a young man. And he was just so about justice and about love. But when I lost him and this is the help mental illness, when you're on the other side of it and of course, for the person is we lose the ability to access.

[00:07:51] But what happened was that trauma cut off my voice.

[00:07:55] And like I was saying to you, as soon as he died, there was total grief. I smashed my finger really hard that night and had to go to the emergency room the night before. He jumped that night, that same night. And I smash my grandmother's wedding ring that I always wore the diamonds into my finger and it was bleeding and had to be cut off by the doctor. And a few hours later he'd jumped and there was some kind of cosmic connection. But and I screamed when when that finger was hurt, I screamed like this, this hellacious scream that I only remember screaming twice before and once had to do with his suicide attempt before.

[00:08:44] Oh, wow. So. I think we're all cosmically connected. I know it, I know it in my being. I.

[00:08:55] I think the support from the other side of the veil is greater than it's ever been teaching us, showing me personally that the connection and the love is always there.

[00:09:07] All the ancestral work, both you and I have done all the personal healing work. I like to come to that the love is always there and that we can move back and forth the Brit across the bridge. And I love what Victus Franco says and Elie Wiesel to a different story.

[00:09:23] But this thing of the opportunity of the present moment, even in the worst of circumstances, to me that's radical radical resilience. So how in 2020, you know, the year people are calling the hell a year.

[00:09:40] How can we restore it to see the incredible opportunities to be in service to each other, to love each other more at this time?

[00:09:52] Well, it's interesting. As I hear you talk, one of the ways that I wonder about. This restoring for you and for me, I met Stephen. Fortunately knew him before his mental illness. Yeah. You know, set sat in. One of the things that strikes me is that you refer to him as the father of your daughter. He was your husband. And I remember that hit me when you told me that he died, that he suicided.

[00:10:25] I remember at 4:00, as sad as I was for your daughter, I was sad for you because you lost a husband who you divorced only because of his mental his untreated mental illness. You didn't divorce Steven. You divorced his mental illness.

[00:10:47] It's a very interesting thing you are saying.

[00:10:52] And because I was thinking yesterday, I mean, I wrote something up and I said, I don't have a problem.

[00:11:02] With white people, I have a problem with whiteness. I don't have a problem.

[00:11:08] I never did with Stephen. I have the problem with mental illness.

[00:11:11] If we can separate out the toxicity, whether it's individual or cultural, and of course, it's not just toxicity that sounds so harsh.

[00:11:21] It's a byproduct of trauma. All of it.

[00:11:24] Well, and because of that, every race has that trauma, which absolutely watching that makes it really hard and how we language all of this. Right.

[00:11:35] It's why I'm reading this book right now, my grandmother's hands.

[00:11:38] And it's about racialized trauma and the pathways to mending our hearts and bodies. And it talks about the different things we need to do if we're in white bodies versus black bodies because it's all DNA memory from our own clusters.

[00:11:53] And that's different. It takes on a different tone and tenor.

[00:11:59] That's right. That makes a lot of sense to me.

[00:12:02] You know, just like schizophrenia takes on a different tenor than somebody who loses somebody to drug addiction or somebody who loses somebody to cancer. There's all there's a loss and all those things. But there's a different human story right attached to it, which is why, once again, the thing you and I talk about the as above so below path.

[00:12:25] But yes. And Steven was my husband. He was my best friend for sure. We shared values in a profound way, which was the only reason I agreed to have a child with him. I wasn't sure I wanted a child. I wasn't one of those women that always knew they'd have a child. It was his idea. And I was 32 when I got pregnant and.

[00:12:53] The love once again is released and I feel him helping me. You were the one that said to me it's like after 19 years of losing him to mental illness.

[00:13:04] I got the FA. I got the other parent back. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You have him back?

[00:13:11] I have him back as the other parent. And I do want to say that was always more our natural relationship was friendship and co parent.

[00:13:20] It wasn't some big love affair on either side. There was love, but we felt familial immediately when we met. We felt so deeply familial. And in many ways I'd say, yeah, definitely like co parents and best friends. And so that's the honest energy of us. And I can own the honest energy of us because I think we spent a lot of time. We had problems besides his schizophrenia. That was what took us down.

