Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest is Sasha Mardeux. Sasha is a cartoonist and graphic novelist and memoirist whose new book Past Tense is just out. Sasha's is a life affirming story about carrying secrets, burying them, being haunted by them, and then releasing them in the
fullness of time. Is an extraordinary story of a beautiful human determined to find the help she needs to survive and thrive. So, Sasha, I'm going to begin where I always begin these conversations, which is, tell me about the landscape of your childhood. Give me a sense of as early as you can remember, who was in that landscape, what did it look like, what did it feel like?
Sure, So, my parents had married very young. They had me in nineteen seventy five and they were just barely out of their twenties. I was born into the north of England and there was a lot of unemployment at that time, you know, the Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister, and just the landscape for men had just been decimated, you know, there were no prospects. Men spent most of their time in the pubs.
You know.
My mother was very much raising me alone, even though she was partnered. I would say my father was like a very immature man who never really stopped being a playboy. Some of my first memories of him coming home from the pub and just hitting my mom, beating my mum who would challenge him about him smelling of perfume or you know, being with women. So yeah, there's my earliest memories just him being kind of brutal to my mother and being absent even though he lived in the same
house as us. My mother is a very caring and warm and sweet person.
Actually, most of the women in my family were.
Nurses of one form or another, nurses or carers, so very much a people pleaser kind of person. You know, she keeps the peace by being nice and effusive. He very intelligent woman. You know, she was well read and was into teaching me how to read and write from an early age, so she very much encouraged me intellectually. I remember my parents' divorce very clearly because I remember Charles and Diana were getting married on the TV set at Westminster Abbey as we.
Were packing up the house to go our separate ways.
After the divorce, I lived with my dad for a little while and then with my mom, and there was a lot of poverty. She ended up taking a job as a warden in a it was like a residential home for the elderly, and the job came with a living apartment, and so, you know, that was a lifeline for us.
Both because we had a place to live.
Before that, we were living with, you know, with my aunts, or you know, staying with friends, that kind of thing. My mom became the deputy warden, and another woman called Lorraine became the main warden.
And she had a family.
She had a husband and two children, a boy and a girl, and my father would come to visit and he and Lorraine began to have an affair and their marriage fell apart. So my dad moved in with Lorraine and became a stepfather to her two children. And the weird thing about this was that Doug, who was the ex husband of Lorraine, actually got together with my mom, and so it was these two couples and you can imagine just like the father's swapping, right, So.
I ended up with Doug as my stepdad.
And I ended up with these two half siblings, Gail and Amon, and they started calling my dad dad, which was very uncomfortable for me. It was my ninth birthday when they got married, so I remember that clearly as well.
And then your dad and Lorraine have two more children.
They will go on to have two more children, but a lot happens in the interim, so you know, it's kind of comical in a way to think of these two couples who've kind of like swapped husbands, but the reality was very very difficult to be a child like witnessing these partnerships, you know. So my stepfather, Doug was very upset that his two biological children were calling my father dad, and I had to start calling Doug dad,
which wasn't very comfortable for me. And the situation eventually resolved when my dad and Lorraine moved like thirty miles north of Manchester and it just ended the access. So all the custod rangements fell apart and we didn't see them for.
A couple of years.
Little Sasha was quite a bewildered and timid kid. I was very bookish. I would spend a lot of my time like reading books and blowing the world out. There's a line from Alice Miller in the drama of The Gifted Child where she talks about how you can perfect the art of not feeling your feelings in childhood, and that's very much what I did. I just blanked out from the weirdness of my family. You know, I didn't acknowledge it. I didn't talk about it.
So very early on I became a secret keeper.
And obviously in my interactions with my stepsister Gail, I had secrets there to keep as well, because she was a very confusing and bewildering child to be around. At first met when I was about seven or eight, and she was a very different person to me. She was Catholic and so very churchy. I remember she was very excited about going for her first confirmation and dressing up like a little bride.
It was all very bewildering to me.
I'd never been so a and I think the first time I went to a church was actually seeing her confirmation.
Her mother was my mum's.
Boss, and I feel like Gail adopted this attitude like I'm your boss too, because we were thrown together for a summer, and when we would play together, her games would get very intense. And there was actually something that happened in that summer we played together where she actually played sexual bullying games on me, inspired by pornographic magazines that her father had hidden under the mattress that she would bloat and show me.
You know, Gail isn't just showing Sasha pornographic magazines. During this time when Gail is nine and Sasha is eight, Gil molests her.
It was the kind of thing that I had no language for whatsoever. You know, I knew it had to be a secret. But even if I were to tell a grown up what Gail had done, I wouldn't have known the words to say.
And so it was a secret that I just pushed down really, really far.
And I wouldn't tell anyone this until I was in my forties. Actually, when I was in therapy. That was the first half of my connection with Gail as this bully somebody who intimidated me. And then she moved away, you know, my dad became her dad. I felt very resentful.
To her for that.
She would call my dad dad in front of my face, and I would just feel so jealous, you know, like he's not your.
Dad, Like I'm living with your dad. It was such a weird situation for a.
Child, and you know, obviously something that I never talked to. You know, I had friends in school, but I would never tell them about my family's situation or how my family came to be. It was just weird, and I knew it back then, and it was also embarrassing, kind of like a soap opera, you know, like a crazy situation from a soap opera that no one would believe really happened.
