Healing from Childhood Trauma – w/ Past Tense Author Sacha Mardou

Emma:

Today, we have a really special guest on our show. Her name is Sasha Mardau, and she is the author of this book, Past Tense. And you can see I’ve got all these post-it notes in it because I read this book in about 2 hours because well, one, it’s awesome, and two, it’s a graphic novel, so it’s not as dense as it looks. But she drew pictures and journaled through her entire process of going to therapy for some pretty painful stuff from her past, including child abuse, violence, and other forms of trauma.

And so, she works through her relationships and her therapy and everything in this graphic novel format. And I’m really really grateful that she was uh willing to come on our show today. So, let’s jump in.

Sasha, thank you so much for being here. I’m so happy to have you.

Sacha Mardou:

Oh, it’s so great to meet you, Emma. Thank you for having me.

Emma:

Okay, so I love just jumping in. First off, I read your book in like a day and a half when your publisher sent it to me. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And it tells about how you worked through difficult past in therapy, right?

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah, that’s right.

Emma:

But it has pictures. I’m just going to show my audience. It has pictures. It’s a graphic novel.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah, it’s fully illustrated and it it kind of originated in online comics. I’d make like short comics about the therapy process and it snowballed into a memoir of like the full three-year therapy process and all the family history that went into it. 

Emma:

Yeah, I love that. I loved reading from your lens what it was to be like, “Oh, maybe I maybe I something’s not right. What am I going to do?” trying a few different things, ending up in therapy, trying having a great therapist, trying another therapist, you know, going back to both, I mean, integrating different types of therapy and doing your own reading and everything. I loved reading about your process of like growth and healing. So beautiful. Um, can you take us back to the beginning a little bit of what was going on in your life that led you to to choose to go to therapy?

Sacha Mardou:

Sure. So, as people can tell, I’ve got an English accent. So I grew up in England and I moved to America when I was 30 to marry my person and we had a kid together and so when I hit 40 life was really wonderful on the surface but I was just taken over by constant anxiety and dread and I had no idea why because life was so good. Um looking back I can pinpoint and say, “Oh my daughter had turned six.” And it was the age when my own life and my own history had started to fall apart and just everything just started to come up. I was having what I would call PTSD symptoms. So I was having like nightmares and you know like remembrances of things that had happened in my childhood and I could ignore all that is the thing. Like I was like okay we’ll just push that down but that’s what I do. I’m British, very reserved, right? Um, but then I started to get acne and it was just like kind of constant red acne on my face and I went to see um an acupuncturist to try and get to the root of it and he figured out it was helped me figure out I should say that it was um like an emotional issue you know and he very gently suggested therapy but his first response was to be offended like he didn’t get any therapy but he recommended a great person in St. [inaudible] where I live and therapy quickly changed my mind. Like being British, I don’t come from a culture of therapy and so I wasn’t prepared for like how awesome of a place it would be to really guess what was going on with me.

Emma:

That’s so cool. I love I love hearing that. And um that therapy was so good for you.

Sacha Mardou:

And and let me just say that I didn’t start making comics about therapy like straight off the bat. I did like two years of healing first and it was when I was feeling so much better I was ready to start sharing some of the stuff I’d been recording in my sketchbook and my journals you know so

Emma:

Yeah I love that you mentioned that and I I want to emphasize the things that do work for people and the fact that you kept a journal you kept not you took therapy as like a university almost I I guarantee if a client comes to therapy and takes notes I’m like this person’s going to get better

Sacha Mardou:

[inaudible]

Emma:

One of the signs you clearly use like a narrative process, writing things down, drawing things to work through your thoughts and feelings, but I want to hear a little bit about what it was like for you as you um so you were having these physical symptoms and you didn’t necessarily connect them to your past.Is that right?

