Bonus: Dani's Family Secret

Published Apr 20, 2023, 10:00 AM

In this special bonus episode, the tables are turned as veteran journalist and podcast host Kimi Culp interviews Dani about her own family history and the secret at its core.

Well, here's something special I promised you all a while back in our final bonus episode before the eighth season of Family Secrets launches in just a few weeks. The tables are turned, and today I'm the guest. The wonderful Kimmy Cope, writer, motivational speaker, former OPRAH producer and host of the podcast All the Wiser is sitting in my seat today and asking all the questions about my family Secrets. I hope you enjoy our conversation. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Hello Danny, Welcome to Family Secrets.

Hi Kimmy, It's nice to be on Family Secrets.

Yes, yes, familiar territory for you. My intention for this conversation is really for this beautiful community you have built, your listening audience to know you a little deeper and yeah, hopefully find some pieces of themselves in stories that perhaps will here for the first time. And the origin story of Family Secrets in this podcast was you as a secret. And I know so many of your listeners are familiar, but for anyone who's listening and does not know that story of the life changing secret that you learned in twenty sixteen, can you briefly share?

Yeah? Absolutely so.

In twenty sixteen, my husband Michael was sending away for a DNA test, a home DNA test, and he asked me if I wanted to do it too, and I just, on a whim, said sure. It wasn't out of any real curiosity or you know, I could easily have said no, because I thought I knew everything that there was to know about my family and its ancestry and my origins, my ancestors.

But I went ahead and did it.

And when the results came back, I actually didn't even remember that I had done it, That's how insignificant it was to me. The results revealed to me that my dad hadn't been my biological father, the dad who raised me, and I.

Learned a lot.

I uncovered a great deal about secrets that my parents kept all their lives that I feel certain they intended to take to the grave with them, which they did after a lifetime of writing a bad secrets, or writing novels and memoirs of bad secrets, and always also feeling like something didn't totally add up, just something I felt slightly adjacent to myself. Somehow it all suddenly became.

Clear, and you described, you know, growing up having this really easy love for your father and just this deep adoration, where your mother was more distant at times, it was much more contentious. And you had even pondered that question, you know, is she my mom? Does she feel like my mom? I'm curious sort of, you know, you've described a sense of loneliness as a kid, wandering around the neighborhood, peering in windows, looking at families, large families with siblings, and so I know you were an only child, and I'm curious about Danny in the outer world versus your inner world and what that was like during that time.

So Danny in the outer world apparently looked like she belonged. People who I've enco it over the years, who knew me when I was a kid, are really shocked to learn how out of step I felt. And you know that I didn't feel that I belonged. You know, people I went to middle school with, people I went to high school with, all really professed shock about that, because I guess I had a kind of contained nature and I sort of looked to the part, but I felt really like a creature visiting from outer space. A lot of the time, I didn't feel like people really knew me, or that I really knew myself in many ways, and the environment of my home was so awkward and uncomfortable. One of the things I've really learned on you know, hosting this podcast is that what we experience as children, whatever the environment is of our home, we just think that that's the way it is, and that's normal, and maybe that's the way everybody lives. At a certain point, when I was probably in high school, I started realizing that that wasn't the case, and that the atmosphere in our home was markedly different from you know, my friends whose homes I would visit. It felt to me, and I think this has to do with my own extreme sensitivity, you know, just too behavior and tone and actions of others. It felt to me like it was a tinder box. It felt like it was always ready to just sort of explode. My parents were miserable with each other, and there was something in the way that each of them was with me, very different in the way that they treated me, But there was something that just didn't feel easy or comfortable.

You know, as we have this conversation, I've thought a lot about how your present work, this podcast included is deeply informed by your past. I think all of our work is. But I also from hearing you and how you talk about your son Jacob and your husband Michael, the deep love and connection that I hear in the family you've created. You know, I think so often in generational stories, we either repeat, or for lack of a better language, we write the wrong and create something very different. And that appears to me that you very much created that.

It certainly feels to me like the greatest achievement of my life that I didn't repeat and that I did create something different. And I do think that probably from the time that I was a teenager, I was forming myself in counter identification to my mom. I understood that she was somebody who very often put people off, chronically felt misunderstood, was very angry a lot of the time, this kind of just simmering, low level, ready to be dissed at the slightest notice. You know, the world had something against her in her mind, and she sort of built the life that she saw in a way like she felt that way about the world, and so the world reflected that back at her. And you know, I'm not trying to throw her under the bus. I have a lot more understanding of her now than I did when I was younger. But as a mother, she wanted me to be a certain way, and if I didn't conform to the way that she wanted me to be, which was essentially a reflection of her, then there was trouble if I couldn't do that.

And I'm sure and then for you it then said not enough and not enough for her right.

And something that's occurred to me recently, I've been thinking a lot about my father. The anniversary of his death was just last week, and always a time where he's very much on my mind. And because of his religiosity, I mean, it was really the defining characteristic of my father was that he was an Orthodox Jew. It's how he would have defined himself, I think, before any other way of defining himself. It was the landscape that he was brought up in, and you know, there were generations preceding him, you know, where that was the way they lived. And in order to please my father, I think my father would have loved me no matter what because he knew how to love, which was something that I think saved me in a lot of ways. But in terms of his approval, I had a really hard time being a good little Orthodox Jewish girl. If you had asked me, I think even when I was like a child, whether I thought that I would grow up and marry an Orthodox man and you know, have a whole bunch of Orthodox children and live that life, I think I would have known from a very early age that that wasn't going to be my path. And that was really problematic between my father and me, because that was the most important thing to him. So in a way I was sort of squeezed between both of my parents and failing them each with my mother because I was unable to be her perfect mirror, and with my father because I just wasn't that Orthodox Jewish girl.

