Judy Foreman is a survivor of physical and emotional abuse from both her mother and father. Her dad – she had to call him by his first name only—was an alcoholic, a bully, and the perpetrator of unending abuse until Judy left home for Wesley College. Her mother could not or would not express love and affection. Judy can’t remember a time when her mother hugged, kissed, or supported her in any way. Only when Judy stayed with a Danish family for a summer did she begin to realize how dysfunctional her family was.
But Judy’s journey toward healing took years of therapy and self-introspection. Her new book, Let the More Loving One Be Me: My Journey from Trauma to Freedom, is a testament to her inner strength and her refusal to
lead a life of fear, anxiety, and mistrust.
The book is available on Amazon and on most other book sites.
You can find out about her other books at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Judy-
Foreman/author/B00E7GSZ8M?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppi
ngPortalEnabled=true
www.judyforeman.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/judy-foreman-88a0272/
Judy Foreman is a survivor of physical and emotional abuse from both her mother and father. Her dad – she had to call him by his first name only—was an alcoholic, a bully, and the perpetrator of unending abuse until Judy left home for Wesley College. Her mother could not or would not express love and affection. Judy can’t remember a time when her mother hugged, kissed, or supported her in any way. Only when Judy stayed with a Danish family for a summer did she begin to realize how dysfunctional her family was.
But Judy’s journey toward healing took years of therapy and self-introspection. Her new book, Let the More Loving One Be Me: My Journey from Trauma to Freedom, is a testament to her inner strength and her refusal to
lead a life of fear, anxiety, and mistrust.
The book is available on Amazon and on most other book sites.
You can find out about her other books at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Judy-
Foreman/author/B00E7GSZ8M?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppi
ngPortalEnabled=true
www.judyforeman.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/judy-foreman-88a0272/
Do you feel overlooked and invisible because you're an older woman? Have you had those age jump days when you look in the mirror and swear that you're looking at your mother? Do you feel the clock ticking and wonder whether you have enough time to check off all the items on your bucket list? Hello, I'm Jane Leder and I'm the host of Older Women and Friends, a podcast about and four older women that kick stereotypes to the curb. We older women are the keepers of stories, and guests on Older Women and Friends share their stories about love, loss, dreams, friendships. But let's not kid ourselves Aging can be a messy, complex affair. But older women have been around the block a few times and learned a thing or two, and this podcast celebrates their lessons. So put in your earbuds and join me on Older Women and Friends.
Speaker 1:Judy Foreman has worn many hats and author, staff writer at the Boston Globe and a syndicated health columnist for national newspapers. During that time, she tackled subjects ranging from aging to exercising to the pain gender gap. Yet as her professional life flourished, she struggled with the repercussions of childhood trauma and the process of healing. Judy's latest book, let the More Loving One Be Me my Journey from Trauma to Freedom, explores how time, therapy and courage led her to a life of deep fulfillment, rewarding work and, most importantly, love. Judy, I am excited to have you here and welcome to Older Women and Friends. Thank you, I'm delighted to be here. Your story is one of trauma to freedom and to set the stage, if you don't mind, I'd like you to read a part of Chapter 1, the very first page or so. That sets the scene.
Speaker 2:Sure, it was decades before I could tell my mother about it, a feat I managed only when it was clear that she was dying. My mother seemed shocked at this belated telling. But how could she have been? Where did she think her husband was disappearing to half naked every night, above the neck of his t-shirt, his face erupted, oversized, two chins sinking down to touch the edge of his shirt. The dim light from the hallway bouncing off his hairless head, his thick, bushy eyebrows, the hairs poked up every which way, casting his eyes into shadow.
Speaker 2:This image, unerasable, set me up for a lifetime of insomnia, a fear of falling asleep. I couldn't afford to go to sleep, I didn't want to be surprised, and so it went every night until I finally went to college. Every night, I would hear his footsteps coming down the hall, getting closer and closer with each breath. I took hey silly. I would switch off my light, hoping I had been fast enough that no light would show under the doorway. When he turned the corner toward my room, I would burrow down, squeezing my eyes shut, fending sleep the way a small, frightened animal plays dead. I got hot, huddled under the blanket, yet my body was stiff, frozen.
