Leslie and Lindsey Glass are bestselling authors who have traveled their own road of healing and recovery. Owners of the popular recovery site. Reach out recovery.com and authors of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover series. Lindsey and Leslie are experienced writers, filmmakers, and humanitarians here to share their expertise and experience on family wellness. I am excited and honored to bring you a mother-daughter duo here to not only share their story. But to share what they've learned along the way and how they've helped other families to heal, to work through recovery, and to also reconnect some mom and daughters back together. Let's bring in Leslie and Lindsey so that you can learn what their story is, and how they reconnected their relationship. And their views on the mother-daughter relationship. Welcome to the mother-daughter relationship. Show the podcast for mothers and daughters who want to build stronger bonds, deepen their understanding and transform their relationships. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. After years of working with hundreds of daughters. And a mothers, I've developed strategies that help break generational patterns, heal wounds, and create the loving relationships you've always wanted. Each week I'll be sharing insights from real clients, expert interviews and practical tools you can use immediately to improve your mother-daughter dynamic. Whether you're struggling with communication breakdowns, navigating major life transitions, or simply wanna take your already good relationship to the next level. This show is for you. And yes, the transformation I guide my clients through can be yours too. I'll share more about how you can work with me. It's time to experience the relationship you both deserve. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Okay. And we have Leslie and Lindsay here with us today, and I'm like so excited for you guys to hear their story and hear what they've created based off of it. So. Introduce yourselves. Tell us about who you are. Well, I'm Leslie Glass. I'm the mom. I was a mystery writer for a lot of years and wrote nine New York Times Bestselling Mysteries, and my job was killing people for a living, and I was pretty good at killing people for a living. And I think what's important to know about me is that my mom died before Lindsay was born, and Lindsay was the daughter that I wanted so, so desperately. So I was a mystery writer, writing. Killing people while raising my fabulous daughter. And later in life, when Lindsay started going through her troubles, I switched my career and I became a recovery person trying to help people rather than to kill them. So that's basically my story. Lindsey, what's your story? Wow. So hi Lindsay. Obviously I'm my daughter. Born and raised in New York City. Spent a lot of my adult life in Los Angeles. I have been a screenwriter. I have been a blogger. I am an author now, and a huge part of my life has been devoted to recovery because of my own recovery and because I just really found that sharing everything that I had gone through and everything that I had learned was really what I was most passionate about. I love both of those. Leslie, yes. Killing people and being very good at it. Like that's a really cool, fun fact. I like how you share that. Well, I started out as a gossip columnist and for New York Magazine, and then I realized that if I wrote fiction, I would be telling the truth a bit better. So I started writing. I wrote mysteries, but I also wrote novels about, you know, like regular people like relationships. So I, I've written 12 novels. That's really cool. You guys have lived very full lives. Yes. Yes, we have. Well share with us about your relationship today, and that way we can kind of go backwards to hear what happened and how you guys got here. Absolutely. You want me to jump in on, I do. Lindsay, what is our relationship like today? Well, this is what's so important for anybody who's even considering this kind of work to understand our relationship today is not perfect. We still do some of the things that we are not supposed to do. We can fall back into codependent patterns. We can be controlling, we can do the things, but we have tools today. We have a toolkit. We are kind to each other. We respect each other. I believe that is one of the foundations of a healthy mother-daughter relationship is that. Basic respect. We don't say things to each other that are hurtful. We don't call each other names. We don't scream. And when we do have our moments that get a little tense, 99% of the time, one of us immediately goes, all right, I'm gonna take a walk, or I'm gonna step away from this and we're gonna come back to this at a later time because we know how to deescalate now and we don't wanna escalate. So. I'll finish. My answer with this is that our relationship today is great. It's loving, it is supportive. We trust each other, but all of that was rebuilt and all of that creates work. And we still to this day, check in with therapists, coaches about our relationship with each other, about our relationship with other people because it's kind of like addiction recovery, you know, it's ongoing. Leslie, do you agree? I agree. I do agree. I do agree. I think the most important thing in any relationship is trust. Does this person have my back? Can I tell the truth? Can I be honest? Can I be kind? But honest? And I think that that's what's really important in our relationship because for so long we tried to fix the other person. We tried to make the other person the way we wanted the other person to be. Would you agree with that? Yeah. Now we don't do that anymore. It's literally, I'm gonna give you an example of today. Okay? So Lindsay said to me, our interview is at three o'clock, right? Our interview is at three o'clock, and I knew that our interview was at two o'clock, but I did not want