How Jewel Survived Abuse and Betrayal

Superstar performer Jewel soul Stirring Music is the soundtrack of a generation. Her debut album is one of the best selling in history and went twelve times platinum. She sung at the Super Bowl, the White House, and for the Pope, but her path to success was wrought with trauma. Jewel grew up in Alaska without running water, was raised by a physically abusive father, and abandoned by her mother, all before the age of eight. She left home at fifteen

Yeah, so there's a good and a dark side, I think to my family history.

I was raised on that homestead by my dad. My daily life was varied. We did move a lot, but a lot.

Of my childhood was on the homestead, and I think that that exposure to nature. Actually, my dad once said we were given the illness and the cure, and I think that's very true. My dad has eight siblings and they had such a again amazing childhood but also kind of horrific. And I think the reason none of them have committed suicide. None of them are drug addicts. And don't get me wrong, but it's kind of striking that you could have eight kids raised in this environment and

So let's talk about your dad then, because I've had the privilege of reading your book. Everyone should read jules book, by the way, And I know that he experienced abuse growing up and then some of that cycle continued to a certain degree. Can you talk a little bit about your father, because it's a complicated story with your dad.

My father's childhood was psychologically, physically and emotionally abusive. I didn't know that though, of course, growing up, and so all I knew was my dad. I know my mom left at eight suddenly I was being raised by my father. My father went from like a Mormon like classic Mormon dad to drinking, smoking and hitting me pretty much overnight. So my mom left. I had no idea why. I didn't know actually she left. I just assumed my dad

So that was a radical shift.

And it was, you know, obviously having your world turned upside down and we started singing a bars to make a living.

Growing up in bars was not easy.

I would have men put dimes in my hand and say, you know, call me when you're sixteen. You're going to be great to fuck when you're older. And so I just grew up in a wild environment. But I'm dyslexic, and for some reason, I think that causes me to see patterns, and I'm very visual. And what I was seeing was pain. I had a front row seat to pain. I was in pain. It was the most salient feature in my life. And what I was seeing in the bars and what I was seeing in my dad, I

And bury it.

But by the end of it, they were consumed in a mountain of other distractions that caused more pain. And for anybody to face that after so many decades was quite difficult. You had to deal with all this crap you've done and inflicted more pain on yourself basically just to go ahead and deal with this. And so to me, like I remember saying, pain, you know what do I

So your dad had been abused by his father. You'd say that if things didn't go his way or you woke him up, you'd have might gotten hit. And there's one poignant story that really stuck with me is that he hit you and your brother. You had to walk eight miles to school because you missed the bus with bloody noses in the cold Alaska weather, and then he came to school with your lunches almost looking ashamed and that something awoke in you that you're saying, I want

Yeah, And there was also what we would call gaslighting when I sat down with them on the couch and I was like, oh my god, I think I see a pattern and I kind of see what happened, and I see what's leading to this maybe for him, and how it's affecting me, and I probably remind him of my mom. And I was so excited to share that with him. And I think that having a young girl, you know, try and explain your psychology not attractive to people. And he talked to me out of my truth and

Decades, which is really what the legacy of this is. The bruises, the scratches, the wounds they do heal on our memory conveniently pushes that out, but that emotional loss of losing your sense of knowing what reality basically, it can take a lifetime to heal from. How did you continue to cope with your home life as you grew up?

I did move out at fifteen.

I decided that it was just better to leave my dad than stay in this like intense arguing, fighting, physical dynamic and just go out.

On my own.

I knew that statistically doing that was quite dangerous, but I wanted to cut my losses. And that's kind of how I've always been, is like, can I do something different?

Can I do better? How will I succeed?

And so, rather than kind of fixating on anger for my dad, which I had a lot of anger, I decided to put all of my resources into going what makes me think I can move out at fifteen and not become a drug addict or a prostitute, because that's statistically what I should be destined to. And so I knew I had this genetic inheritance. I'd been learning about it in school. You know, we had a genetic inheritance that could give us a predisposition to diabetes.

Or heart disease.

But I saw this like an emotional inheritance. It was habits and emotional languaging that I was inheriting, and it was going to give me a predisposition to abuse, addiction, all.