That makes so much sense to me. And yeah, this idea of just the radical acceptance for you exactly as who you are and who you came into this world. So you mentioned being the anniversary of your father's death, and you know, as I research and as I told you, it's been such a joy and privilege to learn about you through your work. I see these sort of tempole moments in your life, and some of them are of deep suffering and trauma, and certainly the loss of your father. Your parents were in a car crash that killed your dad, and your mom survived. So for what you're comfortable sharing, what do you remember about that period, about that day and sort of how it shaped you.

That day I've described in my writing as the moment that divided my life into before and after. And when I wrote those words, I was probably in my thirties and I was writing about my twenties. I was writing about, you know, February nineteen eighty six, and I was young enough to not understand that lives contain more than one of these before and after moments if we live long enough. But for me, that was the first, and a huge one. I just want to preface what I'm about to say with I've been very aware lately that I recently had a big birthday and I turned sixty, which is still a complete shock to me. It was, you know, it was a big milestone birthday, and I entered the decade that my father died in. He was sixty four years old when he died, and My mother was sixty two when she was widowed, and my son is twenty three, which is the age I was when all of this happened, and I suddenly realized all of that recently that.

Wow, yeah, of all the ages and the pieces and.

Exactly like the perfect storm of that. And on family secrets it comes up often the whole idea of anniversaries and the anniversary of a loss through the anniversary of a shock. And you know, it's easy, I think to dismiss what that is, but the body remembers always, you know. So I might not remember on February twenty third of any given year that it's February twenty third, but my body remembers. I mean, I'll be out of sorts all day and then suddenly I'll realize what the date is and understand, you know, or I'll remember what the weather was like on that particular February day. So the main thing about that day and that time is that I was such a mess in my life. And also looking at my twenty three year old son now and seeing that he is not a mess, you know that he knows who he is, and he has courage of his own convictions and he's his own person. I wasn't that yet. I was really kind of unformed.

You know.

When I started teaching university, when I was around twenty nine or thirty years old, I remember looking around the workshop table I was teaching at Columbia University, and I looked around the table at these young women, these young Barnard and Columbia women, and I could identify. It was like this little game I played in my head, you know, the ones who never have let themselves get into so much trouble or never would have sort of like followed the path that I followed, and then the ones who would I could feel and see and pick them out, you know, and tried to mentor the ones I thought I could help.

But I had dropped out of college.

I was modeling and acting and doing TV commercials, or at least that's what I told myself I was doing. I did that for a while, but I was terrible at it.

If I was going to cast you for anything in life, knowing your deep soul and commercials, I love that.

Commercials like you know, for Coca Cola, you know, for York peppermint patties. I actually had to like jump up and down on a beach and say California loved New York with more chocolate. I mean, I was terrible and uncomfortable in my own skin and awkward. But because again going back to sort of mirroring my mother, a big part of the fuss that was made over me when I was growing up was the way that I looked and that I was a pretty little girl and I was a pretty teenager, and I kind of just went with that. I thought, well, I guess that's what I have to offer. I don't want to sound like I'm blaming anybody, because I'm not. Like I had a lot of longing for other things, but I didn't know.

Well, maybe that's the disconnect I just felt, because I know you right for your brilliant mind, and so much of that work is on the physical appearance, especially when you're young and youthful, and yeah, that's so interesting. You know, this expectation that you were beautiful and that people identified you with that, and it's perhaps there was some unconscious expectation around that to do something with that physical beauty.

Mm hm. Well, and that was complicated by the fact that that focus on my looks had a lot to do with my not looking to Iwish quote unquote, you know that that's what people were constantly, constantly saying, And so really what they were saying was that I didn't look like who I thought I was, or like my physical appearance was some sort of crazy, weird gift, like some sort of nutty fluke, that I looked the way that I looked, and I didn't look like my family, and instead I was, you know, very fair and had blue eyes and features. It just didn't look like, you know, anybody that I was surrounded by. So I think somewhere within that there was this hard kernel of confusion.

You've described as inner knowing, which I think when I hear you talk about it, it feels so relevant and real to me as I look back on my life, and you know, part of it, as you share, is was your physical appearance almost this whisper of your heart. Right, something's off and that subconscious knowing, and you've described with the discovery that your father was not your biological father, that it was almost as if the puzzle piece it all came into focus, all that little subconju the whisper of the heart and the mind. So yeah, I'm deeply curious about that and what your heart was saying to your mind.