Sacha Mardou:

Not at all. No, I I think it started to twig when I was in acupuncture because um my first acupuncture session, I started to like weep, you know, I was all needled up. I had needles in my hands. I couldn’t even wipe away my tears. So, [inaudible] came back and found me. He was like, “Oh.” Um, and I started to kind of like do meditation like, you know, like silent meditation and every meditation session would end up me in tears. And I began to realize, I began to make the connection like, “Oh, my daughter is six and I’m just feeling like so sad all the time. And I’m having dreams about that era of my life.” And so, yeah, that was how I made the connection. And then when I was in therapy, my therapist really started to connect the dots for me. And it it was like, oh, of course, of course, all the stuff I went through has kind of like shaped how I cope with the world. And I had really reached a point at 41 where um my coping strategies for dealing with anxiety for dealing with life. They were just all fall apart one by one. And I just was no longer coping. You know, anxiety was what I woke up with when I went to sleep at night. My dreams were anxious and like full of fear and terror and dread. And now it was just like life can’t really live like this anymore. So even though I had like real um reservations about how therapy could help me, like once I was actually there and it was like, oh, this makes so much sense to me, you know, I can sort of piece together the past and see why I react to things this way. Um yeah, it gradually got clearer and I really embraced it and like you said, began taking notes, really invested in it because I was also, you know, I was working at a library. I wasn’t earning very much money and that, you know, $130 entry fee to therapy was expensive for me. Actually went up.

Emma:

So expensive,

Sacha Mardou:

You know, and so I’m like, well, I want to get my money’s worth. And so there were a variety of factors, but I was like, yeah, I’m going to try and make this work because I was really feeling like this is the last, you know, this is the last thing I’m going to try that can maybe help me.

Emma:

So yeah. So, so you start going to therapy, you get a wonderful therapist, Chris. Um, and at that point, like you start to explore what was going on with your past and and with your family.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. So, I grew up in a really kind of complicated working-class family in the north of England. So, um, when I was born um, in 1975, well, they kind of like the blank of like mass unemployment in the UK. So, like all the men in my family, the one who had stuck the ones who had stuck around like were mostly unemployed and kind of like women held the family together. So I come from a lot of strong women. Um I also had a grandmother who had lived through World War II and my mother had been a child like born in the 50s, you know, still into rationing. So like hardship was something we were kind of like used to. Um right. So very my parents got divorced when I was about six because you know there was like philandering and he was terrible with money and he was also like domestically violent as well. So I had all that kind of growing up and then I went on to have a very very complicated um stack family arrangement. um which I can explain or not. I just like readers like if they read the book, they’ll see, but I ended up with a a step sibling and two step siblings. Um one of them was a little bit abusive to me. Um and I can kind of go into that as well. Um and so yeah, my teenage years just ended up being incredibly rocky as well. My dad was a felon and went to prison. Uh my mom became a Jehovah Witness. And I kind of like grew up thinking, okay, I’m going to leave all this behind me and not be like my family. But you know by the age of 40 just all this had kind of caught up to me and I was just really not coping with life. So that’s in a nutshell.

Emma:

That’s a high a level overview. I mean to say the least your step family situation was pretty complicated because your parents divorced and then married a had affairs and married a divorced couple.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. Yeah. So if you imagine two couples um it was like my them mothers swapped. So um a woman ended up with my father and my mom ended up with this woman’s ex-husband and yeah it was very very complicated and you know it kind of sounds a bit sitcomy you know like wife swapping or something but the reality was that um for the children of that that arrangement there was just you know so much like jealousy and kind of like recriminations on the part of the parents. So, you know, looking back, I see that, you know, I had like adults in my life who were really not coping very well. And I think, you know, they were maybe doing their best, but it wasn’t it wasn’t really healthy environment for the kids, you know.

Emma:

Mhm. Hurtful place. Hurtful place to be and confusing. I’m sure so confusing.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. And just a lot of um you know, a lot of good attention which children should should get. K wasn’t happy because like the parents were really like wrapped up in their own like dramas, you know. So there was I I don’t I don’t mean neglect as in we were locked in a room, but I mean just slight emotional neglect in the fact that our needs our emotional needs were certainly not being met.

Emma:

Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And um and your dad ended up going to prison.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah.

Emma:

Uh so have you ever seen ACES? Have you like you’ve learned about ACE’s adverse experience?

Sacha Mardou:

[inaudible] experiences. Yeah.