Kinds of things.

And so what I realized I was up against was learning a new emotional language. And at least that felt like a clear objective. You know, I knew like I could go to school to learn Spanish, but there was nowhere to learn a new emotional language. But at least knowing what I was up against felt like a clear objective, and so I went my own way. I didn't think i'd ever see him again. I didn't honestly care. Maybe

How is your relationship with your father today?

So my dad and I do have a good relationship. Now, all I can say is I didn't try and heal them. I didn't try and save them, not that I think it's bad. You know, each their own. I didn't know how to, and I just tried to focus on saving my own life. Basically, my dad in his sixties late sixties got sober and he wanted to figure out how to heal.

On his own.

I think, especially when my son was born, my dad really wanted to be involved, and he asked my permission, and you know, I'm sorry.

He's nice.

Not a lot of people get i'm sorry. My dad did say I'm sorry, but it doesn't mean you get a relationship back. Changed behavior earns back relationships, and so you have to trust yourself and your real sight, and that really comes through healing. I had to trust my ability to perceive my dad for who and where he was now, and behavior is everything. His behavior was different and it didn't come back to a relationship overnight, but through consistent changed behavior, I felt like it was worth

You said something is so so important here, Juel, which has changed behavior is what changes relationships. I'm sorry. Is nice, but that's not how you can actually move into another phase of your relationship. And I'm so so happy for you that you and your father have been able to achieve that that your son will reap the benefits of your father's healing. It's not the norm, and I think that foul forever question do I reconnect? Do I not reconnect?

It's hard to describe. My dad's kind of a much more cut and dry case. Being hit hurts, it feels wrong, it looks wrong. A guy that yells and gets angry is an easy villain to identify. I don't think my dad's a villain, but it's easy to identify that My mom was subtle and the abuse was a very different type.

It's my really hell me. Isn't it wonderful coreage?

I mean, it is literally under my pillow. I've read it so many times.

Is brilliant, It's wonderful work.

And I want to make a really strong caveat I am not diagnosing my parents. I've just read books that helped me understand my own personal experience. One of the most interesting things he said is when you're raised by a traumatic narcissist, you either become one or you.

Get married to one.

Basically, I just sort of say that as a bit of perspective, because what my mom did I consider to be incredibly difficult and damaging. What I'm about to say about my mom is so inflammatory, it's easy to make her into this huge villain at the same time, I feel like somebody who was raised in an impossible circumstance by people who were raised in impossible and circumstances by people who were raised in impossible circumstances. But my mom

I mean maybe. And I was like, wow, that's cool thing to think about.

And she's like, why don't you sit here and like stare at that light bulb and you see if it's possible. She's like, I really believe in you, which felt so good. And I sat there on the floor and I stared at a light bulb for four hours and I felt loved, and I felt seen, and I felt safe. And what I didn't see is that I was being babysat by a light bulb, okay, by mom that didn't really want

It is interesting you brought up the topic of narcissism. I always tell everyone narcissism in and of itself. Jewele is not a diagnostic term. It's a description of a personality style. So I can tell you I'm introverted. It's not diagnostic. It's simply so who I am, how I go through the world. The word does not have a good connotation, but it's just merely a personality style that puts a person off and at odds with other people. It's very selfish. They put their needs ahead of other people.

Yeah, you know, there's my perspective at the time, which my mom was a saint to my dad was a bad guy. So real, binary, real, black and white. I realized with time much later that there was nothing wrong with me. I did what I was built to do. I attached to my mother. I was wired to do it, and so there was nothing wrong with me. There was something wrong with my mom's ability to attach. And so with hindsight you see the fault there that there was

Correct.

That's a difficult duality for people to inhabit. People tend to want to throw the baby out with the bath water, or make people all bad or all evil, and that isn't true. Hurt people, hurt people, and how we choose to hurt people because of our hurt has a lot to do with our own hurt and tools and lack thereof. I have a line in one of my songs called Goodbye Alice in Wonderland where my love was turned against

I didn't see the strings.

That were my own wounding, my own desperate need for love.

