Dana Killion: Why am I staying?” And trust me, this is not a one-time decision. It is a back and forth. Some days I wanted to run out the door. Some days I did run out the door and said I'd had enough. there was a point in time where I filed for divorce and then yanked the papers, and it's okay. We're sorting it through. These things are not linear. They are painful, but we have to come to grips with why, and we have to come to grips with how much we are damaging ourselves through wanting something that maybe can't be true.

Welcome to Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, the podcast where we stop playing small, start calling things out, and actually do something about it. I'm your host, Erika Rooney, executive coach, speaker, and a little bit of a movement maker, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Erica Rooney: You know that moment when you realize that the life you built is built around someone else's chaos? When you've been the strong one, the loyal one, the one who holds it all together, and somewhere along the way, you completely disappeared? Dana Killion knows that moment intimately. Y'all, she spent decades in the corporate world of fashion, building a career, building a family, and then quietly becoming collateral damage in a marriage to an alcoholic husband. And when it finally fell apart, she didn't just survive, but she sat down, she put pen to paper, and she wrote about it, and she put together this incredible how-to guide for the rest of us. Now, Dana is an author, a speaker, and what she calls a trauma big sister. Y'all, she will hold your hand through the hard parts, or she'll hold your hair while you cry. But her memoir, Where the Shadows Dance, and her upcoming book, Becoming Unbreakable, are for every woman who has ever set herself aside for someone else's needs and is finally ready to come back to herself. So Dana, welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floor podcast. How are you?

Dana Killion: Thank you, Erica. It's so lovely to be here and such an important conversation for women to have.

Erica Rooney: Such an important conversation. I feel like there is so much that we're gonna unpack that is just going to really resonate with the women who are listening. And I mean, there's a line on your website, Dana, that just stopped me cold, and it was, “He got sober, she got broken.” And I wanna start with that. What does that sentence mean to you now, now that you're on the other side of everything?

Dana Killion: It's really sums up the entire process. When we are in partnership with anybody who is struggling in our life, whether it's addiction or not, everything in us is about keeping that person alive, keeping them well. For other people, how do we navigate? How do we help them? And what happens is little by little, we are losing ourselves in the process, and it's often something that we just don't even realize because we're focused on the other, keeping him alive and making sure my kids are not in the car when he wrecks it or whatever horrible thing is about to happen because all of these things stick with us. It is our motivating force, if you will, and we disappear, and it it's something that's not even in our awareness most of the time. So by the time I realized I was broken, so much had been happening, and I had to be at a point where I could step back from his addiction to see myself and be totally surprised at where I was.

Erica Rooney: Oh my goodness. So talk to me a little bit, give me the story, paint the picture for us. You know, where were you in your career? How old were your kids? Where did you notice this unraveling start to happen? 'Cause I mean, you can tell me your story, but I'm imagining that you're spending so much mental energy just trying to keep everything together and trying to keep the family going. can't imagine how exhausted you are, so paint that picture for me.

Dana Killion: Well, it was a, it was a situation that is unlike what most of us perceive as alcoholism. Very high-functioning alcoholic. So it took me a long time to understand what was happening, to recognize the signs, and it really wasn't about the bad behavior. It was about the need, the constant need for booze. It did not affect his job. Our children did not even know. It was just a very, very controlled scenario, and this went on for decades, as these things do, little by little getting worse and worse over time. And of course, in all of these situations there is, there are constant conversations about, “Honey, there's a problem here. We have to fix this.” And it moves into a very normal progression of therapy and please, maybe it's time for rehab, and how do we collectively deal with this? It's, it's a very painful back and forth, back and forth process as you're evaluating your marriage, the impact on your family, and trying to do it all at the same time. So I'm keeping my career together in the background, raising the children, but this is a 25-year marriage and the crisis didn't hit fully in towards, until towards the end of those 25 years where I could see and the extent of the damage became more, more obvious.

Erica Rooney: Yeah, talk to me about that moment, Dana, 'cause I wanna hear more about when you realized that you were the one that really needed saving, it wasn't him anymore

Dana Killion: Is there one moment?

