Welcome to Episode 114 with my guest, listener Michael D. This episode is brought to you

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My name is Paul Gilmarton, this is the metal illness Happy Hour, 90 minutes of honesty

about all the battles in our heads for medically diagnosed conditions and past traumas, to

everyday compulsive negative thinking. The show is not meant to be a substitute for professional

metal counseling, it's not a doctor's office, it's more like a waiting room, it doesn't suck.

Website for this show is mentalpod.com, please go there and check it out, there's blogs

written by me, by guest writers, there's a forum you can join and post in, there's tons

of surveys that you can take that I've designed that lets me get to know you guys and what's

going inside, going on inside your heads. So yeah, please go check that out. Let's get

into the show. You know, it's interesting, last week's show, I'd read a letter where

somebody had wanted, a listener had wanted to hear more from the episode with Social

Worker Ray, they wanted to hear him talk more about the cycle of abuse in families. And

we didn't really get to it in that episode and as I was putting this week's episode together,

it's just fortuitous how so many of the like emails and survey responses and this episode

with listener Michael D, the subject of the cycle of abuse just happened to come into play

and I just love when that happens on the podcast when there's this this beautiful synchronicity.

Okay, kick it off with a couple of surveys. This first one is from the Shaman Secret survey,

filled out by a listener, it's a guy who calls himself James, he is gay, he's in his 40s, was raised

in a pretty dysfunctional environment, he writes, my mother was slash is extremely controlling and

probably has a few personality disorders, borderline, narcissistic. My father, who is now deceased,

...