Geneen Roth: What kind of child is that? A child who is irrelevant, a child who is damaged, a child who doesn’t matter. What was painful now was that I had installed those lies—and they had become the perceptual lens through which not only did I see myself, but I saw everything else. And that is something I could do something about.
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Geneen Roth, the author of 11 books, including the New York Times bestseller Women, Food, and God. Geneen is an expert at helping people look deeply at what drives emotional eating and what drives us as human beings. Through her retreats and workshops, she’s helped thousands of people step out of exhausting cycles of control, shame, and self-judgment, and discover something far more lasting and fundamental.
We could call it peace. Geneen Roth has now written a new book. I have to say, it’s my favorite of all her books. It’s called Love Finally: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food. Friends, stay with us.
Geneen Roth, welcome.
Geneen Roth: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m so happy. I’m so happy to be here. I’m so happy to be with you, Tami.
Tami Simon: Introduce to our listeners Love Finally and what drove, for you, the writing of this new book.
Geneen Roth: Well, I knew for a long time that my heart was really shut to my mother. I felt like underneath all the work I had done—which was years and years and years of therapy, and almost all of it on my relationship with my mother, and of course, the way I turned on myself from internalizing the messages that I thought she had given to me—I worked on that. It hadn’t actually opened up, and I didn’t want to die hating my mother. Just didn’t want to die hating my mother. I’m getting up there, and she’s also getting up there. She’s 97 this year, and I realized there’s just got to be a way here, because I also realized that as much as I felt like I hated my mother, and I hated hating my mother, I also loved hating my mother, because I felt like it gave me a special place—a badge of being an abused daughter of a narcissistic, neglectful mother. Many therapists had said to me, “You don’t ever have to talk to her again.”
So in an attempt to open that up, I started writing Love Finally. Also, meeting the mentor that I talk about in Love Finally, Coco—I don’t even know how to describe it. She just gobsmacked me with telling me that what was going on with me now was not about my mother at all. And so those two things came together: the desire not to die hating my mother, and also realizing that it was about something I hadn’t considered.
Tami Simon: Now, Geneen, you and I have known each other—we were talking about this—for something like three decades, and I’ve watched you study with many different spiritual teachers and explore lots of different growth modalities. What happened in meeting Coco that was the big new shift and realization for you?
Geneen Roth: All the things I had done—and I want to say that, because I list them in Love Finally, all the modalities and all the current trending modalities—I had done all of that, and they hadn’t moved the needle for me. I think maybe I just wasn’t ready. It’s hard to know, Tami.
When I met Coco, I was both exhausted from the self-rejection that I was heaping on myself. It’s exhausting to hate yourself. I was ready to see if it was possible to let it go. I had a lot of cynicism about that, because I believed with every single modality I had tried, “Oh, this is it. This is it. This is it.” I can finally do that—including so many meditation practices. I had done them all, hoping that I was going to pop over into the dharmakaya, at least for a little while during this lifetime. Hadn’t happened.
And when Coco—who’s now 87, wasn’t six years ago when I met her—sort of wobbled onto my friend’s deck, because my friend Lizzie had hosted her for the afternoon. Lizzie had told me she’s a walking love field, and I was like, “Yeah, right, give me a break.” And then it was, “Well, okay, who doesn’t want to meet a walking love field?”
So I volunteered that day on Lizzie’s deck—it was a bunch of us—to work with Coco, and she pointed out to me within about two minutes what was going on with me and my mother. I told her that my mother beat the shit out of me, that my mother left pretty much every day, wasn’t home, only thought of herself. I mean, I gave her the whole thing. And she said, “Yeah, I understand, and this is not about your mother. This is about what you concluded about yourself about your mother. You’re seeing the world as your wounds are.” She also added one sentence that stuck with me: “All you ever experience is who you’re being to yourself.”
And I thought, “Okay, I’m willing to see if this is going to do anything for me.” I had given up on myself because one of the conclusions—and she points to conclusions—was that it’s not possible for me. I’m doomed. I’m a failure. I’m damaged. Something’s wrong with me.
Tami Simon: What would you say, Geneen, to that person who’s listening and saying, “Wait a second, you can’t erase these horrible abusive wounds that I’ve experienced in my life. We can’t pretend that didn’t happen. It’s just perception.” What would you say to help that person track along with us here?