to correct Lindsay. I said, did you check? And she said, I know. I know it's at three o'clock. And I kind of let it go. I kind of let it go because you don't wanna be too directive with the other people in your life. Because I figured she would check. I did check. She did check, and then she came back and she said, it's a two o'clock. You were right. And then she said, you're always right. So I think the key to healing our very tumultuous relationship was getting to the point where I don't have to tell Lindsay what to do. Right. And also be able to say, you may be right. You know, you may be right when things get hot. And I think that was one of the first things that Lindsay did to start deescalating our tumultuous conversations. You may be right, mom. You know, so our relationship is kind of what you want a relationship to be, and when we get tired of each other, we just do our own thing. Yeah. And I mean, that's very real. Every relationship has conflict. Like it's inevitable. And it's even a part of healthy relationships. Yes. Oh, absolutely. I mean. Groaning when the other person is driving the car, making faces, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like y'all have taken the approach of give the benefit of the doubt and allow things to just play out without having to add conflict in. Like you could have tow her, you're wrong. It's not at three. Yeah. But you knew that the answer was gonna come anyway. It was gonna come. Yes. She would get to it. Yeah. On her own. Yeah. So let's go all the way back to the beginning. 'cause then I want to see how you guys built it back up. So you say the relationship was tumultuous, what was going on? What happened and what kind of broke you guys apart? I'm gonna start here. You know, I would like to say that it's simple and very often we start out saying, well, we had communication issues. We thought about everything and we fought about everything. And we finally broke up over bad behavior, distrust, anger, control, and finances. You know, we were codependent. The reality of our breakup is much more complicated. So relationship breakdowns really occur over a long period of time, and many can be repaired along the way if you have the red flags and you know what to do. So as a mother, having a child who is struggling, you wanna be aware of those challenges and struggles and kind of address those and be the safe place for your daughter. As challenges arise, but many mothers don't know how to repair this. They don't know how to create the safe space of trust. So every time we answer this question, it's a little bit different, which is why it's such a fascinating question when you're talking about, you know, I'm in my forties, so we're talking about 40 years here of development. So I think some of the really big things that played into our family was. I think the whole family had bad communication. We were the kind of people that were judgmental, had to be right, a lot of pointing fingers. I think there was a bit of issue between the boys and the girls in our family, and that created a lot of conflict for us as well. Neither one of us really had the support we needed, and I think sometimes when you're in a family situation where it's like the Hunger Games and everybody's kind of like fighting for their own survival. Things can get really out of whack. And I think I would add, I thank my mom for being really respectful in how we talk about this, but I was a teen addict. We had tragedy, hit our family multiple times and you know, we didn't know what to do in those days. No one really knew what to do. And I sort of went down this path for about 10 years. And I think that when drugs and alcohol and mental health enter the picture. There is no roadmap. So suddenly we had multiple members of the family who were drinking or using, and multiple members of the family were dealing with mental health issues. And I think those hugely contributed to our breakdown. And I think when you're the parent of a young addict, and we've talked about it earlier, so we could say that the desire to protect me at all costs. Even in appropriate, inappropriate ways. That was another root of a lot of problems because somebody who gets sober in their early twenties really needs a little bit of independence. You know, I had to go to my meetings, I had to have my sober job, I had to do all the things, get sponsored, being sober living, and it's really hard for parents to look at somebody that's had these struggles and be like, okay, I gotta let her go do this. So there was a lot of conflict in those years as well. Well, I would say that in the whole of Lindsay's twenties, we were coping with recovery. Now, I, as a writer, wanted to address what was happening in our society, which was demonizing the addict. So that was when we made a documentary about what recovery really looked like, and we started our path of giving up the killing people and literally addressing how can we help people in recovery. So that was what was happening during Lindsay's twenties. And I think that it's very important for people to understand that it takes more patience and education than most people know about what it takes to recover from addiction. And I think that by the time Lindsay was in her thirties, we had spent so much time and energy on beating each other up over trying to be normal. That our relationship just broke down. I mean, it was just, we burned out. We burned out. Literally sick of fighting, sick of trying to fix each other. It was just too much. So we separated. Yeah. How long was that? How long did the breakup last? So we had a no contact separation for about four years. This was at the advice of a mental health professional, and we have very mixed feelings about that today. I absolutely. Credit that separation with a lot of my foundation of recovery and healing, I don't think I would've gone and done all the things I did had I