Erica Rooney: I mean, share a few, right? I think that's the powerful piece of this,

Dana Killion: and that is

Erica Rooney: just happen like that

Dana Killion: and that's the reality of addiction. This is not anything linear. Trauma just doesn't work like that. we got to a point in the marriage where he was finally agreeing to go to rehab, but this was, again, two decades into the marriage. And

Dana Killion: while he was at rehab and finally taking this seriously, I learned that he also had a secret life, and that secret life was, to be blunt, promiscuity. He had had a large number of sexual partners that I was not aware of, and it's just a reshaping of everything that you thought to be true over a major chunk of your life. So it becomes a moment of, Who am I? Who is this person that I love? Is there anything in our life that has been true? Yet at the same time, he has shown me love.

Dana Killion: I feel love. So the incredible disconnect of behavior that seemed completely inconsistent with love, and that had to be addressed too, because we have to wrap our head around the why. And the addict or anybody else that's causing this kind of trauma in another can't really explain themselves terribly well, or at least not to full satisfaction. So we did go through, obviously, that was a horribly traumatic, life-changing moment of my life, and we actually tried to work that through. Eventually I found out that, I couldn't do it because I felt myself so empty. I assumed that time and our efforts would get us to the place of being able to rebuild our relationship, but instead it just left me empty. And I eventually got to the place of needing to answer a really important question for myself, and that is: What if it never gets better than it is right now? So often when we are in trauma, we're finding explanations, we're looking for solutions, we're making efforts. And there's just this assumption that time and proper work will fix it. But the reality for some of us and for some things that happen, time isn't enough. The efforts weren't enough because I couldn't handle the emptiness. And that's what it would have taken for me to continue in the relationship. So another turning point, if you will, was leaving the marriage, leaving a marriage that I've, I've, with someone I still loved, who I believe still loved me, regardless of behavior that was disrespectful.

Erica Rooney: Hmm. That is so hard, Dana. I mean, it really is. But, you know, it's not the first time I've heard a story like this, which is what's heartbreaking. It's all too common, especially with addiction, especially with high performers and addiction. And I would really love to dig in a little bit to the trauma piece because you keep saying trauma, and I'm glad that you're naming it, but I think a lot of people might look at a situation like this and not recognize it as a traumatic event because you're not the one with the addiction. You're not the one struggling with alcohol or drugs or what have you. And so how long did it take for you to, like, connect those dots and name that as a trauma? Because a lot of women don't.

Dana Killion: It actually took quite a long time. It was several years. most of us think of trauma as a very sudden, acute event instead of something that is chronic and under the surface. So I didn't view marriage to an alcoholic as trauma. I did view finding out about his secret sex life as trauma. That was an obvious because it was such a distinct, bold hit. And to be blunt, I was curled up on the floor. You know, emotionally, I

Erica Rooney: me too, girl. I would've been too. Yes

Dana Killion: Yeah, it's, it's a common reaction, right? well, some of us would have run off and found the nastiest divorce attorney we could immediately.

Erica Rooney: I might do that the next day. That's like day two, Dana, day two

Dana Killion: No, day two. Day two. It I think there's a shock involved with any kind of strong event. But part of what's going on in recognizing this as trauma, my trauma versus his trauma, is trying to wrap my head around how can this man love me and still treat me with such disrespect? How can I love him and allow myself to be treated with disrespect by not immediately running out the door? And that love was still present. Strange as it is, it was still there. So all of those things have to be processed and viewed differently, and we have to come to the grips with how can both things be true? Because it seems in any trauma, it is immediately the bad person. They did this. They are awful. But I didn't think of him as awful. I thought of his behavior as awful.

Erica Rooney: Mhm

Dana Killion: And

Dana Killion: that's part of the separation and understanding of something, someone who treats you with disrespect. We have to have answers for why. That is one of the common post-trauma questions that all of us ask. Why did this happen to me? Did I do something? How did I deserve it? Why can't they explain to me why they did what they did? And it'the processing is, it's not sudden, and we have to give ourselves time to acknowledge that there is a journey here, that there is a path, that it is not linear, and that there's not a right and wrong way to do it. What is wrong is getting stuck in the pain, and that I was determined to do from the very beginning, even when I didn't know what that meant.