I think that's that's where that disconnect that didn't enable me to really come to know myself when I was younger. I think that that's where it resided, because there was this feeling that I didn't belong and I didn't know. Why in the world would I feel that way? Why would I feel that way? I mean, I was the ultimate insider in terms of, you know, the Jewish world. My family had a lot of prestige in that world. My ancestors on my dad's side were just storied, legendary people. Well, why in the world would I feel like I didn't belong? Why would I go to a wedding or a bar mitzvah in my family and feel that I did not belong? Why were people constantly commenting in some sort of what was meant to be flattering way about my not looking Jewish, my not looking like where I come from. I mean, underneath that, I must have been hearing you're not one of us. What would happen is I would double down. Anytime somebody would say something like that to me, I would nicely bite back and I would say, oh, yeah, no, raised Orthodox, you know, went to a yeshiva, a Jewish day school, you know, kept a kosher home, never tasted bacon until I was a senior in high school. Had two sinks and two dishwashers. I mean really seriously kosher home, fluent in Hebrew. I would say all these things, like list them like a litany, which was my way of saying stop it, you know, stop it. Stop saying that. And after my discovery about my dad, a couple of years later, I was at a dinner, a big awards dinner that was honoring a friend of mine, and it was in the Jewish world. It was like sponsored by one of the Jewish newspapers, and I was there to you know, congratulate and cheer on my friend. My husband and I got there. It was a you know, fancy cocktail party attire, and it was in one of those old New York City hotels that has kind of cloudy glass behind the bar and like sort of modeled glass mirror. And I went over to the bar to get a drink, and I caught a glimpse of myself, you know, unexpectedly, and I was wearing a little black dress and had long blonde hair, and I looked the way I looked, and all of a sudden, I thought, oh, that this is what they were seeing. I mean, in this room, everyone would assume that I'm the wife of a Jewish man who's here, or they would have a story. It was plain as day.

But I.

Didn't see it, couldn't see it. It was too dangerous to see it. We believe what our parents tell us. We believe the stories that were told about ourselves from the time that were tiny, and those become our identities. And that was my identity, you know, when Inheritance came out, you know, which is the books that I wrote about this discovery and the secret. One of the first comments I saw was on my Facebook page, and it was from the wife of my seventh grade English teacher who I was friends with. Them. They were like one of those young, cool, young English teacher couples in high school. And I was always looking for my mentors. I was always looking for like somebody to take me in like a stray dog and just you know, make me part of their family. And this couple, Peter and Nancy Cowan, they were like that for me. And Nancy wrote on my Facebook page hashtag always wondered, you know, only child, older parents, physically so different from what I was supposed to look like and what my ethnicy he was supposed to be, so hashtag always wondered. So there was a part of me that was working, over time, always to try to figure out to belong. Yeah, I think there was a kind of profound anxiety that I couldn't recognize or label. I mean, I was well into my twenties before I even could define the word anxiety. But it ruled me, and it shaped that feeling of not belonging, not fitting in, not adding up being other. When that's the case and we can't supply a reason for it, then we turn it against ourselves. And that was the story of you know, I would call those sort of almost lost decades of my life. I mean, from the time that I was a child, through my adolescence and into my early twenties and culminated with a thunderclap and ended for all intents and purposes when my parents were in their car crash and my dad died, and it was a shock to my system that actually rebooted my system, you know, sort of reshaped my system, and was the very very beginning of my figuring out who I had always been but had never allowed myself to be.

Well, Yeah, and I the deep wounds and the reconciliation of your identity of belonging with the discovery that your father was not your biological father, It makes so so much sense, How much when you can textualize it with the decades before and the knowing, It just really to me just almost highlights how powerful and layered the wave of emotions must have been with the discovery. And you know, there's something that in the wake of that discovery about your family and your identity. You talk about you had a flight the next day that you're on the plane and you're sort of looking around and people are eating pretzels and peanuts and going about their business, and in your body, you were in crisis, almost looking around, How is how is everyone just going about their business. I had lunch with my mother in law days after her husband died, and I remember her having that experience. She turned to me and she said, it's just so bizarre. You know, people were going about having and meanwhile she is sitting there experienced this wave of disbelief and grief and heartbreak that is unbearable in the world is just moving by. So that scene was really powerful for me. But what you spoke to, which I think is really important to this community, is that the specific discovery about your father was unrelatable and unrecognizable to people. Whereas the death of your father, the car crash, some of these other moments you've had in life. When Jacob was sick are immediately there's the sense of empathy and understanding. But this certain piece discovery that was heartbreaking to you was harder for people to grasp, to empathize with, to identify or understand. And you know, for a podcast that is about secrets of all shapes and forms, and you know, the nuance of what a secret can be. I just thought it would be great to hear what was helpful and what was not, so as we moved through the world and people share their secrets, we can show up better for them.