[00:13:52] But there was definitely a trying to make our relationship a big love affair, and it wasn't.

[00:14:01] And so there's something to about like that was conflict in our relationship that had nothing to do with his mental illness.

[00:14:06] We were great co parents and best friends. And we have a beautiful daughter together, a beautiful, brilliant daughter.

[00:14:17] So I wonder, what is the relationship? I mean, I'm not saying there's an answer to this, because the most profound wisdom is I think at these in these days is held in the unknown. But I guess I want to skirt the edges of an inquiry which is feeling into the relationship between covered and Stevens, the timing of Stevens death.

[00:14:40] Well, then I want to hear from you. The relationship between Kofod and everything that's changed in your life because, yes, like, well, people are saying 20-20 right is the worst year, the year from hell. And I would say through the Ecos lens.

[00:14:57] That's the truth.

[00:14:59] I mean, from the souls lands and from the long stories lands, because that's what we're here for, right? The long story, my friend and teacher, right now, produ taffin talks all the time about the long story of the soul and all the threads past, present, future, quantum time, no matter what's going on in the body now.

[00:15:23] So in the long story, I feel like 2020 is a blessing. I could never say it will be a blessing that my daughter's father was in that much pain and that he had to end his life, felt he had to end his life that way.

[00:15:41] But the the liberation that I feel personally and that that knowing he is also free of that suffering, there's like I feel like there's an outbreath.

[00:15:53] And I was talking with his mother about it like that we're all taking an outbreath cause and eat and, you know, like we know how the story ends now. And there's something holding with that that's so hard. I think it's a metaphor for this time.

[00:16:07] The tension part of what the tension of those 19 years did teach me was holding with the tension, not knowing the ending of the story. And it's hard to hold with that tension.

[00:16:22] And then the story changed, right? It didn't really. And it changed.

[00:16:28] Yeah, well, it reminds me of the living dead. I mean, I think it's that way with people, you know, who have Alzheimer's or dementia.

[00:16:35] Yes. Yes. People with with severe mental illness, untreated mental illness.

[00:16:41] People with, you know, late stage substance abuse addiction. I think it's like the person left a long time ago. And so what you are left with is this body that is acting things out in certain ways and a voice that may still sound like them. And, of course, their soul is still there in some way.

[00:17:01] But the relationship that we had was interrupted.

[00:17:08] Exactly. And and they become unavailable for a long time for the relationship. And it's actually in the release of the body that the love, the availability comes back. So for me, in terms of 20/20. Right, so many deaths.

[00:17:24] And I think we're seeing like. The death culture we live in, the extreme materialism, the extreme pressure on us all to do something. Be something the. My God, the struggles, you know, and where it's taken us at this moment in humanity around the big issues and that the intimacy issues. So I don't know. But I just know you have for me that there's a clarity.

[00:17:59] And I have my voice back in a way, and I feel him supporting me. And so what happens? Like Victor Frankl in the camps. What happens when the worst happens? And there is still this opportunity. For incredible blessing through connection, right? That's what can't be taken if we have connection with ourselves and with each other.

[00:18:26] I think that's been the silver lining for me, even though the process has been hard, very hard at times, is that it's forced me inward, right? It's like I was traveling a lot. I had a lot of ways in which I was had developed really sophisticated coping mechanisms for some things that were difficult for me to face.

[00:18:46] And.

[00:18:48] And we all do that. Right. I mean, it's not a bad thing. That's like kind of some part of human brilliance is that we we find our ways. Right.

[00:18:56] And and then to be someone who loves to travel and loves to engage with a lot of people.

[00:19:02] And then here I am. And my you know, I mean, what is it?

[00:19:06] It's like maybe 14 by 14 foot office where I spend most of my time. And so it has definitely driven me inside of myself.

[00:19:18] And.

[00:19:20] I have to be careful, right, that I don't get lost.

[00:19:23] But I also feel like, you know, we've been moving into such a different direction in our culture. Right.

[00:19:31] We've been doing this inflationary move for so long around, get bigger, get louder, be more visible. Right. And I feel like something's happened for me where I'm going into this reverse place and I'm finally I'm fine. And it's happening organically. It's not been something I've contemplated. It just is happening because of the circumstances. But it's become so deep for me that it's like I'm going.