Dana Killion: When I first learned of his sexual behavior, I laid in bed night after night in tears, trying to figure out what to do and how I felt, and I said to myself over and over and over and over again, “I will not let this man destroy me.” Determination, a stubbornness kind of came into my, my being for lack of a better way to describe it. Because I'd come across other, other women who'd been through something like this who seem to never recover and can't seem to find joy or wholeness in themselves again after someone hurt them, and they live with the anger and the regret, and that's all I knew that I didn't want. I was determined not to live lesser than. I had to figure out how to create the scar and not let that scar stay infected. It's a wound that doesn't go away, but scars don't. So how do we get through that? How do I become something better? How do I use it? And that is a process that's not an easy, “Here's the answer to all trauma.” But name it whatever you like. Even if you don't like the word trauma, who cares? I'm hurting. Something happened to me. It can be a big T screaming in your face trauma. It can be a little thing that just annoys you. But if you're sitting with the pain for an extended period of time, I'd put it in the trauma bucket.

Erica Rooney: Hmm. I love that you said the outcome has to be no longer getting stuck in the pain, because I want to just provide an opportunity for what you did there, which is really showcasing to anyone who's listening here that if you are in a situation like this, right? If you have a partner who is stuck in addiction or is treating you disrespectfully or what have you, it doesn't matter what you do next as long as you don't get stuck in the pain, right? Because some people will be very judgmental. They'll say, “You should stay. You signed up for a marriage. You stick it through.” Other people will say, “Girl, you gotta get the hell out of there,” right? There is no right or wrong way to do it. You just cannot get stuck in the pain. And girl, like my whole body of work is all on infinite possibilities, and I was just like getting goosebumps because you took a big old spotlight and you shined a whole bunch of different avenues on a very challenging situation. And I mean, you said it, you were married for 25 years, right? 25. Okay. So we stuck it out. We gave it the good old college try for a quarter of a century. And I know too that you've talked about being a good girl, right? Always following the rules, staying loyal past that point of logic. And you know, you've talked about setting yourself aside because it felt like love, and I think that there are a lot of women who are listening that might not be in a situation like this, but that they have put themselves in the back seat because it feels like love. And I would love to know, like when do you feel like that started for you? Like that you had to be this good girl, you had to stay loyal at all costs. And I mean, expand upon that. Were you always like that as a little girl?

Dana Killion: Oh yeah, that's a childhood thing.

Erica Rooney: Yeah. Yeah, we all carry that

Dana Killion: good grades

Erica Rooney: Oh

Dana Killion: I was thinking earlier today that I think

Dana Killion: I spent the first 50 years of my life barely speaking and now

Erica Rooney: Then you went the opposite

Dana Killion: I went the opposite direction. I I, Through this process,

Erica Rooney: Oh.

Dana Killion: I've come to understand the damage that staying quiet does to us

Erica Rooney: Hmm. Yes, it

Dana Killion: It doesn't mean you're a good girl. And, and the loyalty, the loyalty question is what you're really getting at. And it's a hard one for anybody who's been in a relationship, whether there is substance involved or infidelity involved, because we're trying to understand what is the line between doing the right thing for a partner that's hurting and doing the right thing for us? And the question that I eventually had to answer for myself was, “Am I gonna go down with the ship?” I have come to believe of trauma, to believe trauma is a contagious scenario. His traumas played out in, on him and, and became contagious. Therefore, when he treated me badly, I could have just as easily gone into a really dark place and been traumatized and taken that out on my children, people in my family, and stayed damaged. But the conscious choice that we have, that we have to make for ourselves is, “Am I willing to sacrifice everything for someone else? And, and part of how I got around that is my views on my partner. I couldn't go into the place that many would go to, which is, “I hate him. I never want to talk to him again. He is a horrible man. What was I thinking?” And I couldn't do that because it didn't feel true. It meant denying the love that I felt from him and for him. So I had to go back into that place of, okay, there's these are the things about him that are an amazing man. And oh, by the way, he's got this part of him over here that he hasn't healed, and it is damaging him, and it's damaging to me. And if I stay, I get damaged too

Erica Rooney: Dana, was there a part of you that... Gosh, I've got so many questions. Was there a part of you that stayed quiet too, not just to be the good girl, but also out of guilt or shame?

Dana Killion: There are parts of this. before I I knew about his sexual behavior, I was quiet about his addiction because it doesn't go well in relationships when that becomes public, because so much of addiction is about hiding.

Erica Rooney: I was gonna say you're airing people's dirty laundry. The addiction is all about hiding, right? It's something you keep behind those closed doors. That was gonna be my next question too, is like, did you talk about it with anybody? So keep going.

