Ep 37 | Angela Williams
Angela Williams | Abused by My Mother, Homeless, & Heroin Addict to Ph.D.
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Based on the experiences she had in the first decade of her life, Angela was destined for a life of struggle, and, as her mom declared – die with a needle in her arm by the time she was 16. This prophecy nearly came true more than once. Instead, she got her Ph.D..
A life of trauma, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by her mother led to early motherhood, heroin addiction, looking for love in all the wrong places, and losing her son to her own mother who put him in foster care. It would take over a decade for her to get her son back.
As her book describes, she was a child that fell through the cracks of the system. And, nearly paid with her life for it. Her story is a hero’s journey where she paved her own path out of living hell.
Connect with Angela:
Victoria Volk 00:00
Welcome Grievers to another episode of grieving voices. This is your host, Victoria. And this week I have a special guest. They’re all special, because all Grievers are special. But this special guest is named Angela. And Angela is an author, a free-range researcher, independent podcaster and survivor of many horrible things in her words. And she is from Sydney, Australia. Welcome, Angela. Thank you for being here.
Angela Williams 00:34
Hi, Victoria. Thank you for having me. It’s lovely to be talking to you today. Well, you know, difficult but lovely. Yeah,
Victoria Volk 00:41
I know. It’s heavy stuff. And I have thoughts on that. Moving the podcast forward actually how I can bring a little lightness to all the heavy, you know. I think we need a little bit more balance in times
Angela Williams 00:53
Think of the cactus flowers, cactus flowers. They’re the theme in the shop. It’s and we find the beauty is hiding there waiting to just pop out. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 01:02
Yeah. And that’s actually where a specific question came from that I came to me today that I will ask you later.
Angela Williams 01:09
Okay.
Victoria Volk 01:10
All right. So, we just met just now, man.
Angela Williams 01:15
Yep, yep.
Victoria Volk 01:16
Yeah, no history here.
Angela Williams 01:19
I feel like we’ve clicked.
Victoria Volk 01:21
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the thing with grief. It’s where we all experience it. On some level. And that’s the one thing that we nobody can run from.
Angela Williams 01:35
We can try.
Victoria Volk 01:36
You can try.
Angela Williams 01:38
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 01:39
And that’s what the education piece is all about.
Angela Williams 01:41
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 01:42
The work that I do. But what I do know is that your story begins when you were four.
Angela Williams 01:49
Yeah. So that that’s when I started grieving. When I was four, my father had was an alcoholic, and he died of hepatic cirrhosis. And so, I was four years old, my brother was three years old. And we found out a lot lighter that we actually found him at the time, but it was very traumatic. So, he died. And my mother had, we had been living with my two older brothers who I only met last year for the first time. And they had been raising myself and my brother, because my mother wasn’t very good at it. So then when he died, she just took us and left We went to a couple of different places. And she was incapable of looking after two human beings, but also very, very abusive. So, from she then told my brother and I, for a very long time that our father had died of suicide, and specifically told me any number of times that he’d killed himself because I was a naughty child. So it was, yeah, like I started grieving him 40 years ago, and part of grieving him was that that that gradual awareness as a child that my mother wasn’t like other people’s mothers, so she died on Halloween last year. And I never really liked my birthdays, because they were always really dodgy at home. And she somehow managed to time it so that she committed suicide on Halloween and was then buried on my birthday last year. So instead of going to the funeral, I made a podcast about the situation and so I’m now in this really kind of unique situation of grieving this woman who I started grieving 30 years beforehand, so yeah, she Yeah, my father’s. I probably told the whole story and you were gonna save it up for the whole interview, and I spurted it all out in one go. Yeah, that’s where it started. And that’s where I am now trying to balance all of the lies that she told me about myself and about my world and who I am and how to grieve someone. When it feels like to grieve someone, there has to be a connection, there has to be love or a link there. And it’s very, very difficult to work out how to grieve someone when you almost wish they’d never been born, you know. So yeah, it goes back a long way. And it’s really all flared up in the last year. But since she died, I’ve, my whole life has changed. It’s been remarkable from the day she died, everything got different and that’s why I decided to do a podcast to talk to people like me who are going to have to face this really complicated grieving process somewhere along the line. Lots of us are estranged now and we need to talk about that.
Victoria Volk 05:09
So, you mentioned that she kind of plucked you out of the life that you were living so and where you were and everything familiar. So, it wasn’t even just the loss of your father. It was the loss of yours. Whatever support you did have, correct?
Angela Williams 05:25
Yeah. We, we went from, I’ve only really found the details of this out in the last couple of years from kind of extended family members who I found gradually through poking at the Internet. She she just took us away we had, I was at school, my brother was in preschool, and we just kind of got picked up and moved overnight, she sold my father’s house, liquidated all of these assets, left his other children and his first wife with nothing, and then just took us and, and then we went through this series of living in tiny, isolated places like small flats, and we went to stay for a while in this weird Christian commune in the middle of like regional New South Wales, where we all farmed together, we had to leave there, after she got really violent with me. And when we left places, it was always bundle everyone into the car, pack everything up, and now we go. And then, so it was just, it was this horrible experience of not actually ever having, learning the basic human things. So, like, by the time I left school at 16, left home, I didn’t have any human skills, all I knew was how to be an abused child. Everything I’ve made since then has come out of recognizing the strength I got back there.
Victoria Volk 07:00
So, at the time to when you left at 16, and your brother would have been 15
Angela Williams 07:06
Yes.
Victoria Volk 07:07
She’s equally as you said to him.
Angela Williams 07:10
It was weird mine, it was gendered, very specifically gendered. women had one job according to my mother’s view of the world and men had a different job. So, my brother was abused, but in different ways we both kind of he was a lot of mine was really weird sexual stuff, and emotional abuse and yeah, kind of public humiliation and things but all linked to my sexuality from when I was like a small child she was offering to sell meet men and to auction off my virginity for a boat at the golf club. And she just thought this stuff was funny, she thought she was the funniest person in the world, and it was 1980s 1990s Australia, people didn’t step in with child abuse, we have a terrible history of what we’ve done to children in this country and things that have been covered up institutional child abuse and stuff. And nobody stepped in. People just assumed it was the mother’s job Oh, and so many people said to me over the years, a mother wouldn’t do that to her daughter, particularly the sexual stuff like a mother wouldn’t do that to her daughter. So, it was kind of I was always just trapped in all of these messages that she was giving me the really dangerous messages that then the rest of society was not challenging those messages not interrupting and saying hey actually that’s wrong. I am a little bit by psychiatrists likes to remind me I could have gone to jail for this one but I once ran up at a woman in the supermarket and slapped her across the head and told her to pick on someone around sides because I walked behind over three aisles watching her slap the child across the back of their head every time he reached for something and I wait to stand by it and ignore it because I was that kid that people stood by and ignored so yeah, she gave me a real put a fire cracker and to me that woman I had to be this is where I can read it. Let me Can it Can I just read that bit from my book? Yeah, so I wrote this book. It’s not about promoting this for everyone else that already told Victoria this, but I wrote this book and in this book I talked about it’s called Snakes and Ladders wonderful book, but in their awful awful book I lie It’s not wonderful. But I survived spoiler. It’s about it includes the the horrible things that my mother did to me and the dedication in this book, I wrote it. When I first started writing the book it says to my mother for making me the strongest woman I could be to my mother for making me the strongest woman. I could be all stop That’s what you do with it, you take it and you go, this stuff is intolerable. This is unbearable, you cannot live like this. And then you change it, you do something different with it. So I did something so different to what she told me to do. And now it’s like, right up until the day she I’ve been in therapy for 20 years, okay? 20 years with the same psychiatrist, you can do that in Australia. He’s been both billing me the whole time. It’s free. Because I’m really broken that so you don’t normally get that, but I’m pretty broken. He likes me. But you can get free therapy here. It’s amazing. I forget where I was going, I started talking about therapy. Does it every time you can take all of this stuff and make it into something different. And odd. That’s where I was going. The day she died. I’ve been in therapy for 20 years. And I thought I processed at all. But the day she died. I sat there and because she died of an overdose. She’s she overdosed we don’t know for sure if it was suicide, but it was a painkiller overdose. And that’s what she always said to me. From when I was so young. She said, you’re going to die in the ghetto with a needle hanging out your arm, Angela. And she said it was gonna happen before I was 21. So 21 was when I was like, Oh, I won that. Then 42 I was like, Oh, I got to double what she said, I totally won. But then when she died the same way she told me I was gonna die. Something dropped off my gaze, and I was able to see how much of everything she ever said about me. She was actually saying about herself. She was talking about herself with all of those things that she said to me, and just that moment of realizing she was finally dead. Let me just own the truth of myself as a person separate to that abuse. To like really step into being that strong woman that you have to be when you when you’re raised with all four things you have to be strong or die. As I tried to die with a needle hanging out my arm, I’m just obviously better at surviving. She thought I was going to be I gave it a good read hard go. Heroin is not the way to solve your emotional problems. I can say that 100% confidence, but I’ve gone somewhere different what she planned for me. And letting her go is letting that hold over me go. I am. I started my podcast after she died because after years of worrying about talking and being heard in the world, because she would hunt me down everywhere. She never respected my no contact. As soon as I popped up the social media accounts, she was there she would send requests through friends and constantly had some illness that I needed to rush to her side and comfort her. So, the poor people who had to email me about her finally dying, got that response of I am so sick of this. No, I am not rushing to her bedside again. And then she was actually dead and all I felt was relief. I already processed all the grief. I’ve processed the grief through the book and through the therapy and through making myself into this amazing, strong, capable human being. And I don’t regret not having contact with her. I don’t regret having kept myself safe. I don’t regret prioritizing my safety over her comfort
Victoria Volk 13:42
For the audience, it is Dr. Angela Williams. So, it’s an incredible story. What’s up?
