Breaking the Cycle: Lauren Henry Brehm on Generational Mental Health and Healing

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 00:00

I

Mark (: 00:00

reading your book,

Welcome Lauren, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here. ⁓ As I was reading it I found myself getting emotional because you know this is a topic that's very dear to my heart and not always in the best way right. You know having it in the family my mom suffered with it and being the youngest I was exposed more directly to her OCD than any of my siblings and

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 00:03

Thank you.

Yeah.

you

Mark (: 00:25

Although we all have manifested in some ways as I've experienced through observation, I know how badly I've suffered from it myself. so it definitely is an emotional thing for me to, as I was reading about your grandmother's background and stuff, all these things we're going to get into today that I'm just really, fascinated about. So let's just start with a little bit about you and your background and.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 00:42

Right.

Mark (: 00:48

you know how we get here today.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 00:50

Well, I'm a former special ed teacher turned English language arts and especially English as a second language teacher. I've lived in lots of different places, born on Long Island. So I'm actually a native New Yorker. But we moved to North Carolina when I was 10 and I consider Greenville, North Carolina my hometown.

Mark (: 01:08

⁓ okay, that's where I am.

⁓ okay. Hey neighbor.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 01:21

I've also lived in, let me see, I wrote down a list. Let me check that. Florida. It really, I had to add one in this morning because I left it off. From North Carolina, I got married in North Carolina and had my daughter there. And then we moved to Florida, to Illinois, got divorced, moved to Maryland, then to China, then.

Mark (: 01:24

Well, the places I've A lot.

Wow.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 01:48

briefly to Alaska to Oregon and now I'm back in Alaska. I live, you can kind of see from the background, in a log cabin outside of Fairbanks with two dogs and a cat. They are important.

Mark (: 01:55

Yes.

cool.

I'm sure they are. sure they

are. They help keep the bears away?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 02:06

Well, the cat has a bear meow. ⁓ You can hear the absolute panic. Although the last time he made that noise, it was a raccoon. And we had a serious talk about this is a raccoon, this is a bear. Yeah. Right. There's lots of verbal communication, a little bit of sign language.

Mark (: 02:11

okay.

sit down with pictures. You know, as a special ed teacher, you can use pecs, right? You're very good at that. ⁓

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 02:35

Whatever it takes.

Mark (: 02:36

Whatever

it takes, that's right. All inclusive language, it's beautiful. And so you're in Alaska now you're a retired teacher. Did you retire after many years or you just kind of like left it?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 02:47

Well, I say

I'm not retired because nobody pays me a pension. I'm a disabled teacher and that's the reason I'm not working. But I am 66, so it kind of works either way.

Mark (: 02:55

Mm-hmm.

catch up.

Yeah.

Grab that social security while it's still there. ⁓ Yeah. Well, the main reason we're here was to talk about your book and your experience dealing with mental illness in your family and also in how it impacted you and generational impact.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 03:09

Really? ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Well, that's the main reason for writing the book is to show how an untreated mental illness will echo through the generations. And I'm the second generation. There is a third generation and they seem to be just as impacted. None of the mental illnesses that are in my family or the ones that I know about anyway are

unusual in any way. It's depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, a whole slew of addictions. And those appear in many families, but in the first two generations, it seems like 100 % were affected with some kind of mental illness. And even in the third generation, which right now is age 18 to 40, there are 50 % of the people who have

erations, we were born in the: 1930

So I suspect there are more educational things going on in that generation. I could, there's a couple of people I'd go, yeah, they've got ADHD, but it was never identified.

Mark (: 04:59

Right, I know. My brother even jokes about it, that he self-identified as a kid, because he was bouncing off walls and he ended up, he was the only one I think who went to preschool of the four of us because he needed something to do.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 05:11

Well,

when my daughter was about eight, I could see signs of ADHD. Her dad and I could. And every now and then someone who taught a less structured class, like a dance class, would say, you know, she can be very distracted and similar characteristics. So we did ask for an assessment. And what came out was...

In unstructured settings, she definitely showed some signs of ADHD, but in more structured settings, she was able to meet those requirements. So she was dependent on that outside structure. They didn't diagnose her at eight, but at 14, she read an article about adults with ADHD. I read it and thought, yeah, that sounds like my kid, but I didn't say anything. The next day she brought that article.

to both of us and said, this is me, I want help. So she also self-identified, but she did then get the diagnosis and I think some medication. She wasn't suitable for the traditional amphetamine type medications. She was put on, I believe, buterin at that time, which helped. I mean, she's finished a graduate degree. She's a good student, but she does need.

Mark (: 06:32

Yeah, okay.

good for her. Yeah.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 06:38

a little bit of assistance. And I suspect other members of the family are kind of in that same boat, but didn't have a special ed teacher as their mom.

Mark (: 06:47

⁓

Right, exactly. Well, there's that trait of hyper-focus with a lot of people with ADHD. So, school was a place where she had that structure in the academic area, then maybe putting her full focus into the academics maybe the ADHD kind of helped channel that.

And so good for her that she got herself some help. let's get into the book. Let's talk about the impetus of the book. It seems like your grandmother is the fulcrum for this book, correct?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 07:17

It

really was. I mean, I lived with as a witness to some of her routines and just skewed perceptions of reality. One of the big things, one of the big motivating factors was my father's reaction, because this is my mother's family and they divorced after six years for good reasons.

But my father was the one who came up with the analogy of the French court. And to me, it so perfectly explained what happened in my family that grandma's delusions, and in this sense, the delusion was not recognizing that her behavior was not normal, insisting that everything she was doing was absolutely correct and reasonable. And the family supported.

