Forces Of Nature: A Conversation On Childhood Trauma with Gina Demillo Wagner

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Three years ago we published a TTFA episode called ‘Don’t You Want Somebody To Take Care Of You?’, an interview with Gina Demillo Wagner about her experience growing up in a dysfunctional family and being a caregiver as a child.

 

Gina’s brother Alan had a rare genetic disorder that caused him to veer from loving to violent. His illness put stress on the entire family, including her parents, whose mental illnesses went untreated.

 

Since that episode, Gina’s written a book about this experience called Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Finding Home. On this episode, Gina and Nora catch up about writing the book, how writing helped her process and how some of the Real Housewives helped give her the courage to cut off contact with some family members.

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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You know, they were so afraid to talk about it, you know?

I can hear it when I listen to the episode. Oh, really? I was like talking so quickly.

Yeah.

And I could hear that I was nervous and it wasn’t like because I was on a podcast.

It was because I’m like, oh my God, like, what the fuck am I saying all the things?

Yeah, I’m about to talk about this. I’m about to talk about it, okay. Guess who this is, everybody?

Hi.

Gina Demillo Wagner.

Is it Demillo or Demillo?

Demillo.

Okay, Demillo. Does that mean something sounds like vaguely Italian? I’m like, eh.

Yeah.

Well, and when you live someplace where there is a Hispanic population, I get a lot of Demillo.

Oh, that sounds nice too. Okay. You already know Gina, if you have listened to TTFA because she was on it in 2021.

That’s exactly what I was going to say. 2021, her episode is called, Don’t You Want Somebody to Take Care of You?

And among many other things, the episode is about Gina’s brother, Alan, who had Prader-Willi syndrome growing up, but in a time where nobody knew what that was.

Right. Well, we didn’t know.

Yeah.

We didn’t know what it was. Yeah, he wasn’t diagnosed until his 30s. So growing up, you know, doctors used the horrible term, mental retardation.

We thought he had brain damage. We knew something was wrong. He was severely disabled, but yeah, there was no word for it.

There was no diagnosis.

And there are a lot of things that stand out about that episode, but you were just saying that when you listen to it, you can hear your nervousness. Tell me more about that.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I had just started writing about. I think you and I connected. I’d written something for The New York Times about mourning the loss of a sibling rival.

That’s what they called it, the essay. But I had been writing about my experience as a sibling, but I had never outside of therapy talked about it. And you and I connected.

We recorded that episode, and it was so powerful to hear my own voice say all the things that I was not supposed to say growing up.

When you grow up as a sibling to somebody who has a severe disability or medical issue, or you grow up in a family where somebody is louder and needs more, your job is to mute your own needs, to be invisible, to support everyone, and then add to that

You knew that you couldn’t talk about it growing up because your mom was unwell and there was a good danger to it.

There was a danger to speaking up. There was a cost associated with it.

There was a cost. There was a threat. She, you know, explicitly and implicitly made me believe that my job was to be okay, to project that everything was okay, because if I didn’t, then she would tumble into the abyss.

And, you know, and kind of the subtext was that she would not be alive anymore, that somebody in the family would not be alive anymore. It just kind of felt like it was life or death.

And when we were recording the episode, I had this weird sensation where I was like, I wasn’t nervous about being on TTFA. I wasn’t nervous about talking to you.

But I had this physical, visceral reaction to hearing my own voice say all the things that I was not supposed to say. And now, you know, I’ve got this book, I’ve told the story, it’s out there. I feel a lot more confident talking about it now.

And I went back and listened to the episode and I just have compassion for that version of me that was so… I could hear it in my voice. I just was trying to get it out as quickly as possible.

I was like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I’m saying it, I’m saying it, this is what, you know. And you were such an empathetic interviewer, too, that you just were creating this space.

And it opened up parts of the story that I had not even fully explored yet.

When you… First of all, I would never be able to listen to myself be interviewed on a podcast. I’m really proud of you for being able to listen to it.

I really…

I couldn’t do it.

I just couldn’t do it.

Well, it was therapeutic for me to hear it and hear your voice, like hear the compassion.

Because the other piece of it was, and I think a lot of people can identify with this, when you grow up in a dysfunctional family, you tell yourself, oh, it wasn’t that bad. I made it out fine. I’m actually like, I’m a pretty healthy adult.