Angela Williams 13:53
I said I’m comfortable in lecture mode.
Victoria Volk 13:56
Can I ask what kind of with doctor?
Angela Williams 13:59
Yes, yes, you can. I actually have a PhD in Creative Arts. I like to tell people that I’m a doctor of making shit up. I taught critical theory at university for seven years, which is all of those big ideas. We used to think about the world like philosophy so the feminism and the socialism and all the different isms and ologies. I taught a big first year class of around 300 students where we taught them how to do things like think and write essays and paragraphs and sentences. Let’s be honest. And so, I’ve given a lot of feedback. Oh, my favorite subject I ever taught was a I was just a tutor for this one. It was a third-year research project. So, the students got to write like a mini thesis, and I did. I was working with about 90 students helping them all make their own little mini thesis research pro at the end of three years of creative art, so there were across all of the disciplines visual arts, dance, and dramatic pin performance and all the rest of them. And including a couple of writers, creative writers, which is my field, they’re always the quiet ones sitting, they sit in a little clump in the middle of the room, and then the louder students get around them. But yeah, so I spent seven years wrangling creative art students to learn how to think while I was writing my PhD well, and after I finished my thesis, but my research was into how writing a memoir is like self surveillance, and we turned the lenses on ourselves to discipline ourselves into being more socially acceptable human beings. proved that theory, didn’t I? Yeah, so that’s what my doctorate is in, I think way too much. And I’m overqualified to do everything. But podcast turns out so yes, I’m technically an expert. They told me. Obviously, I am. Yes. Can I arrange my favorite bit of the book since we’re talking about me being a doctor? Here we go. This I didn’t even write this bit. Neither did my publishers. This is by an Australian author called Anna crying. Sorry, my microphones there. Oh, this is why I started a podcast. Snakes and Ladders is devastating and brilliant. Williams is a tremendous writer, her insight into power and punishment is brave, honest, and revealing. Thank you, Brian. Yeah, so that’s what kind of doctor I am. I am really good at looking at stories and looking inside them and behind them and underneath them. I did University and therapy at the same time. So, I just think all the time.
Victoria Volk 16:51
I think it’s absolutely incredible how I mean, you’re the epitome of the heroine story. And can we circle back to when you were 16? And like, come back to like the time in between now, if the time is between?
Angela Williams 17:11
Say, between 16. And now?
Victoria Volk 17:14
Yeah, like, how did you get from a needle in your arm to a PhD? And like, how did you quit? Like, you just like, kicked heroin, like, I’m done.
Angela Williams 17:24
I’m, I’m really smart. I didn’t know that when I was a kid. I thought that I was creative, which was an insult in my family. So we went to a Pentecostal church, and I had been reading it, my job was to work in the bookshop. That was my volunteering gig. And I read all these books about heroin in the church, bookshop. It took me about 10 years in therapy to realize that what I had done was put those messages together and worked out the consistent thread through all of those books was that when a person started taking heroin, their family stopped talking to her. So, she had already been predicting this for me for many years. So, I didn’t come up with these ideas by myself. But it was a really good escape hatch for me. I used heroin for a few years, got myself in some terrible, terrible trouble, ended up in jail, and then back in jail, 10 years later, the same thing, but um, when I left home, I just, I found a place to live. And she came there and saw me. So, then I moved further away into the city right into the city, and she came and found me. And so, I ended up actually just I lived homeless on the streets of Sydney for about nine months. Um, I was at the time, I was like, I’m pretty sure there’s a private investigator following me. And then my friends will like your paradine Angela, that’s the drugs found out years later that my rd actually had paid a private investigator to try to come and try and find me. And so, I did have a private investigator following me. for brief periods there, I had to make myself so unpalatable to my mother she had, she went through this period of every time she saw me, she would give me money for heroin and would try go and buy it for me offered to shoot the app one day because my hands were shaking too much. She was really it was kind of like Munchausen by proxy. She really liked having a broken child. When I was a kid, she used to feed me toothpaste so I would have a fever and go to the hospital. So by the time I left home, like it took me about a year and a half to get her to leave me alone. And then I met this man and, and he convinced me that he was going to rescue me and when we’re gonna get married, I was 17. He was 26. He’s the father of my child. He convinced me that my parents needed to be involved. In this so they came and met his family and it got really weird. And then it turned out he was abusive, because like part of what you do when you’ve had abusive parents is you go and find a bunch more to keep that abuse going don’t is so I actually have had I think my next book will be about how many relationships are fucked up on the way to having one that actually works. But um yeah, I had a child I was spiraling out of control, and I needed to, I got so sick that I actually genuinely don’t know how I’m alive, I weighed like 36 kilos, you guys can confer those two pounds yourself. And I had this big, crap sores on the corner of my mouth where every time I talked pass would run down my face. And I really liked to talk. So, I got really, really sick. And then I went to rehab, because that’s what you do. And I did 12 months in rehab, and my first therapy while I was there, and I started thinking, and I started putting things together. And the first three months I was in rehab, you weren’t allowed to talk to your family. That was one of the rules. And then I got through 12 weeks, and then my mother rang me. And I stood there, and I had not wanted to use heroin. I was going through the program, I was loving it, I was enjoying being clean. And then I heard a voice on the phone, and I wanted to use again. And I was like this is and then I said, no, I can’t have any contact with you. And then about six weeks later, a social worker turned up at the rehab and told me my mother was dying in hospital and that I needed to go and make my peace with her. And that was in 1997. So that was the first time she got me out of the No Contact thing. And then I just I refused to play by the rules I’d been given. So, I, my son might, she took my son to live with her and put him in foster care. And I didn’t see him for seven years, the police wouldn’t let me file a missing persons report because he was with a family member. So, in that seven years, I tried to kill myself really hard with other drugs, not just heroin, I made my track marks into a work of beauty, you can use them as little soup bowls. And then I went No, I said, this is not working for me. So, I attempted suicide, which was kind of in my genes as well, when you look at it, or how I was raised, but then my suicide attempt failed. And while I was in hospital, the doctor who assessed me was my psychiatrist. And, and how I still see him to today. He, he was the magic thing I had just applied to go to university. And I have been spent 20 years telling this man these stories about myself. And he just he just gives me constant positive regard. He likes me no matter what. And 20 years of therapy, and 13 years at university and the two combined to just I can see so clearly how my teenage years were just like those years after I left home, that was all I Those were the only options I had. I didn’t know how to open a bank account. I didn’t know any of the basics of like economy of how the economy works, how politics works, how to engage with the world, how to get a job, but how to do anything. And so I spent 20 years being my own parent, in therapy, doing, giving myself all the things that my mother hadn’t given me to make myself into a human being and I think I probably technically hit like a human being around about 26 or 27. Before I was actually able to see myself as being the same kind of creature as the people around me. Now I bought I am 100% convinced I am a human being but took a long time. A lot of therapy. He charges $360 an hour to people who are being both build. Oh, I am so privileged this man. It changed my life forever. Oh yeah, absolutely. He is the captain of my fan club. Yep, yep. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 24:46
Sounds like an amazing guy.