not had to go out. You know, I moved from New York to California. No family contact, no family financial support, and I think those were big growing up years for me. However, it was so painful and so intense, and it really was damaging for the rest of the family. The rippled defects of this. So we wrote these books because we wanted people to know that communication can break down and you can be in a very bad place, but these huge breaks are a very intense way to go, and there are things you can do before you get to that burnout and breakdown. I also have mixed feelings about people. I don't know if I wanna use the word encouraging, but. I guess encouraging, for lack of better words in the moment, encouraging estrangement because I know there are times where a daughter or the family or you know, whatever party we're looking at, it might be the safer option. It might be the best option, but I think that a daughter should come to that on her own. Mm-hmm. And make a decision all for herself without any outside encouragement. 'cause that is really hard and it comes with a lot of grief. And a lot of pain, and also sometimes confusion. Very confusing. I think it's fair to say that Lindsay was with me one day and gone the next, and she ghosted me. So I didn't know where she was. I didn't know where she was living. I didn't know what she was doing. I didn't know whether she had relapsed and I felt it as if she had died. You know, she was dead to me, if you know what I mean. And it felt as if she had killed me off. So Lindsay left me and I felt seriously abandoned. So I do not believe that any therapist should say, you know, ghost your mom. It's not the right way to do things. And if you do, I would agree with Lindsay that the separation was great for us because even though for a couple of years I wanted to die, I basically didn't know who I was because for so many years I'd been trying to save my daughter and when Lindsay was gone. There was nobody to save, but myself. So faced with just that, yeah, I'm faced with who am I? What am I? She's not here anymore. Oh, how am I gonna live my life? Lindsay has created what she calls the recovery lifestyle, and I think we wrote the book, the Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover, because this is what we went through and we basically wanted people to understand what can get between mothers and daughters. There's so much about the relationship that we don't know who was our mother, what traumas did she go through? What are the lies, secrets and lies? She's not telling us about her own life, so if you don't know the whole story of your mom and she has a completely different personality, wow, there's so many ways that the relationship can go wrong. In our case, the relationship went wrong, and I really do have to say, although Lindsay didn't say this, that the men in our lives. They made it difficult. They were jealous of our relationship too. Would you say that? Would you agree with that? I would say that we love them very much, but they were complicated and didn't always make our relationship easier. They were not there to mediate, you know? And I think without throwing anyone under the bus who isn't here to defend themselves, there was an element of. Despair over not getting the support we needed. Sometimes, and I would go back to saying when you break up, there should be a negotiated separation. Well, let me interrupt that one because I wanna be really clear, and we talk about this in the book, if somebody's really toxic, if somebody is untreated and making you very sick yourself, you know, if someone in your family's unsafe, whether it's mom or daughter. That is someone you have the right to detach from and never deal with again. So we are not telling you if you have an abusive mother or daughter, if you have a mother or daughter who's severely mentally ill and won't take care of herself. If you have a mother or daughter who is, you've said, I don't wanna be around you if you're using, and they won't stop. These are line crossing items and they deserve real consideration. But what I think what she was trying to say, and, and I agree with, had we had a mediator be able to come in and say, look, you know, 'cause we were working together, Lindsay needs to go off and do what she needs to do. 'cause it had gotten so emotional between us, we weren't able to have these conversations. You know, in hindsight she's like, well, why didn't you just tell me what you wanted? And I'm like, well, why didn't you just, but it's not like that when you're in it. So had, we had a mediator that came down and said, Leslie, Lindsay needs to move. She needs to go do something else. What are you comfortable with? With her leaving the company for a while, going and starting something else, you know? And somebody saying to me, Hey, are you really understanding? Do you not wanna have contact with her? Or do you just wanna change the relationship for a while so that you can have. You can both have the break that you need to kind of let time do time. I really believe like time doesn't heal all wounds, but something happens with time. It's just a fact. And one likes to believe if you're healthy, you get less angry, you get less en rich. So anyway, I don't wanna go on and on, but I just wanted to add that piece. Yeah. And I think in a perfect world, having that happen and letting. Estrangement or no contact, be like a mutual decision would be great. Yeah. Well, I would like to reiterate what Lindsay said. If she had just, you know, I was happy to have her go. I would've been really happy. You wanna go to California? Great. I'll help you. I'll do whatever you need to get resettled there. But she didn't ask me, you know, she didn't say I'd like to leave. I was fully prepared to support her and have her go, but she didn't ask me. So I think that's where communication comes in. Where right now if she said, mom, I really