And but then you hear somebody else’s like empathy and reaction to what you’re saying. And that also felt really healing to me.

Yeah. So it’s so interesting to me that it was hard for you to talk about this. It’s not surprising.

It would be hard to talk about, right? Right. I think.

But hearing that as an adult, it was hard for you to talk about it or hard for you to hear yourself saying it out loud, is surprising to me because you were in the process of writing this book. This book was not done when we were talking.

This is the book, by the way, it’s called Forces of Nature. I hope it’s in focus. Let’s see if it is.

There we go. There we go. It’s really beautiful.

Well, with my dumb name on the front, but when I first read this, I was reviewing our old texts and I think I text you, I was like, I’m five pages in and I’m in this.

It’s like a really brave book and you really do directly explore the depths and the nuances of growing up in dysfunction, of growing up as a glass child, the sibling of a person who has incredibly high needs and that loneliness, there’s just so much

loneliness in your story. I remember hearing that in the interview too and just being like, oh no, one needs to reach through space and time and grab your little self and be like, you don’t have to, this shouldn’t be it. This shouldn’t be it for you.

But there’s such a difference between that girl who’s so afraid as a teenager to go to her best friend’s house and be like, I’m not going back home, right? Call my dad, I’m not going back home. And this woman who can write a whole book about it.

Like, what is the process of finding that voice and using it?

It’s been a process. And actually, this summer, after my book launched in May, I’ve been in therapy talking about what is it that’s allowing me to be in front of people talking about it and feeling okay about it.

And there’s an interesting connection to that night that I moved out. And I think I write about this in the book, but I was so stuck in that dynamic of like my job is to keep my family alive.

There’s no, but I’ve been, you know, forced to see a therapist who kind of planted a seed that there could be a different path for me. And so the night that I moved out, I just had, you know, my mother and I had had this huge explosive argument.

She had actually thrown a dinner plate at my head and missed. And there was just like this moment where the clouds parted and there was this clarity. And I was like, oh my gosh, I have to, like, I have to go.

And if I don’t do it right now, I’m not going to go. And there was something about that clarity and knowing that I stepped into and that’s how I moved out. And I feel like if I had waited even five minutes, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

And there’s something about the book where I feel like I stepped into that same like moment of clarity, like I’m not supposed to tell the story, but I’m going to tell the story.

And as you and I were talking before, like I think for me it was reminding myself that this is the story I needed. I needed to create the thing that I would have liked to have had to validate my experience.

And so for me, it’s not like I’ve just suddenly like, I don’t feel like I’ve arrived on the other side of anything necessarily, but like it’s become like this practice.

Like I need to keep practicing using my voice, stepping into that place of, you know, feeling grounded in my story and also trusting that my story is actually everyone’s story.

Like there’s a big piece, and I think for a lot of writers, you have to kind of find that space of like, this is very personal, it’s an extreme story, it’s very unique, but it’s also everyone’s story in a lot of ways.

There’s a lot of ways that people feel invisible and need to find out how to use their voice.

Yeah, feel invisible and also just feel like a lack of agency in their lives, which I try to remember that when my kids are frustrated and frustrating me too, is like, oh, they have almost no agency in this situation, right?

Like someone else tells them when it’s time to wake up, then they go to school and they are told like where to be and when to stand, you know, stand and when to sit and like when to like, you know, play and when to eat and then they come home to like

more tyranny, you know, and I’m, and I’m telling them they can’t play, you know, nine hours of, of, of Roblox to like unwind, like they must settle for like a mere 60 minutes. Um, and they must brush their teeth twice a day.

But, uh, the other is like that just feeling, and it’s real too, of like not having control over your life. And then the realization is you get older or, I don’t know, just more comfortable, like asserting yourself that you do have some agency.

Like over your story and over where you’re going.

Yeah. And like I think there’s something, and this, you know, we’re middle-aged. Like there’s something about also realizing that, oh, this is it.

I’m in my life. I’m not waiting for my life to happen. I’m not waiting for, you know, you have parents in your life for better or for worse.

At some point in adulthood, your job is to understand that this is it. Like you’re doing it. This is, this is.

Yeah. And no one else is going to own your life and your decisions and your voice for you.

Hi, it’s Nora with a little bit of an update.