Mark (: 07:49

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 08:13

that delusion. And dad would say it's like she thinks she's Napoleon, so everybody forms a French court to support that. So yeah, the

Mark (: 08:22

Okay. So that was the metaphor. That

was the metaphor, correct, because she didn't actually think that she was Napoleon. Yes. ⁓

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 08:28

No, no, but her delusions

she might as well have thought that.

Mark (: 08:33

Yeah, because

you said that she ruled, get the quote, ⁓ what did you call her?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 08:40

Well, at one point I called her a cast iron bitch. ⁓ And one of my cousins took exception to that. Not so much that he disagreed, but that it wasn't respectful to say that. But honestly, that's how I always saw her. She had a very, very strong personality, domineering.

Mark (: 08:43

Cast Iron Bitch, that's it, yes, Cast Iron Bitch.

Ha

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 09:07

is just cutting the surface there. She was very good at imposing her will on others and in that sense we were feeding into her delusion.

Mark (: 09:09

Okay, yeah, that's what you use in the book.

What years are we talking about here when you were kind of experiencing this?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 09:24

Her

father died in: 1941

Mark (: 09:33

Okay. Okay.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 09:52

social stigma. So she traveled from New York to Philadelphia with both girls to consult a psychiatrist, apparently went to two or three sessions, decided he didn't know anything and she wasn't going back. So nobody ever treated anything in 1946, I think that's the right year, my mother and her sister were 13 and 16 respectively.

Mark (: 09:54

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 10:22

My grandfather ran away from home because he couldn't stand what was going on anymore. And the two girls just didn't know what to do. So they ended up calling Bellevue They lived in Brooklyn. So Bellevue came and took her away. I heard about that event.

some 40 or 50 years later, and it sounded like in that conversation, the two girls had never talked about it before, how each of them had felt and reacted to that incident. No, apparently not. ⁓ My mother was talking about how glad she was to have had grandma out of the house, while her sister, who was the older girl, felt guilty that she had made the phone call that resulted in her

Mark (: 10:51

to each other they never spoke, or to anybody.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 11:08

her mother being taken away. And they never shared that with each other, which means they couldn't support each other.

Mark (: 11:15

being left with those thoughts and those impressions and your experiences on your own is, I mean, that can be the worst thing, I mean, probably is the worst thing that could probably happen to you because everything just gets more more intense and gets more deeply entrenched in you and all your belief systems. Yeah.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 11:31

Exactly. ⁓

Nobody ever questioned grandma's behavior. It was always, this is how she is. I know there was a lot of peacekeeping in there that keeping her happy so she wouldn't have outbursts. And she could be very nasty when she had what I think of as a tantrum. She was

Mark (: 11:44

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 11:57

belittling to my grandfather, but even to anybody else, anybody who crossed her in any way, and therefore they backed off.

Mark (: 12:10

because no one was as strong or willing to stand up. And since she had had quote treatment from the relative doctor and been to Bellevue, everybody figured then that's, I mean, what is the thinking behind acceptance and indulgence at that point as opposed to recognizing when it was obvious your aunt called Bellevue. What.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 12:31

Right.

Mark (: 12:33

What was the reason, do you think, that they just decided to indulge and not fight it anymore? Was it just simply the fact that she was such a strong personality and that they were afraid to challenge her?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 12:44

I think that's where it comes from. My grandfather definitely was that person. Very placid, very compliant. Do you know the word nebbish? Okay, he was a nebbish. I mean, he was a very sweet man. But I know in the last 10 years or so of his life, most of what he did was just sit and wait to be called on to do something. He could not have been a happy person.

Mark (: 12:55

Mm-hmm. Yeah, he was nibbish. Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 13:14

but he didn't have the strength of will to stand up to his wife, which honestly, I think that may be part of why she married him was that she knew that. However, since he didn't stand up, he also wasn't in a position to protect his daughters. There was never a time that the family said, this is an illness and we need to get help for you, or we need to at least not indulge you.

Mark (: 13:22

Yeah, she could control him.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 13:42

Identifying it as an illness, I think in any family, then implies a responsibility to do something about it. If you think it's normal, you can ignore it. And they just ignored.

Mark (: 13:53

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, or even hope it goes away right on its own. I'm not saying that that's what it was. I'm thinking from my perspective, know, I think we'll just kind of weave back and forth a little bit because I'd like to share my experience a little bit too, to kind of parallel what you're talking about because my mom was not domineering at all. In fact, she was like the sweetest person you could ever meet.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 14:04

That may have been in there that if we indulge it, yeah.

DIRT!

Mark (: 14:24

And so for her, she had the hand washing and the germ phobia and all those kind of things. And it got to a point where she was obviously becoming more frail. She was not eating as well. She was thinner, the stress that just peels off the weight. But like your grandmother, because no one was treating it, she was

basically exposing the family to it every day. so as a young boy, I got the brunt of it because I was the youngest. So I was exposed to most of it more directly.

not realizing how it's, what it's doing to you. Because I was kind of rejecting it. The family was just tolerating it. My dad would go as long as he could before he blew up, you know? So it was just like a horrible cycle of things and complaining when she was making us wash our hands and things like that because she needed us to be compulsive also to be able to manage her existence. And so that eventually caught up with me.

Took a while but eventually it did and not knowing of the treatments because I don't think any of us really knew what to do at the time my mother saw a commercial for Prozac and she said it just she lit up she's like that's me, know, and she got herself treatment and finally was able to start coming out of and managing life ⁓ but it always followed her forever and

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 15:29

Hey.

Yeah

Mark (: 15:49

I do want to talk about the senility part later, because that's really interesting, because I have something to share about that, too, So anyway, back to your story. Your father called it the French court, correct?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 15:58

Right.