Did you understand that then, because you know, one of the things that I've learned, it was in my own life and hosting this podcast, is that our childhoods are all we know, and there's a kind of strange but very human normalizing in our minds. I think of whatever happens in our childhood, it feels like, well, that must be happening in everyone's childhood. It's the only world we know.
Was that the case for you or did you know at a young age you know everything that you're describing that it wasn't happening in other homes or in most other homes. And in the case of Gail and these awful sexual I mean molestation. You know, these quote unquote games that she was playing with you, is that something that you understood was deeply not okay? Or where do you put that at the age.
Of eight, Well, these games had begun with her showing me like secret pornography that was hidden under my then stepfather's mattress. So is back when her, her father Doug, and Lorraine were still together, you know that she would show me these things, and so yeah, I had a sense then that the secret you know, and you would see pornography as a child, and it's really shocking. And you know, this was how I learned about sex from these from seeing these magazines that I didn't even particularly
want to look at. They just made me feel hot and embarrassed and ashamed and very trapped because like Gail was kind of my Jaila that summer, you know, she was kind of in charge of me while my mom and Lorraine were working in the old People's unit taking care of the old people.
So I had a sense back then that the situation was weird.
And when the partners what happened, and my dad became her dad and her dad became my dad.
Yeah, I knew it was weird.
I feel like in my life and my youth as well, I've always been like drawn to people who have more traditional, stable family situations, you know, And so I would always compare my family life with the family life of my friends, who would have like a mom and a dad, And yeah, I always knew that I was kind of weird and different.
The incidents with Gail happened, and your moms were working together, and your Lorraine was quote unquote your mom's boss, and Gail kind of made herself the boss of you. The swapping of partners had not happened yet or was in the process of happening. Kind of during that period of time, it was.
On the brink of happening.
So Lorraine and my father were beginning their kind of secret affair which would kind of blow up and become a public affair. So yeah, it was like right before that happened. So already, I mean a lot of things were kind of happening in my life, so there was no real time to pipe up and go hey, by the way, Gail's playing these word games.
On me, if that makes sense, and then she becomes your stepsister after this has.
Happened, that's right, and she would actually end up living with us because obviously Doug was her real father. So after an extended period of no contact, like around nineteen eighty six, we get a visit from Gail's mom, Lorraine, Like early in the winter of nineteen eighty seven, Lorraine comes to visit my mom while I'm at school, and Lorraine tells my mom that my father is in prison
for sexually abusing Gail. And to add to that, she says that Gail is in a children's home because she can no longer cope with her.
How do you find this out?
I find out the same day.
I come home from school and I see my mom's face in the window and she's waiting for me, and I know that something's off as soon as I walk through the door, and so she sits me down in the living room, and I remember her chain smoking like it was a winter's day. It was a very gray skuy outside. You know, she hadn't put the light on in the room, and so the room got dark as we were talking, and she would light her cigarettes from
the gas fire. While she was telling me the story of what had happened, and she told me what Gail had told her, which was that like in nineteen eighty six, Gale was about twelve, and she had apparently sexually matured and she had breasts now, and she would walk around the house and like shore t shirts. And my dad was unemployed and he was kind of looking after the kids during the summer.
Apparently Gail would get.
In bed with my dad for cuddles after Lorraine, her mom had gone to work, and so this had been going on all summer, and at the end of the summer, when Gail went back to school in nineteen eighty six, she told the nuns at the Catholic school that she went to that her stepfather had been abusing her. And so the police came and arrested my father and he went to trial and he got sentenced to prison.
Lorraine had Aimen.
I think he would have been about six at the time, and Gail, who was turning thirteen and had had a really difficult time apparently, and social Services in England had stepped in and taken Gail into a children's home. And so my mom told me all this information on that day in February in nineteen eighty seven, and my mom put it to me that Gail doesn't need to be in a children's home.
She has another parent she could live with. Doug was her biological father.
And there was a part of me that day that felt like, my father's a monster, and if I can help make this right and get Gail out of a children's home, like, of course we'll do that. Of course girls should come in love with us. And so that's what happened.
Were you completely shocked by this information about your father or did it feel in some way like it was part of a trajectory, like when you talk about your very first memories of like violence between your parents and you talk about your father and who he was. Was there any part of you that wasn't completely surprised or was it just utterly shocking.
It was definitely shocking in terms of like a feeling of you know, sick disgust.
In my stomach.
Yeah.
But the thing is I'd been living with Doug my mom for years and they'd constantly told me that my dad's no good, you know, and so this basically confirmed this bias that they both held for Doug. My dad was the bad guy who'd stolen his kids, right, and now my dad was the man who'd molested his daughter,
Like of course he was a monster. I felt an internal shame that in some way this reflected on me, like I didn't want to be like my dad, and I very much wanted my mom to see, look, Mom, I'm like you.
I'm a good person.
And so I think leaping to the aid of Gail, even though I had my own dark history with her, it was something I've felt compelled to do, you know, just to kind of reclaim like I am your daughter, I'm not his daughter.
That felt very important to me.
So what was that next period of time, Like when Gail came to live with you.
Things moved so fast.
I feel like my mom and I had that conversation, and I think the next weekend we met Gail and her social worker in a cafe, and Gail was just not the kid I remembered. I remember this long blonde hair, like blue eyed, like perfect Catholic girl.