Emma:

You know, I mean, based on what you described, there’s like five right there.

Sacha Mardou:

I once encountered my mom’s. The mama was like way higher. So,

Emma:

Your mom had even more ACES.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah, she did. Yeah, she had a death of a parent and she was like sexually abused when she was a minor. So, yeah, she had a lot going on and separation.

Emma:

Mhm. Yeah. that I want to come back to that because one of I thought one of the most beautiful parts of the book was how um your therapist helped you see your mom from a softer place.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a beautiful way point. You really did.

Emma:

And um well I don’t know. Do you want to talk about that? How did you feel about your mom for a while?

Sacha Mardou:

I I love my mom so much. She’s also a Jehovah’s Witness and she has a lot of um for people who don’t know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses are, they um they’re basically a doomsday cult. They’re a very high control religion and I would define them as a cult even though that would hurt my mom if she had me say that. Um but they indoctrinate their followers and so they’re very geared towards thinking that the world is ending. And so I kind of grew up in my teen years believing that Armageddon was coming and we’re all going to die. And so that was something else I had to break away from. Um, and I did break away from it and we’re still kind of in contact or we’re quite close even though I live in America and she’s in the north of England. But I think it was really very much like like parts of me would step forward whenever my mom and I interact, I would be very defensive inside and you know like we can’t talk about religion, we can’t talk about this and so I feel like I would tiptoe around her issues. And I also could see that she had a lot of unhealed trauma, you know. Um, and in therapy, my therapist suggested, you know, I could see my mom’s religious fantasies for what they are and maybe not be so um like defensive about it.

Like I can choose how I respond. He even said, you know, you could be playful if you so choose. And to me, that sounded like that doesn’t help me at all at first until I th it out. And it’s like, oh, actually, when I’m not being defensive, when I’m actually, you know, able to sort of be vulnerable and like openhearted around my mom, people pick up on things and she would respond in a kind of similar like way. And so, I’ve really come a long way with my mom. And, you know, I still I still run into things, especially around religion. And that that’s like a hot topic for everybody, right? And so, you know, there’s still things I’m finding to kind of heal and work around, but my mom and I came so far. And to give all credit to my mom, my therapist put it this way. He said, you know, it’s it’s as if you said to your mom, “Mom, I am on this journey and I’m doing this healing work.” And my mom was like, “Okay, I’m kind of coming with you.” Because my mom has also told me lots of things about our family. And even though she’s not been to therapy, I really feel like she’s benefited from the work I’ve done in therapy because, like I said, that reactivity isn’t there. Actually feel so much love and can express it. And when I do get annoyed at her, get angry at her, like lash out at her, which happens sometimes, you know, I’m able to kind of make a repair and say, “Look, I’m sorry, Mom. I was speaking from this place in me that was feeling triggered, you know, just being able to have language about the difficulties I was carrying out.” That was revolutionary. So, yeah.

Emma:

Oh my gosh, I love it. I love it because the process was not short. It wasn’t like, oh, six weeks of therapy and then therapy, right?

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah, it was three years. Yeah.

Emma:

Mhm. And I think sometimes people when they’re engaged in short therapy or with a therapist who’s perhaps um maybe not seeing the whole big picture, the therapist might just be like, “Oh, you should just cut them off. You should just set boundaries. You need to have more and more boundaries and your therapist guided you to be like, well, let’s see what’s going on inside of you and how you can different responses.”

Sacha Mardou:

You know, that’s that’s so well put, Emma. And I would also say that, you know, there was a place for kind of cutting off a toxic parent. So, I mentioned I had a father who was a felon and my therapist was quite clear like obviously you don’t want contact with him and I did not but he had helped me work with my my dad’s stuff as well by can having me kind of engage an imagination like well if my dad was here what would I say to him and that was like a very revealing answer for me you know I kind of discovered that I was actually carrying really deep wounds about my dad’s abandonment and his behavior and it was the way my therapist put it was it’s like okay you’re not opening the to your dad like he’s not going to be in your life again but you can open a door to your feelings about him and that again that was a really big moment when it’s like oh all these things I’m feeling about my dad I can actually feel them and process them I don’t have to you know exile those as well if that makes sense