Mark (: 15:59

So let's talk a little bit about how that kind of transpired. What were some of the compulsions and how did it kind of actualize in an everyday kind of way? If you could talk to that at all.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 16:11

⁓

I can try. ⁓

Mark (: 16:15

Yeah, I don't know

how much specifics you have about that, but.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 16:17

One of the hallmarks of why grandma's story is unusual, and I hear an echo in yours that your mom made everybody wash their hands, and it was the imposition of her routines onto other people. So she didn't do anything for herself. She controlled the people around her. They had to wash their hands. They had to do whatever she needed.

Mark (: 16:28

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 16:45

She had very strict routines about her digestion, what went in and what came out. Lots of concerns and there are jokes about this is a normal Jewish thing of, you know, being regular and...

Mark (: 16:56

You bet.

You were just gonna say the toileting Correct. Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 17:03

Right, ⁓

but she then took it to an extreme and involved other people in it. So when she had a bowel movement, somebody had to check it and make sure it was normal. That ended up being my mother because she was the youngest and also had a personality more like her father, a little more passive. And she had no one to pass it on to and no support for saying no.

So she got stuck with these chores from age 13 on. ⁓ The feeding rituals, I think, developed a little more slowly. My father used to talk about going down to the corner deli and getting a few slices of bread. And the guy would reach behind the counter, grab it with his hands, wrap it up in paper. Once it got back to the apartment, it was treated like the package was sterile.

and you had to wash your hands first and had to carefully unwrap it. Later on when...

Mark (: 18:04

It's the irrationality of what

came before doesn't matter. It's the irrational. It's like everything begins now. And if I see someone touch it, then I have to do something about it. But I may pick that thing up and don't know who touched it and it's fine. Right? Yeah. I mean, I have no personal experience with that. So that's I'm just saying.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 18:07

Right. She didn't see it. Right.

Exactly. One of her... ⁓

But you

understand.

But one of her conclusions at some point was that if she couldn't taste the difference between good food and spoiled food, she needed something that was obviously sterile and she chose eggs because they're in a shell. But we know so much now about salmonella, that was a bad choice. Rational, ⁓ logic, these were not her touchstones.

Mark (: 18:44

wow.

Right?

Mm-hmm. Right. Yes. Well, it rarely is when it comes to these things because there are rational thoughts right there. As my therapist would call it, fantasies with a pH. Fantasies. ⁓

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 19:02

Right. So.

Exactly. And families do develop these little jokes about things. One of grandma's concerns, and you would have seen in the book in the chapter called Choke and Die, just kind of the cumulative effect of what she thought. But among other things, she wouldn't allow salt in the house. And my ex-husband and I, even back when we were dating, would joke about

let's sprinkle salt on the threshold of her bedroom and like a slug, she won't pass it. Of course, that's not true, but those are the kind of dark jokes that people end up making to cope.

Mark (: 19:43

for us. ⁓

It's coping, absolutely, absolutely. You need to be able to cope because it is, it will drive you to distraction in so many different ways. you know, when you're young and you're experiencing, you're internalizing all these things, but you don't have any place to put it that makes any sense. And so it's just kind of like, for me, was like, it just was being stored in the cellar of my mind, you know, until one day that cellar was unlocked for whatever reason that triggered it.

Did you find that that's happened for you? Do you struggle with OCD yourself?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 20:17

I'm not sure.

No, although I do, I would self-diagnose obsessive compulsive personality disorder. The criteria in the DSM-5 are things like a rigid need for control, perfectionism, ⁓ hoarding, which definitely was my mother, ⁓ just a whole lot of very rigid personality traits. And I see that in myself.

Mark (: 20:39

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 20:48

but I also know now that I'm on the autism spectrum. so, no, no, I did get it diagnosed. I had started to suspect it in April one year, doing research to benefit a student. And I started going, whoa, this is me. And so took that to my therapist and got a diagnosis in December the same year.

Mark (: 20:53

Was that self-diagnosed or did you get a diagnosis for that? You did, okay.

Ha

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 21:17

So there wasn't a long period of wondering. I was able to act on that pretty quickly. And yeah, I'm grateful because I can look back now and say, ⁓ I was definitely showing signs of autism all through my life. I'm ⁓ an intelligent, highly verbal female. And so the amount of masking I did was incredible.

Mark (: 21:20

You. Good.

Yes, right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 21:43

I made weird my mask because it fit, but also I was a very artsy kid. Drama, music, a little bit of hands-on visual art kinds of things. And so being artsy and weird fit really well by the time I got to junior high school. And that's just, I'm still that person. I'm still obviously quirky, but now I know where some of it comes from.

Mark (: 21:46

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 22:13

And having the diagnosis gave me freedom to express those parts of myself. Instead of feeling like this isn't normal, I shouldn't do it, it's my normal, I can do it.

Mark (: 22:26

Yes, exactly. That's a point we constantly make here on the podcast, is that everybody's normal is different, right? There's no normal normal. ⁓ And acceptance of all of our normals is what's important.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 22:39

Yeah, the broad

range of normal behavior is so immense. Everybody fits in there, somewhere.

Mark (: 22:45

Yeah,

I mean you have 10 people, you have 10 normals. ⁓ looking back saying you identified, saying, ⁓ I've been doing that for a while, or that was me back then. And I did that, the same thing, because I was like, the OCD came out roaring out of the cellar at a certain point, but when I look back, there were things that I was doing even as a kid that were, definitely you could identify as OCD.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 22:49

Exactly.

Mark (: 23:10

And so, the rituals, minor, not as obvious, but certain ritual type of stuff. so did your grandmother have like, have rituals that she did?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 23:19

yes.