Terrible, Thanks For Asking is on an indefinite hiatus, which means that for the foreseeable future, you won’t see new episodes in the main feed.

But if you want to support the work that we’ve done, get access to our entire back catalog with no ads, you can join us on Patreon at patreon.com/ttfa or on Apple Plus.

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But if you want to join a community of Terribles, come over to Patreon. And if you just want more Terribles, join on Apple Plus. What’s it like to have it out in the world as a podcast episode versus as a book?

Gosh, as a podcast episode, you know, I was nervous to have it out.

It also was just a huge relief. And it was interesting to have people who are close to listen to it, people who like actually knew most of the story. But again, it’s like the form.

I mean, there’s something about the format of a podcast and that narrative and hearing, you know, I had friends who were like, I never heard that story start to finish. And it’s not the whole story, obviously, but like…

No, it’s the whole story.

It’s word for word.

What’s in the book? But in a 50 minute podcast episode.

The digest version. So it brought me closer to some people that I already felt close to because, you know, they understood that piece of my story better. The book is interesting.

Publishing such a long process. I mean, this was like a five year from like the beginning of the draft to when it came out. So I don’t know if you felt this way with your books, but like, by the time it came out, I was like…

What’s in it?

I have no idea.

Yeah.

I don’t remember what it’s about all my life.

I don’t know how I wrote it.

Yeah. I don’t know.

Did I write this? I don’t remember.

It literally looks not familiar at all. Sometimes if I’m reading, like you read, we did a book event in Changing Hands Tempe together, and you did a reading sometimes when you’re doing a reading, are you like, did I write that?

Yeah. I don’t remember. I actually had the feeling like, oh, this is good.

Yeah.

I actually did that.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is mine?

You’re telling me this is my book. Okay. Great.

But I had, when I first started writing this book, I had this vision that I was just going to take something that was really like kind of ugly and painful and find a way to wrap it up.

And I just had this vision of like putting it in a boat and floating it down a river. Like I don’t want, I wasn’t looking for, you know, to be a bestseller, to have like a lot of attention.

But I felt really strongly that I just needed to find a way to float this out in the world. And whoever is going to find it is going to find it.

And so I had this detachment that, you know, by the time it came out, it felt like it wasn’t my book anymore. Like it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to whoever is going to read it.

And the other thing that’s interesting, because obviously people are reading it and they’re reacting to it and I’m hearing from people as I realize like a lot of the work I did to be able to write this book, I did off the page. I was doing therapy.

I was processing it. It’s not like this wasn’t the thing that healed me. Like I did a lot of work and then I gave shape to it in the form of this book.

So it’s not that I’ve gotten over all of it because you never get over it, but then when somebody is reading it, for them, it’s immediate. And so I feel like I had to find empathy for the reader’s experience.

We’re like, okay, I know this happened for you. And 30 years ago, some of the things in the book. But for them, it’s immediate.

It’s happening right now. And so I had to realize that they were feeling like that compassion and almost like vicarious trauma in real time. And there was just like a little bit of like, oh, I don’t know how to.

Yeah.

I don’t know what to do with that.

Yeah.

Yeah. The the the book has like, I think, reflects all of that work that you were doing very clearly, too.

Because our conversation really was very focused on, you know, the Alan of it all and like on growing up with this brother that was, you know, your big brother and also your little brother in a lot of ways and a brother that could be really, really

loving and also really frightening and violent. And, you know, a mother who was negligent and hard to understand and cold and a father who was like, not there, not there, like just sort of, you know, an affable and absent father figure.

And you called it Forces of Nature. And you are also by trade or by training or by, you know, career path. If I check your LinkedIn, right, you are a, like you’re an outdoors writer.

Like you are also a person who I live in Phoenix. I live in Phoenix. You chose to live when you lived in the Phoenix area to live.

You were like, I needed a mountain. I needed trails. And I’m like, I could see them some days and also not others.

Like, you know, this is like a woman who hikes, like you can just tell, like this woman who goes outside. Like repeatedly, probably throughout the week. Yes.

Yes. We called it Forces of Nature. And there’s all of these themes of like the healing power of nature and of, you know, our ecosystems and even just, you know, geography and land and the way it’s shaped.

And I could listen to you or read about your writing about that forever, truly.

Yeah. I felt like the places I lived and traveled mirrored a lot of my experiences.