Angela Williams 24:47
He is, he is.
Victoria Volk 24:51
Perhaps a father figure you’ve never had?
Angela Williams 24:53
Well, yes and absolutely the father figure I never had but also a kind of rebel. representation of society because the school ignored the abuse, the church ignored the abuse, our Doc’s the Community Services, they got sent out to see us. They saw me at the school and then went back home and told my mother what I said about her. So, all of society was just saying this is okay. shrink Allah, my psychiatrist. He was the first person who said, Actually, no, this isn’t okay. Like, there was a moment where I was telling him this story about how my grandmother said that if I could get a recording of my mother abusing me, then she would go to the police with me. And I was telling my psychiatrists this as evidence that my grandmother was my hero. He was like, hang on, Angela. If she was like, what adult asks a child to provide a recording of them being abused before they will believe you and take action on it. Yeah, he was the first person who ever said actually, no, no, this is not okay. And I needed to hear that.
Victoria Volk 25:58
In grief recovery. We talk a lot about my grief recovery specialists. talk a lot about beliefs. And what I mean was your I don’t know if this is okay to ask. So, if it’s not just let me know. But do you know if your mother who was abused, growing up?
Angela Williams 26:20
Okay, so there is, this is totally intergenerational. This has happened a lot in Australia. We’ve actually just put the story together. In the last, say, four months before my mother died. My auntie died. Well, three and a half months before my mother died, my auntie died and my auntie had been her younger sister, and had been the victim of her abuse growing up my mother and my grandmother used to team up on my sister and my her younger brother who died of suicide Would you believe? So? Arnie Liz died last year in August, September. And then my mother died in October, but in between, we found his briefcase that Ali Liz had had sitting for years and she would say to my uncle, don’t worry about this, this stuff for the kids. And she was kind of like my standing mother, I lost contact with her. She tried to kidnap me when I was 11 after my mother broke a fry pan on my head. And so, then we didn’t see them again until I was an adult and I found myself Um, so Arnie layers had kept this suitcase, this briefcase. So the way the story goes, we put all the documents together. My grandfather was a in the Navy, and he went off to World War Two, and he met my grandmother. And so, he went off to World War Two was on a boat, they accidentally told him my grandmother was at home, pregnant with my oldest Auntie, and they accidentally told my grandfather that she was dead her and the baby had died. And so then he ceased all contact with her back in Australia. And at the same time, the Navy decided the way to treat his grief was to feed him heaps of rum and put him in an officer training program. And then because of you know, all those screw ups that happened in World War Two, he didn’t come back to Australia for five years. And he lived as an officer in the Navy drinking heaps of rum and constantly reporting back to the hit the medics that he wasn’t dealing wasn’t coping with this while at home. My grandmother was going mad because her brand-new husband had deserted her and left her at home with this baby. So we’re pretty sure that something broke in the family then they went on to have three more children and my mother was the eldest of those three children. So, my grandmother was a nasty woman. And everybody agreed with that. She was nasty to her children, and she taught my mother her unique brand of nastiness. So, it wasn’t my mother would tell you she was abused by everyone. Everyone abused her. My stepfather abused her my father abused her my grandmother abused her. The people who were victims and my mother tell it very differently so I’m something broke in our family in World War Two. I’m trying to put we’ve got all of this in my grandparents own handwriting. My grandfather’s written this to the Veterans Affairs trying to get recognition of what was done to the family. But I think something broke back then. And so, then they came back to Australia and Australia had a really long we have made torturing children a tradition here. We routinely dig up backyards in the inner west of Sydney where there are multiple babies skeletons buried around because you could make money at certain stages of Sydney’s history by we call them the baby farmers. They would take babies on to look after them or to rehouse them and then just kill them and bury them in the backyard. We had orphanages set up just to bring homeless destitute children from the UK and the US to Australia to farm them out for profit. And this is like 100 years ago 150 years ago, so we had a really bad history of child abuse in Australia that was ignored on every level. So, it’s kind of filtered down to it is ridiculous how many friends I have. It’s such similar stories of mothers like mine. But down to really ridiculous. I have one friend and we both had the same identical experience of being made to paint ceilings in our house in the light one at two o’clock in the morning, standing on tables whilst being beaten with broomsticks. That is such a precise, it’s like we taught women in this country mothers in this country how to abuse children. So it, I can understand why she was the woman she was, but I can’t forgive it. But luckily, it turns out that forgiveness isn’t as necessary as they make out. Yes, so she there was something broken in the whole family. And my grandfather was one of the first people to get off the boat and set foot Hiroshima after the things did you know, we let Navy officials just get off and wander around there after the bombs went off without any PPA. Whoa, and then his hair was falling out and he was bleeding from his rectum for the rest of his life. Yeah, yeah. So I’m, I’ll do something with that suitcase full of records, write a book about it, but we can always you look at society, you look at any level of society, you can find something there that is guaranteed to turn a person into a monster. But at the same time, we have to look at the monsters and go doesn’t make it okay. The monster I should have been a monster I should be Myra Hindley, the serial killer, the most murderer had such a similar upbringing to me, I should have been Myra Hindley. But instead, I did therapy, wrote about my stuff, changed my life. And now I’m a beacon for good. We don’t have to live out the histories that were given.
Victoria Volk 32:12
It takes people like you to break that cycle to break the pattern of that generational learning. Because imagine then, if you hadn’t, how would your relationship be with your son? How would your son be, you know?
Angela Williams 32:27
Well, my son came back out of foster care to live with me when he was 11. Apparently, that never happens. So, we talked about it, he was officially put back into my care when he was 16. I took him back from the state. I was like, give me back those papers, which apparently again, never happens. But he lives with me now. He’s an adult 26 we have the best relationship in the world. He has been very slow about getting any relationships. And there’s damage there that comes from having a family like mine, but we did something different. He’s my hero. Would you like to say a picture of him from the book? So ah, he’s amazing. His name is Finn. I call them decks in the book. He got to choose his own name. There he is. Oh, that’s what he was little. And there is with me and him. No call. Oh, there’s my boobs. Look, I covered my boobs.
Victoria Volk 33:22
Check out this book.
Angela Williams 33:24
I’ll do but yeah, you don’t get the pictures in the edition. People have been very disappointed about that. It’s a very good book. Lovely. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 33:33
I like a book in my hands. Yeah, like a book in my hands.
Angela Williams 33:37
Sniff them. You can’t sniff in a book.
Victoria Volk 33:41
You can’t doggy ear you can’t like right?
Angela Williams 33:45
Take posted notes. Where do you put your posted note?