Emma:

So let’s talk about that like so what can you describe some of the things that were helpful for you in therapy you’ve just talked about a couple you’ve talked about him listening and and understanding you and also encouraging you to open some doors that you had perhaps closed but doing it in a guided way like oh we could write a letter to your dad or something what else like …. I just want people to read the book basically. Like, guys, read the book it’s hard to like talk about this without without being like let me show you cuz that’s what you do in the book you show people like how this process was so good

Sacha Mardou:

Now people talk about Chris people really like the character of Chris my therapist who’s a real person um obviously I’ve changed his identity a little. But he was he is a family therapist and he also does AFS and he does EMDR and he does solution focused therapy. Um, and so he has so so many tools in his toolkit and he would he would kind of like switch between them and I would often say to him that was amazing. What was that? And he would tell me and then I would go read a book on it. You know what I was telling you about my dad. He would ask me questions from solution focus therapy which is actually quite short. And that was really helpful because he’s like I don’t want to go into a big thing about my dad. I just wanted to sort of find that I have feelings about him and I want to discover what they are. Um, another modality we used a lot was called internal family systems IFS. Oh yeah. And I loved that because um as a as a creative person, as an artist um my introduction to IFS was I found a book at the library um and it’s called it’s about drawing your parts. So you basically like draw the parts of yourself and you get to draw yourself. And I can kind of go into it more, but um when my therapist first suggested it to me, I thought it sounded terrible.

You know, I was kind of like raised in a cult and stuff in my teenage years. And so anything that has different language um you know it calls things different names. And so in IFS you have like manager parts and firefighter parts. And I was like, parts of me were like shut this down. It sounds kind of culty you know and I can’t go there. And and yet when I actually like found this book in it and I had to go back to my therapist and say look you know that IFS thing you mentioned actually sounds really awesome and he was and so we started doing IFS you know. So, I really appreciated how, like I said, he had lots of different tools in his toolkit. And um I really benefited from that. He also would get me to be very specific and congruent about what I was saying, you know? So, if I’d say something vague, he’d say, “Okay, well, be more specific. Let’s really like narrow down what you’re saying there.” And and that was really helpful, too.

Emma:

Did you ever leave therapy sessions and just being like, “That made everything worse. I I like I never want to go back.” Or like really regulated, really upset.

Sacha Mardou:

I did like with both my therapists I had that and um I’m trying to think of a good example. So, for example, I mentioned earlier just you know when Chris suggested I could see my mom’s behavior from a different perspective. I could have left that session thinking what a waste of like $150 you know? Not worth my time or money like I could have read that in an Instagram post. Um there were also times with my female therapist um I went to a female the therapist later on um and I feel like she saw me very much um through the lens of being like a kind of mother and a daughter and she didn’t necessarily like honor the kind of artist and creative parts of me. So I would like kind of leave those sessions going why did I leave Chris like he’s these other parts of me that she’s ignoring. So yeah I would get like triggered by them. Um, and one of the things I really like learned over the three years were was that what triggered me was kind of what needed working on, right? And so even though it felt terrible at the time to sort of be all like disregulated and just be feeling, you know, dread and anxiety and anger and all these like feelings crashing around of me, um, it’s like, okay, well, that’s that’s telling you something, right? That’s telling you like there is something hurting there. There is something to heal. Um, and and actually something I learned from your videos is that you can kind of develop capacity. Like the more I did therapy, the more I kind of built up the tolerance for these bad feelings. Like the anxiety wasn’t going to hurt me in any way. It wasn’t going to kill me. It just felt bad, you know? I can I can sort of sit with that. I can, you know, now I know that it’s not going to like be the end of the world if I’m feeling anxious again. Um, it’s not like therapy like has completely failed and I’m back at square one. It’s like, no, I’ve found something else that needs healing and I can also I’ve got room enough inside me now to sort of sit with it because I can trust that this process has worked before and it’s still working. So, that was it. I love big minds.