Speaker 1:That is some description, obviously very emotional, very distressing. You make a very interesting point here. I found it interesting. You have a very vivid description from the get-go of your father and you mentioned how only when your mother was dying you were able to in fact tell her about the abuse.
Speaker 2:Well, tell us a little bit about your mother In some ways I feel like the emotional damage I got growing up in this household was worse from her than from my father. He was unredeemable. He was an angry, alcoholic, blustery, highly successful CEO of a company we all know intimately, very famous American huge company, with all the corporate bluster and braggadocio and bullying. He was like Trump in many ways narcissistic, angry, angry, denying anything real. My mother was.
Speaker 2:She was a spunky kid, I think, growing up, and she rode horses with her father and went sailing and played the French horn in high school. It was ahead of her time in some ways. But then when she got married she became the quintessential corporate wife and very good at throwing dinner parties and acting all smiley. But I don't remember her ever really hugging me or snuggling or reassuring me. She was very superficial. She could just hated emotions, couldn't feel her own emotions or acknowledge anybody else's and practically to her dying day, thought that my father was just that. They had a fabulous marriage and at the same time she did not want her ashes buried in the same urn as his. She did not want him for eternity, even though she kept pronouncing it a wonderful marriage.
Speaker 1:And when you talk about this emotional abuse and the lack of feelings and the lack of support, physical and other, from your mother, and you said that perhaps that was even more devastating than the abuse from your father. What effect do you think that had on you, first of all as a young girl?
Speaker 2:It gives you a huge burden to unravel and look at it made me feel like nobody was home Inside me. A young child has to bond with a parent, usually the mother, and take in that person's sort of reassurance and presence and warmth and feeling. If you don't get that, there is an emptiness inside, constant gnawing, yerting and a fear of abandonment. Because essentially it isn't a bit. That takes a long time to recognize that as a part of oneself not one's whole self, but as a damaged parts and essentially learn to Try to be nice to that part, to feel compassionate toward that part of oneself or, in my case, myself. It's a tricky, difficult journey but for an awful lot of people Not just people who have had sexual abuse but show them, growing up in alcoholic families people had other kinds of use or loss it's a huge. It's a huge deal trying to heal from that Initial lack.
Speaker 1:were you like many children of alcoholics, where you try to be the perfect daughter?
Speaker 2:yes, I got straight A's almost. I was a cheerleader, I had the right boy friends. I got into wilsa college, which was wonderful. Yes, I tried to do everything right and my poor brother looked at me. He was younger and thought she's a stupid girl. She's trying to do everything right and she's not getting anywhere. She's not getting anything. He did the opposite, messed up all over the place, and that didn't work either. So we look at each other, at other's unconscious strategies, and think, well, what a stupid way to do it. But nothing worked. Essentially, there was nothing to be gotten, there was no good there and you mentioned your brother.
Speaker 1:Was he older?
Speaker 2:younger. My brother was older. He has died now a whole bunch of medical problems. He was younger. He did not share well either my father. When I was six and my brother was three, my father gave us both pen knives why he gave this to a three year old, I don't know. And we were coming home on a ferry from Nova Scotia and we each had our pen. I grew in the back seat. My brother was trying to cut a piece of spring cut string cut up with his Knife. It went into his left eye and he subsequently lost that I so. He grew up as a little kid wearing a glass eye and interesting thing, that fake. I always had tears or mucus or something coming back. He always had to mop it and he would say, no, it's just a cold. But I always thought in a way he was crying and he was crying because my father never let us call him dad and I think he was like a little three year old, crying for a father neither of us ever had.
Speaker 1:What did, what were you allowed to call your father?
Speaker 2:by his first name. I will say now because I'm not outing him by name in my book. But yes, he only one message to call it by his first name.
Speaker 1:So were you aware of how dysfunctional your childhood was?
Speaker 2:no, that's the weird thing what you grow up with is normal. I had no idea to the extent that I had any conscious figuring out of things, I wouldn't have known that everybody's father didn't come into their room like mine did, or that everybody wasn't allowed to call their father dad. What you grow up with, that's your world. That's normal. You don't even know normal from abnormal. It's only later, when you get to be with other families or talk to other people, you realize whoa, this was not normal. But that takes years to figure out.
Speaker 1:So I understand that there was a pivotal event where you did have an opportunity to live with another family. Can you tell us about that please?