Victoria Volk 33:51
I know! So let me ask you this. Among all the chaos and the trauma and use and and and and where did you find your joy? How long did that take too?
Angela Williams 34:09
Finally my middle name is Joy, Angela joy because I’m an angel of joy. Yeah, I don’t know where she was going with that. But um, I found my joy by recognizing my superpowers. complex trauma does has an effect on the structure of your brain, particularly complex trauma with really young people so your, your brain wires differently to normal people and it gives you some things that like when we talk about pathologies, they kind of describe these as symptoms but I prefer to think about them as superpowers. So it was a really slow process, going to university and realizing that I was very good at critical thinking. I can put a Very sound argument together; I can read some very disparate different sources and bring them together to make a hole. And it took me a very long time to realize that that was because I was smart, I had been creative was the insult I it took me a really long time to realize that I was smart. Once I started to let myself relax into that. studying and learning and writing and creating is where I find my joy. It’s I’ve won a couple of awards for the book where I got to before it was published, I got to go and stay in this amazing writer’s retreat up in the Blue Mountains just above Sydney. And one day I wrote like 22,000 words, in one day, I was from like, three o’clock in the morning, I woke up just with the flow of burning in me and just wrote, that’s where I found my joy, I found my joy in not quite retelling, it’s reimagining every story I come up against, I challenge it, and I think about all the different angles and that’s, that’s why I started my podcast. So, I could just share this stuff with the world, I usually just share it with my Facebook and people are like, Angela, you need to talk to other people about this. I’ve done some conferences, a couple of appearances, and I just I love taking the bad stuff and making it into something good being able to find those cactus flowers. When I, when the editors of my book first read it, they were like this is an amazing book, there is a wonderful story, we just need you to find. Some of them are pretty bits, we need you to find the joy in there and bring it out because it’s a very heavy book to read otherwise. And so I’d gotten addicted to this kind of flow activity of learning and reading and synthesizing information before I realized that I was enjoying it. So, I was at university getting those really good marks going, spending 80 hours a week reading and researching and writing. And then never making the connection that the really good marks I was getting. And the fact that I was happily and willingly spending all of these hours reading things that other people were very resistant to reading. That’s where I get my joy and my flow. It’s the superpower of part of the brain damage that’s inflicted on you as an abused child is hyper awareness, you have to watch for everything, you have to read the tiny, tiny details because that’s what keeps you alive. I took hype awareness and made it into a craft an art form skill that I can use to make myself stronger. And that’s it. That’s where I found my joy in flipping all of the narratives and all of the stories I was ever given. And turn upside down look underneath find out the other version of the story and then do that instead. Yeah, yeah. And build the superpower theory has only really formed over the last five years or so when I got quite heavily into researching cortisol and neuro Neuro Linguistic prayer. I’m not I’m not doing NLP. I think it works, but I’m not doing it. But once I started researching how brain chemistry get to get gets fits together, I realized that Yeah, I get way too excited about research. So I just let myself do it now, freelance researcher, I am not affiliated with the university, I am considering a current research arrangement that might let me stick my nose into corrective services. But mostly I just to work from my fun
Victoria Volk 38:33
Was it your therapist that encouraged you to apply for university.
Angela Williams 38:37
No, no, it was not my therapist. It was well yeah, he encouraged me to apply for university, but I’d already kind of started the process before I met him. I was flirting with the idea people. I used to take a lot of drugs. I know I don’t seem as sort of way, but um, for a very long time. Or maybe it just seems longer because I was on drugs. I would have these conversations with people and the pool tables in the toilets at the pub at the bus stop. And they’d be like, you should go to university Angela. Um, so lots of people said it. And then I met this guy. He’s like, I was 26. He was 16. It was nothing romantic. He’s gay. Were bsfc lives in Canada. But he started going to university, and we were hanging out quite a bit. There was drugs involved. He started going to university and he was like, honestly, sorry, Chris. I know you’re listening. Not very smart. Not very smart. So, I was like, well, he’s going to university surely I can go to university right? And so, he made me drive with him to Wollongong University, just south of Sydney. And I was like, oh, this is pretty nice, isn’t it and then I watched him get to put your form in in person back then I watched him put his form in and I was like, by the time we got back to the car, I was like, dude, I’m gonna go to university. It was like, I think you should, And I didn’t know you could get scholarships because that I hadn’t done your 12 the end of school HSC we call it, I didn’t know you could get scholarships to pay for the bridging course. So, I was working in the sex industry. So, I just went to work and stayed at work until I made enough money to pay for that course. So, I could get in and go to university. Um, yeah, yeah, I was just determined to go. And then I worked in the sex industry the whole way through university, to pay my way there, which is legal in New South Wales, and we pay taxes and things. It’s excellent. And by the time I finished my second degree at university, I was just taught, I just stayed there until they started paying me to be at university. And then I got so involved, and I saw the back end of University and I went, I don’t want to work for your people anymore. I’m just gonna go and think for myself now. Yeah, so it was Christopher’s fault. He’s the reason I went to university. He’s just upstairs from you in Canada, give him a poke with the state.
Victoria Volk 41:02
There’s so many layers to you. Like it’s just,
Angela Williams 41:05
I know, I know.
Victoria Volk 41:06
What’s the next what’s the next chapter?
Angela Williams 41:10
I’m on, I’ve met this woman. I’ve had lots of very awful relationships in my time. And I’ve met this woman and she’s pretty excellent. We’ve been together for coming up on two years now. And our families like each other. And her mother gave me a card at Christmas time that know for my birthday right before Christmas. That said to my daughter in law, so we figure she’s dropping some pretty heavy hints there. Um, yeah, we are talking about going Bush, we’re gonna go and live in a tiny town and grow vegetables except for when there’s a drought, then we’ll just eat dirt and stuff. Because Australia and she started a business. I’ve got a couple of different things I do. I’m writing another book, of course, actually, that’s a lie. I am writing six different books at the moment. So, I should probably focus in a bit pour my energies towards just one of them for a while. Yeah, I’m just relaxing. I’m 44. I’m pretty sure that I’ve started metaphors. I’m going to see the doctor about that on Thursday. I’d really like to just relax and enjoy the second half of my life. I want this thing to go away. Like to. Yeah, my son’s name is Finn. I told him it’s my Finkle.
Victoria Volk 42:34
These are my like the number 11 I got you know, 11 lines. It’s Are you effing KIDDING ME lines?
Angela Williams 42:41
Well, I think I’ve done it so much. Mine squashed into one. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I am I’m a bundle of contradictions. My podcast, I go 20 minutes, Monday to Friday and,
Victoria Volk 43:00
Wow. What’s your what’s your podcast?
Angela Williams 43:03
Oh, my podcast is called the Deboning Power. I like to stick my knife into things. I just I’d make terrible puns. And I can’t stop myself. So, I talk about mostly I talk about New South Wales and Australian politics, I bust a lot of spin there. But then at the same time I have at least once a week I do one on getting better. The therapy stuff, Badaling, all of that amazing therapy I’ve had and just trying to speed it at the intent. And on Mondays I talk about kink. BDSM. I’m a bit of a community leader. So, I educate people about how to do things safely. It’s all a good combination. Power just pretty much covers everything, doesn’t it? You talk about power; you can talk about anything you want. Um, yeah, I asked if you’ve got questions. I’m very good at reading media. And I really dislike my politicians. So, I have to tell them that frequently. Um, yeah, but my therapy ones are my most popular. No, that’s a lie. People love the kink ones they get very excited about those, but the therapy are the second most popular episodes. Yeah. Politics is just what I do for fun.
Victoria Volk 44:11
I just, I love, I love this interview because it’s going from heavy to light to so many spectrums of the human experience that I mean do you feel like you’ve lived like three lifetimes?