[00:20:00] I'm going into almost like a gestational phase. And I think it's really good. I mean, I think that that's really the blessing of it. Right.

[00:20:09] It's and it's amazing. And you and I talked about it's almost like we're like the sliding doors because I realize her to me really went small and small for me. Doesn't necessarily look like small for somebody else. Like somebody could look at me and say, that's not small, that's big. But for me, I contained for 19 years and it was a big deal when I stopped performing and felt a lot of fear about what had always come naturally to me and what I'd been trained in as an actor.

[00:20:40] And I know that right now, as you're going in, my call is to show up with my team now in the world and to lean all the way and with my voice and what I learned and what I've integrated. And all of a sudden there's a congruency in my voice that hasn't been there before. There was like fragmented.

[00:21:02] I had parts of myself, but I actually feel that I have my whole self back. Maybe for the first time since I was a young child.

[00:21:14] You know, it's interesting when I think about because you said you lost your voice when Steven's mental illness came as to play, right? Yeah.

[00:21:20] And I think that there are many ways which in which the soul can become entangled. And it's not just past and future can be in the present.

[00:21:29] But it almost makes me wonder if part of you.

[00:21:34] Was occupying a space with Steven. And that that's part of where your voice went, was sort of in accompanying him in a way where he was at. Like, could there have been almost some kind of an entanglement in the present moment? That isn't about time, but it is about space and conditions, right?

[00:21:53] Yes, there totally was. And you're so intuitive to ask that question, because what I got. And I haven't said to anybody out loud was when he tried to strangle me because his schizophrenia had kicked in. He was looking in my eyes and tried to strangle me and kill me on my daughter's fourth birthday. Somebody had to stop driving by and pull them off. And from my point of view, there was no conflict. Then I looked in his eyes that I went, Oh, Steven's gone mad. There's no Steven there. Nobody. He didn't have his diagnosis shed. Nobody believed me. But I knew there was something that was. I'm a cop, cautious with my words here, because it's not going to sound maybe politically correct, but there was an energy in him that was very.

[00:22:47] Evil. It looks like a demon to me. And I met its gaze cause it was a Steven, I met this energies gaze and. The night Stephen died, when I set my finger was smashed and I yelled. There was that energy came out of me in the scream.

[00:23:14] And it scared my scared my current husband. And I felt it come through my eyes.

[00:23:20] And I looked up, said like Steven looked at me and I was like some part of me. I swallowed part of the energy perhaps for him. And it was suppressing me.

[00:23:35] I mean, it was wild. And then when I when I heard about his death, I knew immediately the energy that had come out of me the night before that.

[00:23:44] Like in quantum time before he jumped, I was released from that energy.

[00:23:50] It makes a lot of sense and, you know, it's interesting because in one of the traditions I work in schizophrenia because of schizophrenia is an identification with both the victim and the perpetrator.

[00:24:04] Well, Steven told me getting back to the Holocaust, I had a very, very strong belief and a past life memory that I was put to death in the camps as a Jewish pope, Polish woman. Steven had a very strong belief that he was a guard, a Nazi guard in the camps.

[00:24:24] Really? Well, what's really interesting, when we think back on Victor Frankl, he that's well, that was his sanity. Was that.

[00:24:32] He didn't identify with the perpetrators. He also didn't identify with the victims. He stayed, Victor.

[00:24:41] So, like, how do we remain who we are amidst all of the turmoil is happening in the world and stay ourselves when we when we identify with the victim or the perpetrator.

[00:24:54] It's like we don't even recognize that we literally have stepped in to some kind of like a toxic field.

[00:25:04] Perdita would call it a puddle.

[00:25:07] She calls it like we step in the puddle of our issue and our ancestral issue, perhaps. And certainly for me.

[00:25:15] That has happened with particularly my activist self, like Around Black Lives Matter. And my relationship to really decolonizing myself and whiteness. But there was a point when I over identified with black women's pain. And then when we when I realized when I did that I was out of my power. I was actually out of even being useful to them. And it was I was re traumatizing myself. I also wasn't in deep relationship then. And you could always tell. I could always tell on social media, like white women who are just sort of like I just want to say kissing ass to black women.

