Do you have difficult — or even toxic — family members? How does one go about setting boundaries with them? And is it OK to cut them off? In today’s Not Crazy podcast, Jackie and Gabe tackle these tough questions with Sonya Mastick, a mental health advocate and fellow podcaster of a show called “What Won’t She Say?” Sonya shares her personal story of how she handled her toxic mom and demonstrates how it’s OK, and sometimes even necessary, to set strong boundaries with family members who hurt you. It’s also OK if those boundaries shift and evolve with time.

Tune in for an honest discussion about protecting your mental health from harmful family members.

(Transcript Available Below)

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About The Not Crazy Podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Jackie Zimmerman has been in the patient advocacy game for over a decade and has established herself as an authority on chronic illness, patient-centric healthcare, and patient community building. She lives with multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and depression.

You can find her online at JackieZimmerman.co, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Computer Generated Transcript for “Sonya Mastick- BoundariesEpisode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a Psych Central podcast. And here are your hosts, Jackie Zimmerman and Gabe Howard.

Gabe: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy Podcast. As always. I am here with my co-host, Jackie.

Jackie: And you know my co-host, Gabe.

Gabe: And we also brought along a guest.

Jackie: We are here with my friend Sonya Mastick, who is amazing for a lot of reasons, one of which she is a podcaster herself. Her podcast is called What Won’t She Say? She runs her own business called Rise Above the Din, where she’s a social media expert. She writes for The Mighty. But the best reason, and the reason why she’s here today, is because she’s a mental health advocate. Sonya?

Sonya: Hello.

Gabe: Welcome to the show.

Sonya: Thank you.

Gabe: You are you are very, very welcome. The reason we wanted to have you here today is because our listeners often talk about they talk about cutting off their families. Then that’s the way they talk about it. Just like I want my mom and dad to go away. I want my brother and sister to go away. I just I need to get as far away from my family as possible. This is what we’re hearing from our listener base. But one that’s not so easy.

Sonya: Oh yeah.

Gabe: I mean, right? Just telling the people who raised you, who grew up with you, who you’ve probably known your entire life by, I never want to see you again. It’s difficult. But as Jackie talks about a lot, setting boundaries is extraordinarily important. And you, Sonya, you set some masterful boundaries with your parents.

Sonya: Mm-hmm.

Gabe: Now, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you describe your parents as toxic. You’ve cut them off, but not completely.

Sonya: Yeah.

Gabe: Can you talk about that for a moment?

Sonya: I will. I would like to backtrack and add a little bit to what you said, that not only is it hard for people who are contemplating doing this, to do that for like the paternal maternal reasons and you raise me. But, everyone listening, I feel you with the pressure of societal because people will whip out anything. The Bible, it says in the Bible, honor thy mother and father.

Gabe: It does, it’s right there.

Sonya: They’re all. No, they won’t tell you anything. Any of the context around that. God forbid. But they also will. It’s just all the societal guilt that people that are in codependent and or toxic family dynamics seem to be OK to perpetuate that. I get that. I don’t judge that. It’s very comfortable. It’s what you know, it’s hard to sort of un-write that coding in your brain that you get from an early age. So I understand that. But everything, every Hallmark movie, every everything conspires against you to do what you need to do for boundaries. It’s exhausting.

Gabe: I think the people who are saying that are well-meaning and I don’t think they’re coming to you and saying, hey, we want you to connect with your family even though it’s going to hurt you. They don’t realize it’s going to hurt you because they’re comparing their families and they’re thinking, oh, you know, just they have a political difference or they don’t like your hair color or your job or where you live or your choice of mate. But this is deeper. When we talk about toxic families, we don’t mean a disagreement about a movie or politics or even lifestyle choices. We’re talking like literal toxicity. For example, what made you put a big wall between you and your parents?

Sonya: Well, this is the point where this this can be very triggering for some people. It is triggering in a sexual nature. So just a heads up if this is a problem for you. But.

Gabe: Thank you.

Jackie: Thank you.

Sonya: There was sexual abuse in my family and alcoholism is really long lineage of really well-intended but super messed up people. And they’re not. Not only are they all not awful people, I don’t think any of them are awful people. I don’t. This is the thing that buys a lot of compassion for me and empathy. Is that I don’t think anybody was five and was on their big wheel and said, I’m going to grow up and be awful to people. I’m gonna be damaging, maybe hurtful. But it’s all like a lot of codependency. It’s all really toxic and everybody seems to be OK with it. Everybody seems to not want to go any further in their lives and examine things. And when I when I first decided to go and get therapy, they were like, you’re not crazy. I was berated. I was belittled. You know, maybe you are crazy. You’re the only one in this family that is crazy. I’m like, possibly, but we’re gonna find out, you know.