Emma:

I love hearing that. And um it’s so interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The opposite of anxiety or the solution for anxiety is not control, it’s trust. And I think a lot of times we seek to control anxiety by by stuffing it down by suppressing it by engaging in rituals by you know trying to be perfect by doing all these control factors but like what you’ve described is you developed the capacity yourself could think about these things or handle these things without without losing it in yourself.

Sacha Mardou:

For sure. The interesting thing, especially using IFS therapy, which is where you take a single part of yourself, like whatever is you’re feeling, it’s like, okay, I’m going to get to know this. I’m really going to focus on it and like listen to what it wants to tell me. And many times I would like be in the middle like of an anxiety attack. And when I could like just really tune into it and listen to it, it would become something else. It’s like I’m feeling um like really really sad or you know, I’m feeling kind of like angry and I don’t feel like I can express it. So the anxiety was never something like we directly addressed in therapy because it was always like a side effect of what was really going on like makes sense you know.

Emma:

Yeah. So could you describe how like you used an IFS lens on that? So I’m familiar with IFS. I’ve read some IFS. I’ve done some IFS trainings but I’m not an IFS primarily practical. Could you describe like what that would look like? Give me an example or we could pull one out of your book if you

Sacha Mardou:

Sure. Okay. So, um, in IFS therapy, especially when you’re dealing with a therapist, which if you have a lot of like childhood trauma like I do, I would only recommend like starting IFS with a therapist because it can really bring up a lot that if you’re not ready to handle, it can just make everything worse. And so, in my book, I will also show a little bit of how I did IFS like on my own using like guided meditations. But that was kind of like a bit more like advanced level. So to begin with you really you sit with a therapist and you close your eyes and your therapist will basically like ask you a question like so what’s here for you right now and you will um you will find what you’re feeling and you’ll kind of like focus on it. You kind of like notice where you feel it in your body and you you ask it a series of questions. So this feeling you might ask like when did I first notice it? Um or how old does this part feel? And you get answers to that question like I got answers to that question. Often like a memory would come up and it’s like okay when I feel this way it’s connected to a memory of a time in my life when I didn’t feel safe. Um and so I think what for example like feeling like really um kind of anxious um and feeling like I couldn’t speak you know and when I got close to that part um I remembered I was in a car accident when I was 11. I was hit by a car. And my mom came to the scene of the accident and she rode with me in the ambulance and as she was riding with me in the ambulance I could see how scared my mom was. And so in that moment like a part of me took over. It’s like can’t scare my mom like she’s terrified. And so even though I’m the one with a broken leg and I’m in shock and I’m experiencing a physical trauma. I also feel this sense of responsibility for how my mom is feeling. So I’m telling her like I’m okay mom. It’s okay. I’m fine. you know, but like years later, the sort of the energy of that has has metamorphosized into a part of me that feels like I can’t speak up for like how I’m really feeling, you know, and I’m feeling really anxious about it. So, I fence is kind of a little bit magical in a way that it will kind of connect what you’re feeling on your body or what sensations you’re having or what thoughts you’re having with kind of like childhood memories. And once you kind of bring those into the open, your therapist can guide you to kind of unburden them. And it is a little bit magical because it’s like you still have the memory of what happened. You’re still fully conscious of it and yet you you relate to it in the same way. So when I look back on that accident and how I responded to like my mom’s fear in that moment. I just feel like so much tenderness and compassion. I don’t feel like it’s this awful memory that has to be locked in a basement like don’t ever go there. That freaks me out, you know? So  IFS really helps you respond to yourself in a completely different way and it’s a loving way. And that to me was it just brings so much joy to life you know when suddenly you’re feeling compassion inside for yourself instead of anxiety and self-criticism you know it’s a different paradigm

Emma:

Yeah and so as you did IFS like with that situation how did that help you heal or act differently in the present moment instead of simply going back, cuz I think the pops psychology on Tik Tok is like, um, oh, the reason you feel anxious is cuz your mom did this thing in the ambulance when you were 11 and now you have trauma and it’s never going away. And it’s like, but what you’re describing is is different from it’s like here in the present moment you’re interacting with your the part of you that was there.

