Welcome. This is A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti and today we are wrapping up our four-part series, Relationship Rescue with a segment on the art of healing relationships.Â
If you’ve missed any of this series, you’ll want to check them out. In episode one, you’ll get a real relationship advice from the trenches as Paula Jean Burns and I share our personal lessons about friendships, teenagers, spouses, and everything in between.Â
In episodes two and three, you can listen in as my client, Megan and I dive deep into her struggle to find love. You’ll hear us talk about what’s in the way and how true love, connection, and intimacy is 100% possible for everyone, no matter where you’re starting from.
My guest today focuses on the relationships between mothers and daughters, but her spot-on insights and teachings can be applied to help heal any kind of relationship. I’ve spent time with Karen in person, and I can tell you all that the energy of love and peace that flows from this woman is absolutely palpable. I know you’re going to feel it too. Karen C. L. Anderson‘s incredible work helps women take a compassionate look at the troubled relationships they have with their mothers and/or their daughters and guides them to reveal patterns, heal shame, and transform legacies.Â
She’s the author of The Peaceful Daughter’s Guide to Separating from a Difficult Mother, Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters, A Guide for Separation, Liberation and Inspiration, The Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationship Journal: A Guide for Revealing and Healing Toxic Generational Patterns, and Overcoming Creative Anxiety: Journal Prompts & Practices for Disarming Your Inner Critic & Allowing Creativity to Flow. That one’s coming out in the spring/summer of 2020.
Karen also runs occasional programs and workshops and is at work on a memoir, A Letter to the Daughter I Chose Not to Have. She lives in southeastern Connecticut. Karen, I am so happy to have you here today. healing relationships
I am dittoing that. healing relation
Yay.
Cosigning that. Thank you.
Four books in five years is wildly prolific. Have you always been a writerÂ
Yes, I have. Not always a writer of books, but taking a look back over the years, writing has always played a huge … It’s part of who I am.
What made you decide that you were going to take that to that next level and have it be your mission, your calling and profession in life?
Well, as a little girl, I had this dream that I’d be standing on a stage and I’d be belting out a song that would make people shiver and feel amazing, and it turns out singing is not my thing. And for many, many years, and I did, I went to college. Let me just back up a quick second and say, when I went to college, I was going to major in journalism. I did a major in journalism, and I think that made my parents believe because they thought, “Okay, that’s like, she’s not going to be a starving artist.” And I sort of envisioned myself as being a foreign correspondent or something like that.
So I went to college and I ended up spending many years as a plastics industry trade magazine journalist and editor, and I did actually travel overseas so I guess in a way I was a foreign correspondent.
Type out the caption here so it goes with the image
On plastics.
So this writing thing, it was like, this is what I want. This is what I’ve wanted since I was a small child was to be a writer. The singing I think was maybe what I thought was the thing, but it wasn’t. It was more telling of the stories, right? The ability to move people with my voice, and I did the plastics thing for gosh, close to 20 years, had somewhat of a midlife crisis I guess. I don’t know if it was midlife at the time, but the magazine that I was working for, the company sold it to a different company and the new company didn’t want me, and I kind of had, as I said, a sort of a midlife crisis of well, all I know how to do is write about plastics.
And so, what did I do after that? I actually went to work for a Borders bookstore that was opening, and from there I started doing some freelance writing for local publications and local companies. It was kind of business to business kinds of things. Then in 2009, which was 10 years ago now, which is significant to me realizing, wow, 10 years, I started a blog and very quickly realized that even though I had been a writer all those years, I had never really written for myself. I hadn’t really taken a look inside. I really hadn’t excavated myself, and I was going through some struggles with body image and weight and self acceptance. And so the blog became, I’ve often said that it’s how I saved my life. Because I just started to write from my heart and just, gosh, it’s like when I think about it I cannot imagine my life without that.Â
And so my process as a writer is interesting. I don’t set out to like, okay, I’m going to write a book about this. I basically write something everyday, even if it’s just little notes for myself, and what I’ve come to realize is my process is that I write everyday and over 10 years of doing that has created a lot of material. Some of it’s not for public consumption. A lot of people would say some of the things that I do put out there for public consumption shouldn’t be, but so what ends up happening is I take a look at what I’ve written and I’m like, “Oh. No, this could be the basis of a book.” So that’s I think the quick version of how I got to write books. healing relation
What I love about your work, Karen, is that it’s so intensely personal and I think that at least as a reader, that’s what makes it so relatable. For you, kind of living on the inside out like that with so much of your personal life described through your work, what if anything about that is challenging or difficult for you?
It’s weird how it feels like a very natural thing for me to do. I know a lot of people struggle with that. They’re afraid, and trust me. I’m afraid of a lot of things, but for some reason that’s not one of them. I think the thing that I might struggle with is in making sure that the stories that I’m telling our mine to tell and not somebody else’s, and I’ve stepped on toes in that regard and so I take that hopefully very seriously and I’m very careful with that because it’s not in my intention to throw anyone under the bus or to be telling stories that aren’t mine to tell.Â
Yeah. So these books have had a literal groundswell of readership. I mean, it’s so cool from where in such a short time how they’ve just really exploded in popularity. What surprised you most about the response you’ve gotten?
Oh boy. It didn’t surprise me that it was an issue. I knew it was an issue. Difficult mother/daughter relationships. I think what surprised me, and it took a little while, was to sort of see, okay, there’s the micro scenario of say one mother and one daughter struggling, but that there’s a macro view of it as well. Sort of like the context in which difficult mother/daughter relationships happen and why, and seeing how universal some of those issues are and the systems that we have, not just in our country, but all over the world, systems of oppression, systems that don’t value women equally or certain other groups of people equally, and how that affects our humanity. And so seeing, as I said, that’s what surprised me was like … And I’m a big picture thinker. I’m always looking at the big picture, but it hadn’t occurred to me that that was part of this issue. healing relation
You know, that’s so powerful when you think about it, right? Because our mother/daughter relationships are truly potentially the most pivotal relationship for half the population on the planet, and there’s a real spectrum of how those relationships go from completely dysfunctional to relatively healthy, but none of them are perfect, right? It’s always a challenge because it is such an incredibly intimate relationship.
Well that, and that women especially, mothers especially, are held to such a high standard.
Oh yeah.
And we hold ourselves to that standard as well, and we beat ourselves up with that standard, and you know, I’m not a mother. I purposely chose not to be a mother. That was just not something I wanted, but I know lots of mothers, and they talk about the mommy wars, right? Like if you work, then you’re bad. If you stay home, you’re bad. And I’m oversimplifying it, but just all this pressure, all of this perfection, expected perfection, you know?
Yeah, and the letting go of policing one another I think definitely appears in so many places in your work.
Yeah.
Okay, we’re going to take a really, really quick break, so for those of you out there, we have been talking with Karen C. L. Anderson about her very personal work as an author. We’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll be diving into Karen’s best practices around the art of healing relationships, and as always, I’ll be giving you all some tools that you can start using today for creating transformation in your own life. Karen, if listeners want to learn more about you or your books, where can they find it?
My website, which is www.kclanderson.com.
Terrific. Stay with us. You won’t want to miss what’s coming.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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