And here was this young woman.
You know, she had short cropped hair, like a full eighties outfit, makeup, eyeliner. She just seems so grown up within a few weeks she moved in, and I think Social Services paid for like new bedding and a new bed and we began to share a room, and in my mind it was like, we will be teenagers together.
I think I was still eleven turning twelve. But I felt very much like I have to hide away all my dolls and my childish books because you know, I've got this mature teenager moving in with us, and so I swapped my dolls for klor of posters of the Bangles and things like that. You know, I feel like I tried so hard to make it fun and to make things okay for her. I felt like, this is the worst thing in the world that has happened to you, and I want it to be okay. I want this
to work out. I was very invested in having it work out. But it didn't take long for things to just get like a little bit unhinged and weird.
You know. I remember she started in my school.
She was the year ahead of me, and she quickly made like a clique of friends, like the popular girls. And I had this assumption that everything that had happened with my dad would be a secret. We're not going to tell people that, But one of the first things she did was she told like all the girls she'd made friends with at school that, you know, she was a victim of sexual abuse.
And it was a little bit horrifying to.
Me, Like I didn't want the shame of people knowing that was my dad who'd done that.
I didn't want people see me that way.
But also I could see that she was doing it to be manipulative. I know that sounds harsh, but that really was what it was. Like she was telling her friends and kind of enjoying the attention, and she was saying, Oh, everyone's been so nice to me, it's so great.
And then she told me.
A story that just felt really weird, and it was kind of like a red flag for me. She told me that a friend in school had heard her story of abuse and had kind of comforted with their own story of abuse, and this girl's mother had freaked out and taken her to acologist to get a check up and the ofcologist to confirm that this girl was still a virgin. And Gail told me this story with the kind of air of gloating, like, see, she wasn't for real, like she.
Hadn't really done it.
With a man, and that story just like disturbed me so much, and those moments of of antagonism and mistrust just began to kind of grow and grow. Gail was the kind of person who used to pull the energy in the room, you know, no amount of attention ever seemed enough, and she completely hogged my mother, so my
mother no longer felt available to me. I would come home, you know, from school, and like maybe Gail had gotten there before me, and Gail would be like pouring a heart out to my mom about boys or friends or haircuts or makeup or whatever was.
On her mind that day.
And I really felt resentful, like, oh, this is my mom, but she hasn't got time for me or room for me anymore. And so even though I had the best intentions when Gail first moved in, it quickly soured and became the antagonistic relationship we'd always kind of had, you know.
And how long was that period of time where she lived with you and you were in school together and living together.
She moved in with us in the early spring of nineteen eighty seven, and I think by early nineteen eighty eight she had kind of moved back into a children's home so she wasn't with us for that long.
What precipitated her moving back into the children's home.
There was an incident that I really should tell you about. There was a library book that I'd always wanted to check out. I'd read all the Judy.
Bloom books, and there was one Judy Bloom book that I was not allowed to read, called Forever, and.
The local librarian, who'd you know, she'd not permitted me to check it out on a number of occasions. And then one day I came home from school in that book, Judy Blooms Forever had materialized on our kitchen counter, and I was so excited, like, this is the one Judy Bloom book I've not read, and so I, you know, I started to read it, and I had so many questions. You know, it was about this sexual relationship and there was language in it that I didn't understand.
So I had conversation with.
Gail one night after lights were out, and I said to her, you know, what does it mean, Like what does this sexual reference mean? And she told me, well, first of all, she said, I'm not allowed to tell you.
And I'm like, what do you mean? And she said, well, my Mum's made me promise not to talk to you about sex.
She said, you're still innocent, and I was sex so offended, like I know all about it, even though obviously I didn't, because I'm asking her questions. And so she goes on to tell me what this sexual reference means, and she tells me in such a way that she's kind of bragging about it, and so I keep my voice neutral as I ask the more questions, and she goes on to say that what a great lover she is, and that when she and my dad.
Were together, like what a great sexual partner she was.
And I am like so shocked by this because she's been telling kids at school that she was raped and abused, and now my dad, who's in prison, is apparently her ex lover. And so I just I turn away and pretend I'm sleepy, but I am so shocked to my call. That is a moment when I'm truly shocked. I'm just so confused by this information. I can feel my heart
beating as I tell you this. You know, it's it's a difficult memory after that incident when she made this weird confession to me about my dad being her lover, and just not knowing what to make of it, Like I still think my dad is a monster, but now I kind of think she's a monster too. And so after that, I really I stop trying, you know, I'd tried so hard to make this a fun teenage like hangout for her, and now I just stop trying completely,
and we get more antagonistic. And there's actually an incident where we we have an argument about me being in the bedroom first and trying to read my book and she comes in and blasphem Adonna tape and so as I walk out of the room, I say to her, you're such a bitch, and I turn her tape off, and she follows me out of the room and at the top of the stairs, I don't realize she's behind me, but she'd pushes me down, and you know, I'm okay, Like I have some bruises and carpet burns, but I
did manage to save myself. But when my mom comes home from work that day, I don't hold back and I just tell my mom like what Gail had done, and my mom.
Just loses it.
She loses her cool and says, Gail, you could have killed her, You could have broken her neck, you know what possessed you.
And Gail shows no remorse.