Geneen Roth: I would say: something happened. My mother dragged me across the floor by my hair. My mother beat the shit out of me. My mother didn’t really want to be a mother. It was an awful time with her.
And what I am saying to myself… Let’s just say when she dragged me across the floor by my hair, or when I’d see her coming at me with her fists, or when she’d leave every afternoon as I stayed and I watched her get dressed—her jacket, then her skirt, then her stockings—and, “Where are you going, Mom?” “None of your business.” “What are you doing, Mom?” “None of your business.” “What time will you be home, Mom?” “Why do you want to know?” And then she’d turn to me and say, “Stop asking me questions. Go to your room. Go do anything.” And pretty much: get out of here.
Did that happen? Yes. And she actually now says, “Yes, that happened.”
What was most painful was how I interpreted that. First of all, there was the feeling—what I felt, and not feeling like I could feel those feelings then at all. They were unbearable, really unbearable. And the conclusion that I came to about myself: what kind of child would be left every day by her mother, would get beaten by her mother? What kind of child is that? A child who is irrelevant, a child who is damaged, a child who doesn’t matter.
I understood through Coco that what was painful now was that I had installed those lies—never true, but unavoidable conclusions—and they had become the perceptual lens through which not only did I see myself, but I saw everything else. And that was what was so painful. It was that I approached everything with that lens. And that is something I could do something about now. Could I do something about what happened in my childhood? No. Could I name, feel, and become aware of what I was constantly telling myself for 70 years without even realizing? These are really subconscious, these conclusions.
Tami Simon: You mention in Love Finally that you went through this process—and you’re talking about it here—of feeling what happened to you as part of the working-through process. You couldn’t skip over that. And you compare it to eating a box of nails. I want to talk about that, because in doing inner work, working with a mentor who says, “Let’s go back, let’s feel—what are you feeling right now as this comes up in you right now?”—for me, I wouldn’t say a box of nails. I might say something like I swallowed a cheese grater, which is similar. And I’m like, “Okay, now I’m gonna sit here and feel that I swallowed a cheese grater.” Tell me about your journey and your capacity to do that as part of the healing path.
Geneen Roth: Well, first of all, it’s not that you feel it and you get down there into the feeling of it and you just stay there. You feel it—and I want to back up for a second. What Coco had said to me was, “You think this is about your mother, but it’s about you.” And I also didn’t like that at all. No matter what I brought to her, she’d say to me, “It’s not about them. It’s about you.” And I’d say, “No. No, no. Uh-uh. No. Forget that. I’m the universal exception here. This is not about me, this is about them. It’s their fault.”
So that was one thing I had to accept: okay, this is about me and what I concluded.
In terms of the feeling of it—feelings come and go. They don’t stick around unless you utterly glom onto them, elongate them, tell a story about them. So in terms of doing this, I would feel—let’s just say that situation with my mom, with me watching her leave every day, feeling abandoned and valueless. I’d tune into that. I’d feel that.
But let me back up for a second, because I forgot to say: something currently would remind me of that. That’s how I got to it. A friend wouldn’t answer a text, let’s just say. And I’d notice—and this is what got me interested in this work to begin with—that I noticed the same conclusions I’d had as a kid: “I’m not worth it. I’ve been abandoned.” These came up in tiny little situations. In a little situation with a bank clerk on the phone, or not getting a text answered—that same conclusion would come up.
So I’d go back to an early situation where that had happened, and then I’d feel it. But then it wouldn’t stay there. I would feel it, and because I’d never really allowed myself to feel it—Tami, I mean, I hit pillows. I did gestalt work. I did parts work. I mean, I really did everything. And I thought I had felt everything. But there was still this: when it was connected to these conclusions I’d made about myself, I realized I hadn’t really let myself go as far as I could.
But once I did, the very next question was: “And what did you conclude about yourself when you felt that way?” And that was very helpful for me—to realize I could see myself with the eyes of, you know, Ram Dass calls it loving awareness. You can call it awareness itself. I could see myself there as awareness, just sitting on my mother’s bed, and see what I had concluded about myself. That was very helpful.