Angela Williams 44:26
Oh, yeah, totally. I’m waiting let me I know I wrote this bio. Yeah, no, it’s in my bio. It says Where are you by Oh, come back here. It says that I’ve lived way more lives than by 20 I’d lived more lives than anyone should have I’ve but that was it right? Because I wasn’t my mother didn’t teach me how to be a human so I had to learn for myself and all of the predictions she made for me She told me I’d end up in sex work so I went into sex work became an incredibly successful like professional dominatrix. She told me I was gonna die from using heroin. So I use heroin. Instead used as a tool to escape and to get away from her. And she told me that I was creative. And that meant that everything I said was a lie. And instead, I became a writer and became very well equipped at just speaking truth. Truth is what I do better than anything. And this for a podcast about grieving. This is so important, because I’ve grieved my auntie, this year and my stepfather in a much more complicated way. But everything I’ve made in my life, every single weird thing that I’ve stuck my finger into, has been in response to my grief for not having a mother not having that central cohesive, because she was there, but she wasn’t a mother. So that’s everything I’ve done. My psychiatrists, my sex work, my education, it’s all been about mothering myself, giving myself the things that she wasn’t giving me and the thing. The thing that’s been hardest about her actually dying, was, how much relief I felt. And how uncomfortable I felt saying that other people I could tell my girlfriend or my psychiatrists, but it’s really hard with most people to say yes, my mother just died and I feel absolute relief. Over the years, lots of people have said, you need to make your peace with her. She’ll regret regret it when she’s dead. Everything I’ve done has been me making my peace with her. And I didn’t realize how efficiently I’d already grieved her. I didn’t realize how making myself into the opposite of what she thought I was gonna be was. It was a gift I was giving myself because that’s all grief is isn’t it? They don’t know were grieving them. They’re, they’re gone. They all of our grief is something that we give ourselves. It is a for some people, it’s soothing. for other people. It’s relief. And it’s about us, though, not them. And yeah, I couldn’t go to the funeral. I couldn’t my brother when she changed her name, after the court said that she wasn’t legally allowed to have access to my son. Cuz, she tried to get him removed from my care and put in foster care up near where she lives. So, she could see him up there. And I’m like, no, that’s not happening. And I, in exchange asked for an order saying that she never be allowed to see him again while he was child. So she changed her name after that. And so I would have had to turn up to a funeral with all these people from her church, who had become her church was very important to us. And I couldn’t have my truth there. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I couldn’t perform the grief that they would expect me to perform. And I couldn’t fake it. If I walked into their I would not call her by her name that she talked to you avoid. Police finding out she was talking to children. I would just I’m too honest, I couldn’t do it. And every single funeral that I’ve been to, my army chose not to have a funeral. We got drunk on her river and sent her ashes out there all happily and celebrating under her tree where we fished together for years. I couldn’t give my mother that I couldn’t did a podcast instead. talked about it. Yeah,
Victoria Volk 48:32
Maybe a podcast about a eulogy that you would have liked to have written.
Angela Williams 48:39
Oh, well I tried that right. I was gonna give her a eulogy. And instead, I just ranted about how horrible it was that she decided to get buried on my birthday. Because you know, I do my podcasts every day. So, some of them get quite a lot of research. Some are just I am yelling at you today internet and that’s okay. When you do it every day, they can’t all be amazing. But that one was quite amazing. It was very raw I am I didn’t want to give her a eulogy. She um she left a stack of notebooks a stack of them and my brother burden I am I asked him to because we knew we knew that all that would be in there would be pages and pages and pages of explanations for why she was a victim in the world and everyone was out together and I’ve had it I’ve had the letters sent to me pages saying if you don’t respond to now I’m cutting you out of the will cut out of the well the first time when I was 14. So, it’s like you can’t keep holding that thread over me forever. And it turned out there was no will so or anything to leave.
Victoria Volk 49:43
The truth how you saw at people close to her? Probably never did.
Angela Williams 49:49
No, no, no. My brother asked if I wanted them. Or if I wanted him to say anything. said tell them to read my book. But that’s my truth. Yeah. Yeah. Because I’m, that’s it, I’m on to them, I said goodbye to them. By writing that book, I had to find some kind of sympathy for them in writing in that empathy that you have to have for your characters, even when you know their people abused you. I found a whole new level of understanding for my mother and writing that book and who she is as a person was as a person. But um, the only reason I would have turned up to that funeral was to make the other people there feel better about it. Yeah, I felt more guilty about being the MTC in the Pew then missing saying goodbye to my mother I’ve been. I’ve cried over too many times. Every time I cried myself to sleep after a beating, those were the tears that should have been at the funeral. And like I said to her, when she tried to ask me if she could move in with me a couple of like, last year sometime, I said I am. If you want to have children who are going to look after you’re in your old age, you have to skill your children up as human beings before they leave home. You can’t abuse someone for most of their life, and then say, Well, now it’s your turn to look after me. Yeah, can’t you just can’t do that? Yes. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 51:23
So she’s the epitome of a narcissist too?
Angela Williams 51:27
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Top to bottom. Yeah, and prescription pill addicts. So, you know, had lots of doctors treating her for lots of different illnesses and all kinds of prescribing. Yeah, medication for different things. And she would self diagnose and then go to a doctor and tell them that someone else had diagnosed her with that thing and then,
Victoria Volk 51:54
Coming back to what you were talking about with, like how other people would say that. You need to make peace with her regretted it’s like, what people don’t understand is like you like in grief recovery? Oftentimes, the people that give us the most grief are people who are living.
Angela Williams 52:11
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people when they say that they’re projecting their own experiences onto other people as well, if you’ve grown up with loving, supportive parents, it is very, very hard to conceptualize. Like, it’s equally hard for me to conceptualize loving, supportive parents, you can’t just assume everyone else has had the same experience as you. And when people say that to you, when they say, well, you’ll regret this after they’re gone. what they’re actually doing is trying to place this responsibility on you to value your blood connections over your own safety and security. If someone has just told you that they’ve been terribly abused by someone, and you turn around by saying, or you need to stay in touch with them, you need to have their your mother You have to have that connection, what you’re actually doing is I’m telling them, that all the stuff that that person has done to them matters less than their safety, no, sorry, matters more than their safety. It’s and grief is so difficult, we need to know to people will grieve the same way. And it’s been really strange talking to my brother about this, because we never, we’ve had a very difficult relationship because we were co victims, you know, victim bonded, and then talking to our kids about it. He has five kids and I have one kid and we talk to them about stuff. Particularly stuff with suicide, because my brother has four girls, my cousin has three girls, we talk about the suicide stuff, because not talking about it is more dangerous than talking about on now. My father’s suicide was not real. So, I don’t count that in the tally anymore. But apart from my father, I’ve lost half of my mother’s generation to suicide. And that’s enough. That’s enough. Yeah, so we talked to the kids, and we talked about the abuse, and we talked about what it means. And we talked about suicide because that’s it right you know, when you when you live with this risk, how can we reasonably certain I have complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, one of the most likely ways I will die is from suicide. That’s just the reality of my illness and my history and my baggage, so I kind of live around that risk knowing that yeah, and I suppose my mother’s done it now. So that’s even more likely, isn’t it? Um, that pushes me into even further into a risk category and that was that was one of my biggest concerns over the period where she was being buried. It was my birthday, which the last time I saw her on my birthday She sexually assaulted me in front of a big group of people and made a joke out of it. And yeah, so I was in a real risky place around that week and, but I just did what I do I talk to my psychiatrist, I talk to my girlfriend and kept myself safe. Yeah. I got docked in it. It’s okay.
Victoria Volk 55:25
You’re talking to me. You’re here.
Angela Williams 55:28
I know. I know. You’re like Oh, so many times over the last 10 years I’ve just stopped and yelled at the sky, I win! I am, I did so different to what I was told to do. I became whole.
Victoria Volk 55:44
The whole suicide narrative that doesn’t have to be your story. You don’t have to live into that story.