Jackie: Is the attitude towards, I guess, not repeating behaviors or sort of bettering or getting out of the cycle similar to that, where it’s like, well, I was spanked when I was a kid and I turned out okay.

Sonya: Yeah.

Jackie: Is it similar, but like much bigger topics.

Sonya: I think for my case there was so much damage that they couldn’t even get out of the headspace to even have that argument. It’s just like this constant survival mode of trauma. It’s just constantly living your life through trauma. And it took me getting older. I was a musician. And once I started traveling and seeing other people experiencing other things, other people, you start realizing like this isn’t normal. What’s going on here? Even if you take out all of the, like, overt neglect and abuse, just the way that the family functions as a dynamic. It was just like crazy. Simple things that to everyone else. Like, well, this is just what families just eat at tables, not mine, you know. So it’s just really interesting. So it really took getting out into the world and it took like 20 years of my life to sort of undo, like realizing like they’re coming from trauma.

Gabe: One of the things that I noticed that you’re doing is you’re kind of giving your family cover. You know, we started this with your family is toxic. And you cut them off. And people don’t understand that you needed to get as far away. And then even in telling your story, you’re like, well, they didn’t mean to. Nobody starts off at five years old and wants to be bad. You describe, you know, codependency, trauma, sexual abuse in school. But it was accidental.

Sonya: No, no, no, no.

Gabe: So it’s also ongoing.

Sonya: Yeah.

Gabe: That’s kind of my question there to clarify those things. I was I started to hear your story. I’m like, oh, this is messed up. And then you were like, but I love them.

Sonya: No, no, no, I don’t. Actually, that’s not. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad you called me on that. Yeah. No, I don’t want anyone to misread that because the point I’m getting to with that is that I can still see them as fractured, damaged human beings that do this. I don’t want anything to do with it. And so for myself, I have to maintain some compassion for who they are as humans, or I’ll be angry and hard. I’ll be ferocious and bitter. And I was for a period in my life, just I hated everybody and myself. And so, yeah, I don’t ever want people to confuse my compassion for excuse. I have to have that part of me that keeps me soft and open and willing to give to people. And willing to love people, willing to make new friendships and things. It damages all of that. But, you know, I realize like when the point came when I really needed to do the cut off and you get to a really distinct crossroads. And for me, and I think for a lot of people, is when you get healthy, when you finally invested so much time into yourself with professionals or whatever it is that you need to get to that spot. I realized, OK, well, I’m allowed to have boundaries. So these are my boundaries. And once I established those boundaries and they were completely ignored, I mean, not even like, there was no way we’re gonna pretend to even. There was nothing of that. I was just like, OK.

Gabe: Well, when you say your boundaries were ignored, it was your family pushing through.

Sonya: OK.

Jackie: People hate boundaries. Yeah. You put them up and they’re like. I don’t think so. I don’t like this. And I find for me when I put them up, it comes back at me as anger and frustration. At no point is it like I see you doing this. This hurts me. But go ahead. It’s like you’re terrible. Why are you doing this to me?

Sonya: Yeah, I remember just recently that sort of the last hurrah was telling a family member my story, my version of what happened and saying like, you know, my boundary is this, this and this. And immediately, days later, violate that boundary. And then when I said, what the hell? You know, you violated the boundary. They were like, oh, you just hold a grudge. That’s my favorite thing about boundaries. You just hold a grudge.

Gabe: Yeah, forgive and forget. The boundary is always based very much on fact. I think like I don’t like it when you talk to me this way or don’t call me after 9:00 p.m. could be a boundary because I go to bed early. Right. That it’s very much based in fact. But the pushback against it is sort of nebulous. You hold a grudge. Why are you bringing this up again? And the one that I hear a lot is you need to forgive and forget. I like what you said about forgiving. You’re like I have forgiven you. But forgetting just allows it to happen again. So it’s almost like they’re setting you up. Forgive and forget. And then as soon as you forget it, they have another entry way back into abuse you. Is that how you feel about it? Would it be better to forgive and never forget? I think that people just have a hard time with that. Hard. No. Fuck you. No. We’re done. Because there’s there’s just so much pressure to tear that down from other family members, from other friends, from helpful people. How do you stand up to that?