I love that.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much I've learned along the way in this regard that feeling of you know, happen to be your peanuts And watching the in Flight movie, the thought that went through my mind is that is the experience of grief, of immediate grief is you know, how can the world still be turning? And there are so many ways in which I think we as human beings, we want to make it better for someone who's going through something, and if it makes us uncomfortable, we tend to fall prey to platitudes. I mean, we do that even with things that are relatable, like grief, like the loss of somebody like you know, death, will you know say things like you know she's in a better place, or we tend to often say something that's easy, that doesn't cost us very much, just to actually deal with our own discomfort that somebody else is suffering. And you know, one of the things that happened with my discovery and I thought about it even really early on too, because I know, I knew that I was going to write about it. I was aware that it was not instantly relatable, as you say, to feel sympathy or compassion for somebody who's lost someone very close to them is not a stretch. But this felt and I realized very quickly because I started almost immediately, I sprang into action, which is it tends to be my way when something's really hard, is I kind of go into fix it mode or research mode, or what can I do. And in that case, as we were moving through airports, and because of where we live, we had to make connecting flights, so you know, there were planes, there were airports, there were terminals, there was Starbucks, there was you know, there are hours to sort of observe people and also to talk to people. And I remember calling one of my aunts, my mother's older brother's wife, and I was calling them because I was trying to figure out whether anybody had ever known anything, you know, had my parents told anyone? How big a secret was this? Was this a secret that everybody was keeping and I was the only person who didn't know or did everybody not know? And did they not have that you know hashtag always wondered experience. And on the phone this happened as well with my mother's best friend, who I called, said you know, well, you know, whatever happened, Danny, your father still your father. And that was profoundly not helpful. I ultimately, over the course of years and a tremendous amount of thought and work and questioning and living with it and metabolizing and processing, absolutely feel that my father is still my father. But on the day, you know, within twenty four hours of discovering that in fact he was not. In point of fact, there was somebody else out there in the world who was my biological father that was a total stranger to me, and I had no idea that that had been the case until that day. That's not a helpful thing to hear. It made me enraged. I felt just absolute rage at the don't try to fix this for me right now. I'm trying to understand everything that I can possibly come to understand.

Well, what you say which is so powerful is this idea that we're sure about the past, or at least reasonably sure, and uncertain about the future, and that when you're past became completely uncertain, how disabling and wobbly, that nothingness almost on both sides, And again the reckoning and the knowing that in a whisper becoming real and proof. Then you're absolutely right. It's people's own discomfort with pain and suffering that we so often can't just sit with someone in it. But the idea of acceptance, you know, I see how hard this is. This is painful versus oh you're still you know, you're still part of the family, or everything worked out fine, right, This missive of that extraordinary grief and confusion and uncertainty and trauma that you were experiencing. It's minimizing something that was really significant.

Yeah.

I learned so much about human nature through that experience, and then through the writing of Inheritance and then the publishing of Inheritance, which meant that I was having many, many conversations with people, and you know, and everybody had different opinions, and the world really divided between people. Fortunately, most people who sat back and thought, huh, what would that be like? Let me see if I can imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and discover that everything that I had believed, my entire history, my memories, all need to be reordered now, and there's no one to ask about it. There's no one My parents were both gone. There was no one to sit down and say what happened? And why didn't you tell me? And how did you feel about it? And did it matter to you? And was this always hard or did you forget it ever happened, just you know, to have that conversation. I think that in writing Inheritance, which was the hardest books that I've ever written, I had to stay conscious as a writer about the universality. I had to constantly ask myself the question, what is universal about my experience? How can I invite the reader into my experience in a way that the reader's going to understand? And as a writer, and as somebody who had written a whole bunch of books prior, I was able to really focus on doing that as a writer.

How painful was the dismissal When it was.

This, Oh, it still happens.

People will say something like, you know, what's the big deal? Or you know, they'll somehow turn the volume up on the privilege argument, which is like, look at everything that you have. You know, you got great genes, you know, you're so fortunate. Are you glad you're here? That sort of thing. I what I experienced that as is very wounding because what it boils down to is not being seen, not being seen, not being understood.

You know.

I always begin my Family Secrets episodes with asking my guests to tell me about the landscape of their childhood. That was the landscape of my childhood. My hair could have been on fire, and I could have been, you know, walking on my hands, and nobody would have noticed. And so I think when those moments come up or someone will say to me as happened recently, someone told me that they have a grown child who was conceived using a donor and that they have never told that child and asked me what I.

Thought they should do. And it gets very tricky.

For me because I almost feel like I'm having a conversation with my own mother when somebody says something like that to me. And I do have very strong opinions about the corrosive power of secrets. And look, I understand why my parents didn't tell me, and I am very happy to be here.

I really love my life.

And even when I didn't love my life and was feeling sort of like a just like an alien, as a result of this discovery, I would look at my son, who's just this magnificent person, and I would think, without any of this, you wouldn't be here. You change one single thing about any of this, you would not exist. So I'm very happy that everything happened exactly the way it happened. I understand that my parents couldn't tell me because no one in that generation did.

No one.

You know, we live in a culture and in a society that so badly wants to put everything into its basket and have everything like remain in its lane. And once that is the ground that you spring from. Once there is that wound, there always is that wound. Closure is a myth, healing is incomplete. There are always scars. When my son was little, we used to play this game Shoots and Ladders, and you know, you're kind of moving your little piece along on the on the board and then you know, you roll the dice and you you hit a certain square and it's a shoot, and all of a sudden, you were on that square. Youre in the you were in the present, you were making progress on the path, and boom, you're back down to like where you began. And sometimes there's a ladder and you get to climb up. I feel like that's a metaphor for what we commonly, you know, and probably over use the term triggering, Like something will trigger that feeling, that very solitary, lonely, not being seen, not being understood feeling. And even though I'm sixty years old and even though I have this big, rich, wonderful life, I can be brought right back there.

Yeah, And the intensity of it, because as you said, your body remembers, so it's so amplified because of that, the intensity and the amplification because of the history and the wiring of the story in your body.