Angela Williams 55:51
Yeah, but we have to talk about it. Exactly.
Victoria Volk 55:55
As much as you talked in, you know, I’m sure your therapist, ie your father figure.
Angela Williams 56:03
In Australia, were as scared of talking about suicide as we are talking about child abuse. We have named renamed world Suicide Prevention Day is now called Are you okay? De? Shut up? No, it is and instead of talking about suicide, people say, are you okay to all their friends and everyone wears a badge on that day and then we don’t have to talk about it the rest of the year. And our Prime Minister has just hired a woman for one of these marketing buddies who is going to she is revolutionizing the Suicide Prevention space in Australia by she’s making a program where we’re going to identify people who might be at risk of suicide and then offer them support and counseling but without bringing up the topic of suicide so we’re going to talk cast people go up and have conversations with them where we just all of a sudden look really positive and cheerful that I’m sure will say Are you okay? And but we’re not ever going to mention the word suicide So yeah, I respond to my environment. This country is a bit toxic in some ways. So yeah,
Victoria Volk 57:08
Better line would be, how do you feel?
Angela Williams 57:12
Well, yeah, I’ve been every year. I’ve I kind of I get a bit activist around Are you okay day, and I like to do things like, why isn’t it okay for me to say I’m not okay. Yeah, and this year this year, it was Oh, sorry. Last year. 2020. Do you guys have kitkats? Over there? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Do they have the have a break? Have a KitKat? ad? Guess who sponsored Are you okay, day in 2020. kid? Are you okay? Have a break? Have a KitKat?
Victoria Volk 57:46
Anything related?
Angela Williams 57:50
Yes. Someone in the marketing room thought they were an absolute genius coming up with that sponsorship campaign.
Victoria Volk 57:56
Make suicide talk clever.
Angela Williams 57:58
Yeah, yeah. How to kick cat instead of killing yourself.
Victoria Volk 58:01
Oh my god.
Angela Williams 58:02
We want to talk about it without talking about suicide. So yeah, yeah. It’s one of my topics.
Victoria Volk 58:08
Yeah. bring that to the forefront, more regularly. Yeah, for sure.
Angela Williams 58:14
Yeah. I’m a bit of an activist in the circle. Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 58:19
My Bringer.
Angela Williams 58:21
Truth speaker, brutal, unflinching, and honesty is my brand. Yeah. I say the things that other people are just too uncomfortable to say.
Victoria Volk 58:33
What would you like to scream to the world? and wish people knew about your grief?
Angela Williams 58:39
I did write something that didn’t I?
Victoria Volk 58:42
I think it comes down to just that you don’t always have a loving relationship.
Angela Williams 58:47
Yes. All right. I already said that. No, yes, that is the thing. The thing I would like to scream to the world is that not everyone has a loving relationship with the person they’re grieving. And we need to make space for people who don’t we’re in Australia, there’s a fly there. Not everyone is going to mourn with sadness and tears. The shock on some people’s faces when I said they said, I said my mother died. They said, how are you I said, I feel relief need to make room for people to feel relief, we need to welcome these kind of stories of grieving that challenge the norm and challenge the stereotypes because lots of people have come to me over the years and asked for my support with going no contact with abusers. There’s a lot of people out here living this truth. And the reason I’m talking about this as much as I am right now is just to say to all of them, you’re not necessarily going to regret it. You’re not we don’t all grieve the same way and we don’t all love the same way and we weren’t all raised the same way. We have to give each other room for the differences.
Victoria Volk 1:00:01
Because we’re all unique, and every relationship is unique, and like you kind of brought up a little bit earlier, like you and your brother lived in the same household with the same person, but your experiences, you’ll see it from your own unique perspective, and you won’t believe the same.
Angela Williams 1:00:17
I don’t. No.
Victoria Volk 1:00:19
So, coming from a place of understanding and compassion?
Angela Williams 1:00:24
Absolutely compassion, we need to just be more gentle on each other. We’re also willing to tell each other what’s wrong with the other person, but much less willing to look at ourselves, I it’s the biggest value I’ve had of therapy every two weeks, I spend an hour fact checking my reality and identifying when I have fucked up when something is my fault. And when I have contributed to something, and then changing that.
Victoria Volk 1:00:54
What does that look like? What does it process for you?
Angela Williams 1:00:58
Oh, I’m big on accountability and honesty, and I screw up all the time. It’s, for me that it’s hard, it’s hard to realize that you’ve done something wrong, or that you’ve been an idiot, or that you haven’t noticed something harmful you’ve done to another person. I did a I did a really good podcast recently about shame and secrets and about how we talk about them. And I think for me, a big part of living so honestly, is learning to also cope with shame, deal with shame, acknowledge shame, Own your shame. It’s the the feeling that we run away from the most is shame. And I know that my feeling of not wanting to leave that empty seat at my mother’s funeral was linked to my shame of never having been a good enough daughter for her never having. And I’ve carried that shame so long, but it’s still something that I need to check again and again and again. And its stuff that it’s so easy to project onto other people.
Victoria Volk 1:02:13
This is like the third time the word shame has come up today.
Angela Williams 1:02:18
Really?
Victoria Volk 1:02:19
Yeah, and so that’s actually where I was kind of going and how shame is very much tied to grief. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, we may feel guilty about something. It’s these conflicting feelings of I should feel this way. But I really feel that way. I want to feel this way. But I have this weight of shame. Yeah, and, and that blocks us from the ability to be intimate with ourselves, like to really look at ourselves, and really connect with other people.
Angela Williams 1:02:59
Yep. Or shame is such an uncomfortable feeling it is. It’s prickly and horrible. It’s when our chest gets warm, and our throat gets warm, and our face gets warm. And most people will never even recognize that they’re feeling shame. In my opinion, I think a lot of us flip it instantly into fear or disgust or anger or rage to avoid having to feel shame. And I think that people like myself, and like my mother who blamed everything outwards. That’s about doing anything possible to avoid having to come close to that shame. And what you’re saying is true. It blocks you from any kind of intimacy with yourself or with other people. Because when you’re 100% doing everything you can to avoid feeling shame, you never give yourself the space to connect realistically with people because everything is about protecting yourself from shame. And it means that when you need to be accountable to someone, if you’re doing everything you can to avoid the shame. All you’re going to do is put up a wall between you and that person. And that’s usually cut that wall is really frequently blame. It’s your fault. You did this to me, you made me do this. And as soon as we put the word you in there, we’re pushing our shame away putting it onto another person and saying this is yours. It’s it’s so much harder to just say, I’m really sorry I did this, and I can see how awful it’s been for you and then just stop talking.
Victoria Volk 1:04:40
Be honest. Right?
Angela Williams 1:04:41
Yeah, it is.
Victoria Volk 1:04:42
And that honesty is the drug is the wrong word. Antidote for shame.
Angela Williams 1:04:45
Oh, that’s a good one.
Victoria Volk 1:04:52
It is the antidote for shame.
Angela Williams 1:04:55
It is. Do it, do it. I think I might have said something similar in my shame. People message me all the time to say they’ve read that one. I mean, listen to that one, it’s amazing. We need to talk about shame more.
Victoria Volk 1:05:10
And the word grief, and the word suicide.
Angela Williams 1:05:13
Oh, yes. And how they all lay it together, I was I’ve spent so much of my life, thinking that if I could just be a bit more something, then I’d be the kind of person my mother could love. And my first suicide attempt, when I was really young, came as a reaction to feeling that I would never match up to that. And my last suicide attempt came from a feeling that I would never match up to that. And that feeling that I would never match up to it. That is shame. That is, but that is that’s absolutely shame that’s been kind of mis smeared on to me, but I never did anything wrong, I didn’t actually have anything to be ashamed of there, there was no way that I could have made that woman love me no matter what I did, but
Victoria Volk 1:06:04
And then here’s the thing. She wasn’t there, when she wasn’t, she wasn’t there for you to even blame and wanted to blame her, she would turn it around and spin it on you. So that’s where that self destructive behavior, if people don’t, aren’t able to communicate, and get that out, like, just even speak it.