Speaker 2:Yes, I was lucky enough to be an American field service and AFS exchange student between my junior and senior year in high school and with 700 other kids I went on a big boat ship to Europe and I lived with the Danish family and they were wonderful. Nobody got drunk, nobody was swearing, nobody was angry. They seem to like each other. We had fun. We had five meals a day Danish pastries. I learned to cook some Danish food. It was. It was a shock.
Speaker 1:I thought well, this is nice, it was interesting, it was enlightening, it sounds like it and I'm just wondering after that experience I'm assuming it was difficult to pick up, move back into your family of origin and have to deal with, as you mentioned, the alcoholism, the lack of emotion, the lack of support. Were there flashes of light going off in your head? Did it change the way that you dealt with your parents once you returned?
Speaker 2:That's a good question and nobody has asked me that. Frankly, I think I just threw myself into school. It was my senior year applying to colleges and I was a cheerleader and I was on the school newspaper and I just got really busy.
Speaker 1:So I think I just glided right back into where I was and no epiphanies yet Now you write about your experiences at Wellesley and you mentioned earlier that it was a wonderful thing to happen for you and I know you wrote right about how being at an all-girls school affected you, and I wonder how oh yeah, wellesley was huge for me.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm sure your audience is roughly the same age as I am. Yeah, I wasn't supposed to be anything or do anything. My mother was a stay-at-home mother and sometimes it makes me crazy thinking women are doing this service if they go to work, because you've got to be a stay-at-home mother and that fixes everything. Well, I had a stay-at-home mother and it didn't fix anything. Well, I think it's the dynamics and the health of the family that's really more important than who stays home and who goes to work. But for the first time, I felt like I was being taken seriously, and not just it wasn't because I was, it was just automatically there. We were all these women and we were taken seriously. We took each other seriously and it was stunning. It was a stunning thought that, oh, I should do something with my life, or I can do something with my life. I want to do something with my life.
Speaker 1:It was great, but in fact you did do something with your life. You began a long and happy career at the Boston Globe and I know that your book contains multiple stories that you worked on actual quotes from the stories or your responses to them. How did that help you get on the road to recovering from the abuse?
Speaker 2:Because, at its heart, journalism is a search for truth, or truth plural, and being able to look for the truth and tell the truth on page one or page six or whatever, and being paid to find out the truth and tell the truth.
Speaker 2:I had this whole institution behind me to tell the truth, even if the truth I was reporting wasn't popular with some institution or some person. I was not an investigative reporter at that point, I was a medical writer, but still there were a lot of controversies. In being able to tell the truth about what was valid science and what was not, things like that, it was incredibly validating and encouraging and I think along the line I began to get more curious about what was actually the truth in my family. In fact, at one point I remember being at a conference covering I guess it was alcoholic and dysfunctional families and one of the speakers said the typical dysfunctional alcoholic family has very tight boundaries around the family and very loose boundaries within the family. I thought, holy cow, this is my family. I didn't know I fit into a category and suddenly that made a lot of things make sense, that there was a pattern, that people understood this and maybe I could too.
Speaker 1:But you were still struggling and I'm wondering at what point did you begin therapy?
Speaker 2:I was. I did therapy with when I was with my first husband a bit, but then I finally found my second husband, tom, and we had 22 years together and then he died of prostate cancer and I went on matchcom and found my current husband, ken and Ken has understood me better than anyone in my life and he referred me to this type of therapy called internal family systems, which is getting increasingly well known. What's the name of the woman who wrote Eat, pray, love? Elizabeth Gilbert has written, and Bessel Vanderkog, whose book the Body Keeps the Score that's been on the best seller list for years. He is a big fan of it and it's the kind of therapy that you learn to recognize the different parts of your shelf and get a little distance on them and then be compassionate toward those parts of your shelf, the parts that you hate, basically.
Speaker 1:And what were some of those parts that you hated?
Speaker 2:Oh, I hated the anxiety that I have always felt because I had such an insecure upbringing and the emptiness, the little child who didn't get held and loved. I've had to learn to take that part into myself and I think they call it re-parenting in a way, learning to love that part and realize that that was not my fault, there was nothing deficient in me, although that is the feeling you have, what's wrong with me, that I'm not getting this. But it's really not a deficiency in the child, it's a deficiency in the parent Speaking of children.