So I went from the feeling to the conclusion. Not quickly—I didn’t rush it. Sometimes doing this would take me 20 minutes. But 20 minutes isn’t really that long when I think of the years I’d spent wallowing in that feeling without realizing I was wallowing in it. And then seeing the conclusion I’d decided or made up from it—which was utterly my own creation. That was the other part: realizing I made it up. It happened, and then I created the conclusion. Because my mother left every day, my interpretation of her leaving was that I was worthless. And that became the lens through which I saw everything.
And once I saw the feeling and the conclusion, it started unwrapping. Was it any less painful, that time of chewing nails? No. Did it really help me to see—oh my God—I have been seeing… I mean, Matt, my partner of now 40 years, could do the littlest thing and I’d immediately go to that, while knowing that he really loves me. This is not my mother we’re talking about, but I could still look at him with suspicion, and what I call in the book is: he just snookered me. I’ve been snookered. I’ve opened my heart to this person who doesn’t love me.
So it was the process that helped.
Tami Simon: And I want to talk more. You summarize it in the book as this six-step method—six steps to freedom—that you learned in your work with Coco. But before we get there, you mentioned that your friend introduced Coco as a walking love field. The thought occurs to me that when we’re in the presence of a walking love field—whoever that might be—we can do all kinds of discovery work that might be hard to do on our own. It’s as if they’re lending us their love field as we explore.
Geneen Roth: Well, I think that’s true, but not only that is true—I think both are true. You know, I ask myself: what would have happened if I had never met Coco? Her generosity, and the fact that she had pretty much dropped her defensiveness—what she calls the “me-person”—there was no defensiveness. I mean, I’ve watched her over the years. She’s never complained about being blind. When she had COVID and all of that, she continued to be a love field. That was important to me.
But the questioning itself is really what’s done it. Look, I’ve been with a man for 40 years who told me when I first met him that he was going to love me like no one ever had—and he did, and he has, and he still is. So in many ways, he’s a love field. Did it rub off on me? Well, yes and no. It kind of did. I still would wake up every day with, “Something’s wrong, and who’s to blame?” And mostly it would be about myself.
So I think actually doing the work is what happens in the field of love.
Tami Simon: So you offer these six steps to freedom. Step one: recognizing you’re triggered—and you’ve already talked about that. Matt could do something, a friend could do something, the bank teller could do something. Okay, I think most people get that. But here’s step two: “It’s about me. It’s not about them.” And you say this is the step where our righteous indignation falls apart. And I think this is also where a lot of people might stop listening. “What do you mean it’s about me? It’s not about me. It’s about them.”
Geneen Roth: I had to fall on the sword of this step I can’t even tell you how many times.
You know what else I’ll say? It takes a while to even realize you’re triggered sometimes. You think, or I think, anybody would feel the same way. This isn’t a trigger; this is obviously justified.
In the book, in the chapter called “Girlfriends,” I talk about my friend Christine, who stopped talking to me and ghosted me the day I got back from radiation from breast cancer. The first thing I did—I didn’t tell anybody, not even Matt—because I was so convinced that what she was seeing in me was the underbelly of what I was most ashamed of, what I tried to hide from every living person in the whole world, even though my books—I sometimes feel like in my books I’ve pulled up my dress and I’m showing everybody my panties. It just seems to be my mission in life to say things that people don’t want to say. However, I was ashamed of myself. I felt like something was really wrong with me.
As I started telling people what had happened, they all blamed Christine. “Oh my God, how could she? It’s brutal, it’s horrible. What kind of friend? What was she thinking? She’s really messed up.” So the constant feedback I got was, “It is about her. It’s actually about her. It is not about you.”
And when I told Coco about it—this was during one of my first sessions with her—I said, “My best friend ended our relationship after 20 years.” And Coco said something like, “Oh, poo.” And I was like, “Oh, poo? Excuse me. That’s something you say to somebody who burns the meatloaf. This is not something you say to somebody whose best friend stops talking to them after breast cancer. It is absolutely about her.”
And she said to me, in the sweetest but fiercest way—even though she didn’t sound fierce—”No, sweetheart, this is about the experience that you’re having about yourself because she ended the relationship.” And I kept saying, “I’m the universal exception to this. This is about her. This is not about me. You have to change the rules right now.”
“No. It’s about the perception you’re having about yourself.”