This is a beautifully crafted metaphor, the likes of which could have only come from such a gifted songwriter and poet. Jewel makes a brilliant point here. Our core wounds often guide us into treacherous situations and keep us stuck in unhealthy ones when those wounds aren't explored and addressed, we can drift into unhealthy relationships and find it nearly impossible to cut the strings and free ourselves. We will be right back with this conversation.

This is the thing that causes you to be attracted to crappy, you know, relationships. This is the thing that causes us to make poor choices. Something my mom did, and she figured out how to manipulate me in a very masterful and very subtle ways, because my need for valid my need for love, my need for her approval was so great that it was kind of like a great martial artist that learns to use your own force and turn it against you.

So she ended up becoming a co manager and a manager.

In her best selling memoir Never Broken, Jewel writes that she soon felt as though she couldn't make any decisions without her mother. She was manipulated into believing that all of her success was because of her mom.

My mom had to do very little to get me to do more and more of what she wanted. My own need for love, my own need to have a mom, the overwhelming hurt and abandonment, and all those things got used in a way that was sophisticated, very sophisticated, and kept me coming back to her. You know, she has a position and the perspective that is valuable because I

People believed that about her as well.

And it led to a really you know, dangerous thing, like when I got discovered while I was homeless at eighteen, and I remember calling her and saying, you wouldn't believe it. Labels are coming, and she was like, oh, my darling, let me come down and help you. That must be really overwhelming. You know, if I could go back one moment, you know, and have a do over, it might have been like, let's wait on that.

Let's let me see if I can figure this out.

Long story short, I woke up at thirty four and had to come to terms with the fact that I had no money and that my mom wasn't who I.

Thought she was.

Jule has said that while she was on the road touring, working around the clock, her mother was reaping the benefits living a lavish lifestyle with a full staff tending to her every whim. In all, Jewel has estimated her mother embezzled about one hundred million dollars. How did you cope with that betrayal?

I've had some very powerful moments in my life. Moving out at fifteen was powerful. I learned skills that changed my life forever. Moving out into my car because I wouldn't have sex with a boss, I decided to live in my car instead. My car got stolen and so I was homeless for a year. That was a powerful moment. These are these moments where you either break or you go I fucking I have this. I'm going to figure

A nub.

I was dismantled psychologically, and I played a big part in it. I kept saying yes, and I kept taking apart pieces of myself.

I participated, and I didn't know what was me and what was her.

And I do know that I actively engaged in tricking myself. I do know there was this voice in me yelling and kept suppressing it.

And I get why. I'm not trying to be hard on myself.

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard this from survivors, this idea of tricking yourself. How did you begin to unwind that and work through that?

I came out of this with so many tools I'd love to talk about. I think the first thing I had to come to terms with is the truth wins. I willfully tricked myself about my mom. I wanted to believe she loved me. I wanted to believe she loved me so much. But I did make myself a promise that the truth wins, and that I would dedicate myself to seeing the truth, no matter how painful it was, being willing to see the truth. And that's what I wrote.

Yes, with my mind.

You said, you and your dad have a good relationship. Now what about you and your mom? What has happened there? Because that was a much a different kind of betrayal.

You know, what happened with my dad was kind of just a surprise, mind you. I don't expect him to be somebody he's not. I love my dad and I'm proud of him, and we are closed. But I don't think his and my relationship are probably what dad daughter relationships are like. We're two adults that we have a lot to offer each other. But you know, my dad isn't somebody at call for advice. When I'm hurt, my

Those needs, and that's the good news.

So my mom, the last time I saw her was two thousand and three. It was in a lawyer's office. It's a scene that I describe in the book. She said, you know, I'm just so glad that I get to go back to just being.

Your mom now.

And I knew in that moment when she said that, that i'd never see her again, or I didn't think I would, and I haven't.

I haven't seen my mom since that day. She never reached out.

She did write me a letter when I was pregnant that said, you know, I'm always here, to forgive you whenever you're ready.

This classic gaslighting and manipulation technique is something I've heard from survivors time and again. It offers zero consideration for how the letter will affect the emotional well being of the recipient, and in this instance, shows us how distorted forgiveness can get. People who betray us often twist reality

You know, what I did might seem extreme to people. There are all kinds of ways to deal with this. This is just mine. I always caught my losses, like when I felt like it became between death and staying with somebody. It took me way too long to leave it fully. And my job was just to learn how to heal. And it was a real thing to heal from the most rebellious thing you can do.