Speaker 1:do you have any of your own or did you inherit kids from just?
Speaker 2:No, no, both. I have one of my own who is now in his 50s and he has a wife and two kids. So I have two grandsons and my husband, Halzen, has two kids.
Speaker 1:So how do you think your experiences with your family and the abuse emotionally and, in fact, as you describe, physically, how do you think that impacted you as a mother?
Speaker 2:I think I was very determined to tell the truth and not say that everything was okay when it wasn't. My divorce was very hard on my son. We had joint custody, my first husband and I, and he went back and forth two weeks with me, two weeks with my husband and probably that was an act of generosity on my part because I could have gone for sole custody, but I didn't want to take that fatherhood experience away from Bruce, my first husband. But I think it was hard on Mike to not have a permanent home of his own and it was hard for him as a kid to express his feelings. We used to have a little puppet that I would do play therapy with him. How was the puppet feeling today? Well, the puppet's a little sad to try to get him to talk about his feelings, but it was hard for him. I think it's hard for a lot of kids of divorce but it made me very sensitive to not faking it with him.
Speaker 1:Healing is never a direct path. There are side roads that we go on. I'm just wondering if there were any misguided steps that you took along the road toward healing.
Speaker 2:No, it wasn't exactly a straight line. I had different kinds of therapists along the way. I had a good sort of regular talk therapy therapist and then a cognitive behavior person who was very helpful, but, frankly, when I got to IFS and total family systems, I felt like I had never really had therapy before that. This was so much more effective and so much more helpful. And my husband and I have done it as a couple as well, and it's extremely helpful for that, because if one person is angry, you, as the other person, can say, hey, what's going on? Are you in your angry part again? What's wrong? And then the angry part actually is feeling hurt about something and you get below the outer. So I find it very helpful, very helpful.
Speaker 1:So you determined to write a memoir. What was your motivation in that? Was that initially a way in which you could work through your own feelings, or was that in combination with a real desire to help others?
Speaker 2:I was taking in this organization it's a lifelong learning thing, it's called a Harvard Institute for Learning and Retirement and I decided to take a memoir class, just for fun. I'd only written journalism. I'd never written a nonfiction word in my life and I started writing these memoirs. The first one was the one that I read a piece of to you and I wrote. Just every week I'd read another memoir, and some were hilarious and some were serious and some were thoughtful, and they were all over the place and eventually I decided I had enough for a book. So I really didn't have any goal in mind, I just the process took me along where it took me.
Speaker 1:But at this point, having done all of that and letting the process take you wherever it took you, are there messages that you want to convey to your readers? What is it that we should come away with, or you hope that we should take, from this book?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I think that paying attention to one's inner life is essential and difficult. Paying attention to the inner stuff is really what counts, and that's what counts in terms of making connections with other people and with oneself, and that's not easy, but it's totally the way to go. That is essentially my message.
Speaker 1:Talking about the message, let's talk a little bit about the book and where people can find it and where they can find more information about you. So the title of the book Let the More Loving One Be Me my Journey from Trauma to Freedom, and I'd like to know when this will be available for purchase and where people can find it Amazon, what a surprise.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can pre-order it now and the official pub date is in eight days, on this 29th, but you can already pre-order it. You can also get it through my website, which is judiformancom, and if you go there, you can get little tidbits about my other books, if you're interested in those as well, including this one on exercise and one on chronic pain, which was my first book. So, yes, it's on Amazon and a bunch of other sites, but Amazon is certainly the easiest and best known. So you just click on Judy Forman, don't forget the E F-O-R-E-N-A-N, and Let the More Loving One Be Me. And this has been a insightful, meaningful interview.
Speaker 1:I am so appreciative of you spending this time with me and looking at some very difficult issues and topics. I thank you so much, Judy I thank you.
Speaker 2:You've been a great interviewer. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Older Women and Friends Speaking of friends. Please tell yours about this podcast and if you'd like to contact me with comments or suggestions, you can email me at olderwomenandfriendspodcastcom. And while you're at it, please take a few minutes to write a review. It's really easy. Go to Apple Podcasts type in older women and friends, scroll down the page and click on Reviews. Until next time.