[00:25:54] And they're they're out of their power. They just think, now I've got to give all my power away.

[00:26:00] I can't. And when the reality is it's not an intimate relationship unless we can actually address these things and talk about them. Right. So there's so many ways, so many puddles.

[00:26:13] We can step in and be outside of our integrity, around the power we do carry. And being honest about it because of our overidentification with the victim or the perpetrator. And I do think in our culture we celebrate overidentification with victimhood. It's really hard to support ourselves in each other and standing actually and owning our full power. Right. And you and I have talked about the self victim.

[00:26:39] Identifying with the victim leads to entitlement and then we become the perpetrator. Right. I mean, it really is. They really are on the same continuum. Yes. They're not separate continuums. They're completely related.

[00:26:51] It's a different paradigm. And they we move back and forth between victim, perpetrator and inner victim, outer victim, inner perpetrator out of victim. Right. It's a different paradigm to say I'm here. I'm here with my ancestors. I'm here. I'm right. Relationships are willing to become right.

[00:27:08] Relationship with everybody. Right. I mean, and it's messy. I do want to say it's not a linear process in my experience. Right.

[00:27:17] Right.

[00:27:19] So what else do you want to say about 2020, 20-20, like, what is your what is your wisdom? Like, if you had to distill it of like what you've gotten so far from this year and perhaps your hope moving forward, I think.

[00:27:37] One of the things that's happened for me is that I've given myself permission to really have more limitation, like in awe.

[00:27:50] It's almost like the pathway to me for me to unfold in my fullness is by saying, knowing when to say no and knowing when to say yes, that there is no price like the price of leaving part of myself behind is not negotiable now. That's become a reason. And that's a real shift inside of me. That is, it's changing me. And I would also say that I've.

[00:28:17] I feel like I have cut I've come into contact with the intelligence of love and not just the love between people, but the intelligence of love. And I really feel like for me, that's.

[00:28:36] It's not only the gift, it's like I'm waking up to something that I've always known. Mm hmm. So what Cobbett, what the pandemic and what all of this has done for me in getting more in touch with myself is it's actually more of a remembering than a learning something new. Right. It's detaching from all the distractions that kept me, you know, spending more time on the level of persona than the level of soul. Yeah, totally.

[00:29:05] How about you?

[00:29:09] I think this time has really awakened me to embodying.

[00:29:16] Myself and has confronted my own spiritual bypass, my desire to spiritual bypass or do emotional bypass and really land more in my body land and become more human.

[00:29:35] I feel like like containment is my medicine because I've been able to express myself throughout my life despite saying I lost part of my voice.

[00:29:48] That's true. And I've still been able to express more than contain. So everything is about simplicity, structure. And that's to me, the sacred masculine I'm bringing in to the relationship with the divine feminine. I'm feel.

[00:30:07] Much more whole from coming through this year.

[00:30:10] And and great fall like for the expiated lessons of this year, because I know we have to learn now as a species, not individually only, but as a species in quantum time, because there is no time with everything that's happening in the big cosmic narratives. And my hope going forward is, you know, one of the things I've been saying to my clients is how are we going to write news stories of the culture?

[00:30:40] I think it's now about getting smaller, not bigger. And why smaller? I mean, more intimate.

[00:30:48] I do, too. Hundred percent sharing our deepest, most intimate stories and making the unspeakable, unspeakable. And moving past shame. Right. That's how we're going to. Those are the news stories said the old stories. They're also the news stories going deeper in that connection.

[00:31:09] Sounds like we're moving, huh? Things are moving and shifting and. As always, it's a privilege to be here. I feel.

[00:31:20] Yeah, this one feels important. That's all I'll say. Mm hmm.

[00:31:24] Thanks, everybody, for listening. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for being with us.

[00:31:33] Thank you for joining Camille and Tanya for this episode of Restoring the Culture. If you were inspired, we would deeply appreciate it if you would leave a review on iTunes or any other platform where you heard our podcast. For more ongoing inspiration and support, please join our no cost global Facebook community. Restoring the culture. You can support that podcast by making a donation here. And remember, we are each restoring the culture as we reach story. Our own lives. See you next time.