need to get away from you. I'd say Fine. It wouldn't be a hostile act. It sounds like there was room in your relationship for low contact versus going completely no contact. And I'm so glad that you said that because when I talk about, when we talk about alienation, I, and what we talk about in the book as well is you can decide how much contact you want, you can decide. What makes you comfortable in your relationship? Do you wanna talk once a week? Do you wanna talk once a month? Do you wanna just have birthday cards meet on holidays, or you can, you know, have daily meetups? I mean, it depends on what you're comfortable with. So you have this four year gap and there's no contact. You guys have not seen each other, you have not spoken to each other, essentially. You don't know what's happening in each other's lives these four years. That's correct. Who initiated contact first and how did the repair start? I did, and I also think it's important to know, 'cause this is a huge part of the story. In those four years I was in aa, Al-Anon, a financial recovery program. I was in therapy, I had a coach. I did EMDR, I did inner child work. I did. Cognitive behavioral therapy. I did silent retreats. I did yoga retreats. This was a four years. In fact, I had a therapist when I came in and I said, this is what's going on. Here are my goals. She goes, this is gonna be a financial commitment. Like are you prepared to come in here twice a week and do the kind of work that we need to do to get you to where you wanna be? And I said, yes. And I did that for several years. So it wasn't like four years going about our business. Guess what? At the end of four years, you do all that self-help. You are not angry anymore. I wasn't angry. I could support myself. I was great in my recovery, and I really missed my mom. I missed her. I wanted her back, and I felt that things could be repaired. So I was guided by an Al-Anon sponsor and a therapist through all of it. I reached out at first through email. There was a little bit of distortion even through that process, and she wasn't getting them at first. And I told my brother, and he's like, she says she's writing you and you don't get it. And he's like, you're both crazy. So we ended up, she wasn't ready to reconcile as quickly as I was, but she was open to, you know, connecting. So we did a lot of. Emailing. We would talk on the phone, but we'd talk about the dogs and the weather and you know, I let her know I was okay and things were okay. And then at a certain point she said, I'll come meet you wherever you want. She ended up coming out to California and that was about eight years ago now. We were figuring it out last night. So I would just like to say I didn't wanna get back together with Lindsay because I felt that she had been so, she had been so mean. I can't think of another word, but she was so mean, so blaming, so angry at me because I wasn't doing what she wanted. I wasn't acting the way she wanted, and she was really, really angry at me. And I'm sure that I said awful things to her too. I mean, we said bad things to each other, but you know, her wanting to reconcile with me, I really didn't want to until I felt sure that she was not gonna do any more attacking of me. So this is really, really important for mother-daughter relationships. You need to be feel safe and I, I would say this is the most important thing in any relationship that I needed to feel safe that Lindsay wasn't gonna revert to old communication habits. And basically we always tell people is make your beginnings fun. So what we would do is we would talk about, we love to gossip about our friends. And you know the past and we talked about the past and we talked about fun things that we used to do and we talked about recipes and we sent each other fun videos and that reminded us of how we used to be before we got bad. Right? And then after doing that for, what, six months or something? It was a while. I said, I will meet you anywhere in the United States. You choose. And we'll go and have coffee somewhere and we'll talk about anything. But what happened? And I think that our goal was not to talk about what happened between us. Mm-hmm. For, and we didn't For years. Yeah. We didn't, we didn't say you did this, you did that. I really hated you. We didn't go there. Can I throw something in? Please. You know, we get asked a lot of these questions and we, this is our business. Right? And people really wanna know, and here's one of the things that we see. And this is one of the big things that if a mother and daughter really wanna reconcile, you have to stop yelling at each other about the past. Mm. You have to, it doesn't matter what I did. It doesn't matter what she did. You know? The other thing is a lot of daughters are really angry about what their moms did when they were growing up. Try being a grownup, raising a daughter, maintaining a family, and then come back to me. You know, I just know so many women that are still screaming at their mother. And it's like a lot of the sympathy and compassion that I ended up having for my mother is when I started identifying who she was and what she had been through. Like, am I really gonna stay angry at a mom who was on her own in the seventies and early eighties, no support with a job and a husband away, like 75%. I mean, it was not easy. And then having this huge career. And that was part of our healing and reconciliation was time was passing and we weren't yelling at each other about these things. And when she saw that I had a really solid recovery, she was able to not worry about that. And when she saw that I wasn't gonna bring things up anymore. So those are the things that I think are really important when you talk about healing and reconciliation. Making changes. Yeah. And the changes that moms have to make. You know, I felt that I needed to be safe with Lindsay. Because Lindsay, because