Sonya: Well, the first thing I feel for boundaries, the way you described it is great. And then the other caveat to that is I think that people say when you call them boundaries is they’re saying, don’t call me on my bullshit. Like they don’t want to be called on their bullshit. They don’t want to have to look inward and see where they’re culprits, where they’re actually accountable. And I got to tell you, like going through my life, being as damaged as I was, I did some really messed up shit to people. And I had to be accountable for that. I had to go back and ask for forgiveness. And I did. Because when you when you know better, you do better. And so I just think that most of the push back of boundaries is that. And then just the codependency of this is the way it’s always been. And as Jackie said, I got spanked as a kid. I’m just fine. Like, no you’re not. People have told me that are just not well.

Jackie: Most people who say X happened when I was a kid and I turned out OK, are not OK.

Gabe: Yeah.

Sonya: Yeah.

Jackie: None of them are OK. I wanted to touch a little bit on we talked a little bit about society and how you’re supposed to love your parents and you’re supposed to keep them around. And even this concept of, well, they’re the only parents you’re going to have. Or, you know, that’s the only mom you should really. What used to really get to me was on various holidays where it would be like call your mother memes.

Sonya: Oh, yeah.

Jackie: Things like that. Where, for the people who don’t have good relationships with their parents, it’s like a smack in the face. If you’re just like a shitty kid who doesn’t call home, you call your mom, right? But if you have like a toxic relationship, the pressure to fix that and the pressure to fix it is on you, the kid.

Sonya: Right.

Jackie: You should make it better. You should reach out to your parent. That’s something I’ve struggled with. I have a somewhat tumultuous relationship with my mom. It’s significantly improving. But there were a couple of years in there where I would see that stuff. And I wanted to I wanted to comment on it and be like, you know, my relationship with my mom. Right. How dare you just assume we’re all bad people who don’t call home or something like that? But it’s what you don’t know. If you grew up in a family where you eat dinner every night together and you can’t fathom the person who gave you life being a dick to you.

Sonya: Yeah.

Jackie: It’s really hard to think about not wanting to talk to them, actively avoiding speaking to them, seeing them ever again.

Sonya: Yeah.

Gabe: That it’s establishing where you are on that spectrum. Right. If the reason that you and your family are strange is because you’ve gotten an argument over who won the Super Bowl in 2012, fucking call your mom. What the hell is wrong with both of you? You let a football game get in between you and your family. Or let’s raise the stakes. If the reason that you’re not talking to your family is over, who won a political race? Come on, man. Don’t. Don’t let politics cost you your family. Can’t you agree not to talk about that and find the things that you have in common, but to get back to you, these are serious things that started in your childhood, went through your formative years. Your early adulthood. I’m not trying to call you out or call you old or anything. You’re a middle aged woman. You’ve had a long time to observe what happened to you when you were younger. What happened to you when you were in your twenties and where you are now and you hard stopped it. So you’ve set up this huge wall where you have cut off all the toxicity, but you’re literally caring for them now that they’re elderly and they’re in a nursing home. Right?

Sonya: Yeah, my mother suffers from schizophrenia, so that’s a reason diagnosis. I think it’s probably one she’s had her whole life, but was undiagnosed. So she self-medicated prescription drugs, alcohol, and that actually really, really destroys your brain and your brain chemistry. And so when people become of a certain age, it’s a chicken and the egg. They can’t tell whether the schizophrenia or the dementia or the chemically induced dementia started first. And so I didn’t talk to her for years. And then once it became apparent that she actually was. I mean, obviously, she’s mentally ill, but that she had some sort of diagnosis or some sort of way to kind of get a handle on it. And she was starting to do more reckless things where she was getting into car accidents and she drove out into a cornfield and just stayed there for days, could see houses, but she’s just not mentally capable. And in that moment she was in a in a like a spiral of mania that she just she felt like people were chasing her. And so I felt like the only way I could go forward is I had to help in some way because of the human being. And I have one sibling. And we sort of struck this agreement where he would be the guardian. He would deal with seeing her and I would just deal with her money. I would make sure that she had care for as long as possible. So she’s in a facility where they, it’s assisted living basically. So they nurses come and give her meds and things like that. But she can kind of freely roam about there. And so that was sort of where I became involved. And it took me like, you know, a good six months to really go, yeah, I can I think I can do this. But it’s a precarious balancing act for sure.

Gabe: When you say deal with her money, you mean like there’s all this paperwork that comes with being older, right. So it’s like, oh, you’re older and you need to live in a nursing home? You also need to fill these forms out in triplicate. So it’s interesting because you are helping your mother, but is she aware that you’re helping?