She just says, you know, Sasha's been a baby, like she's fine, Like what's the problem here. And it's this moment when my mom sees Gail's moral indifference and I've already seen it, so I'm not surprised anymore. I'm just disgusted. But my mom that is the final straw. And so my mom.
Calls social services.
And you know, the arrangements are made and Gail actually goes back to a children's home.
That's such a powerful phrase, moral indifference.
Yeah, girl is fourteen at this point, almost fourteen, but she did seem very morally indifferent to me.
You know, she would change her story and not care, like.
She really didn't care about me, and I stopped caring about her. It feels so ugly to say all this. I'm very conscious that she's a mixed up kid who has been abused, and I'm sitting here judging her. But it's actually like a lot of therapy that I went through and I don't feel that judgment anymore.
Is something I felt for a long time, kind of secretly, that i'd kind of pushed down. I just pushed down all of this, to be honest.
And when you say judgment, you mean judgment of yourself. Is that what you mean?
I feel like there's me judging myself for judging her.
When Gail left us, dug didn't really have any He didn't show any emotions about it at all. It was weird, you know, but he kind of washed her hands of her. Gail's mom, Lorraine had washed her hands of her.
And after Gail.
Goes into a children's home for a second time for a final time, we find out that my dad is out of prison. He's only been in prison for eighteen months of a three year sentence, and to people in the twenty first century, that sounds so shocking, but it really goes to show how this crime was not taken that seriously in the nineteen eighties. So my dad gets out for good behavior and we found out it's a real scandal. But Lorraine has taken my dad back. They
have gotten back together. And what's more, Lorraine's pregnant. She immediately gets pregnant in nineteen eighty eight, and she has my half sister, Charlie in late nineteen eighty eight, and it's followed a year later by another child in quick succession. It's very uncomfortable to go visit them, but Lorain is acting like it's all okay, and so I kind of accept that. Well, maybe it is okay, and I can't
make sense of that. But there's something about this. It's like, well, he is my dad and Lorraine's forgiven him, so maybe I can go and see my new sister. And so I see them twice. I think over the next couple of years. I visit when Charlie is about one, and then I visit again when Charlie is.
About We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Sasha heads to university and brings her secrets with her. As we do, she stuffs them down and carries them, but they don't go away. They're alive in her body, alive in her psyche. They don't disappear. And yet Sasha isn't pulled under because she discovers reading, and she discovers herself in literature and in exploring the minds, hearts and souls of others on the page.
I would use books to make sense of so many things. The time my dad and Lorraine got back together and started having babies. My mum had become a Jehovah's witness, and that was something that was very present for me.
For a couple of years.
I had to study with the Jehovah's witnesses too, and I would eventually pull away. And what empowered me to do so was being a reader, just reading George Orwell and jam Paul Sartre, and these are the books that made me think, maybe my personal freedom is kind of important. So I definitely decided not to be a Jehovah's witness because of reading. And one thing I will say is
that I remember in my teen years. I hit sixteen and I found a copy of Loalita by Vladimir Nabakov in a thrift store, in a charity shop in England, and I remember reading this book and it's a story of a young woman, Dolores Hayes, who kind of seduces her stepfather and it's such.
A weird scene, you know, like Loalita makes the first move on Humbert.
And I'd never read a story that actually maybe described something that had actually happened in my family too.
So literature was definitely the lifeline.
It's how I tried to make sense of this really weird family story that I never thought I.
Could talk about.
And of course it's so complicated because Dolores Hayes is also this victim who dies tragically. There are no happy endings, so you know, that's how it kind of felt. But literature gave me a means to kind of like make sense of what I couldn't speak about in my own family.
So I was always reading and always finding escape, definitely, but also understanding that life is so complex and so weird, and it's like, I may not know anyone else who's had this happen in her life, but I've read about it in a book, and so it can't just be us.
When Sasha's twenty three, she visits her dad, Lorraine, and Charlie, who's now around twelve. She also has a half brother Nick. It's been a long time, perhaps long enough for things to have changed. We can always hope, and sometimes that hope is heartbreaking.
I think I'm prompted by a boyfriend who his that I've been estranged from my father for a really long time, and I really don't remember how the reconnection happened, but I was like, well, sure, like I can be curious and.
Go see them. You know, what's past is passed.
And I think a part of me was pleased that my dad and Lorraine had made it work, you know, like maybe it's okay, Maybe my dad's a reformed character. I had all these thoughts going on in my head, and so I went to see them in nineteen ninety eight.
I was a graduate. I was twenty three, and my dad.
Picked me up from the train station, and as we drove to the family, he gave me this lecture about what a great guy he was and how his wife was wonderful and if Lorraine ever turned her back on him, he would be a lost man.
That you know, she'd forgiven him so much.
You know, he gave me this pep talk, But it also felt like a warning in a way, like you know, you're not meant to talk about this in front of the kids, right, And I just kind of sensed that, like, Okay,
I don't know what these kids know. I don't know if Aimon remembers his older sister, and the fact that I'd not been part of their lives felt very deliberate, because you know, I was this witness to all that had happened, Like maybe Aimon was too young to remember, but I remembered Gail, and I knew what had happened, and so I always felt like an unwanted guest with them, even though I'd seen them a few times. It was like, well, you can see is, but you can't get too close, if that makes sense.