daughters are very angry and they can be angry because moms didn't give them the things they wanted it in childhood, or they weren't responsive to emotional crises. There are so many things that go wrong in those middle years and high school years, but I think that one of the issues is that moms don't know how to change their language. They don't know how to get soft. They don't know how to be soft, and they continue. Worrying over the same issues that they worried about when they were younger. What do you look like? How heavy are you? Are you married? How are you raising your children? Why don't you have children? Yeah, why don't you have children? Why aren't you married? Why are you whatever? But, you know, moms get these things that these ideas in their heads and they, they can't let go. And so daughters don't feel safe. And if they don't feel safe. Because if they show up for Thanksgiving or they show up for Easter and Mama's gonna do this in front of everybody, you just don't wanna go. Yeah. You guys brought a, a few things that I do in my practice when I'm helping moms and daughters to reconnect. One is that I tell them that I don't really care about the truth. So we're not gonna true seek in our sessions. I'm just gonna assume you're both right, and so we can stop deciding who's correct. I'm gonna take the approach that you're both correct and so let's actually hear the experience. So a mom and a daughter will never share the stories the same because one's a mom and one's a daughter. The experiences are so vastly different. So if we're gonna look for who's correct or who's telling the truth, we're gonna be here all day. And that's why y'all keep fighting because like you keep doing this little dance of you're, I don't remember it that way, or You're wrong, or this is not right, and then you keep fighting when it doesn't really matter. So I teach them, I was like, instead of looking for the truth or trying to find the truth, I want you to just hear for the emotion. You know, when your daughter's telling this story, how does she feel? Mm-hmm. If we're, we stop looking to see if she's telling it correctly or if she's right or remembering it right or wrong. You know, it doesn't matter. What emotion did you hear when she told that? Well, it sounded like you felt sad. I'm like, great, let's talk about that. Your daughter felt sad. How do we want to move through this? I'll just give an example of something that enraged me that Lindsay used to do. Oh, good. When? When she got sober. Before I got sober with her. She would, uh, say you're an alcoholic too. Now. I would have one drink a night. You know, this was before Al-Anon this, the way, this was before Al-Anon. Right? So she would justify what she was doing by pointing out the fact that I was drinking. Now there was a moment where Lindsay said to me, I'm sober, but you're still angry. And I was very angry. I was angry at the years that I had suffered through this. And she said, you're still angry. And it's true. I was so angry. Then she said, you need to go to Al-Anon. And I thought, I'm not one of those people. And then I went to Al-Anon and I realized I was one of those people. So there's a lot of lessons in Al-Anon, whether you're, I guess, a full-on addict or not. There's so many lessons in that. But I was really talking about the trigger. She was saying to me, you are an alcoholic too. And it just, it infuriated me because she was accusing me. But you were talking about things that we said are recovery reconciliation, so like you guys had talked about, so one, the truth seeking like, you know, just, oh, truth seeking. So you guys had brought that up, but the second one that you guys had brought up that I do in my practice when I'm also like helping moms and daughters to reconnect, is we don't have to focus on the past so much. Yeah. And you guys decided not to talk about it at all. And so when they're in sessions with me, I spend maybe two or three sessions talking about the past. 'cause sometimes you just wanna get a little bit of it out. Yeah. But after that we stop. I'm like, okay, this isn't gonna get you guys to rebuild a relationship. If we're just harping on what happened, it already happened. We know it's back there. Do you guys want a new relationship or not? 'cause then we could just focus on building the new one. So I like that you guys did that. 'cause it wasn't gonna change anything to just keep harping on it and keep reliving it. We still try not to talk about the past still, which is very hard when you get interviewed about it. And over, but what? Yeah, people ask us What happened? What happened? Well, it was nasty. It was really nasty. Okay, so then you fly to wherever she is, you go to California, you see her, and you guys actually get to meet in person. What do you do next? How does it go from there? We went on a walk. You know what? We went to Rodeo Drive and we walked that walk and Lindsay said, I haven't been able to walk this walk for four years. Because it reminded me of you because we used to walk that walk. Sure. That's exactly close. And there we are. There we are. A really different memory. But basically when I met her in California, we did do some of the things that we had done before that brought back happy memories. Would you agree with that? Yeah. So do you mean like moving forward with the relationship? Like how did we carry forward? So I think well. Within a year of that, I was doing some work with reach out recovery again. So here's one of our problems is we actually enjoy doing some work together, and we have some passions around the same causes. So it's kind of been a blessing and a curse. When we said we'd never worked together again, then we ended up doing a little bit of work together again. And I think it was good because I think that. You know, it's something we like and we believed a lot in our cause and what we were doing. So it gave us