Hello, welcome to the show. This is Emotional Badass, where Moxie meets Mindful. I'm your host,

Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist. And on today's episode, we're doing a throwback

episode. We're calling this one, when fences aren't enough of a boundary.

All right y'all, so we are going to roll with this throwback episode.

Listen all the way to the end to hear my notes on this episode, which really are notes for me and what's come up for me since its release. And it really might shock and surprise you.

I'm going to touch briefly on what potentially creates the Petri dish where DID dissociative identity disorder can emerge and PTSD is learned or even

taught. My personal timeline for ages 6 to 10 has always been wonky. No matter how many times I try to nail it down and write it out,

it just shifts within my memory. I was dissociated very young. I was having night terrors.

And those things only occur when we're having struggle. By this age, I had witnessed my biological parents being violent with each other.

And my parents separated.

And there was no real explanation.

One day we lived as a nuclear family.

The next day, my mother and my sisters, my youngest sister just a few

months old, we moved in with my grandparents. Now, I never went back to the family home to pack or to

gather my things. I didn't get to say goodbye. And goodbyes are, and they're often overlooked, especially for children.

My biological father had built me a tall swing set. I thought of it as a sort of treehouse.

Now, it wasn't really in a tree, but it was high up within the trees. So I thought of this as my tree house. And I thought of it as proof that my father

had loved and cared about me. This nuclear family moment seemed to burn into my psyche. So much so that

when I earned my driver's license at about 16, one of the first places I drove myself

was to that old nuclear family home. And I could see, roughly a decade or more later, that that

tree house was still there. That meant to me that other children had played on it. And I sat in my car

and I wept for a very long time. I had to grow up and give myself a proper goodbye to that house.

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