Angela Williams 1:06:31
But the other thing is right, that that shame, I can see that shame now and know that it’s not my shame. But before I could do that, I had to feel that shame, and process it and think about it in all of its deeper layers. So, when I first met that shame, it was my shame because I hadn’t looked at it enough to know that it wasn’t. And so, when you can identify shame that has been smeared on you from outside like that, then you can step back from it and go, no, I don’t own it. It’s not my shame. But you’ve got to go through the process of feeling at first. And so, a lot of a lot of things that people turn into more dangerous emotional, well, toxic emotions, like anger and rage is things and blame was something where if they just sat with the shame, set with the feeling and thought about what it said about them, it might have been that they’d done something that they needed to apologize or be accountable for. Or it might have been that they were carrying some baggage that had been smeared on them from outside. But by refusing to feel the shame through that uncomfortable bit and think about it, they’ve lost the ability to it becomes their shame, then no matter where it comes from, because they can’t look at it long enough to categorize it, sort it into its basket. Shame is toxic. I’m pretty sure that shame is linked to the majority of suicides that happen and I can see my mother’s as a direct result of her own shame made had finally gotten to the stage where she couldn’t keep spinning games to people. But that was her shame, not mine.
Victoria Volk 1:08:16
I believe the root of shame is grief.
Angela Williams 1:08:20
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:08:22
I believe grief is at the root of a lot.
Angela Williams 1:08:29
Yeah, and we haven’t I think we’re carrying a lot of kind of societal and cultural grief as well. Some of the things that we’ve seen humanity being capable of in the last 100 or so years. I will buy way before that as well. But you look at things like World War Two and the impact that had on my family we all kind of we have a lot of shame that’s spread around and it is about grieving it’s about when you feel shame you’re grieving something in yourself. We don’t only grieve deaths we lead grieve losses as well. And payment grief so much shame about grieving. I was supposed to bounce back we’re supposed to be able to deal with it. We’re supposed to,
Victoria Volk 1:09:14
Yeah, I could talk all day about grief. It’s really the loss of hopes dreams and expectations and anything we wish would have been different better or more. And so, when you think of grief in that way it that’s why I say everyone, every single one of us has grieved something.
Angela Williams 1:09:33
Yet, all we’re putting off grief to later we’ve got something we should have grieved, or we need to grieve and we’re saving that up for ourselves to do some other time.
Victoria Volk 1:09:45
But we’re dealing. Dealing with it yes, some way. Yeah. You know what, if you turn into the bottle, if you’re turning to sex, if you’re turning to gambling, you’re turning on your turn into shopping. You’re you’re addressing it?
Angela Williams 1:09:58
Well, yeah, I did a podcast on this yesterday where I was talking about endorphins and pain and how endorphins work just there your brain’s natural heroin. So, when you’re doing things that give you an adrenaline rush, basically all you’re doing is getting your brain to shoot out its own heroin. And that works for emotions as well as for like physical pain. So yeah, the great eraser is what they call alcohol in the AIA movement, the great eraser and it is it’s just, you’re not dealing with it, you’re just kind of putting a cap on it and hope that it will stay there for a while. But your card that those caps don’t hold, they got to cover off eventually.
Victoria Volk 1:10:42
Well, no grief recovery can be equated to picture yourself as a tea kettle. And you either implode or you explode.
Angela Williams 1:10:52
Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. And that bit in between, you’re going to be spitting stuff in every direction. Yep. Yes.
Victoria Volk 1:10:59
I’m assuming it was your therapist, who was the most supportive of you? What did you find? was most helpful to you? And I started to navigate everything.
Angela Williams 1:11:14
When I first got the email, saying that they needed me to call about my mother. I am. I hope she was dead, after all the times that she’d kind of use that as a tool. But I couldn’t let myself hope because it had happened a lot before, but I couldn’t I also couldn’t. It’s really difficult to say to a person who was ringing me to say your mother’s in hospital, you need to come and see her to say no, I’m not doing this again. So, I rang my brother and said, I think can you call this person I think something’s gone wrong with our mother. And that was the best thing I did. asking him to do that for me. I couldn’t have done it. A year ago, we drove to my Arnie’s for her funeral together it was the longest we’d spent alone together since we were children. So, I called him and asked him to take that and then in the bit in between me saying that to him and him ringing back to tell me that she was dead. My beautiful girlfriend just I didn’t cry. It was really I felt shame about not crying. But I just kind of sat there with it kind of gradually dawning on me that maybe this time she actually was dead and and then I had four or five days of just was like I was startled cat constantly. It was really bad timing. The Jacaranda trees were out, and they triggered off some really bad stuff from my 16th birthday. So traditionally, my entire life every single time I’ve seen a Jacaranda tree. I’ve had this moment of being triggered back into my 16th birthday. And day after she died, I went out driving with my girlfriend and a sort of Jacaranda tree. And I just had this moment of lightness in my heart. So it took me a couple of days to actually believe that it was real this time that I wasn’t going to open my email or my messenger to a big long message or lots of messages from people she’d messaged about me, but I just I took that space, my girlfriend has sat on the lounge next to me and held my hand and she just kept saying to me, I’m here, like whatever you need. I’m here. First, I got an in practice I had, when Annie LEDs died in September, I grieved really hard, I cried on the floor in the kitchen for hours. And I cried on the floor in the bathroom, and you know all the places with tiles, let’s go and cry there. But I couldn’t cry over my mother, I couldn’t. I just needed the space. And I needed the space to own that reality, and to go yet. And then I had my next therapy session. And then it’s harder she died, and we talked about that. And then I have my next one where I said and you wouldn’t leave, she got married or got buried on my birthday. And he was just like, of course she did. And it was like I needed those people around me who I knew would just affirm my decisions. And luckily, I’ve curated my world quite well. All of the people who said things like, our mother would never do that to her daughter, I’d gone I just haven’t I don’t give them space in my world. So I just yeah, I needed that space and I needed a couple of days to just test. I kept expecting to feel regret. I kept expecting to feel loss. And all I felt was like the threads are finally gone. The threat that she could pop up any second and want my attention again or The worst thing she ever did was every single time she saw me as an adult, she apologized for what she did to me. And then she said, I don’t remember any of it. I wasn’t there when any of it happened. So yeah, yeah. She said, I’ll let you publish that little book, and you say whatever you want, because your reality is your reality. And it was like, your reality is your reality is pretty good. But the bait at the beginning what you say, will you publish that little book. Um, yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:15:28
Give him permission.
Angela Williams 1:15:30
No, I didn’t. And I kind of can’t believe I waited until after she died to start a podcast because I’ve been yelling a lot for years. But um, I just gave myself space to let myself be however I was. And it was a surprise for me every day. I’m still kind of surprised that I don’t feel regret.
Victoria Volk 1:15:49
So, advice. And it’s that’s advice too, for others.
Angela Williams 1:15:55
It is nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:15:59
The people around you that,
Angela Williams 1:16:02
Connect with people you’ve similar experiences. if for no other reason, then just so that you’ve got someone you can talk to? Who knows? Because really, I can’t imagine only having friends who’d had excellent relationships with their mother and then trying to talk about this. About this big circle of friends. I call them the bad mothers club. We um, we know, we know, because we’ve all been there. So those are the ones I went to talk about it because they want to know.
Victoria Volk 1:16:36
Can I ask you something?
Angela Williams 1:16:38
Yes.
Victoria Volk 1:16:39
How do you hear something today, too? And I’ve been given it a lot of thought even before, but do you identify yourself as a survivor? Like, is that a word? That you feel like you wear like a badge of honor.
Angela Williams 1:16:58
Some people hate that way.