something to kind of come back together about as well. And from there it was visits. She'd come to visit me in California, I would come to visit her in Florida. From time to time we would meet in Connecticut where my brother lives 'cause he's got three little girls. Um, so we did some family trips together and. You know, I have to say it was a totally new beginning for us. It really was. Things have really not been the same between us since we reconnected. They really never went back to the bad place. I remember one argument in California, one where I got so upset I had to pull the car over, and I think we hung up and called each other back a few minutes later and said, let's never do that. And that was like it. And again, not that there isn't a heated moment here and there, but it's very quickly followed with, all right, uh, let's not, you know, the passion isn't there. What I'd like to talk about for a minute is writing, so I don't know if you use that in your therapy, but I think that Lindsay and I, we started our recovery together writing, because so much of recovery is about writing. What are you feeling and identifying your feelings, and that's something that we write about. Both for reach out recovery and writing about in our recovery books in our mother-daughter book. But I think that Lindsay and I really, we had connected initially around writing, 'cause I taught her what I knew about writing and then she carried on writing in her own career. It's something that is, you know, at the foundation of who we are really. And then I think that, um, writing the books, writing together about trying to uncover the truth. You were talking about, it doesn't matter what the truth is, but I wanted to tell the story of how my mother had raised me. And so I wanted to show what was my story, what was Lindsay's story? And we each wrote our own story. You know, we each wrote about, and you wouldn't even know that we were connected because our stories are different and the same. But I think that that was what brought us together. But if it were another kind of mother, you know, it could be the cooking. Or the arts and crafts or the whatever, because we all have gardening. We all have passions. Our passion happened to be writing and that's what brought us together. And also the powerful need to know what happened. But you know, we don't like to talk about what happened, but we can write about it. It's safe to write about. Yeah. I do teach moms and daughters about, um, writing to each other. Mm-hmm. Um, actually moms are teen daughters because sometimes it takes the pressure off of having big conversations that need to be had, but they can either cause anxiety or just being afraid to have them or not really knowing how. So I do teach moms to like start a journal with her daughter. Oh, together? Yeah. And that way they can kind of write back and forth with each other, share different Oh, that's cool. Inside of the journal. And so that's how I start with the writing. But I agree. Writing it takes away so much pressure. Like you get to be as honest as you need to be because it's all just kind of flowing onto paper without somebody staring at you and maybe making faces or kind of questioning or interjecting. And there's, yeah. I do think it's powerful too. You can write a letter and tell Lindsay all the things that annoy me about her or whatever, and then when you throw it away, you just feel so released. You just got it out. But she didn't receive it. Right, because she didn't need it. Like it, yeah. It wouldn't have made a difference or it would've made a negative impact, which would've then just hurt the relationship. So in the book that I have here, uh, what steps are you walking people to? If you had to pull out two or three steps from your books for us to talk about, what are the important ones for you guys? What either helped you the most, or what do you think? Like where should a mom and daughter start? If they're like, we're stuck. We don't wanna go no contact, but we're struggling. How, how do we get to a place where we can. Either have a successful conversation or just start the path to healing. So I think that it is absolutely critical to understand triggers trauma and conflict resolution. So step one is self-discovery. That's really important, but the triggers trauma and conflict resolution a lot of times. Mothers and daughters are fighting, fighting, fighting, and they don't even realize that they have these triggers that they're triggering each other. They're having the same fight about the same things over and over and over. And what we do is we help people understand what their biggest areas of conflict are. You know, maybe you're fighting over food and weight, maybe you're fighting over appearance. Maybe you're fighting over girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, romantic partners. You know, maybe you're fighting over drinking. But whatever it is, let's identify what they are and understand that these are triggers. And then once you understand what your trigger issues are, you can plan for them. Okay, we have a situation that where we're gonna be dealing with food or money or alcohol, instead of just going, oh, it'll be all right. Or I'm in complete dread of what's gonna happen. You can make a plan for it. The other thing is. Mom may have gone through trauma, grandma may have gone through trauma, daughter may be going through trauma. Sometimes it's really scary to tell each other about what we're going through. So sometimes moms keep secrets because they think it's the best for the family, but if daughter is experiencing something that mom went through and she doesn't know that mom went through it, that could be really important. So triggers and trauma, and then of course the conflict resolution is in there too. You know, I just love the end of the book. Step four is forgiveness, healing, and the recovery lifestyle. Every