Right, and it remains as alive as it's ever been. I mean, you know Besil vander Kulk, who was a guest in a bonus episode of Family Secrets a while back. You know, the body keeps the score. I mean, it's one of the great titles of all time. I mean, the body does keep the score. And no amount of knowledge or intellectualizing.

Or meditating or lemon juice at.

All, meditation, lemon juice, yoga therapy, talk therapy, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, e MDR. You know, it all helps, but it's never going to make it go away.

And and that's okay.

I really feel like to have that go away would actually be what would what would that even mean? It would be like I'd be like sort of amputating a part of myself that that lived, you know, that lived that story.

Yeah. And the work is the softening of it, right, not the eradication exactly exactly.

I love that word soften and I think about it a lot and try to sort of model it in my life, that that feeling of yoga teacher friend of mine, Elena Brower, once said to me as I was getting ready to go on book tour, and I pulled my back, you know, like picking my suitcase off my bed. And I called her, because she travels all the time, and said, how do you do it? And she said, move softly through the world. And I constantly it's like a mantra. I think about that when I'm moving through the world, when I'm having an off day, just move softly, just you know, be gentle with yourself.

We'll be right.

Back in thinking about the discovery of you, you being the secret, as you have said, and eventually that you would meet your biological father, and that as a result, you would create a podcast called Family Secrets, which would reach millions of people around the world. And I can only imagine the ripple effect of the families and the conversations and the healing and that have occurred. And I couldn't not think deeply about for all of the realities of technology and the world, and the good and the bad, the intersection of technology and humanity and technology and human story, and particular arc that at this time and place, the identity would have never been exposed because the technology didn't exist to understand your genes in the way that we can now by simply your husband telling you in the kitchen, hey, spodness vile, that you meeting your biological father, and you paint in the book you peering into each other's world. I mean, he's really getting to know you through your writing and seeing pictures and almost I think this sense of safety and security and looking at that you and your the pictures and your words, that this is a safe person to meet in person and connect or at least that was my experience. And then you turn to podcasting and had this been twenty years ago, none of that would have existed or been available in a way that it is now and the reach that it is now.

Absolutely yeah, and it would have been you know, one of my favorite quotes from sort of Buddhist literature has to do with dharma, and it's you know, when it comes to dharma or your life's calling, if you're off by a centimeter, you might as well be off by a mile. And if I had lived my whole life, especially given what I've done in my life and the excavating that I've done and the writing book after book about you know, family and identity and different kinds of you know, novels and memoirs that all really kind of dealt with secrets in one way or another. And if I had never known, I think there always would have been something that was off by a centimeter. It's what it felt like, even though I had reached a point in my life where I had a you know, tremendous amount of stability and love and family and work that I love and you know, felt and feel very blessed in that way, but that centimeter would have been there. And the thing about the podcast and also about publishing Inheritance, it is one of the things I realized. And this actually goes back to Besil vander Kolk again. In The Body Keeps the Score, he talks about trauma and the different ways that people recover from or have trouble recovering from traumatic events. Is that if it's a traumatic event that has trapped you, say, you know, something where you were powerless. You know, you're in a car watching someone you know and someone in another car not make it, or you know, a crash. You know, there are many examples that I don't want to trigger my listeners with, but you know, if you're in a state of powerlessness when you are traumatized, there tends to be a more difficult, challenging outcome in terms of dealing with that trauma as opposed to the kind of trauma that allows for a kind of agency. And when I was reading that, I was rereading The Body Keeps the Score before Bessel came on my show, and I thought, Oh, that's what I've done. I wrote a book about this experience that has helped hundreds of thousands of people and has actually had an impact. You know, parents have told their children when they never planned.

On time, you wrote it the book you needed on the shelf at that very moment.

Yeah.

And it turned out that a lot of other people did too, And I started hearing about that, and so there was this tremendousness of purpose to what had been extremely painful and hard and traumatic and shocking. And then Family Secrets, which has been like really one of the great gifts in my life. I started this podcast by accident. I had no idea what I was doing. I was on the phone with my friend Sylvia Borstein, who whose episode is in the first season of Family Secrets. She is an early reader of mine. She read a draft of Inheritance, and she proceeded to tell me a story about it family secret, and I just thought, oh my god, I wish everyone could hear this. This is a really moving, beautiful story, and she's an amazing storyteller. And the next thought that went through my mind as I was sitting on the phone was, Huh, I wonder if there's a podcast about family secrets. And there wasn't you know, there are times in our lives where the dominoes just all fall in a certain direction, you know, in a good way or in a not good way. That was in an extremely good way. And then there was this coincidence, which is that she was coming to visit me. She lives in the Bay Area. She was coming to New England to visit me in a few weeks. And so the podcast company that I was connected to said, you know, we'll send a sound engineer. Let's just give it a let's give it a whirl. Why don't you have a conversation. We'll see what we've got. And we did that, and then everybody got really excited. I never had a dream that it would be a huge successful podcast. I didn't even know what that meant when it hit the iTunes top ten the week it came out, I thought maybe all podcasts did that.

I truly had.

No idea, because we all have secrets, right, so I would think, because it's so deeply universal, and to focus in and zoom in on a beautiful, inspiring and uplifting aspect of your work and secrets, so often there is liberation, and certainly in your work and inheritance, you write a lot about the liberation in the sense it sort of created this blank page for you to be and explore who you want to be, including changing your name, a tattoo, all of these these things because you weren't as tethered to your story of origin or your generational story. And certainly we know obviously in this community that that secrets can be deeply freeing in a sense and healing, as difficult as the process is to move through them.