Yeah. And also there's Charlie, who you don't know whether she even knows about Girl's existence, right, I mean, Girl's been in a way kind of written out of the story.
She has been written out of the story.
And I'm pretty sure that at least two of the kids, Nick and Charlie do not know they'd have a half sister.
Yeah, it does not go well. Sasha's father displays his true colors pretty quickly and flies into a rage. This reminds Sasha that perhaps estrangement is for the best after all. But some good does come from the visit. She connects with her half sister, Charlie.
She's kind of like a version of me, you know, like there's something between the two of us.
We just connect and clerk.
Even though I'm twelve years hes senior, and so I'm a school librarian at this point in my life back in Manchester and I sent her books and I've become her pempal, and we writes.
To each other for the next three years.
And she's so charming and lovely, and I am so sure that she has no idea what's going on. You know, what's happened before she was born. And there comes a point I go on a vacation swiftly with my boyfriend at the time, and I send her a postcard, and this postcard really touches a nerve and she writes back and she says, you know, Sasha, you can go on vacation, but you never come see us. And you know Amon had gotten married and you never came to his wedding.
And I don't know how to reply to this letter, like she's so annoyed at me. She's a teenager now, and I don't know what to say to her. I can't say to her, you know, your parents have this secret that they're hiding from you guys, that happened before you were born. Like I don't know what she knows.
I don't know what they told her. And so I just I realized I have to kind of be estranged from my half sister as well, even though it pains me so much, and so I basically write to her and very vaguely say, look, I wasn't invited to that wedding.
That's why I wasn't there.
And I don't really got on with Dad, but I will always be there for you in some way if I can be. And it's kind of like a goodbye letter, and I know it is because shortly afterwards, my dad actually writes me a letter saying, you know, I can't believe you wrote this venomous letter to your sister, like.
How dare you?
And the fact that that's what my dad thinks of me. It just discussed me and I hate him so much and I'm just done. At that point, I decided to kind of like divorce my dad in a way, even changed my name shortly afterwards, so I don't have his surname anymore. And unfortunately that's the end of me and Charlie for a number of years.
During those next years, another relationship begins. Sasha meets Ted, a fellow cartoonist, and it becomes clear to her very soon that Ted is her person. He's someone she can trust.
I meet Ted in late two thousand and four, and by two thousand and five it's kind.
Of obvious that we are meant to be together.
So I visit him in the United States and we go on this road trip from Saint Louis to Chicago, and I know that he is my person and not going to get married, and I feel like I really need to tell him and get this off my chest. I've told him everything else about my life, but I've not told him about my real father. So I tell him this family history about Lorraine and my dad and Gail and what happened and how Lorrain and my dad got together again and had children, and how I just have this history.
And I told him about Gail.
I didn't tell him about the sexual abuse with Gail, but I told him about Gail coming to live with
us and being abusive. And my husband's response is just pure love, Like he's just so sorry that I had to carry all lot as a kid and as a young person, and I'm like, it doesn't matter, like it's in the past, is behind me, Like America feels like this whole new start, and actually my story just telling you this just feels so much lighter in my chest, Like, oh, it's so good to be past all that old stuff that baggage that I don't have to carry to my new life in America.
So yeah, I really feel like I get past my past and I'm happy, you know, like I have a good life.
I work hard, I kind of enjoy, kind of let the people around me. I work on making comics and being a graphic novelist, and everything's going right, at least for a couple of years, you know.
Yeah, First of all, I love that you instinctively chose a road trip and a car to unburden yourself, to tell him the whole story, or most of the story. There's something about cars that are just like confessionals. You know, you're driving along the other person can't get out. The world is kind of you know, you're speeding by in a blur, but you're in this like really intimate little confessional bubble.
Right, And imagine also, all the events of my childhood took place under these grace guys of Manchester where it always rains. And suddenly I'm like driving through cornfields and the sky is blue, and I just feel so far from where I started, you know, like geographically, just everything feels different, like life isn't technical, and.
Now that's how it felt.
It's now years into what Sasha describes as her shiny American life. She's married Ted and the couple has a daughter. Via Sasha's first graphic novel is published, It's a Good, Rich, Shiny Time. And then in twenty twelve, Sasha gets a letter from Charlie out of the blue.
She actually finds me through my Etsy store.
And I've not been easy to find right because I've changed my name legally and I've switched on. But she remembered that I made comics, and she remembered the name of which I made comics, and she found them on Etsy. So I got a message from her saying, is this you? This is me Charlie, And we struck up an instant friendship, picking up where we left off, and we skype and we write emails and it's wonderful, like she's grown up into a really beautiful young woman, Like I'm.
So proud to know her and proud that she's my half sister.
And what I noticed straight off the bat is that she's not talking about my dad, like where is he? And for a moment, I think, well, maybe he's dead and that's why she's contacting me, But she goes on to tell me that she knows some things about my dad now that she didn't know back then. And furthermore,
he has left Lorraine. It turns out that around the same time Lorraine was pregnant with Nick, another woman was also pregnant with my father's child, a Spanish lady, and my dad has like left Lorraine to go be with his son and his former girlfriend, his former mistress in Spain. So it's a real chuck, and it's also like confirmation, like I knew this man was a piece of crap, and this has just confirmed it. And I'm so delighted
to have my half sister back in my life. I'm really happy to have this validation that I did the right thing in getting estranged from my father. But it's also a time when Lorraine kind of enters my life
as well. Lorrain is a spurned woman and she spends her time now stalking my dad like on Facebook and looking up pictures of him in Spain, like happy with this new woman, And she kind of calls me on the phone and she tells me this stuff, and it really feels like this past that I've really tried hard to move away from, like physically, you know, and geographically
it's kind of back, like the baggage just back. So even though I'm happy to have Charlie back, it feels like this family story has kind of come back to haunt me a little bit, and it really coincides with the beginning of this growing anxiety that I just find I'm not able to shake.