And I just—no. You know? And the same with my mother. How could you say this? My mother should be flogged, whatever. In fact, I say this in the book: I once looked up “most awful mothers,” and Charles Manson’s mother came up, because I was convinced I had one of the most awful mothers in the world. Charles Manson’s mother came up—she traded him for a can of beer—and I thought, “Okay. All right. My mother is not up there.” But she’s still pretty awful, and it’s still about her.
So it took—I don’t know what to call it, Tami. Coco kept saying to me, “It’s the way you’ve turned against yourself that’s hurting you. It’s what you believe about yourself, how you’ve rejected yourself, how you’ve internalized what Christine did, and how that comes up with the conclusions you had about yourself.” And I know how hard this is—I spent a lot of time with my arms crossed saying, “No, you’re wrong.”
But I think because I knew—really, really knew—how harsh I was with myself, and that all my years of eating disorders were about that—how I turned against myself—and that question of, is it possible for me ever to feel differently about myself? I’ve done all this work, and I’m still doing this. So I kept being willing to continue, and to see that what Coco was saying was true. It was about the experience I was having of myself. It was about me.
Matt will often say—the way he explained this to somebody is: “You know, the same thing can happen to both of us. One person will have a completely different reaction than I will, so it really is about me.”
Tami Simon: Okay, so you became clear that what you concluded about yourself from these early woundings—and the woundings throughout your life—really was about you. How did you change those perceptions? I think a lot of people have done the work of realizing “I decided I was unworthy, I’ll never deserve love,” et cetera. But actually changing out of that—what shifted that for you?
Geneen Roth: Really good question. I can tell you what doesn’t shift it: affirmations and pretending that everything’s okay. That is like putting sugar on shit.
What changed it for me—this is where the so-called spiritual meets the psychological. What changed it is actually seeing what I was doing to myself. Just getting it, naming it, feeling it, naming the conclusion, and understanding—this is the next step—that it was a lie.
There was no way that kid sitting on the bed watching her mother leave was worthless. Or, for example—and this is something that has been branded in my mind—when my mom told me she was getting divorced. She hadn’t told my dad yet. I was the first person she told. She called me into her bedroom. I was 11. “We’re getting divorced.” I started to cry. She said, “Go to your room. All you can ever think about is yourself. Leave.” And so that feeling of “I’m selfish, I only think of myself” also got branded in there.
When I went back to that moment of believing, and realized I had been carrying “I’m selfish” with me ever since, I could see that when Christine ended her relationship with me, that’s what came up: “I’m selfish. I was a terrible friend. I never asked her about herself”—which was not true.
So I got to see those were lies. And in the act of seeing that the things you are convinced about and have spent your whole life believing—”I’m unworthy, I’m a piece of shit, I’m damaged, I’m not enough, I’m too intense, I’m overwhelming”—there’s a whole basket of conclusions, let’s face it, that we all go around with. When you name them and see them as lies, and feel them with both the kindness and the awareness, the presence of love starts entering in. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask me why. If anybody had said this to me—what I’m saying to you—I would’ve said, “Oh, right. Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that,” because of my conclusion that this was impossible.
But the more I named the feelings and the conclusions, and really got that they were lies—that I had made them up—the more it opened. My mother did what she did. I took what she did, interpreted it, and concluded something about myself that I installed and that became a background program running throughout my entire life. As I saw that process—felt it, named it, saw the conclusion, and saw that it was a lie—it slowly started to open, with the presence of awareness. That is what saw it.
So it wasn’t the big me coming to myself. Coco would say, “Be the one you’re waiting for.” And I’d roll my eyes: “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that in about 9,000 therapy sessions.” No. I don’t want to be the adult me coming to the child me—now we’re reifying the child. It was the over and over again of doing this—seeing and feeling the feelings, seeing the conclusion, and getting that it was a lie. I think it was really important to get that it was a lie.
Tami Simon: You mentioned, Geneen, that your books are you lifting your skirt up, so to speak—you’re confessional, you’re truthful. So I know what you’re saying now is from your own direct experience. Here you are, turning 75 this August. Would you say the programming—”I’m a worthless piece of whatever”—has been de-installed? Or that you may encounter it and now have a way to work with it?
Geneen Roth: I would not say it’s de-installed. I don’t think it gets de-installed until you drop the whole historical conditioning of being a person. I really don’t think it gets de-installed then. I could be wrong—I mean, I’ve questioned Coco about it. I think it’s been installed, and then it gets lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter.