I describe her feeding rituals in the book because I got to participate in those at, I think I was 13. And then after grandpa died and there was a series of hired helpers, they could no longer do it in private. So I witnessed the same rituals going on for decades. Her preparation for her meals.

e great Northeast blackout of: 1965

It was obviously not normal and yet you couldn't question it within the family.

Mark (: 24:24

Did anyone ever try and that there were consequences and they just learned from the consequence of actually trying?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 24:30

I would assume early on, yes, because there was some resistance in ⁓ Family of Four. The other three did show resistance, but they were overruled by whatever she then did. And as I say, she had tantrums, including crying. She used every emotional lever she could to get people to do what she wanted.

Mark (: 24:32

Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

You get it.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 24:57

And she could be a very charming person other than that. People who didn't have to live with her did like her, but she didn't have friends. It was just the people in her life that she could control and the people she met as she went about her business.

Mark (: 25:04

Mm-hmm.

So how then does your mother and your aunt take on what they were exposed to? How did it trickle down to them? We talk about generational exposure.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 25:24

What I saw with my aunt, and this is, you know, out of remove, because I didn't live in their household, but she adopted some of my grandmother's standards, like for cleanliness. So she kept a very clean house. Grandma had done the same, but everybody else around her did the maintenance on that. My aunt was equally involved as a housekeeper as well as recruiting the kids.

normal family chores, but her standards were really high. She also married someone who had a similarly domineering personality, very much like Grandma. He was the only person that I ever saw my grandmother treat with respect slash fear because he would,

talk back to her. He would tell her, no, you can't do this. And with my aunt, I saw the relationship between my uncle and my cousins, or at least the male cousins, as being abusive because he used a lot of humiliation in parenting. He didn't do that so much to his daughter, just really to the boys.

But what I see in my aunt was she didn't stop it. She didn't see it as abusive. And even now my cousins will say, well, that toughened me up and it was good for me to have been treated that way. And I can respect their feeling that way because if you question it, then you have to question who you are.

Mark (: 26:54

Yeah.

Sure, sure. And

But there's also looking at your parent and the fear of questioning your parent because if you do, because you talk about this and I want to talk about your grandmother's relationship with her father and the potential reasons for where this all kind of stemmed from. But you know that your parent is the person that you rely on, right? So to question them and to see them even as a human being sometimes is we don't even do it, they're this thing, know? So there's that extra.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 27:13

bright.

Mark (: 27:30

respect that's granted and so we kind of give a lot of leeway, I think. Even if we know that it's not, it doesn't feel good.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 27:38

Right, you have to accept your parents as they are because if you don't, you're risking your own health and wellbeing. You need them for shelter, for clothing, for food, for everything that allows you to be a person, allows you to exist. If that is shaky, your whole world is shaky.

Mark (: 27:52

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 28:05

But what I was going to say about my mother's reactions to her mother's disabilities, my mother reacted in the opposite way from her sister. She was a slob and she didn't value cleanliness, whether it was hers or the household or when she was needing to parent young children.

Hygiene was just not part of her equation. And I know when my brother had to clean out her house during her final illness, it was just a disgusting job. There were piles of books and papers. She went on numerous cruises, but all of the pictures and souvenirs were dumped on a bed in the guest room.

He had to go through all of that and basically just throw everything out because she also did not keep her pets from toileting in the house. So the floors were a mess. We sold the house for just a minimal price because the amount of fixing up it needed was terrible. Fortunately, it's a college town and the house was

Mark (: 28:55

you

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 29:18

within a mile of the university. So somebody wanted it and some fixed it up and I'm sure it's ended up as a rental for somebody. But it was difficult.

Mark (: 29:26

Okay, right, But it sounds like a...

Yeah, it sounds like a full on subconscious or conscious revolt against her mom, right? It was a complete 180.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 29:40

Mm-hmm.

Well, the other part, and as you said, we'll get into talking about my grandmother and her father, but my mother inherited those ideas about being very negative about sex and being very negative about men in general. And a psychiatrist friend of mine, after reading the book, pointed out that her lack of personal hygiene

may also have been a way of repelling people. And I had never seen it that way before or would have ended up in the book, but I thought that was a wonderful insight that yeah, she probably was. Right, well, with my grandmother, as I did the research and as you know, I discovered evidence that she was probably the

Mark (: 30:11

Right, keeping

Yeah.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

wanted to repel men.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 30:34

victim of incest at the hands of her father. And one of the characteristics of adult survivors of incest is wearing too much clothing. So to and it's to conceal the body. Never saw grandma that way. But when I take a step back and think, yeah, she was always wearing gloves, but also a hat and a coat. And the coat was large and shapeless.

whether she knew it or not, think that's what she was doing, just hiding herself.

Mark (: 31:08

And that was one of the many indications that you came across. You mentioned at one point, just quick with the gloves, you mentioned that you didn't see your hands till you were 40 years old. Amazing.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 31:08

So yeah.

right.

That's correct. They were always

in gloves even when I saw her asleep. The gloves were still on.

Mark (: 31:26

you said that her hands, it was first time you saw her hands uncovered, and they were just these small and pink with tissue paper thin skin of extreme old age. She was 92 at the time.

Cotton gloves formed a barrier between grandma's hands and the dangers of the world around her. In her mind, the barrier was impermeable to dirt and germs. But there were also these hands that symbolized all the pain that she inflicted on her family from the early days of washing them raw to figuratively ruling with an iron hand. So these hands were quite symbolic to you you saw them. Can you just talk about that a little bit before we get into a little bit more of

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 31:55

Yes.

Mark (: 31:59

the things that were indications of the incest.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 32:02

I'm not sure it's visible. I love the cover that my designer made for the book. And it's a big throne, you know, very, very ornate, but resting on the seat is a pair of black gloves.