It is it is figure out how to be happy. It is. It is, yeah, And I had.

My work cutout for me. It was going to take all my all, my intellect, all my everything to figure out how the hell to recover because I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be able to love and have trust and resilience, and that was such a monumental thing that I didn't have time. Now I did have anger. I did so much shaft to work through. But I realized one day there was a story called the Allegory of the Golden Statue. A village had a golden statue.

That is quite profound. How were you able to do that?

I looked at that kind of like nature versus nurture. My nature was the gold statue, and it existed. I had just been obscured through decades of trauma, and so I decided to use my body and my experience as ruth and to trust it and to not talk myself out of my experience with my thoughts. And so that led me to realizing that my anxiety isn't my enemy, it's my ally. And this was probably one of the

You shouldn't get mad at throwing up.

You should think throwing up because it was your body's way of saying you consumed something that made you sick. It makes me so tender I tear up. Anxiety was my best alarm system, letting me know I was consuming something that didn't agree with my nature. And that's how I began to deprogram myself. I had thousands of thoughts that were false. I had thousands of beliefs that were false. I had thousands of guilts and shames and decades of stuff that I was trying to figure out how to

In a weird way.

It's just one point on a compass. But when I had a thought and it made me anxious, I would stop and I would write down what was I thinking, feeling, or doing, and I would just move on. And then when I was consumed with more anxiety, I would write what was I just thinking, feeling, or doing. And what I realized is those were thoughts, feelings, and actions that didn't agree with me, and was I willing to stop

Yeah, it's not something you're going to do in a week.

But there's an axiom called the wicked teacher, and it says you become that which you resent. Yes, And that's the most powerful sentence when you look at what your choices are. If you've been betrayed, it's a fork in the road, you know, But choosing willfully in that one moment, No, I'm going to go right. I want to learn how to love and trust and heal. And so every time I would be consumed with regret, resentment, just say what,

I have enough to work on.

Right I think a lot of people out of there is a family betrayal that persists. A pattern of behavior that persists is people do feel anger. And one thing I do let people know is you feel as you feel. And the thing you need to trust about feeling is to never over identify with feeling. There is no right or wrong feeling, to have you have the feeling you have, and to never judge how you feel, because that's the internalized judgment a person has always carried on.

Yeah, and I want to touch on anger because choosing to go right doesn't mean you stop being angry.

It took me decades. I'm sure to process.

The anger and I will have reserves for life. Probably for me, what I learned about anger is right, I should have been angry for what happened to me. That's a sign of health. Anger is typically a sign of health. I think of it like a gunpowder blast. It's quick, and it's intense, and it should create a tremendous amount of energy in your body to take an action. Yes, And so for me it was like, I'm angry, What am I going to do with it?

Yeah?

And by constantly focusing on okay, what am I going to do with this anger. My anger lets me know that a boundary has been crossed, or that I crossed my own boundary, or that I compromised, or that I got compromised.

It's very powerful. It's a good tool.

You know, I'm very angry at my mom. And then you have a choice, you know, will I fester? Right? Because hey, many nights did I stay up with circular thoughts? Resenting, angry, locked in and it is a poison, and it was my own mind. What am I now going to do? Now I have a lot of energy my body. I would typically spiral in shame. I would lock into regret.

It isn't like that you.

Were heroic and you were angry and you chose to go right. All of those things are true. Again, the multiple truths. I have to say though, that scene with your mom, the two thousand and three one in the lawyer's office, it was absolutely chilling because here your mother has completely financially abused you, financially betrayed you. It hits even harder because of where you came from, where there

I love being a mom, so much to say about it. I highly recommend doing as much healing as you can before having a child, if you have that luxury or the option. If you didn't know you had stuff to heal from, it's okay. I believe that as I heal in front of my child, it's a healing for him. Yeah. And I can tell my son it's okay to make mistakes. But if I don't think it's okay for me to make mistakes, I'm sending a mixed message to my son. Yeah.

Come clean as it were. Yah that I'm going like, you know what, I was really impatient.