Dana Killion: Yeah, and, and this is something that everybody in any kind of relationship with substance abuse or any kind of addiction runs up against because to speak exposes your partner. And while that may be helpful in some cases, if you're speaking before you're ready and the addict reacts negatively, that can drive them fur-further into their addiction. It can accelerate. And when we're living in addiction, part of what's going through our minds is, “It's my job to keep him alive.” So by speaking, he may run, and then if I'm not in his life, he won't be alive. There's that potential there that the substance will end his life. After I found out about his sexual behavior, speaking about the addiction part was certainly easier because I forced it into the family conversation. “If you're gonna get sober, this is a requirement I have. we tell the children, you tell my father, you tell your best friend.” None of them knew.

Erica Rooney: Hmm.

Dana Killion: So those conversations needed to be had. But the sexual behavior that we didn't talk about and publicly, and that was about my embarrassment, absolutely about my embarrassment. And the embarrassment for me was not as much about his behavior, but about mine. How do you stay with a man who has behaved, who's treated you with such disrespect? And I was grappling with, what does that mean about me, about my own identity, that I am willing to try to work it through with somebody that I don't know if I can trust, that I don't know what to think about his willingness, or disregard perhaps would be a better word for my own life?

Erica Rooney: Yeah. No, I mean, I'm thinking about that, and it feels like for any woman who's like listening and they're in it and they don't know if they should stay, if they should go, or how they can reconcile any of a situation like this, right? think it comes down to your core values and what matters the most. I mean, y'all, Hillary Clinton's husband had an entire affair on the dang presidential stage, y'all, and she's still married to him. And I look at that sometimes, and if I'm real honest, sometimes I'm very judgy. I wanna be like, “What is she doing?” She's an amazing, powerful woman. But at the end of the day, it comes back to what you were saying earlier, which is not getting stuck in the pain. And so if you decide to stay, if you decide to go, as long as you are not in that pain and it works for you and your core values, that is what matters most. And so, Dana, what I'm hearing with you is this core value of trust was such a big one, and you couldn't reconcile, you know, how someone would behave that way and you could trust them. But is that one of your core values, or are there some other ones that really run deep that kind of helped you come to this decision?

Dana Killion: I think part of what we're not saying here is when you make a decision to stay in a relationship knowing that there are some really damaging aspects, the only way to get through it and to really stay is to understand why you're staying. Am I staying out of fear? Unlikely to be a long-term emotionally healthy scenario for you. If you're staying because you believe you're doing the right thing and doing the harder work and that there are core values that you can indeed build on, that's an entirely different story. And I think any woman who decides to stay, if she's really conscious about her decision And understands it doesn't have to be forever. Knowing why you're staying versus just, “Well, I think I love him.” Quite frankly, love is not enough of an issue. It's not enough to feel when somebody is treating you with disrespect. So there has to be something behind that, and, and as you're pointing out, it is about values. It's about who am I, and what does that mean, and how do I want to live my life? And these things are not quick, and they're not easy, and I don't really believe in jumping to fast ends with a long-term relationship. He appeared willing to commit to doing all the right things. He showed me in the years after the revelation that he was trying really hard and doing the right thing, and all of that plays into your thought process of, “Do I continue to stay? Why am I staying?” And trust me, this is not a one-time decision. It is a back and forth. Some days I wanted to run out the door. Some days I did run out the door and said I'd had enough. there was a point in time where I filed for divorce and then yanked the papers, and it's okay. We're sorting it through. These things are not linear. They are painful, but we have to come to grips with why, and we have to come to grips with how much we are damaging ourselves through wanting something that maybe can't be true.

Erica Rooney: Mm.

Dana Killion: Or do we have to have another version?

Erica Rooney: That grip on control is so hard.

Dana Killion: It is. It is. It is

Erica Rooney: Oh. Oh my gosh. All right, Dana, we've spent a lot of time talking about this one hard thing, right? But you actually have been stretched in many ways, right? We've had the end of a marriage. You've lost both of your parents. You've had a cross-country move. You've lost a child, too. How do you carry all of that and not just completely fall apart?