Yeah, I mean, well, the knowledge is a kind of its own kind of superpower, no matter how hard it is, the knowledge, after a long time of being shoved under the rug, being in some way compartmentalized, because I really do think that most of the time the secret's being kept from us on some level, we do know that? And if we are the secret keeper, were haunted by the burden of carrying that secret, And then you know the secrets that we keep from ourselves, you know. That was the story of my life. I mean, I was having a secret keft from me, but I was also keeping a secret from myself because it was impossible and too dangerous to know. So I used to ask my guests in every episode, I would ask them in the interview, do you wish you hadn't found out? And not one single one of my guests said, yeah, I wish I hadn't found out.

I kept a secret for twenty four years and I shared it on my podcast three years ago that I have bipolar disorder, and the amount of the weight, the shame and the secrecy and the work of covering it up I was. I mean, I would go on a girl's trip and leave my little makeup bag that had all my meds in it and leave it unzipped. And when I thought my hand would shake, that somebody had, you know, as if they would spend their time googling with all the medications. But that was my level of fear of being seen, of being known for who I really am, and the brain I was given in this world. And you know, on the outside, I was working for Oprah, I had three kids, happily married. Obviously my three kids and my love of my husband is very real, but there were pieces of my mental health that were really hard to manage, and so stepping out of that shame. I cannot tell you the freedom, the liberation, the healing and what I think about your work on this podcast, and it certainly was not my intention when I shared, but the message it sends generationally, I believe to my kids is that not that there's no place for it, but shame and secrecy will not win stepping into your truth. I just think, you know, my daughter even said to me she was talking about a friend talking about her mom's mental health, and she was curious, like, I'm confused why everyone keeps it a secret and you talk about it so openly. So I think the work that you are doing, the impact will live on as people share their secrets and heal from them and are move into this place of freedom, which I deeply sensed that you've experienced. And for me, it's been perhaps one of the greatest gifts I've given myself in my life. Was no longer keeping it a secret.

I love hearing that, and it makes me think really like it's all of a piece, right, Because if you keep a secret like the one that you kept out of shame, out of fear that you won't be perfect, if you won't see you as the perfect shiny exterior with the amazing career and the amazing.

Family acted, you'll be judge to see us rights.

And that's not what happens.

Is it. Oh, it is the opposite. People are drawn to you in a way that is unexplainable. I mean, within weeks of hitting published and you know, tens of thousands of people hearing the thing, I'd hit my whole life. I mean, people in the grocery store I would run into in town would lean in a little closer. I mean I thought people would run, and instead they were drawn in. It was fascinating.

That's a little bit of what I was describing in terms of the superpower. There's something that feels there's like radiates a kind of humanity, humility, transparency that makes other people feel more comfortable with whatever their own stuff is, because everybody has stuff.

Brene Brown says, you know, when in her work around vulnerability. You share it with the people who earn the right to try. And I always am careful to say not everyone has to shout it on a podcast or from the mountain. It may just be your family, your friend, you know. But but the liberation and having it no longer be a secret, moving it into the light is where the magic hap exactly. So I listened to your interview with Jamie Lee Curtis, and you talked about faith, and faith is a huge part of your story of your discovery and you being a secret because of your family's deep lineage and story of their faith, devout faith. So your book Devotion, you had said in the interview that that changed you the most, So I'm curious why and how did it change you.

Devotion was a book that I really did not want to write. It wanted to be written. I think that's true with all of my books, but with Devotion. When I realized what I was embarking on, the title came to me first, and I realized that I wanted to grapple, or needed to grapple with my own history.

You know, my son was very young.

He was asking me questions about what I believed, and I realized I had absolutely nothing to say, because I had pushed back so hard word against that complicated childhood of my own that you know, I hadn't replaced it with anything. I had just rebelled against it. And so I was raising my son with no rituals. And you know, certainly I had a spiritual life, and I'm a longtime practicer of yoga, and I meditate every day. But there was something I felt like I was not fully doing for him as his mother that I wanted to be. And so I started writing this book and it came out in these little pieces, like little breadcrumbs through a forest. My mandate to myself was that I was trying to look at every single passage, every single scene or incident, as does this pose a spiritual question that I can grapple with?

And if it does, it doesn't belong in this book.

And along the way, as I was writing it, I thought, I am I really think I'm writing a book that no one will read. It's so deeply idiosyncratically me and I felt and feel a little bit like a unicorn. So unless you're a unicorn with the same exact unicorn properties as me, you're not going to be able to relate to this book. That's what I thought, And then devotion came out. And what started happening pretty much immediately was that I started hearing from people readers of every different stripe, of every different age, gender, you know, nationality, background, and they all said the same thing, which was, you've told my story. And that was what was life changing because it was the first time, and it happened many times since, but it was the first time that I understood just how alike we are all are on the inside, that we carry the same anxieties and fears and burdens and longings, and the content of them may be different, but the you know, the human experience is not as distinct or different from each other as as we think it is.

And and what that did. I had been.