Just this morning I woke up kind of grumpy, and, you know, “Something’s wrong.” But then I was able to see it, and I said to Matt, “You know, it’s hard to be a miscreant right now, given the love that really is coming toward me from the publication of the book, but I can do it. I can be a miscreant.” Like, I know it’s a challenge, but it’s a task I can rise to. I can see through that lens one more time.
But what happens much faster now is that I see that I’m doing that, and I stop believing my thoughts—most of the time. Not all the time. Sometimes I’ll walk around in this little huddled “nothing’s right.” But when I see it and I question the thoughts—you know, I told you in another conversation, Tami, that my go-to is Nisargadatta, and I listen to recordings of his teachings a lot. He’ll say things like, “It’s not you that’s the problem, it’s your mind.” And when I remember that, I think, “Okay. It’s my mind. It’s the conditioning. I’m just going along with my mind.” It’s like I’m watching the scroll at the bottom of a news broadcast. I’m just watching it.
Tami Simon: Now, Geneen, not many people would use the word “miscreant” in the middle of a conversation about Love Finally, so I really appreciate that.
Geneen Roth: Yeah.
Tami Simon: Now, your mother is 97, and she may not be able to listen to all of your recordings about Love Finally, but she might. She’s hearing all of this, but you’re in a very different place now in your relationship with her. Tell us a little bit about how your relationship has evolved.
Geneen Roth: This is the most amazing thing of all. Even my brother is amazed, and he rolls his eyes at anything—even if it’s labeled organic, he rolls his eyes. He’s just a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. But both of us are like, “Oh my God, this is our mother.”
So what happened with my mother is that as I started changing—I don’t know what word to use—what I was emanating, the frequency, the energy was softening, opening. And I imagine that what happened is that she didn’t feel the need to defend herself. She wasn’t always braced for the next slam. It’s not like I was ever mean to her, because I had been taught to be afraid of my mother, so I’d never say anything critical—except the time, which I write about, where she had this thing about giving me gifts and then asking for them back. The last thing she asked for back after giving it to me was a necklace, and I said to her, “You can’t have that. Your neck is too fat.” And Tami, I was so proud of myself. I was already 73 when this happened. I had never talked to my mother like that.
But as I started opening to myself and softening, and dropping the absolute conviction that those conclusions were true—and also realizing they were about me, no longer about her—she started opening and softening too. Our relationship started changing so that she began saying things like, “You are the diamond of my life. I am so proud of you. I am so proud of your writing.”
And I said to her in the last six months, “Mom, you’re not going to be so proud when Love Finally comes out and you see that I’ve gone through almost every single thing that happened.” And her recent text to me—because she read an article that came out, an excerpt that featured her abuse in it—she texted me. My mother’s on Facebook and Instagram and texts. And she said to me, “You could hate me for the rest of your life, and I will love you unconditionally no matter what.”
Tami, those words have never, ever been uttered from my mother’s mouth. And then the next text: “Nobody knows as well as I do how low I can go. Please forgive me.”
She had asked for my forgiveness before, and I write about that. When she first started asking, it was like, “No, she’s probably not telling the truth, she just wants to die at peace, and I don’t even know what to forgive”—because the amount of transgressions went from here to the mountain next to us. But I started getting that it was true. And she started changing. Our relationship is loving. It’s almost like a different person is inhabiting her.
Tami Simon: You write about how the forgiveness work you did was forgiving yourself for believing the conclusions you came to. Have you also forgiven your mother? Have you actually forgiven her?
Geneen Roth: It feels like there’s nothing to forgive at this point. Once I started forgiving myself for turning against myself—and you know what, Tami, I’m a work in progress; this is not a done deal over here—that’s actually when the word “miscreant” first came to me. Yeah. So I have, over and over and over, had to turn toward myself with kindness and love. And so my first response now, when I see I’m doing that—and sometimes it’s hard to see—is forgiveness. Because I’m so used to: “I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have done that. What was the matter with me? Why did I do that?” Then I have to catch myself.