We'll be right back. William Faulkner once wrote, the past is never dead, it's not even past. In many ways, this applies to Sasha's experience when she's around forty and the past returns. The secret does not behave or remains silent. It's like a slumbering giant waking up, and when it wakes up, it does so in the form of terrible anxiety. Sasha develops acne, a symptom of what's going on inside emotionally. To ease the stress, she tries yoga, acupuncture, meditation, but
nothing is working. There's an unconscious symmetry at work. Sasha's daughter is about seven, very close in age to when Sasha's own life had been turned upside down.
It took me a while to make the connection between my acne and my anxiety. It was my acupuncturist who pointed it out to me, and he was so honest with me. He said, look, I think we've gone as far as we can go, and the next step will be therapy because it's obviously like an emotional healing that
is what you need, it's not a physical thing. His honesty was such a gift to me because I really did need that emotional healing and it was actually through his influence that I was trying meditation, and I would you know, I found meditation so hard. I mean it makes you ache, Your back hurts, you know, your bum hurts, and it's so boring. And then when you finally get quiet enough, I would just start crying. You know this this pain was coming up. It's because my daughter is
the same age as me. When my life just like began to fall apart, you know, my childhood really took a tone for the dark. So I was grateful that I had support to make that connection. And then the accupunturist actually pointed me to a therapist here in Saint Louis where I would begin excavating and doing this self reckoning in therapy that would actually bring light to all this darkness as well.
As the you know, the acne and the anxiety.
I was also having nightmares, like every night, you know, I would go to bed and have dreams where I'd either wake up in panic and able to breathe, or I'd find like mangled girls and car crashes, or I'd be lost in dark cities or just in complete darkness. My dreams were so frightening that I knew there was something wrong, and I knew that I had to start talking to someone, start asking for help. And I come from a culture, come from England, where we don't go
to therapy, you know, we go to the football. We go to see the football. It's not a culture where you ask for help.
We have a stuff up alp, you know.
So I had a lot of biases to overcome before I could go to therapy, but I'm so glad I did.
So you'll go see Chris, your therapist, and in your first session, I was struck by this. I think it's something that happens a lot in therapy, which is that you tell him a lot, You spill out a lot of your story, but you don't tell him the quote unquote worst thing, right, You don't tell him the thing that you also didn't tell ted. You don't tell him about the molestation that Gail perpetrated on you.
Yeah. I remember being in that first session and I was telling him this crazy family history with these two weird couples who swapped fathers, and then everything that happened with Gail. Just everything sounded like a bad soap opera.
You know, it's just too much.
And there was a small voice inside me saying, tell him about the other thing too, But I just couldn't do it, you know, I was too embarrassed, like I don't know this guy, Like I've only just met him and he's a man, and I'm going to tell him the darkest secret that I've never told anybody, literally, never told anybody. And there was another voice in my head that said, and besides, it doesn't matter. It was just a stupid kid game, like just forget it, forget it,
forget it. And that had been the dueling voice throughout the years. You know that I'd pushed this dock his secret down.
Early on in their work together, Chris tells Sasha about a therapeutic system called internal family systems or ifs for short. It doesn't really resonate with Sasha At first, she's suspicious about therapy and whether it can help her. There's something called parts work, which seems silly, the idea that were made up of different parts and that accessing them can be useful, even healing. So she's resistant, but there's also
trust building between Chris and Sasha. At the same time, the Me Too movement has just exploded into being, and this is triggering to Sasha. The abuse that had happened when she was eight years old doesn't fall into any of the typical me too narratives, and she doesn't know what to do with it. The past roars back into the present. Sasha comes into a session after having had a very disturbing dream.
I have a nightmare that I go into my daughter's room to check on her, and she's okay, And when I go back to my bed, there's a little girl in the bed and I'm mo lest I dream this and I'm so disturbed by it.
And suddenly I just fall apart.
Like I hold my life together enough to take my kid to school, and then on the way home, I just like cry all the way and I can't wait for therapists to roll around because I know that I finally have to tell my therapist Chris this component of my story that I've not told anyone. And when I do tell him, he's never seen me falling apart like that before. He's never seen me weeping and shaking, you know. But I'm just so disturbed by the past that all
of a sudden wants to come out, you know. And when I tell him this secret about Gail's molestation of me as children, the first thing he says is like, you're not the first. There are many kids this happens too. And he even suggests it's possible that Gail was abused before my father came along, that maybe she was acting out things on me like a younger kid, to regain
some kind of power that is obviously unknowable. But for the first time it gave me like a feeling of like empathy, like oh wow, Like that's not even something I could have considered that could have happened to Gail, you know. And so this very difficult story comes up, and it's like in that session, Chris offers me the keys to healing it. He says to me, you know that that eight year old part of you that's feeling this pain, now, you know, how to parent it because
you're a wonderful parents. You are on daughter Verra, so you can take that same love, that same ferocious love, and you can give it to that kid.