Terrified of public speaking before that, couldn't stand getting up in front of crowds, which is not great. If you do what I do, you need to be able to do that. And it cured that for me. And the reason why it cured that for me was because I would look out into an audience and just think we are connected.

There. There really isn't this, Yeah, yeah, this is safe. There isn't You're not sitting there.

Judging me. You're sitting there ready to feel something. And I'm here wanting to offer you that, wanting to give you that. And so that's what I meant in that conversation with Jamie about the way it changed me. But it was really the beginning of that has been true now throughout these years, since twenty ten when that book came out, that feeling of if you really tell your story, and if you tell it true, then what the listener is going to hear is, oh, that's my story too. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

I found a piece of myself in Inheritance, And the interesting thing is it was such kind of subplot in your story, but it was these few sentences and I highlighted and it literally changed the way I view myself as a mother. It didn't change, it gave me language to it. And you were talking about meeting your biological half sister, and you said something along the lines of your illustrating kind of your immediate bond and some of the things you had in common. And you said serious about our work and fierce about our children. And I have, for whatever reason, is somebody who has loved working, who has been really deeply passionate and ambitious in her work. I had this deep guilt because I live in a community where most moms are stay at home moms, that there was a choice I was making and I had to be one or the other. And you saying that it was okay to be serious about your work and fierce about your kids. I literally went on a walk that night and said, that is me. I'm both. I mean, it was unbelievable, Danny, But I think when you look out into that sea of people, they're looking for little pieces of themselves, their little answers or clarity, and it is something as little as a few sentences gave me such peace.

Oh I love hearing that.

And it's been my experience that either in teaching or speaking or writing, you never know exactly what's going to land or who is going to land with. And in a way, it's kind of none of your business as the writer. You said something too about like finding yourself in a description or in the language, and you know, I just want to say one thing because I feel like it might be helpful, which is that when it comes to the secrets that we keep from ourselves. I know no better tool, you know, I mean, listeners will know that so many of my guests on Family Secrets are writers.

And that is not.

Because if I wanted to create a literary podcast. It's not a literary podcast. It's a podcast about family secrets. But it's often writers because writers, and in this case, have written books. But the very act of setting words down on the page, the very act of just trying to write it out, the very act of attempting to write it out, actually unlocks things. I think, probably you know, in the in the top few gifts in my life, the fact that I became a writer, and that I got to spend my days and my months and my years actually following the line of words and not even knowing where the line of words was going to lead me has a lot to do with my having been able to unlock. Of course, I would never have unlocked it without a DNA test. But you know, when I look back at my early work, it's actually there on the page. You know, if I look at my first novel, it takes my breath away. On some level I knew. And if I look at my little book on writing still writing, there are lines in there, like there's there's there's a line in there where I'm snow being through my parents' things, and I write, what was I looking for a clue? A reason? And the word reason is italicized, and it's like, what I didn't I didn't know anything? What did I even mean by that when I wrote that book that I wrote years before the discovery about my dad? So there's something about the you know, the act of the act of writing, and the act of reading and sort of finding yourself, and the act of listening to podcasts and this sort of the intimacy of what that is of you're doing it by yourself. When you're listening to a podcast, you're listening to it by yourself. There's no such thing as as far as I know, as like podcast listening parties, you know, or podcast groups, like there are book groups. It's intimate and the act of reading. When you're reading a book, you're doing it by yourself. Nobody can do that for you. And when you're writing something, you're writing it by yourself and for yourself. So I think all of these things are ways in which things get unlocked.

I'm so glad you brought up the intimacy of podcasting, because I wanted to ask you about this community and what it's meant to you and how it's contributed to your healing. But what I've learned as a podcaster is I love the work of sharing, being a conduit and sharing other people's stories. And when you think of the intimacy of being in someone's ear on a walk as they fold their laundry as they drive to work, and having these really deeply intimate conversations, and the connection and the opportunity right in a world that's moving so fast, with so many distractions, to be able to connect that way. It's a really really powerful medium, and I think it is really impactful when done with intention, as you do on this And on that note, I'm really curious. You know, we've talked about a lot of tent pole moments in your life, but I know your husband, your great love, had cancer recently.

Is he in remission, he's considered cured. It was three years ago.

Three years ago, so I know your husband had cancer. There was a global pandemic. As much as you're showing up for this podcast, you are dealing with a real life and difficulties and pain, and in creating this community and that connection and intimacy. What has this community meant to you? How has it changed you? And how has it healed you.

When I'm doing one of these interviews for episodes, time stops for me. I go so deep inside story. I'm like my entire being is an instrument that is in the service of the story that my guest is sharing with me. And so the actual act of doing the interview itself feels like a sacred act to me, and it's it's very intentional. I don't use zoom. I know a lot of podcasters do, and I don't because it feels to me more intimate in each other's ears. I mean, like my eyes are closed right now as I'm talking to you. I want to be able to go as deep as I can into the story of my guest. And I feel honored that my guest trusts me with their story. And I think a big part of why they do is because I'm not approaching it as a journalist, and I'm not approaching it. You know, people who have never listened to the podcast think, ooh, family secrets. You know, like it must be a kind.

Of sensational elation.