Sonya: Yeah.

Jackie: Because it doesn’t sound like you see her?

Sonya: I don’t. I never speak to her or see her.

Gabe: Gotcha.

Sonya: So that’s the arrangement.

Gabe: But that’s a boundary, right? And you didn’t abandon your mother completely, which I think many listeners like. Oh, my God, that’s so that’s so beautiful. But you never see her and some listeners like, oh, well, no.

Jackie: See what I took away from that, though, which you said pretty clearly was one thing. I’m not a monster. Right? She’s a human being. And I think that’s where one boundaries, important, good, strong boundaries come into place. But I think that’s where a lot of people get really manipulated in these situations, is a lot of the people on the receiving end of abuse or bad relationships or whatever it is, feel like I’m not a bad person. So when you’re in a bad situation, I’m going to help you. Which almost enables the shitty thing. It’s like being around an addict, right? But you can set a boundary still, right? You know, you set a very clear boundary that satisfied in your contribution. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel like I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. But you also don’t have this weight, well, I just said, what the fuck ever. And walked away from my mom.

Sonya: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not saying that this is the right move. Everyone has to make their own decision. And even my therapist was like, I don’t know about this. But I have a very basic principle at. I do what I need to sleep at night.

Gabe: Well, let’s talk about that for a moment. It seems to me, Jackie, like you’re saying, how do you avoid getting sucked back in?

Jackie: Yes.

Gabe: How is it like I cut you off because you’re toxic so that I understand. I’m never, ever going to see Jackie again. She’s toxic. But now Jackie is kind of like in pain. She’s hurting. So I’m not a bad person. So I’m gonna help her like 5 percent. All right. That’s fair. I’m going to help her 5 percent. But you know, Jackie, she’s smart. She figures out that 5 percent. She figures out how to turn it into ten to twenty five to fifty. And now we’re codependent. Now we’re living in a basement where we’re podcasting. I don’t even know what happened to the analogy there, Jackie. But sincerely, you know, it’s that give an inch take a mile mentality.

Sonya: Oh, and she does it.

Gabe: How are you standing up? How do you. Because it sounds like this is working. How do you not get sucked back in?

Sonya: Well, I immediately bought a program that blocks phone calls and so she can’t call me. And she did try to go through other means of like borrowing phones and things like that. But she only has so much access where she’s at and she’s equally delightful to everyone else. So it isn’t like she has a lot of people coming around to visit. That was tongue in cheek, by the way.

Gabe: Yeah, I was going to say, she’s nice to other people?

Sonya: No, yeah, that is tongue in cheek. So that was one thing, which is there’s going to be nothing like that. There’ll be no conversations. I literally will manage your finances. And it’s through the court system. It’s all we have to account for every dollar that goes in and out. And as you would imagine, somebody dealing with such a difficult mental diagnosis that her finances were a mess.

Gabe: Yeah.

Sonya: You know, it was just it was just absolutely insane. So but that is how I maintain my boundary. And it was like a 4-month conversation with my therapist. Like, is it something you can do? Because I was very careful to wade into the water than I did for years, just have nothing to do with her. And she was in the last bit of the time that we didn’t speak being institutionalized on occasion. And I didn’t have anything to do. I didn’t talk to her, I didn’t talk to her, I didn’t pick her up. I didn’t deal with it. And I had to get to a point where I was healthy enough that I could go. All right. This is the boundary. Is there a way to do this where I can maintain my boundaries and my standards in this? And I finally got to a yeah, there is.

Jackie: We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Sonya: I’m podcaster Sonya Mastick and we’re back talking about setting boundaries.

Jackie: The key point in talking about how to not get taken advantage of again is being sure that you have done some healing before working on setting boundaries because it’s much easier when you’re not through your healing process to pull them in and go back to what’s normal and to do what makes you feel good in the moment. But if you’ve done the healing, it’s much easier to say like I need this to preserve me. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work for you, but this is what I’m willing to do, you know?

Sonya: Yeah. It’s a process. You have to be sure you’re as ready as you can be, and you can never really know if you’re ready. Honestly.

Gabe: We never know what we’re gonna do in a situation. Let’s be honest. I would venture to guess, to be fair, if I would have asked you five years ago when you were hardcore in the I’ve come and bomb off, do you think you’ll ever help your mom? You’re like, fuck, no, she’s done. Yeah, she’s making the middle finger sign.

Sonya: Yeah. Yeah.