And that’s where—I would say that awareness and forgiveness are synonymous. I don’t really see that there’s much of a difference there. I tried a lot of forgiveness meditations. I did them for years: “I forgive you for everything you’ve said or done.” Didn’t work. But this worked, and is working—I should say “is working,” because I’m still at times really unkind with myself. So I just notice it and then I stop.
Tami Simon: The subtitle of Love Finally—Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food—what got my attention: I sat up straighter as I was reading it when I got to the section called “Eating My Words,” toward the end of the book, where you were, dare I say, revisionist about your own eating guidelines and teachings on intuitive eating. What do you want to clarify about your teachings on that?
Geneen Roth: Thanks for asking me that, Tami. Someone called me either the godmother or the grandmother of intuitive eating—I’m hoping it was the godmother, but I’m old enough to be a grandmother, so I’ll take it. I started this after I’d been dieting and bingeing, gaining and losing what I call in the book the equivalent of a small horse in pounds—or a baby grand piano. That’s how many pounds I gained and lost.
So I started this whole intuitive eating journey with myself by stopping dieting and telling myself I could eat whatever I wanted. And so I went for it. I ate a couple of weeks of raw chocolate chip cookie dough, and pretty much those first couple of years were nothing but sugar—because for years, almost two decades, I hadn’t been eating what I wanted, but what I was supposed to eat, and then bingeing on what I thought I wanted, which was really what I wasn’t allowed to eat without guilt.
So I taught people from that place. I created a set of seven eating guidelines, starting with “eat what you want.” Now, I revised that in the last ten years to “eat what your body wants.” But still, when people see those guidelines, they go back to what they wanted to eat that their mothers told them they couldn’t eat.
Like at one of my retreats, somebody had piled her plate with ten pancakes, and I asked her if she liked pancakes. She said, “No.” And I said, “Okay, so tell me about the ten pancakes.” And she said, “My mother told me I couldn’t eat pancakes. I wasn’t allowed. And this is revenge.” And I said, “Well, is your mother alive?” “No, she’s been dead for 10, 15 years.”
What I say in that chapter is that the guideline “eat what you want”—or even “eat what your body wants”—needs to have an adult home in order to be able to answer it. And most of the time, people with severe eating disorders get stunted at the time when their judgments about their bodies started—at ten, eleven, twelve—when the shame and the judgment began. And we think somehow that by going back and eating what we weren’t allowed to eat, or what our mothers told us we couldn’t have, we can revise and correct. No. It doesn’t happen like that.
It happens through having an adult home, and asking yourself, “What would this body really like now, from the perspective of now?” I’ve been teaching a set of guidelines that call on the kid in you—the eight-, nine-, ten-year-old. And the ten-year-old pretty much wants sugar or whatever she wasn’t allowed to eat, and oftentimes never grows up around food.
So I felt the need to say: this is how you grow yourself up. You get to be an adult. You occupy your own body. Most of us are disembodied, particularly when it comes to food. We’re not there. We’re not tasting, we’re not swallowing, we’re not letting ourselves get full. But it’s important to be present. That’s really what I’m talking about: presence.
Tami Simon: So the revision might be something like: eat what the healthy you in present time is intuitively drawn to?
Geneen Roth: No, forget that. Because then what comes up is sprouts and kale. And I don’t like sprouts and kale.
My term is: what’s in alignment with you right now? What do you need energy for now? What would take care of you? What would nourish you now?
For example, in the morning when I wake up, I’m not hungry—but I’ve tracked it, and I realize that unless I eat within the first hour of waking up, even when I’m still not hungry, I crash. I just feel my energy going out through my feet. And so I realize I need to eat something—an egg, a handful of nuts—within the first hour. That would be an example of eating in alignment with what I know to be true energetically for my body. “What would best take care of me now?” is the question you can ask yourself.
Tami Simon: Okay. And then another part of this—in preparing to have this conversation with you, I was reflecting on knowing you over these three decades and how much you’ve been through. I knew you when you were involved in the Bernie Madoff scandal and lost your entire life savings, and then wrote a bestselling book about it, Lost and Found. I was aware that you had a cancer diagnosis and successfully went through that, and your own journey of learning and deepening, and now connecting with you as you’ve met Coco, gone through this journey of really coming to a place of peace with your mom. And I’ve thought to myself, “Geneen has gone through so much that’s so hard.” I wonder how you see your life in retrospect—these really difficult initiations and how you’ve been dealt this hand and how you’ve played it.