single one of us should be learning about forgiveness, healing, and a lifestyle that makes us feel good no matter what's going on in our lives. So no matter what's going on with your mom or your daughter, if you are taking care of yourself, if you are nourishing your body, nourishing your mind, you can't even really do self-help. Until you're in a kind of healthy place, I think. So I would really say that's a very important part of the book. Whether you're gonna actually tell your mom or your daughter you forgive her or heal is totally unimportant. But if you can start thinking about these things on your own while creating a life where you're getting what you need, even some of the things that you're not getting from mom. So one of the great things a therapist said to me in the years we were separated was find other women. You know, find other women to be around. My dad had a girlfriend at the time that was very good to me. I found a mentor that was very good to me, and these were the women in my life who kind of nurtured me when my mom wasn't there. So those are the two I would say. What would you choose? Well, I think self-discovery is the most important, is the beginning of all things. Because basically every mother is a mother for the first time, right? For the first time. And most of us don't really know our mother. I mean, we don't know who our mother was before she married, how she changed who her mother was, who the great-grandmother was, because whatever the mother is teaching you, it's something that she learned generations ago. She may be a mother for the first time, but what she is imparting to her daughter is something that her mother, her grandmother, great-grandmother, taught her. So if you don't know where your mother came from, that's the first piece I, my mother's history was very important to me. I mean, to be able to look back and say, well, uh, you know, what did she do? She was a, a, let's say fair mom. She kind of let go, but she was a civil rights activist. She was on the bus in Alabama, and it was something that I could be incredibly proud of later in my life. At the time, I felt kind of abandoned, but. To be able to look at who my mother was, what her beliefs were, why she did what she did, and then look at the difference of my personality and her personality and the things that, um, how we jelled, how we didn't gel. I think every mother and daughter should be able to say, what's her emotional style? What's her communication style? What is mine? Who am I? What am I? So in the book, we also have plenty of assessments so that you can look at, say. What kind of person am I? What kind of person is my mom? How do we not work together? What are our vulnerabilities? Yeah. So I think that self-discovery is really important. You talked about triggers and you gave the other three. So mine is, you know, you start with beginning to learn who you are. Yeah. And what are you bringing to the relationship. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Until I wrote the book, I, I didn't know my mother, she died when I was 25. So I didn't have a chance to ask her some of those questions, and she didn't see me as a mother. She didn't have time for that. So being able to look back in the history of my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, you know, what they had done. Then I was able to say, oh, this is where I come from. This is who I am. So that, yeah, the influence who you became and how you've shown up. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in awe of you guys and just watching. A mother-daughter duo just do this and share their story over and over again, and also help other moms and daughters get here. Like this relationship to me is so important and it's not one that to just be taken lightly. And so I love that you're teaching moms and daughters how to reconnect and they're like, how to rebuild this relationship and, and that it's okay to start over again. I love the, the idea of starting over again because so many people are running away. They're just kind of giving up. Well, a lot of people are also living with the mother wound. I think that, you know, and I saw it for myself and it was why it was so important to write the book. You don't wanna be an adult walking around, bringing your mother wounds into your work relationships, your romantic relationships, your friendships. You know, this is, it will, it does. So that was what was important for me. 'cause I sponsor a lot of young women and I thought, I heard so many girl, I hate my mom. You don't really, you don't understand her and you've gotten into a bad place. Mm-hmm. I don't think most moms set out to hurt their daughters, but sometimes it happens. Yeah, exactly. Well, they're coping with so much, mothers are changing as as much or more than their daughters. So at every stage of life, moms are changing, their bodies are changing. We're getting older. We have different challenges. Yeah. And then daughters too, like those same things are happening. I have another episode where I talk about the six stages that I think exist in the mother-daughter relationship. And so in each of those six stages, we not only have a mom that's changing, we also have a daughter that's changing in each of them. And if Oh, interesting. The six stages. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I do too. Can we see it? So I'll tell you. So number one is to me, birth to adolescence and then adolescence to young adulthood. Mm-hmm. Young adulthood to marriage and family. Should a daughter make that decision? And then marriage and family to midlife for that daughter and then caring for the aging mother. Oh, yes. And so in each of those six stages, mom is changing, but so is daughter. Yeah. Oh yeah. We both were in. Yeah. And if we're not paying attention to those changes and then adjusting the relationship at each stage because it can't look the same in each of those stages, if that's not happening, then we create tension. Fascinating. So I agree, a mom is changing and then yeah. So is her daughter and, but is there anything you wanna leave the listener with? Leslie? I'll ask you to talk to a mom in the room whose daughter may have gone no contact or may have gone very low contact and the mom might be confused and hurt. And then Lindsay, I'll ask you to leave something for a daughter who may be running or may be struggling with addiction or is just so angry with her mom that she can't really see a path back to her. Well, first of all, I'd like to say that wherever you are in your relationship, it's not the end of the story. So wherever you are right now, if you're in a state and I know what it's like to feel like you've lost your child forever, it doesn't have to be the end of the story. I think that moms should do in a sense what I did, which is basically start looking at what gives you pleasure in your life. And if you, if you can, um, reinvent yourself a little bit, um, as yourself on your own and remember who you were before you were a mother, it will allow you to release that tension of being so disappointed and so hurt. And after you. Be able to up that anger or that sense of, of loss and be able to reconnect down the road. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next year, but you know, in the future you can say, how about we get together and, and have coffee together? Or you can send some video, some humor that will allow that person to release the tension. I think that having compassion for the situation, for whatever your daughter may be going through and whatever you're going through, it doesn't have to be the end of the story. There's still more to write. Yeah. And, okay. Anything else? No, I did it. Okay. I'm gonna say something that I used to be scared to say and I'm just gonna say it. The first thing is, if you are using mind altering substances, stop. Stop. I say this as somebody who's been through all of this, used to combat anxiety and depression, used to get away from feelings. You cannot really get better or get into a mind frame where you can feel better. When you are using drugs and alcohol. So I'm very sorry. I hate not being the cool person anymore, but there's nothing the good that's gonna come from it. And the older you get, the harder it is. And I don't say that with any judgment. You know, if anybody's struggling, come to reach out, recovery, check out our resources, get in touch with us. We can absolutely give you some tips to help with all of that. So that's number one. The second thing I would say is. It's a lot about what we've been talking about. We don't really know what our moms went through. Um, and sometimes our moms do things that seem incredibly hurtful or neglectful or even on, ranging on abusive. And there may be elements of truth to your story. I'm not taking away from your story, but there comes a moment where you get to decide what you want for yourself and your relationship moving forward. And being really angry at your mom is not gonna serve you. So even if you don't want her in your life right now, or you're not ready to forgive at all, my advice to be would be how can you nurture yourself? How can you make yourself healthy in all of the ways? Because I actually promise if you get into a really good place and you get a little space, you might miss her. Um, and you might wanna know her again someday. So I'm not saying it happens quickly, I'm not saying, but you know, definitely get yourself into a mindset where you're thinking clearly, nurture yourself with all the things you need and really like find some ways to let go of that anger. Having nothing to do with her just because it's unhealthy to hold it in. I got sober to support my daughter. I have to say that taking alcohol out of the equation in our family, it's made. Every family dinner, every encounter much better. It's true. So it's not just the daughter who's using who should stop. It's like if there's alcohol in your, in your family's life, there's gonna be drama. There is gonna be drama, and there may be conflict. So a mom giving up alcohol, it may be the hardest thing you ever do, but there are some steps that you can take to ensure that your relationship will be better. Thank you guys for coming and sharing your story and you know, the resources that you guys have created. Our pleasure. Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And anybody who wants go to reach Out Recovery and check out our books, our mother daughter relationship makeover series, always on sale on our website, and, uh, we think it works. Yeah. You know, it's worth a shot. Worth giving it a try. Yeah. Thank you so much for everything you do. Yes. Well, that is what I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and liked hearing a mom and daughter duo together. Talk about recovery and repair and reconnection. I'll catch you in the next one. That's all for today's episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you picked up some valuable insights that you can start using right away in your own relationship to create deeper connection and understanding. If something from today's episode resonated with you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with the mother or daughter in your life who needs to hear this message. And while you're at it, please consider leaving a rating. And review so we can reach more families and transform the way mothers and daughters relate to each other. For those ready to take the next step, you can visit my website to learn more about my private coaching programs and my program designed specifically for mother daughter pairs. Whether you're dealing with communication challenges, life transitions, or just wanna strengthen an already good relationship, I'm here to help. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next one.