Glennon Doyle

So when you're seven or you're 10, you don't have any agency to deal with what is happening.

You can't say your thing.

You can't get up and leave.

You are stuck in the dynamic.

And so my way of dealing with that was to dissociate.

So dissociation is how you leave so you can stay.

And we all do it in different ways.

Mine was always related to food.

I just will eat and eat until I'm just gone.

I'm gone.

You have to leave so you can stay when you're a kid.

So the thing that I had to remember...

was in those moments that I'm not a kid anymore.

So the thing that I have as an adult that I didn't have as a kid is agency.

It doesn't feel like a lot of agency, even when you're 50 and you're with your family of origin.

It still feels scary.

But

The difference, I think, is that when I am feeling that I'm in a system, a group, a country that feels to me very much like a dysfunctional family, almost parallel to a lot of the dysfunction in our own families.

Some of us had fathers who didn't know how to regulate, fathers who were authoritarianism, fathers who were angry, and then

mothers who are afraid and complicit it feels very much like the micro of our family is being reenacted in the country a lot and that is hard for all of us and that's why it doesn't just feel like it's happening out there it feels like it's happening in our bodies because we're like seven again and feel like we don't have agency and all of this is just happening to us and so the way that I know how to try now is to use some agency