Geneen Roth: I’d say there are many ways to look at that. One of them is: if you believe in reincarnation and floating around in the ethers before you’re born, and somebody said to me, “Okay, sweetheart, here’s your task for this lifetime. You go through X, Y, and Z. You have this one for a mother, this one for a father”—you know, my father was no piece of cake either, but someday I will write a book about him—”and you’re gonna lose your money, you’re gonna get cancer, you’re gonna gain and lose all those weights, and you’re gonna break four or five vertebrae in your back and not be able to move for six weeks. Do you sign up for this?” Yep. I do. I sign up for it.
So I feel like—one way to look at it is: I signed up for this. Well, apparently I must have, in some alignment kind of way. And I feel like, Tami, I am a tough nut to crack.
Tami Simon: You are.
Geneen Roth: I am a tough nut to crack. So whatever it takes, I’ll do it, because I have persistence and steadfastness and love for the journey itself. I feel like the process is the goal. So each step along the way is exactly what it is. What else is there to be doing with a life than this? Going through it so that other people will know that no matter what, they can go through it too. I want them to know that.
Coco once said to me, “Sweetheart, you do really well at slaying the dragons. It’s the gum on the bottom of your shoe that you seem to have a difficult time with.” And I think that’s true. Give me a catastrophe, Tami, and I will do really well. The Madoff thing was really big. But it—I’ll never be the same after that, because it taught me what enough is when I had nothing.
And going through what I went through with my mother has really been the other huge thing. It’s taught me that anything is possible. But how do you know that anything is possible unless you go through it? And I’m not saying everyone should sign up for hardships and go volunteer for suffering—enough comes your way without that. You don’t have to sign up for it. But it’s taught me everything.
So I feel like if I can do it, anybody can. I said that years ago about my weight: if I, the craziest person in the universe about food, body, and weight, can get to the other side, anybody can. Now I feel that about the relationship with my mother—and about losing your money and breaking vertebrae and all of it. I feel like there’s a fountain going on that I’m not aware of because I’m still so focused on the negative much of the time.
But if I can just allow that—if I can just be with this step and the next step—all these catastrophes have shown me how to do that: how to just be with what’s here instead of overlaying my story of “how terrible, how horrible it is, and I am” onto what actually is.
No mind, no problem. I’ve been just becoming more aware of the horror stories and the bad neighborhood of my mind, and deciding to get out of that neighborhood sooner rather than later.
Tami Simon: Geneen, here as we come to an end—we’re going to be broadcasting this conversation as a Mother’s Day special on Sounds True One. What would you say to that person who’s listening and says, “I’ve gotten some insight into how I can become more free in my relationship with my mother, based on these perceptions that I have”? Summarize it for them. Because they have a complex relationship, and they still feel upset about some of what they’ve inherited—the pain and trauma that came directly from their mom. It’s Mother’s Day.
Geneen Roth: I would say what I say to all the mothers who ask me, “How can I teach my daughter good self-care, to take care of themselves with food and with themselves?” And I would say: start with yourself.
It’s not about your mother anymore. It stopped being about your mother a long time ago. She might still be alive or she might be dead, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not about her. It’s about you. How can you work with yourself, become aware of yourself, be on your own side, be the one you’re waiting for? And when you’re not, realize that you’re not—and be kind to that, no matter what.
I talk about the field of allowing: allow what’s there. Non-resistance. Stop resisting those things that you think don’t want to be there—those beliefs. See that they’re there. Allow them with awareness. And be kind to yourself. I know “kind” is kind of a corny word, but: you are the one you’ve been waiting for.
Not forget your mother—I haven’t forgotten my mother. I’m going to be in New York for the first time on Mother’s Day in God knows how many years, and I’m really happy that I’m going to be there with her. However, it’s not about her. If I cannot be a mother to myself, there’s no way that anybody else can do it for me. And you can’t heal what you can’t feel. So to start with you is the best way.
Tami Simon: Geneen Roth. She’s written a new book—as I said, I think it might be my favorite Geneen Roth book yet, and that’s a lot to say. It’s called Love Finally: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food. Geneen, I always love talking with you. Thank you so much.
Geneen Roth: You’re incredible. My heart to yours. Thank you.
Tami Simon: Thanks, friends.