Victoria Volk 1:17:00
Or do you feel like that’s something that I don’t want that to be my story anymore?
Angela Williams 1:17:05
Um, no, I do identify as a survivor. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who I also use the word victim about myself, though. And I know a lot of people who refuse to use either of those words in relation to themselves. I survived this stuff. If I wasn’t a survivor, I would be dead well, and truly did many, many times over. Sometimes I watched that survivor show. And I think you guys wouldn’t last five minutes in my life, some bits of it. Yeah. Let’s do survivor where you’re just homeless in Sydney instead of on a tropical island. I’m a survivor. Because you’ve got to you’ve got to value the superpowers, don’t you, you’ve got to see the things that are most valuable there. And when you live with a constant risk, like suicide, sometimes the only thing that gets you through is being a survivor. My house is filled with ridiculous craft projects that I did, because I was putting off committing suicide. That’s one of the things I do, I’m like, Well, I will make this stupid thing in my kitchen, I have a little angel made out of why you know how you do those string dolls, where you tie them up, and you make the legs and things. I made it out of really horrible why I where I must have stabbed myself dozens of times. And it’s got these little beaded wings with string. And I made that doll about 20 years ago instead of committing suicide that day. So I’m a survivor and I’ve got like, evidence of my survival all over my house and my life and my body and things I am I have to celebrate it because I haven’t traditionally had a lot to celebrate. So celebrate the things you can and I know that some people don’t like the term survivor and they don’t like the term victim because it that kind of disempowering element that by saying we’re survivors were giving over some of our power whereas I think being a survivor should be mark of honor. And it should be seen as a mock Ivana, it should be. If you know people who’ve survived bad shit standing or have them, look at them and go you did something that I could never imagine. I like it. I like it. I’m happy. I might get a tattoo that says survivor. I put it next to my feminist killjoy.
Victoria Volk 1:19:31
I just, you know, I just heard a story today, a woman she was an addict for I don’t know how many years and she she had a different perspective of the word survivor and hers was, I didn’t want to be that I didn’t want that to be my story. Like and, and like suffering. And yes, this idea of, let’s get out of the suffering and let’s get into the joy, let’s just work on the joy.
Angela Williams 1:20:02
Absolutely. And that part of it, like people talk about tragedy porn, and trying to avoid just your entire life being a story of tragedy, which is I talk about the tragedy and the bad stuff. But I try to talk about the good stuff as well. And I don’t want being a survivor to be the only thing I’ve done. But I never want to forget that it is something that I’ve done
Victoria Volk 1:20:26
It and it’s, we have both right, in society in our human experience.
Angela Williams 1:20:32
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:20:33
You know, you don’t have to have traumatic physical experiences for something to be or feel traumatic.
Angela Williams 1:20:40
No.
Victoria Volk 1:20:41
To feel like you’re a survivor of something.
Angela Williams 1:20:43
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:20:44
So yeah, I’m just you know, I’m actually going to add that as a question.
Angela Williams 1:20:50
I think that bit where I was talking before about the superpowers. That’s it, like I could celebrate being a survivor, because I can identify the superpowers, I got from what I survived. So, I can celebrate my strength.
Victoria Volk 1:21:04
Yeah, its deeper. It’s going deeper than just this identity.
Angela Williams 1:21:10
Yeah. Well, when I get to talk about surviving, and means I inevitably get to talk about how strong and powerful surviving made me. So, it’s kind of that flip side. Yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:21:20
Can I ask you another question?
Angela Williams 1:21:22
Yes.
Victoria Volk 1:21:23
This just really just drives me nuts. What are your thoughts when you hear people say that children are resilient?
Angela Williams 1:21:31
Oh, I hate the word resilient. Oh, God. It’s so shaming, I keep hearing it from our politicians here where they’re like, our country has been on fire, then we had some floods. And now we’ve got COVID. They’re like, you just need to be more resilient, because that’s what we’re saying, instead of let’s talk about suicide. Oh, my God, children don’t need to be resilient. No one needs to be resilient, if you are. Resilience should not be our natural state resilience is to stress and yes function. And I don’t know if anyone’s noticed. But when you put kids under stress for too long, their brain chemistry changes. with superpowers and celebrating being survivors. We don’t want our children to have to end up with superpowers and celebrate being survivors. So we’re not going to force our children to be resilient, I firmly believe that every child deserves to have a period of their life where they’re not under stress. I cannot imagine what that would be like. But imagine if you did Imagine if you just woke up every day knowing you were secure and loved, whoa, children don’t need to be resilient. And now when the entire world is falling apart, and were taking bits of their future away from them just because of you know how capitalism treats things like illness. Now is not the time to tell them to be resilient. When we say to these kids, you need to be resilient, we are shifting the responsibility for what the world we’ve made them. We’re saying, Well, now this is your responsibility. You deal with all the crap we left you just be resilient. It’ll be fine. No, I hate the word resilient. Yes, yes. Our Prime Minister keeps saying our kids don’t need to be anxious. We’re looking after things. He says that about climate change, we’re going to get we’re gonna hit our climate targets by pretending we hit and 10 years ago, we’re just making up these climate credits. And he’s saying to the teenagers, just don’t be anxious. Okay. He took a lump of coal into parliament and hugged it on the floor of the Parliament. And he’s saying to the teenagers, don’t be anxious. Yeah, it’s an insult. It’s awful. Teenagers rise up rebel burners all tell us to piss off and make the world in your own way.
Victoria Volk 1:23:46
With your creativity.
Angela Williams 1:23:49
Exactly.
Victoria Volk 1:23:52
No, and I think it came up not that long ago on another podcast episode I did where it just it. I just I’ve heard it so much lately, especially with Kobo and everything. And it’s just so resilient. They bounce back. I mean, I’ve heard that as I heard that around me, like in my personal experience, what I went through, and it’s like, kids that you’re saying that about did not choose to be resilient? No, no, why not something they chose with you. You catch yourself saying that they’re resilient, that that child is resilient. You’re there in an experience that they did not choose?
Angela Williams 1:24:29
Yep, yep. Yeah. And nobody needs to says or yell or be resilient when I grow up. They want to be right. They don’t want to be resilient. Yeah, yeah.
Victoria Volk 1:24:42
Yeah. Um, I love this episode. I love this. Very rich. Where can people find you?
Angela Williams 1:24:51
They can find me on Facebook. If you search for my group, Deboning power podcast. You can find me there. I even share myself sometimes. Yeah, I also have my podcasts which is deboning power. And that seems to be pretty much everywhere where you can get podcasts you can find that one. Yeah, yeah, I’m not gonna give people my address because this is the internet. Well, links my book you can get anywhere. It’s in audiobook form. The performer who does made a remarkable impersonation of me. She’s excellent. It’s also available in ebook and in beautiful, sexy paper form. And they will send it to you in America on ada booktopia. Or, what’s the other one that’s got sold on Amazon. So, it might be it might be on Amazon. But booktopia ships internationally I think or the Book Depository one of those too.
Victoria Volk 1:25:51
Send me a link. I will put it in the show notes. Anything else you’d like to share?
Angela Williams 1:25:55
My final thoughts. Love yourself. Love yourself. Give yourself the love that other people could give you even if you are loved by everyone in your world. Still love yourself. But if you’ve got no one and nothing, give yourself love. Because that’s it is that is that?
Victoria Volk 1:26:18
I heard when as a kid, I think my dad would always say this. Something about if you think I’m this? If you want a helping hand, look to the end of your own arm.
Angela Williams 1:26:33
Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Hmm. I like that. I like that.
Victoria Volk 1:26:41
You were your own hero.
Angela Williams 1:26:43
Yes, we all can be
Victoria Volk 1:26:46
We all can be. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Angela Williams 1:26:49
Oh, thank you, thank you.
Victoria Volk 1:26:53
And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.