I was so patient. Oh my gosh, I'm impatient. Like I think I'm gonna go for a walk. I gotta go figure this out. He knows I'm impatient. Why would I fool all of us that I'm not obviously not over involving him in my process or overly adulting my process, but just giving a voice to the truth, showing a process of how I handle it that emotions are. My son has big feelings, you know, no shocker, He's like my kid. What do we do with intense feelings? How

My conversation will continue after this break.

The other thing I realized is again I kind of talk about this nature and nurture, but because the way I loved my mom, I took refuge in that in a weird way, and it was that to remind myself constantly that I knew how to love.

Yes, it was intact.

And I had to really trust that and not see that as a negative with my son, but to embrace that I was intact. I knew how to love, and I could trust that nature in me. You know, having a newborn is very scary. You don't innately know how to breastfeed. It's not as intuitive as you all think. So it kind of threw me and it was very dumb. I watched somehow a panda with a baby, and I was like, I have this in me. I have to trust I have this in me, even though I wasn't nurtured.

And it's worked out well.

It has worked out. And not only have you done that for your son, you're doing it for the world. And so I really want you to talk about your platform, Inner World, because it's an amazing resource. I know it's going to help so many people, Jules, So can you explain what it is?

Thank You?

In Our World is a mental health platform that's virtual so you can use your iPad or your iPhone. You can even use like VR goggles if you want, and you come into a virtual community where it.

Is completely safe.

There are no trolls, there is no bullying, there is incredible moderation, and you can participate in a community where people are just hanging around like a campfire or these really logically calm settings and just find connection, which have tremendous network effects, right it helps. Connection alone is wildly curative. Or you can actually attend classes in a peer to peer setting that are led by guides that are trained nice and we have over one hundred classes a week.

Wow.

Groups, Yeah, are already like we really scaled up the classes. They're specific around living with anxiety, living with chronic illness, living with depression, being a support person for somebody with an illness, living with agoraphobia, or you know, extreme social anxiety. You'll find, you know a lot of people even go to classes they don't think they need, just because you learn so much. It's all based on behavioral tools. So these are not therapists, these are not PhDs. These are

But you'll learn tools.

So let's say you go to a social anxiety meeting you don't like going out. We had a woman that hadn't left home in four years. She was in weekly therapy, and we taught her a tool it's called solving ahead. You write down what you want to do. She wanted to go to the grocery store. You say, what's the worst case scenario? She wrote out her worst case scenario. What's your plan? I will call this person. I'm going to take my phone with me so I can stay on inner world is what she wanted. She had that

With Biplos's fantastic.

And her therapist started coming into our settings because she was like, oh my gosh, like how did my client?

What tool was that? So that's what we do. You sign up.

It's a free platform but has a premium subscription, so more access to more meetings and more supports is as little as eight dollars a month. We wanted access for all. We wanted this highly affordable because to me, the idea that people don't have access to these tools is unforgivable and we need to make them very readily available.

Well, I think it's an amazing resource. It is you also infusing what your process has been, like you said, so so complicated, but always plugged into healing, that no matter what our backstories are, we're not defined by them, and if anything, they can really foster resilience. You talk about this idea that just because something bends doesn't mean that it breaks, and you're really a living monument to that idea that we can bend without breaking, even though

You so much, Thanks for what you do and giving a thoughtful place to yeah discuss really complicated.

Very nuanced, very difficult things.

And again I would just emphasize, like it's not always black and white, it's a world of grace, And for me, my healing has been about what can I do? What can I do better today? Do I want to be happy? Am I going to be accountable for it? And if you are willing to do that, you know. I always tell people they're like, healing is so hard and it's so painful, and.

It is, it is real work.

But being dysfunctional is very painful and a lot of work. It's just familiar and there's no light at the end of that tunnel. So learning a new way, learning a new habit, learning a new way to think is so painful and hard. But at least there is a light potentially at the end of that tunnel. So why not take that? Ben?

I love it again. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Jewel. First, she talks about this idea of emotional inheritance and emotional language. When we think about inheritance and genetics of our psychology, we often think about psychological vulnerabilities or genetic vulnerabilities for mental illness, but this is something very different and very important for survivors. We learn to speak emotion the way