Sensational salacious purient, you know, rubbernecking, watching other people's tragedies, you know, go by, and that is the very very last thing that I'm interested in. And so I'm with my guests very much, with the feeling of me too. And at the same time, you know, over the course of the seven thus far, it's about to be eight seasons of family Secrets, I've realized that I actually recede into the background more and more, and my guests stories become more and more. I mean, they've always been front and center, but I think in the beginning I would insert myself more, and I've done that less and less. I mean, I'm sure there's vo but it's about the story itself, and that's been just really interesting for me to notice. I just feel like I'm so completely in the service of the stories, and the person who I most want to reach and to love the episode when it comes out is my guest. If I've done my job, my guest. You know, often somebody who's been interviewed many many times before will say I never thought that before, I never made that connection, I never said that, or I've never cried before while I'm being interviewed. Whatever, it is just a feeling of like, I want you to see your story in a new way. I want you to see your story maybe with a different dimension or a little bit more illuminated for you. Then before we had this conversation and then, you know, one of the amazing things to me about having a podcast that has millions of listeners is that it's kind of abstract. I mean, I know that there are all these listeners, but as I said, like, I could be walking down the street and somebody could be walking up the street passing me with their AirPods in their ears, and they could be listening to me and I wouldn't know it.

I've never thought about that, and so there's.

There's no you know, if if you write a book, you know, somebody took a picture the other day of somebody on the subway reading my most recent novel, is like, okay, somebody's reading my novel on the subway. If they were listening to my podcast, there would be no picture and no one would know that. And so there have been these moments and they are so meaningful to me. But I was at a wedding last summer when a young woman came up to me and she said, you're Danny Shapiro right said yeah, and she said, my entire family, like you've changed our lives. We've all listened to Family Secrets and it enabled us to talk about things that we had never been able to talk about before.

And what an immense.

Privilege to have anything to do with helping people to feel less alone in there, you know, whatever it is that is making them feel a part or alone, and that's just amazing to me and wonderful, and it does feel you know, sometimes I record bonus episodes and I'll refer to my world of listeners as the Family Secrets family, because that's what it feels like to me.

And the privilege on both ends, I mean, I often think, and you just express this, the privilege and the honor for someone in our case, the guest, to trust you with their hearts. I mean, the bravery and courage it takes to not only share the most vulnerable pieces of yourself, but to share it knowing it'll be broadcast, you know, around the world, and who you choose to trust that story with. So I think, you know the privilege of being the conduit between the family that was changed and the person, the guest, who chose you right, who trusted you with their heart, And it really is like when you think about it deeply, the work is it makes you hurtful.

It's really true. It's really true.

And it's the way that I think of myself when I'm putting together episodes and when I'm pairing for them and when I'm doing the interview, is I'm trying to do my best to hold the story, like to hold it in my arms, to be the container for it, to make the container for it. And you know, to be trusted with doing that is just a really wonderful thing.

So my last question. You write so lovingly about your aunt, who has played, you know, such a exquisite role in your life, and I heard you on the podcast that she says, go where it's warm, So my last question is what does that mean to you? And where do you go to be warm?

I think that there are people and places for all of us where we feel our safest, where we feel seen and known, where we feel the absence of certain things, like the absence of competitiveness, the absence of envy, the absence of comparison, where we are with people that we know are rooting for us and want the best for us. And I think sometimes when we don't come from when the initial landscape of our childhoods isn't that it's a learning experience along the way, because we can be drawn to places where it isn't warm because it's familiar. And one of the benefits of living long enough and learning enough and getting older is that I really don't have the patience for that anymore in my life. To the degree that I can choose who I want to, but we can't always choose who are going to be around. But to the degree that I can, I want to choose to be with people who who love me and who I love and really to have time with them, to not be racing, to not be always onto the next. And we live in a world that you know, that doesn't reward depths or quiet. I think increasingly there is a I think there's there's a bit of a move toward understanding how important depths and quiet, And you know, sitting with the Danish have this beautiful word that I never pronounced right. It's spelled hygge, and I think it's yuga yuga, and it's the meaning is a kind of like a relaxed, open, warm, inviting environment, and that's that's what I want to create for the people around me, and that's how I want to live my life and spend my time in whatever way I can.

That's beautiful. I just interviewed a depth Dula and she, you know, walks with the dying in the last weeks and months of their lives, and she referred to them as the wisdom keepers. And I asked her, you know, if there was one piece of advice and wisdom, and that was exactly what she said. She said, just to slow down and make space to just be with your people.

Because really time is all we have. And you learn that, I mean, you mentioned my husband's illness. If I didn't know that already, it was completely brought home to me that when you're facing something terrifying like that, all you really want is time.

Well, Danny, you have made such beautiful meaning out of your discovery of your secret and the work of Family Secrets and the community you have built which feels very warm to me, a very warm place to go. So thank you for that, and thank you for trusting me to have this conversation and yeah, hopefully share some new pieces of yourself with your Family Secrets Family.

Oh, Kimmy, thank you so much. It was really interesting to have the tables turned. Phew.

Well, that was meaningful and intense. I'm reminded of the courage it takes to share oneself fully, openly, with vulnerability and heart. My thanks to Kimmy Kulp as well as to my amazing team. Family Secrets is an iHeartMedia production. Mollie's a Core is story editor and Dylan Fagan is executive producer. We'll be back in your ears on May fourth with our all new season. I couldn't be more excited to share it with you.

Family Secrets

Family Secrets. We all have them. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially be terrify 
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