Part of you.
And in that moment, like this IFS therapy, which had rejected previously, it started to make sense, like, Yeah, I am a good mother and I am a good person, and I can give myself that care and compassion. This was like an youth way forward. And it began with the hardest thing that I ever had to tell him.
Yeah, it's like something clicked. And you then begin this three month project of writing everything that comes to mind, everything that you think, everything you remember, and filling up notebooks, sort of addressing, as you put it, this little ghost child, and just being in communication with her with this, you know, eight year old Sasha.
You know, Danny, It's funny because I'm a writer.
You know, I've written graphic novels and I've written personal stories before, and yet I feel that there's a way that you can recount things without actually feeling the emotions attached to them. And I feel that as a writer. That's previously what I've done in my earlier books. But when I wrote in these composition books, the story of my childhood and everything I remembered, and I would piece together like the timeline from what pop songs I could remember on the radio.
It just went so deep. It was this huge excavation, and for the first.
Time, I was feeling every single feeling that that kid never felt safe enough to feel or didn't know how to express. And it was so painful. I would get up at like five thirty in the morning and like write for like forty minutes and then spend twenty minutes weeping. And it took me three months to write my childhood from beginning to end, and it broke something open in me. I was a different person in therapy after that. My vulnerability was right there on the surface, but it was
no longer something that felt like weakness. It was something that felt like I can connect now because I'm in touch with the deepest pain.
During this time, Sasha is unpacking boxes of books at the library and a book literally falls into her hands. It's a book about internal family systems.
It's not only a book about intil family systems.
It's a book on how to draw your parts and use creativity to work with your parts. It's like, oh wow, this book is not only about IFS, it's talking my love language. And so I set about drawing my parts and a representation of self. And I took this to my therapist and Chris just nerded out, like finally I was coming around in his way of seeing the world, you know, And yeah, it began my IFS journey.
When you have a childhood that's like difficult, or you're neglected.
Or abused or just not seen, children will invariably take on this idea that this is my responsibility, somehow, this is my fault, and you will take on coping strategies to deal with that stressful family life. And IFS calls those coping strategies parts, and they can manifest.
As protective parts.
So it may be a part that manages how you appear to the world like a perfectionist, like I can't mess up because you know, I need to sort of protect the vulnerabilities in me. I can't have people getting mad at me because then the vulnerability inside me.
Will get triggered. So IFS has.
Components, like different kinds of parts, and what you do is you bring those parts into awareness with your therapist and you discover their backstory, and once you have this awareness of the part and how it came into being, you can kind of connect with your core self. It's when you feel those qualities maybe of compassion or calm or courage. Those are aspects of our core self that
is not damaged by trauma. And when we bring in our imaginations together self that we feel in our bodies and the story of our parts, we can begin to unburden them. It sounds a little bit woo woo, but the experience of it is that you get to know yourself so well, and you get to know your own story really well, and you get to pull on this inner resource of your own human heart. When you practice it with a good therapist, it can be incredibly, incredibly powerful. And that was my experience of ifs.
Social works effectively with Chris. While she really likes him and trusts him, at the same time, she has a feeling that maybe she needs to see a female therapist to work through some of her mother's stuff. She worries that this is a betrayal, but her desire to grow and heal outweighs those worries. She starts seeing a new therapist named Sally, and Asasha writes, the silent parts began to speak. Sally works with Sasha in a way that begins to unlock what is known in IFS as legacy burdens.
She begins to explore the links between what happened to her mother, her grandmother, her great grandmother, and the entire chain of female ancestors who came before her, and the generational trauma she had inherited. The woman who had been highly suspicious of therapy now has nerded out. She wants more and more and more.
So I start seeing Sally and we do nine months survive as together, which wasn't my intention when I set out, but the symbolic number of nine months, it really did feel like a birth. And with her therapy immediately is kind of different. She relates to me as a woman, and she relates to me as a mother, and that's the territory we end up exploring together.
So there was another family secret that I.
Knew about and I didn't really know what to do with, is that my mother, when she was thirteen was raped by a family member, and she had kept that head in her whole life, and I think it had kind of shaped her decisions like of joining a church and becoming religious. I had lots of ideas about what happened to her. I'd never really connected with empathy for her. There was numbness there rather than feeling, you know, like the true depth of feeling that my mum as a
child had been so deeply wounded, you know. And so in therapy with Sally we kind of explore this. And the thing is, I'm feeling so much stronger than the twenty seventeen me who had entered therapy. You know, there was this room for curiosity.
Now, why was my childhood like it was?
Why did my mom make the decisions that she made? And this is what we explore together. And the fact that my mother's rape comes up very strongly around the time of Breck Cavanaugh's confirmation hearings. So Christine Blazyford is testifying against Breck Havanah and what happened to her as
a fifteen year old. And I watched that and I really kind of connect with Christine blazeyfod talking about she's actually speaking for the fifteen year old part of herself, right, And I can see that thirteen year old part of my mom going on to sort of cope and not tell anyone about what had happened to her in order to protect.
Her own mother who was struggling.