Gabe: Yet here we are. So I do think it’s important for our audience to understand that, you know, things have to be flexible. Don’t beat yourself up because your opinion has shifted or because you’re in a different place. A lot of times we talk about. It’s hard to cut our families off. You need to do it because they’re wrecking your life. But I’m kind of calling you all for being a little disingenuous because you’re like, hey, I had to cut my mom off because she was wrecking my life. But I still want her back in a little bit, but I’ve changed my boundaries. So in your words, kind of just addressing that, because this is a hard thing that comes up for people.

Sonya: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t think that it felt that it violated my boundaries, that I let her back in, because if I did, I wouldn’t, I would have just kept it moving. But it’s very individualized and it is organic as life is. Relationships are, your wellness is, it’s always a moving target. And I think in most cases, if there is a way that I could help somewhat without being involved with the person, I may. So, yeah, I mean, I definitely think there was more inclination to do it because it was my mother. It was a parent. I think that’s actually pretty fair.

Jackie: I’d like to circle back to Gabe saying it was a little disingenuous to allow your mother back in. And I just want to say, like, fuck off, Gabe. It’s not disingenuous because one of the things I talk about in therapy all the time is that boundaries and decisions and relationships can evolve and change. And it’s something I’ve worked on a lot with my mom where there was a time sorry, mom, if you are listening, but there was a time that I really thought about like maybe I should cut off my relationship with my mom. It was bad. It felt bad. And it felt like an all or nothing decision. And my therapist was constantly like, it doesn’t have to stay this way. Maybe you do it this way and it changes. And it still felt like the weight of the world. Like if I cut her off, I’m never going to talk to her ever again in my life. And that’s not true. Like I said, our relationship is significantly improved. I feel good about it. I like talking to her. I like want to spend time with her. And if you’d asked me that three years ago, I would’ve said there’s no fucking way. Absolutely not. And so I don’t think it’s disingenuous at all. I think that it’s a sign of growth. A sign of healing. A sign of empathy. And also like confidence in yourself and where you are to be able to shift that boundary and still feel like I’m where I’m at and I’m getting what I need out of this arrangement.

Gabe: I bring this up because I think there’s a lot of people that have grown, but they remember their angry 20s or their angry 30s or many of us, itt seems, that when we set the boundary, we set the boundary like the nuclear option.

Sonya: Yeah.

Gabe: You know what we’re screaming. I’m never talking to you. I’ve deleted you for my fault. We tell everybody in the family that we hate that person. Social media now is huge. We’re just like posting memes about how much we hate people. And there’s just been this big public blowup that made the hard stop. And then three years later, five years later, 10 years later, we don’t feel that anymore. But we reflect back on that, too. Yeah, I said never again. So there’s like some embarrassment maybe. You know, I did not publicly cut anybody off and I’ve cut people off and I’ve let pretty much every single one of them back in. I can’t think of a single person that I have ever cut off that hasn’t found their way back. My situations are different. You know, once I got treated for bipolar disorder, all of the sudden I was like, you, half of this is my fault. And I learned a lot of that through therapy to Jackie’s point. I know we can’t speak for our listeners, but I guess I just wanted to bring that up because I think there might be people listening who are like, oh, I cut my mom off 10 years ago. I do kind of want to talk to her like Jackie did, or I do kind of want to do something to her. But I don’t want to be a liar. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about. Right. It’s not hypocritical to understand that who you are 10 years later is not who you were 10 years ago.

Sonya: Not to mention you’re leaving out the factor of the other person. People can change. People grow. People get healthy. So that’s the thing is my case, if there would’ve been any ownership and accountability and some sort of like yeah, we need to fix this and everything. I would have been on board for that. I don’t know if it would have worked. I don’t know if it would have turned out but I know people that have cut people off and then like you, Gabe, they were treated or they came to an understanding of they’re just being kind of a shitty person and going to be better people. And then people see that change like that’s all I wanted.

Gabe: My apology tour was legendary because I cut so many people off because, well, frankly, they were as much as I hate to, I was the toxic person. I mean, like hands down. I was the toxic person. They were setting boundaries against me. It turns out that people don’t want to be friends with, you know, untreated bipolars. And we had we.

Sonya: Odd.

Gabe: Yeah, I know. We miss a lot of things. And when they saw me doing better, they came back. So I’m glad that they did. But now on the other side, it’s just one of the things that makes boundaries so tough, because I think we all think about boundaries as an absolute. And to Jackie’s point, there are just absolutely. Today. They can shift.