Mark (: 32:16

⁓ yes, here it is. can't really, I can't really see them.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 32:18

Right. No, you really can't. I made

a poster-sized blow up for book signings and in that it's really clear that these are gloves. A couple of people have commented that they did notice the gloves, but to me that was such a big part of what was going on. Wearing the gloves kept her from being able to perform her own routines.

Mark (: 32:29

Okay, I never would have seen it.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 32:46

She couldn't wash her hands. She couldn't handle food. So wearing those gloves was almost the cattle prod for the rest of the family. I can't do it, therefore you must. But in my own history, those black gloves meant something. I'm not exactly sure what, but in my own therapy session, a group therapy, one of the therapists showed up wearing gloves. She had a...

circulation problem and just would regularly wear gloves. But on this particular day, they were black. And I was so uncomfortable. It's not like I freaked out. didn't, I wasn't emotional about it. But I sat there for a while and I finally had to say, could you please take those off? And then of course I had to explain why that was an issue. so to me, the gloves,

just symbolize everything else, where everything started and how it developed. I almost saw them as she is holding the reins to the family and the gloves are protecting her from what she's doing with the reins.

Mark (: 34:00

Yeah, now that's an amazing analogy. And so interesting to be able to, if I took time to look back on how things impacted my family to find that analogy, like something like that that's interesting. So the gloves thing is you, from a child, you always saw her with gloves. She was never without them. Yeah,

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 34:18

Yes. And I don't know

' wedding pictures, which was: 1955

Mark (: 34:37

white club.

Right, right, right.

Hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 34:46

ungloved hands, up to about my mother's adolescence. So there was, although then again, grandma went to Bellevue, my mother was 13, so when I say her adolescence, that all fits in with the timeline.

Mark (: 34:50

⁓ okay.

Yeah.

So, okay, let's get back to, we had started to talk about indications. You said that there's evidence that she was a victim of incest from her father, correct? And that might have been, because do we know the history prior to her, Do we know anything in the history there as far as mental illness? don't really have, no, okay.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 35:14

Right.

No, ⁓ she

was her parents were immigrants and she was the first child born in the US. So anything else would be lost in. I'm not sure where they came from. Grandpa came from Odessa. Which makes what's happening in Ukraine very personal. But I'm not exactly sure.

Mark (: 35:43

Mm-hmm, sure, sure.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 35:48

where the family came from originally. And like I said, she was the first one born in this country. I think there was one younger sibling after her. I don't remember how many older. And my great grandfather was a tailor. We're not talking about some burly manly man. He wasn't abusive in any way that I know of except that

Grandma's behaviors pointed to incest. She disliked all men except for her father. And then my mother only formed good relationships with gay men. So men who were not sexually threatening to her in any way. And I looked at those two as I started interviewing family members and

Mark (: 36:32

Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 36:38

researching OCD itself. And I thought that there has to be a reason here. And eventually it was, well, if this man is the only one she values, that would make sense that he's the perpetrator. So I started looking specifically at incest information and found a wonderful book. The author is E. Sue Bloom. And it's title, Secret Survivors. It's about

the survivors of incest, ⁓ specifically adult women. And when I got into her book, I realized she was creating a portrait of my grandmother. The fear of choking all by itself is an indicator. The control of what goes in and what comes out. my gosh, there's several of those. and the dislike.

for an entire group that's related to the perpetrator. Well, in this case, it was men. And yet her father was supposed to be the greatest man in the world. everything started after his death. So it all just kind of fit together. And even though she's not here to say, yes, this is what happened.

Mark (: 37:43

Okay, okay, interesting.

Yeah.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 37:52

although she probably would deny it anyway, right, but she's not even here to ask. All those behaviors really paint a clear portrait, sadly, which means it didn't start with her. recognizing that was very moving for me. Like I said, she had a very domineering personality and I always attributed

Mark (: 37:54

I wouldn't tell you probably

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 38:13

the things that she did to just a need for control. But I never stopped to ask where that came from. So once I put that perspective, the incest idea into my perspective, I was able to start developing compassion for her, which had never existed before. She was the victimizer. She was the villain of the story. And now all of a sudden she's a victim too. And

Mark (: 38:37

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 38:43

For that, she deserves compassion.

Mark (: 38:45

Yeah, and that's a real mind mess, right? To like suddenly change your perspective and paradigm to get a little more insight into why people might be the way. It doesn't excuse the behavior, but it explains it, And sometimes that's a little bit easier to manage that then because you can have, like you said, you're human, you can have some sympathy and compassion for somebody who may have been damaged and wasn't their fault.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 38:48

Right, it really was.

Exactly.

Well, I was.

Right. Well, I was sitting in a college library, that's where I found the book. And at the moment I put it all together, I started crying because it was, such a shock, as you say, a paradigm shift that, yeah, she's responsible, but she's not the one who started this legacy of mental illness.

Mark (: 39:20

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

right. Well, you talk about nature and nurture in one of your essays. I'm just going to read a quick line here. So my own experience leads me to believe that when it comes to mental illness, it doesn't matter whether the cause is nature from within the individual or nurture from within the environment. And I think that something that I had learned too with

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 39:32

Mm-hmm.

Mark (: 39:48

the asking why is it's like it doesn't matter why, It's like here we are and this is the reality. So what are we gonna do about it? And how can we manage it? How can we treat it? Was that something that permeated your life? Was that something that you discovered a long time ago or did it take time for you to realize that the whys weren't as important as the what and how that helped?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 40:09

I'm not sure I realized

it until I started writing that chapter and started putting the story together. I always go back to, and it just was coincidence, it happened on the same day, but I was asked to fill out the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory on the same day that I was handed a parent-reported questionnaire of the exact same type for my daughter.