And so suddenly it's kind of cast a generation back, like, well, why didn't my grandmother notice that my mother was struggling, that she was.
A thirteen year old who'd been raped.
And it made me examine my grandmother's life and I realized that my grandmother is carrying so much trauma.
From World War Two.
You know, she lived in an area of Manchester that had suffered bombardment, like high explosive bombs were kind of like dropped ten minutes from her house. She'd lost people, you know, she'd lost her brother and her husband. After the war, my grandmother would go on to have more tragedies, including a stillborn child. So this feeling that my grandmother was asleep at the wheel when it.
Came to parenting my mom.
But understanding why that trauma was this core element of why my grandmother was numb, you know, of why my mother made the decision she made. It was like trauma was this repeating pattern in our family, and you know, Bessel vander Kulk talks about how when people experience trauma, It cuts them, It kind of splinters them, you know, so.
You will act out of protective impulses. So fight or flight are two. Fawn is one.
I mentioned before that my mom's a people pleaser, and it's like I could really see that maybe that people pleasing was a trauma response because of what she was hiding from her own childhood. So just examining my own family gave me this wider view of society and how trauma just like flows through our stories, and how the fact that we often respond to trauma by concealing it, you know, And this is what felt so corrosive for my own life. But therapy was actually this place of
healing and liberation. It felt like freedom to be able to cast light on everything that happened, not just in my life, but generationally in my family.
After Sasha's work with Sally, she returns to Chris, continuing to follow her instincts about who can provide the best care at what time and for what reason. When she starts seeing Chris again, it dawns on her that she does want to tell her story. She wants to write about it, to draw it. But before she can do this, she feels she needs permission from the people she'll be writing and drawing into being. But it isn't permission from
her father or Gaale she seeks. After all, they were her story, she survived them, and now she felt free and emboldened to chronicle them. But there are other people in her life that she wants to take care of. Charlie is at the top of that list. If Charlie isn't okay with Sasha writing about her, then she won't. She also considers Chris and asks him if it's okay to write about their work together, which now extends all
the way back to twenty seventeen. He understands her as an artist and as a writer, and wants her to be able to express creatively the stories inside of her.
When I went back to Chris, I think communication was very much the theme. That was what I was looking for. I went back because he was such a good counselor, and he would coach me on how to have conversations with difficult people, and I really needed that. Like who in life gives you advice on how to have these
tough conversations like he would do it. He would go there with me and I would do things in therapy that I never thought I would do like role play for example, It's like, you know, we would act out conversations, and that was so helpful.
But it was.
Also this notion that Chris very much responded to me from the get go as an artist, as a writer, and he encouraged me. And in the very first session, when I told him this very convoluted family story, he said to me, this is your story too.
It should be a book.
And I thought in my head, like, you're crazy, there's no way I can ever tell that. But I did come around to his way of thinking, and I did want to make this book. I also had the fact that, you know, I'm a cartoonist, and so I carry a sketch book with me and I would get the metrolink to therapy and back, and so I would have time to like sit and like draw sketches and doodles and talking heads and speech bubbles.
Of everything that had happened in therapy.
Part of that was an economic device, like I wanted to get my money's worth that of therapy, so I wanted to graphically record it. But it was also the fact that, you know, this is so interesting to me. I became so fascinated with the gifts that therapy had to offer me, and the skills that was learning in therapy, and the fact that it was making a palpable difference, not just in how I related to myself, but in
how it related to the world around me. The idea of getting Chris's permission to be a character in my book. It's not an easy thing to ask someone, but he was so generous regarding that, and I did. I had to find my way, and I had this idea that maybe my book could be a bridge and telling Charlie the story that I was not allowed to tell her when she was younger, because it was kept.
A secret from her.
But now the secrets, you know, the family secrets, become like a bridge, you know, to her and I, and we are.
So close now.
She's shared so much about her family story with me that I did not know, and you know, being able to see how it was from her perspective. She said that she always knew that something was wrong in her family. She carried it like a sick feeling in her stomach. And I could have told her back then, but obviously I couldn't. You know, I had the secrets, but the fact that there were so many secrets in my family.
It made me be a secret keeper.
Too, you know, that impulse, the fact that I had to keep secrets for my dad. That was not a healthy thing for me, but had no choice.
Sasha's beautiful and powerful book Past Tense has been warmly received by its readers. She's finished her work with Chris at least for the time being. That whispering voice that told her to tell it, tell the whole truth is now between the hardcovers of her graphic memoir for all the world to see.
I started telling this story online on social media, and it's a very interesting way to tell a story because you get real time feedback from people. And I found a community of people therapists and people doing there and healing would give me feedback on the short stories from
therapy that I would tell online. And so the fact that I kind of grew this readership of people who've been with me as this book went from like very short stories online to be an a book that they've purchased and have, you know, shared photographs of themselves holding it. It's like, Wow, this really isn't the wider world, and it's proof that I'm like far from alone, you know, Like I thought my story was so complicated and so weird that I could never tell it and people wouldn't
believe me or accept it. And I've discovered instead that, you know, so many of reels are carrying like dark paths that they have to heal from, and there's a real sense of connection. It's been a real privilege. It's been truly wonderful. It's a rich experience. That's the best way I can describe it, you know, And I feel liberated, like the sky hasn't fallen, you know. I told this story and the sky didn't fall.
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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