Sacha Mardou:

Yeah. that I can. Okay. So, IFS therapy it, you know, it describes parts of us like parts that protect us, parts that carry shame or trauma, whatever it is. So, we have all these parts and everybody has them, but we also have a self. So, we have like an authentic self which trauma can’t seem to eradicate. And you know that you’re in a state of self like authentic self when you are feeling kind of compassion or curiosity um confidence clarity about what happened all these c words that the founder of IFS Richard Schwarz noticed in his clients when they got to this state of like calm, compassionate you know self- advocacy so he calls that self with a capital S and um I I do having experienced self like over and over in therapy sessions you know, you’re feeling like this terrible thing that happened to you in his back and it is potentially very traumatizing, but then you’re also being invited for that for the energy of that part to sort of meet the energy of your true like now grownup self, which can be very loving and especially, you know, if you’ve ever had a kid, you know, and just that sort of natural love you feel towards that that child, you can turn that energy towards yourself. And so IFS kind of like trains you and teaches you to kind of find your own self and just like love yourself with it. And it’s very difficult to do at first, which is again why I recommend you only do this with a therapist until you’ve done a bit of healing. Um because I think at first I really did rely on my therapist to be the one who was kind of calm and compassionate and holding that space open for me. And I really lent on that at first. Um but I got gradually got more and more used to like, oh yeah, this is a part of me, but it’s not all of me. And that is something that I still I still utilize IFS therapy even though I’m not in it because you know parts of me come up all the time. I look at an Instagram post and a mean comment triggers me and it’s like okay a part of me is kind of offended by that and yet that’s not all of you. You know I’ve still got this self I can rely on and the big self for me thinks it doesn’t matter you. So yeah, it’s a really incredible toolkit that um that you know IFS therapy has sort of given me because I’ve got a new way of thinking about my triggers, you know, my phobias, anything that kind of comes up, I’ve got like a a way to deal with it now that I didn’t have a [inaudible] therapy.

Emma:

Well, one of the things I noticed from your book and from talking with you is that you were really [inaudible]. Like you were really tenacious in like seeking healing and you went to one person and then you tried acupuncture and then you tried meditation and then you worked with your therapist and you read books and you wrote notes and you drew and you processed and then you read more books and you kept going to therapy and then you you were like let’s bump to another therapist and there’s probably more than that. Like what am I missing? You you just kept going in pursuit of this.

Sacha Mardou:

Thank you. It’s really nice. It’s like nobody’s ever said that to me before. Well, there’s a nice really nice compliment and I don’t know. I mean, I guess I am kind of tenacious. So, thank you for that. I always find it interesting that, you know, once I got like adept at spotting my own trauma, it made me really curious about where all the problems in my family came from. So, if you want to talk about that, I’m happy to sort of dig into my family a little bit.

Emma:

Let’s do it.

Sacha Mardou:

Okay.

Emma:

Yeah. Tell us about tell us about your family.

Sacha Mardou:

Okay. So, yeah. So when I got um when I got really adept at sort of recognizing what was going on in me and how my childhood had kind of like influenced you know my my coping strategies and how I didn’t have to do things in this same way I could switch things up. I try new things you know I could speak for my vulnerabilities. I could try all these other things. It made me really curious about why my family was like that growing up. And you know I’ve already mentioned that my grandmother lived through World War II. She lived in an area of England that was like heavily bombed. She lost uh she lost her husband, she lost her brother. Um it was serious serious real trauma, you know, and I know she had PTSD from that. She would have nightmares her whole life.