Mark (: 40:13

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 40:36

and recognizing that we both had depression, mine was, you I have depression, hers came out as, quote, depressive personality, but it ultimately meant the same thing, just she was four years old. And I realized, well, she may have inherited it from me, but she's being parented by somebody who has a mental illness and therefore,

Mark (: 40:47

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 41:01

She's prone to traumatic upbringing because that's the best I can do. And that's, I'm hoping she has her own struggles with mental illness and not all of them come from the family, but she's getting therapy and I'm hoping I modeled that for her.

made it acceptable to get therapy. And I have really high hopes that my grandson, because his mother is being so active in battling mental illness, that he may escape some of it. So he's the fourth generation out from grandma. And of course, that generation is all under the age of 10 at this point. So we're not really seeing anything. But I really have high hopes.

Mark (: 41:24

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 41:50

that that generation will be that the incidence of mental illness will be back within a normal range.

Mark (: 41:57

How do you think you could help as a family that's experienced it in earlier generations and is aware of it, right? And we're talking about the impact on future generations. What are some of the things, I mean, you led your daughter to therapy, so it's one thing.

Are there ways to nurture then at this point, regardless of the nature that the child is born with? is there anything that, I know this is not a book about advice or anything like that and you're not a doctor. Is there anything that you came across and you don't have to have an answer for this? are there any thoughts about how past generations can help the future generations become aware, facilitate a sort of thinking and thought process that says I'm,

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 42:22

Thank

Mark (: 42:37

getting help it's a good thing, it's a positive thing. And in today's society, way more acceptable than it used to be. Like you said, your grandmother, your mom, my mom, I mean, when they were coming up, there was none of that. It wasn't obvious, you had to hide it. so is there anything that you've come across that you would say would help future generations to maybe get back within that more normal range?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 42:58

I think the number one thing is removing the stigma that we should talk within our families about what mental illness is and not make the struggles so personal and so secret. If you have a cold, you can say at the dinner table, I've got a headache or my throat hurts and it's okay to say that. And other people at your dinner table will say, ⁓ why don't you

I don't know, take honey and lemon or gargle with salt water or take a couple of Tylenol, any of those things. But we don't do that with mental illness. And honestly, it should be a dinner table topic. It should be just so normalized that we can talk about it. And I think that's absolutely the first step.

Mark (: 43:49

Yeah, you mentioned it in the book and I was so happy to see that, that the dinner table conversation and the physical ailments we are out there talking about, but the mental ailments can do just as much damage and obviously do do as much damage and they need to be equated in our society so that it's brought to the outside and to the surface where people can actually not feel like they have to hide.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 43:54

Mm-hmm.

One of the points I make, I think fairly early on in the book, is that mental illnesses are contagious. It's that the environment created by someone with an untreated mental illness is just as dangerous as the environment where you have a contagious disease and don't quarantine. You have to prevent...

Mark (: 44:17

I remember coming right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 44:33

the illness from infecting others or affecting others, both. But, okay, let me go back to something that I did say in the book. The objective should be to get the patient the care they need. But my family's objective was keep the patient happy at all costs. And that's the way a lot of families operate.

Mark (: 44:38

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 44:58

They excuse the behavior, they deny the behavior, they just roll along with it and never stop to think, should we?

Mark (: 45:07

Mm-hmm. That touches on one of the questions that I was gonna talk about and you've started the ball rolling on that. Families, they take on the role of protector or peacemaker when dealing with mental illness, right? And so your family didn't wanna cause trouble and whatever the reasons chose the peacemaker part side of it and didn't really try to get your grandmother the help that she needed. There are...

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 45:08

So.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mark (: 45:28

Obviously, you know, in your mom's situation, was her and her sister. They didn't really communicate from what you were saying with each other about what they were experiencing.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 45:36

No, ⁓ this was just a big blind spot in the family. It was so accepted that nobody talked about it. Nobody questioned it. When my generation came along, and I mean, as we were children, we would say, but why does this happen? And those questions were never answered. It was mostly, well, that's just how she is.

Mark (: 45:41

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 46:01

That's really not an answer. And it's certainly not ⁓ a good course of action to just say, that's how she is. They were definitely following the path of least resistance, which is what families do. You know, it's not worth the drama to say no, so we give in. But the consequences of that are devastating.

Mark (: 46:07

Right.

Yes.

Right, right. And we're hurting, yeah, we're hurting everybody. Yeah,

we're continuing to hurt that person and ourselves. Have you spoken to your mom about her experiences with this? Has she been open with you about it?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 46:32

Right.

When I was doing the interview, my cousin, my father, my aunt, I gave them the straight story. I want to understand grandma's problems. With my mother, I wasn't sure how she would react. So I told her I was delving into family history. Turned on the recorder and the first thing she said was, so you want to know about my mother? He knew exactly what was going on. ⁓ And she was very honest.

Mark (: 47:00

guess.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 47:05

And that's why I have all the details that I do of before I was born. My aunt and my mother were very forthcoming with the history that they knew, but they never talked to each other.

Mark (: 47:07

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

either of them ever express a desire to want to get out and just leave the situation or to rebel against it and say, no, I don't want to just keep accommodating?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 47:27

My mother, whether this was just a natural part of her personality or a reaction to her mother, became very passive aggressive. She would find non-confrontational ways to tell her mother no. But they weren't directed toward the actual routine. So the anecdote I tell in the book is from her high school days.