Jackie: It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And if it is all or nothing, it can change to some things. It can change to some times, like your boundary can move. And that to me was when it was a very reassuring moment in me. Everything is awful. I can’t do this anymore. Moment where you’re like, this is it. I’m never going to talk to this person. Everything is terrible, but maybe not always. Just right now. Like, I need this right now for me to be like recycling back. You have to be healthy enough to set the boundary, to keep the boundary. And for me, I had to be healthy enough to get with the boundary. The boundary helped me get healthy. And so once I got healthy, I could think about shifting it or moving it or taking it down or making it smaller or adjusting it.

Sonya: The problem with the boundary too being all or nothing, and this is what makes it so difficult for us is if you think about the culture in the United States specifically, it is always all or none. I’m going to go and lose 80 pounds or I’m a piece of shit. Like it’s all this like shame and this thing. And then it’s just fascinating to me that we also because of this, we cannot stand contradictions. So hear me out. We cannot stand a liberal that likes guns because we’re packaged, commercialized, sold to here. And so we’re sold lifestyles, we’re sold at this complete packages of what corporate America wants us to be. So it’s hard for us to ever be a real human being where you sometimes just flat out contradict yourself and you have this organic nature of learning and you end, people roll on you and suddenly you’re like, I hate punk rock, it’s stupid. It’s the lowest form of music. And then you meet somebody that plays really good punk rock for you. You’re like, it’s all right, you know?

Jackie: Like you can’t admit that. You’re like, yeah, actually really good.

Sonya: Like, I never, ever say because I said on social media that I don’t like punk rock once. I can never go back and be like the Ramones are cool, you know?

Jackie: To that point, OK, I was I am never getting married. Never people who knew me. I’m never getting married for I mean.

Sonya: Same.

Jackie: The last. 10 years, if you’ve met me, you know that I said 100 percent against it. I will never own a cat. I hate cats. Woof, cats. I now own two cats.

Gabe: It’s meow.

Jackie: I’m also the proud owner of a husband as well. Playing absolutes are just the worst way to view your life and to your point. I did talk about this very publicly. I was like, yeah, no, I’m never doing that. And so when I said we were getting married, I got a lot of Oh, I thought you were never getting married. And there was a certain period of that where I had to just like deal with it because people were, it was fun and joking, but it still was like they were throwing it in my face that you said this and now you’re changing your mind. Isn’t that ridiculous? You can’t do that. I can only imagine what that feels like when it’s something not as fun and, you know, perceived as joyous as a marriage.

Sonya: You can’t do that. I love that.

Gabe: Hey, all I know is that Jackie said she was never gonna have cats and now she has two cats. And Jackie said she was never gonna have a husband and she has a husband. And right now she is screaming at everybody that will listen that she will never have children. Jackie, baby watch 2020.

Jackie: Hard pass, hard pass.

Gabe: Sonya, thank you so much for being on the show. We really, really appreciate it. I know that we can find the What Won’t She Say Podcast probably on every available podcast or player.

Sonya: Correct.

Gabe: Check it out. Sonya is awesome. What’s your Web site? Where can our listeners find you?

Sonya: That’s really it. I’m on every social media. WhatWontSheSay.com, and if you’re interested in the business, RiseAboveTheDin.com.

Jackie: Can I search your name on The Mighty?

Sonya: Yeah. Yep.

Gabe: Yeah. Check it out. Check it out. Thank you again, Sonya. Jackie, as always. Thank you for being here.

Jackie: It’s been lovely.

Gabe: I love how I always thank you for being here, even though it’s your show. Like, just.

Sonya: Gabe, thank you for being here, buddy.

Gabe: Thank you. It’s mine.

Sonya: Thank you.

Gabe: It’s my show.

Jackie: It’s our show.

Gabe: It’s my show.

Jackie: We share.

Gabe: We do?

Sonya: Sorry, Lisa.

Gabe: Listen up, everybody. If you love this show, wherever you found it, please subscribe, rank and review. Share us on social media. And when you share us, use your words. Tell people why you like us. Remember, Not Crazy travels well. If you’re having an event that you don’t want to be boring, hire Gabe and Jackie to do a taping of the Not Crazy Podcast live. You’ll get to see us. Jackie really does have blue hair. And remember after the credits, are all of our outtakes and listen, we suck at this. So there’s a lot. We’ll see everybody next week.

Jackie: Thanks for listening.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Not Crazy from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. To work with Jackie, go to JackieZimmerman.co. Not Crazy travels well. Have Gabe and Jackie record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details.