She had extreme anxiety and she was very um tenacious and she just got on with it and kept [inaudible]. And she also kind of like raised my mom and her six children. Like she had a blended family of six children. Um and it was it was really difficult and she didn’t always cope very well from it. So she would abandon her family from time to time. My mother was sexually assaulted while you know she was and not around. And so the sort of I feel like trauma impacted the way my grandmother raised my mother and her sisters. And I read a lot of therapy books while I was in therapy. I just got so fascinated with it. And one of the books I read was um Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. And I saw your video on that actually and I’m in complete agreement that it’s not maybe the best book for someone who’s in the middle of doing their own healing to read because that book really triggered me as well. But it all showed me that um it couldn’t start with me, you know, it didn’t start with my mom. It kind of it kept going back. And so IFS has a framework for understanding trauma that didn’t happen to you but has affected you. They call it a legacy burden. And so I got really curious about my family story um on my side. And that’s a big part of the book which was incredibly meaningful to write. I think when I came to write my own story, I’d already been been over it so many times that, you know, I just felt fine towards it. But when I kind of unpacked my grandmother’s story and came to like find old family photographs in order to draw these scenes, I would like cry and just feel so heartbroken and really grieve. So it was quite a cathartic experience, you know. I got to really experience some deep emotions around my family tragedies, you know. So that was incredibly meaningful and I think it’s an important part of the book to to share because if you look at the world around us I think we’re all dealing with traumatic legacies. You know everybody in Europe and Japan for example they underwent bombings and fire bombings and you know this is like my grandparents generation. So so my daughter will be my great grandparents generation. So I feel like these family stories are for us to find and sort of like recognize like how have they influenced my family? like what have they done to me? What did this trauma do to my parents’ parenting? You know, I found these were like really valuable questions.

Emma:

Can you identify what it is about you that decided that had enough hope to think I can do things differently for my own family instead of repeating the same cycles cuz you’re a chain breaker, right? Like, you took this legacy of trauma and you said it stops with me like it’s not getting passed on to my daughter.

Sacha Mardou:

Wow, that’s a really powerful question and it’s something my my female therapist said to me and she was really wonderful. Um she kind of pointed out to me that um I had like a trauma happen to me at 17. My mom had a trauma happen to her at 17. She was like in a fiery car crash. She had a lot of surgeries afterwards. My grandmother was 17 when World War II broke out. And so my therapist said, “Yeah, 17, you, your mother, your grandmother all went through these traumatic experiences.” And I was like, “Wow, that’s a coincidence.” And she said, “No, it’s not a coincidence. We call it um a legacy burden in IFS.” And yeah, she said, “The work you’re doing now is what breaks the chain of transmission. So you’re not going to pass this on to your daughter.” And that was the motivator. It’s like, “Oh, yeah. I I don’t want to kind of like pass this on to my daughter. And I I knew that it wasn’t it wasn’t as if like I was going to like traumatize my kid, but it was just like all the unhealed energy and um actions that are kind of unconscious that might make my daughter one day one day need therapy because of me. It’s like, okay, I can intervene there and and kind of change that course. So hopefully,

Emma:

Right, it’s interesting because I, you know, I worked with a family in residential treatment. And I was working with the daughter and the mother was very like aggressive. Like she would just express a lot of anger. She would express a lot of anxiety. She would express a lot of love. She was just very very expressive. And she said, “Well, I I think it’s better to be this way than to be the other way.” And her mom had been like an ice box. Like never expressed love, never expressed anger, never expressed care. So she out of her hurt, you know, pendulum over to the other side of like, “Well, I’m going to just say everything.” and then her daughter pendulum to the other side of like I’m going to shut down and like never say anything and like try and be perfect. Right. Right. Like unintentionally when when we don’t do the work to try and sit with our stuff and heal our wound then we can unintentionally kind of pass on various dynamics. Um and you know we all want the best for our kids.

Sacha Mardou:

I got from um reading Virginia Satir who was called the mother of family therapy and her books are so readable for a general audience. So I do recommend them even though they’re kind of old now. But she talks about like open family systems, open family communication systems versus closed family communication systems. And when I read that, it really resonated with me because I recognized how I’d grown up in a closed family system where we had this religion that could only be the right way and anything else was apostasy. Um, I had a mother who was sitting on a lot of trauma who didn’t really feel like she could talk about it or she couldn’t criticize her mother who’d kind of traumatized her and like I didn’t feel like I could like speak up. You know, when I give the example of me in the ambulance and my mom, it’s like I need to like protect her feelings by not being in pain, right? And realizing that um you can move to an open communication open communication system where when things are going wrong, you can speak up and go, “Hey, this isn’t working for me. Can we try something different?” you know, or like people can like voice dissent and it’s not the end of the world. It’s like, oh, you feel differently to me. That’s okay. Like, how can we work together? So, it gave me this this framework for like, oh, okay, I was raised a certain way, but I don’t have to continue living in that box. You know, we can have an open system. And so, my daughter now um I actually kind of take delight when she’s a little bit sassy to me because the teenage part of me who can never answer my mom back, it’s like, “Yeah, you go girl. You And we can also laugh about it.” And I can also say that to her and I can also you know when I make a mistake with my kid and and annoy that or you know upset her in some way. She feels like she can like tell me what I did wrong and I can sort of take that on the chin you know because everything doesn’t kind of like touch my internal wounds anymore. It’s like you know it’s it’s much more relaxed place to be. It’s like yeah I’m human. I’m going to mess up and I’m not being super critical on myself so when I do mess up it’s we can talk about it like it’s not the end of the world you know. Yeah, that was a really helpful framework. I love Virgina Satir.

Emma:

I love that you say that too. I’ve started some of her books and never made it through like in grad school I started new people making. Um, but you’ve inspired me to go back and read cuz you like experiential

Sacha Mardou:

I think sometimes you can read the right thing at the right moment as well. Like when I read that I was like so ready to hear it because I was going through all these other changes in my family. But you know it it is difficult. It’s it’s possible to be a different kind of person, you know, than the one you were raised to be. And there’s such liberation and freedom in that. And at the same time, it’s not like I’m taking on a whole new personality. I’m actually trying to find out who I am. Like, what do I like? What makes me happy? Like, what makes me tick? You know, what gifts do I have to offer the world? So, it’s a shift where you start really kind of like investing in yourself. from therapy was financial investment and a time investment and an emotional investment because it was hard and I did so much crying and it was it was uncomfortable and I was facing things about myself that like I didn’t enjoy. Um and yet that investment has really paid off because it’s like oh I am me and I’m I’m okay and you know I can sort of like be vulnerable with people and I can be honest and I know I’m not trauma dumping unless people are asking me about my book. Right. There’s a different way to approach life and I I can’t imagine finding it in any other way through than therapy. It just had all this kind of like wisdom that was waiting behind closed doors. And that’s really why I wanted to make a book about it because I was like, “Hey, this is awesome. Everyone should go. Everyone should go.”

Emma:

I think it’s beautiful and I think it’s like healing as you go through the process. I would love people who have experienced child abuse or dysfunctional family to read it because you explain like this is what my process was and their process will be different.

But it it shows that those steps of like feeling confused and working through emotions and being supported and being loved and trying different modalities and trying some more and working through your stuff and having new experiences and like it just it’s beautiful. So thank you. Thank you so much for putting it out there.

Sacha Mardou:

I really like Martha Beck. Her new book is about creativity and anxiety and how about when you are um immersed in the creative process, your brain is not in the same place as when you’re like experiencing anxiety. So creativity can actually shift you out of your anxious mind. And I found that to be true. I mean, you know, I spend 8 hours a day now making comics work for like the internet and for my audience [inaudible]. So yeah, I definitely feel like that has also been a gift of this book, you know, that I get to sort of do this full-time for a while.

Emma:

I think I think that’s one of the things that people forget. They think that trauma’s like stored in words and that we have to process our healing in words. And I think it’s it’s like we are much more full complex beings than that. And we experience this and express it like and heal through visual means and emotional means and music and like exercise.

Sacha Mardou:

Like our bodies that are carrying around a brain and we kind of keep up the brain a bit too much, but the body is really important. Keeps the score.

Emma:

That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely. And I love it. It’s beautiful. Tell people where they can find you.

Sacha Mardou:

Um I have a website of my um my therapy comics called Ifscomics.com. And from there you’ll find all my social media links and links to the book, all that good stuff. And the book is out now wherever you get books from, including your library. So yeah, I hope people check it out.

Emma:

Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing your beautiful story. So it’s so good to meet you.

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