She had this little shelf that had become cluttered and her mother said, you must clean this by the time you go to school tomorrow or I'm going to throw everything out by the time you get home. My mother went to bed that evening and realized she had not cleaned off this shelf. So she took out a lifelike rubber mouse that she knew her mother was afraid of.

and put it on the shelf knowing her mother would not touch that shelf as long as the mouse was there. So yeah, my mother had ways of making her displeasure known, but they were not direct and they did not create the change that she wanted. And she remained passive aggressive throughout her life. That was just her way of dealing or not dealing with things.

Mark (: 48:25

Yeah.

Yes.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 48:41

she was the youngest in the family. There was nobody that she could appeal to to help her in coping with grandma's routines. The last time my grandfather ran away from home was just before we moved from New York to North Carolina. And nobody's ever said anything because nobody ever would. But I'm sure that his running away from home that time had to do with losing

the support of my mother. She wasn't going to be nearby anymore. And like I said, that was the last time of three that I know of that he ran away from home.

Mark (: 49:16

Did he ever stay? Did he stay away the last time?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 49:19

No, he came back.

And he always did. The only reason I know about it is that I answered the phone when he called my mother. And then she told me, you cannot tell grandma that he called. I didn't know he had run away from home until my mother told me that. So, yeah, nobody had good ways, good tools of resisting her.

Mark (: 49:33

you

you

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 49:44

My aunt probably was the best equipped because she also had a very strong personality. She was more confrontational, although I don't want to make it sound like she was the same cast iron bitch as my grandmother. She wasn't. She was a very wonderful person and also very talented. But she was the one who seemed best equipped to deal with grandma and even she couldn't.

Mark (: 50:06

I find that when I look on both sides of my, parents and their families and generationally and cousins and then their relatives growing up, There was some form of mental illness on both sides of the family. So it's almost like mental illness. You can't escape it almost. To some degree, I think it's there to some degree. What do you think?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 50:24

Yeah

Nobody gets

out of childhood totally unscathed.

Mark (: 50:32

Yeah, right? Nobody gets

out alive here, right?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 50:35

The difference is how much support did you have as a child getting through those things? But even if you yourself don't develop a mental illness in response to what your upbringing gave you, you're still going to have that post-traumatic stress of my parents weren't able to parent me appropriately and therefore I have

stress from the trauma. Yeah.

Mark (: 51:02

Mm-hmm.

Did that come out as anxiety

for you at different times or not necessarily?

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 51:09

⁓ I have developed anxiety

in the last few years, but really depression was the result. And even with the depression, if you go through, as I did, 59 years of life, being autistic but not knowing that, that in itself can cause depression. You know you don't fit in, but you don't know why.

Mark (: 51:17

Mm-hmm.

were.

Yeah, there's, I mean, we're almost out of time, but there's so much more to talk about in your book, and that's one of the areas to talk about. What I...

did want to mention was the senility part. You have in your book, wrote, senility had in many ways been a blessing to grandma. She had forgotten all her routines bit by bit. Her anxieties and compulsions had disappeared. She was just a little old lady frail and white haired sitting in a wheelchair. For the first time in my life, I saw her hands uncovered, right? So she was not who she wasn't. That was my exact experience with my mom because she developed dementia. And I think it's weird for some people when I tell people that

The last couple of years for my mom were some of my favorite years with my mom.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 52:17

I can understand that.

Mark (: 52:19

she did not suffer and she suffered so much. She was so free and it was such as somebody who very much inherited or mirrors my mom in many ways, with the OCD, it was such a huge lesson to me, that she wasn't aware and she just kind of like everything just kind of went away and it's like she still was all right, you know, it was such a great lesson.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 52:44

The caregivers at her nursing home loved her. They thought she was warm and affectionate. She always smiled. She became less and less verbal. And by the time I saw her the last time, she was completely nonverbal. But they talked about how she just loved chewing on a pork chop bone. And the idea of my grandmother eating a pork chop was...

Mark (: 52:58

Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 53:11

I mean, aside from any kosher background, just the idea that she ate food that came, that was prepared out of her sight and that she had a variety of choices. I thought that was wonderful for her, but she wasn't able to enjoy that contrast. I'm glad she enjoyed the sensory experience of eating because for decades she could take no pleasure in food.

Mark (: 53:16

Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 53:42

And yeah, just knowing that she could find some happiness somewhere was thrilling for me, even though I've never mentioned the pork chop story to anybody. But that was, to me, that was in some ways a gratifying moment that she could have some normalcy, even if it came late in life.

Mark (: 53:51

We have it here.

I get a little chills as you're telling me this because it's so what I experienced with my mom and she was always just a beautiful, sweet, caring person, but she was burdened and with being unburdened by the dementia was, yes, the dementia was a horrible thing and eventually it took her life but.

It was something that gave her some peace, I feel like. just the fact that she was able to be happy and not worry about what she touched and where.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 54:28

Yes.

Right.

Mark (: 54:33

and then her fingers were in her mouth. mean, it was just to watch, to see the things that she never let herself do and now she was able to do. And that was celebratory for me. And again, great lesson for me as someone who continues to try to manage every day and learn from her modeling, she wasn't aware of it, whether she was modeling for me.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 54:58

Well, it also shows the extent to which a mental illness distorts personality. I think my grandmother would have been somewhat domineering anyway. There's there are a few hints that her family saw her as having what at the time would have been called too strong a personality for a woman. You this was the 1920s. Yeah, so that's right. But.

Mark (: 55:21

Well, right, that's distorted in and of itself.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 55:28

I think she would have been a warmer person, a kinder person, if she had not been mentally ill. I know she crocheted and I have the impression she would crochet gifts for neighbors. know, somebody having a baby, those sorts of things. Which shows an innate goodness that was then trapped.

Mark (: 55:48

Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 55:55

in this cage of OCD routines.