Dana Killion: Well, the interesting thing, my, my son died, not quite three years ago, and it was the most recent of the traumas. And as I thought about how I was processing his death, I came to the realization that each of these traumas taught me something, and I was taking a tool from one to the next to the next. And I'd kind of under the surface built something, a process that I didn't really appreciate fully until after my son died, and I was sorting through the differing, emotions that I was feeling because obviously the death of your child is one of the most horrific things that can happen to any parent. Yet I seemed to be handling it with perhaps a little more ease than I expected to. But it came down to the previous traumas had taught me things, and I was using them. And one of the things that we already talked about was this determination not to let what my former husband did break me forever. And that kind of determination became a really important starting point and touch point as each of the traumas occurred and each of the new hard things and the new process steps that I had to go through as I plotted through how do I not stay broken from this new thing. And so much of that is our own individual decisions to keep going, to not settle into the emptiness, because too many of us do. We settle into the emptiness, and then our emptiness becomes contagious and infects other people. And I knew that was the one thing I could not allow in myself.

Erica Rooney: Hmm. And then you took all of that and turned it into a book. You've turned it into this entire process for anyone who's kind of working through trauma and grief. And I mean, your book has been described as a compassionate companion to therapy that you wished you had. And I think this is awesome because I'm so happy that therapy is becoming more mainstream and people are leaning into it these days, but sometimes that's not enough. You need something else. You need different opinions and lived experiences. And so I would love to hear from you a little bit more about the book, a little bit more about this process, and for anyone who's listening who's in the trauma and in the grief, like them about it so they can know how to start to kind of heal from that trauma.

Dana Killion: As as we all know, trauma is very complex. There are lots of aspects to it, but there's not just one way, one path through it. I believe very firmly in therapy, but sometimes we are worried about getting started. We're a little intimidated by talking to strangers, by telling our full truth. So I'm thinking of this particular book as a warm-up to therapy or a companion for somebody who wants a little bit more of a friend at their side. Because some of these things that we've experienced are pretty horrific, and sometimes speaking once a week with a therapist is great, but it covers a moment in time. So I knew one of the things I was missing as I went through these traumas was some big-picture sense of, how does this all work? What should I be watching for? I didn't have that because it's this trauma bubble that we get into, and I didn't because I wasn't sharing a lot, I didn't have a lot of, side support with perspective other than, “Yes, I'm here for you.” And having somebody who has experienced something to talk to you about, “This is what it was like for me,” makes you feel less alone. It gives you some other ideas on what to try, some encouragement to go back and do something else, to try another step, to understand there's so many approaches, so many ways through this. And the most important thing is never getting stuck. Just go back to the last step, go back to the last thing, work a little deeper. And I used each of these traumas in this book, outlined a step, the first trauma, this is what happened, this is what it taught me, and then the next trauma that came along, I learned a little more, and then I learned a little more. And the steps that I realized after the fact build on each other. And my goal with the book is to be that friend or big sister holding your hand, showing you that trauma doesn't have to be a whole bunch of buzzwords. It doesn't have to be a lot of, technical language. It can be your sister holding your hand, but a sister who's been through it

Erica Rooney: And I mean, Dana, that is the most important thing in my own personal experience with my own big T trauma and little T trauma, is hearing the stories of other people and what they've been through and who they are, and listening to how they worked through it was so powerful for me because it made me feel not you know, like I was the only one out there dealing with these things. And it also gave me different avenues to try because just like you said, like one size does not fit all. And read it, try it, but just do not get stuck. And so Dana, last question, best question, but I want you to go back in time, maybe like year 12 to the marriage, you know, when you're going through it, and not quite into everything that we were gonna get into. But when you think about everything you've learned, right, and everything you've uncovered, I wanna know what piece of advice would you give that Dana today?

Dana Killion: You're entitled to speak. You're entitled to have wants and needs And speaking is not as scary as you think it's going to be. So many of us are silent. So many of us are afraid of our voices. We're afraid of the consequences. So the woman I am today has said everything. She's not hiding, and I feel stronger than I've ever been in life emotionally. I love the person who came out on the other side, and you will too.

Erica Rooney: Yes. And she wrote a book about it, y'all. So get out there, check out her work. Whether you've been through the big T trauma or the little T trauma, y'all only heard a half of the story here, so make sure you check out her book. Dana, thank you so much for joining us today and for openly sharing your story. Like, I cannot say enough how much hearing other people's stories helped me when I was in the thick of it, and I know that the women listening today are thinking, “Thank God Dana's here sharing this with me. Now I don't feel so alone.” So Dana, thank you so much

Dana Killion: Thank you so much, Erica. It's been a pleasure.

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