Mark (: 55:58

It's exactly right and a point that I wanted to mention too. It's exactly right because these mental illnesses steal from us. they're delusional. They're not real things, but they steal from our everyday joy and experiences in life. I know personally speaking, when I finally was able to learn to manage certain points,

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 56:08

Yes.

Mark (: 56:22

I'm an artist, I used to paint a lot, and I used to see everything around me as a painting. And that stopped because I was so obsessed with the things that were obsessing that when I was finally able to come out of that place and see the sky and think of a painting and like, my goodness, I haven't thought like that forever. It changes you as a person and it takes from you.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 56:25

Mm-mm.

Mark (: 56:50

know, mental illness is not anything to be ashamed of. It's something that we need to shine a light on more and more and people need to feel comfortable to go get themselves help and to talk about it. And that's what I made a decision. I didn't have to talk about any of this stuff. Anxiety is the OCD with anybody. But I felt like this was a platform and an opportunity to give people

the courage to do it because it's no negative reflection on me. I'm just a person. Think what you want. This is who I am. This happened to me, right? I don't care what you think about me, but this is my truth. And so if me voicing my truth can help somebody else, then man, how valuable is that? And by you writing this book and talking about this stuff, I am so grateful for you. I couldn't wait to talk to you today. I'm...

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 57:17

Drive.

⁓ thank

you.

Mark (: 57:36

Yeah, I still want to talk to you more. Maybe we'll come back another time and continue the conversation. We could talk about other aspects of it, but I'm just, it really is, ⁓ it's, it's, ⁓

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 57:40

Sure.

Mark (: 57:47

I don't know. I'm sorry. It's getting me emotional a little bit. It's just a really, really heavy thing and so important that we talk about it because even family members I know too that run away from it or they tell you, know, enough, get over it.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 57:58

Yes.

One of the things that I'm noticing in social interactions, but especially in book signings, is that when people hear not just what the story is about, but the dynamics at play, they want to read the book. It's a good story. I will acknowledge that. But it has more to do with this book might relate to their own problems. And I think that

Mark (: 58:20

now it is. It's really...

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 58:29

voice, that authentic storytelling by people who've been there is so important. It's the same idea as representation. Somebody that you can connect with. The essay I wrote, The Deep Well of Depression, ⁓ talks about how isolating mental illness can be. And if you can make connections

Mark (: 58:38

Mm-hmm, exactly.

Yes.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 58:54

That's how you get out of that isolation. So that's the main reason for telling the story is, yes, it's an interesting story. think it adds something to the literature on OCD because my psychiatrist told me, this is a unique story. People don't do this. But more than that, it's to help others. I mean, that's why I went into special education. That's my job is making a difference for others.

Mark (: 58:58

thousand percent.

Yeah, of course. That's at your heart. That's who you are.

That's right. That's right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 59:23

And that's what this

is supposed to do. That's what the purpose of the French court is.

Mark (: 59:28

Well, Lauren, you give people permission to live as who they are by writing this book, speaking about it, making that point. You give people permission and you give them the opportunity to go and take agency over their own lives. And I think that biggest point that you just made about reaching out to others, that was always the guidance that I got to have a community.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 59:42

Right.

Mark (: 59:50

Even if there were moments when I felt like I didn't want to leave the house, I felt just couldn't move because I was physically uncomfortable. I wasn't afraid to leave the house. I was just physically uncomfortable. And you know, I was just like, no, I have to do this. I have to do this. You put yourself into these situations. Nobody has to know about it. You could be sitting there and your mind could be freaking out, right? But the more you connect with others, the better you are because you're not inside your own head. it's...

Boxing saved me, exercise saved me. I just become completely enthralled and that hour in a boxing gym doing box fitted, that was my time where everything went away. And so things like that, being healthy, active and being around people. ⁓

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:00:31

The artwork that I do, I call myself a crafty crone because I have so many little crafts and arts activities that I enjoy doing, but that serves that purpose for me. It's a way to focus my mental energies that isn't dwelling on the illness part. It's healthy, it's constructive, and it creates a sort of meditative...

Mark (: 1:00:34

You

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:00:56

mindset in which I can be still and understand what's happening outside of me and how it's affecting me on the inside without actually sitting there and mulling it over. It's just, I find exercise does the same thing. I use an exercise bike and you're not thinking about anything else except moving your body. Sometimes just surviving the workout session.

Mark (: 1:00:57

does.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:01:27

I mean,

that stillness carries over. Which is the value of meditation anyway.

Mark (: 1:01:33

Exactly. That's, know, and I do, last thing I'll say is I do remember early on in the process, whenever I was distracted doing something, like if I was cleaning or something, like cleaning the bathroom, I would realize, that was 15 minutes where I didn't feel this way. All of a sudden your body relaxed. And then as soon as you thought about it, the tension or whatever would come back to me. But I'm like, ⁓ that's interesting. So I started to clue into that early without really necessarily understanding what it was about yet at that point, which I came to understand. But.

Lauren, this has been amazing. I can't thank you enough for coming on today. I can't thank you enough for writing this book and just for being here in this world. Thank you so much.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:02:08

⁓ thank you so much.

well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm glad it touched you. And I really appreciate having this opportunity to share more of myself with others. Always with the hope that it makes something better.

Mark (: 1:02:28

Absolutely. Well it's my pleasure to be able to pass along your message and I hope that people will tune in and spread the word because this is a mental illness is a major major problem in our country and world but certainly in our country it's a major problem and the more we talk about it the better off we'll all be. So thanks again for your time. I wish you all the best. My pleasure.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:02:43

Yes.

And yes. All right, well, thank you.

Mark (: 1:02:55

have a great day.

Lauren Henry Brehm (: 1:02:56

You too.

Mark (: 1:02:59

Thanks.