Parental alienation.

TRIGGER WARNING: this episode discusses parental alienation, mental illness & court proceedings. If any of these things are triggering for you please do not liste, and seek support as necessary.

Join Erena as she shares her incredibly hard journey with the parental alienation of her youngest daughter. 

Erena shares her fear of judgement from others and how she has built her life around the pain of missing her child.

This story shows that while not every parenting journey always goes how we expect, our greatest priority is always our children. 

Thank you Erena for sharing your story to help someone else's.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Uncommon Expose, where I want to change your life by sharing someone else's. If you've got an open mind, then please join me and my guests as we share their incredible, inspiring, true stories. Trigger warning, this episode discusses parental alienation, mental illness and legal proceedings. If you find any of these things triggering, please do not listen and seek support where necessary. Oh, well, welcome. Thank you so much for being my guest today. I'm really honoured to share your story because I know that this is something that is, it's hard. So I'll get you to introduce yourself and what your story is about and then we'll just get started. Hmm. Well my name is Erina and I am a mum to three kids and my story is really about being alienated from my youngest daughter and how I found peace around our physical separation and and it's a topic that happens a lot more your experience is something that probably comes up for a lot more people than we realise. And it definitely would have a lot of taboo and stigma around it. So you being willing to share this today, I am positive, is going to just open people's eyes, even if they don't have experience with it, or it's going to make at least one woman out there feel more comfortable with their journey. I found that myself, as I've been journeying and trekking, traveling through quite traumatic experiences that I felt quite isolated in it as I was sharing before a lot of mothers would sneak into my DMs when I started to share more about what was happening in my personal life and yeah the absolute heartbreak that comes from not being able to have your version of being a mother play out in your reality, in your life. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I guess when did this all kind of start for you? And how long has it been since you've seen your daughter? It's been about, I last saw my daughter in October. Mm-hmm. And that was very brief. Mm-hmm. I saw her for, yeah, just a little while. So that is seven months now that I have not seen my youngest daughter. And every day my heart breaks open a little bit more. Just... with a realization that the relationship that I thought that I would have with my daughter is very, very different. I often refer to myself, and this might seem really strange, as a part-time mother. And I feel like a lot of guilt and a lot of shame about not having my children all together in my life all the time. And yeah, it's been very challenging to move through very disturbing and different emotions as i've been separated from her um this really came about from uh over a year ago now over a year and a half actually longer almost two years ago now when we had that really split in our family is what I call it and this really occurred when my eldest was having some challenges moving from house to house and she wanted to have more time with me. So do all three of your children share the same father? No so my eldest and my youngest are with my ex-husband and my middle child is my stepson okay so yeah i have grouped them all together yeah that's amazing they are all your children but yeah i was wondering what the dynamic was yeah how they were separated emotionally biologically yeah yeah so please continue uh so yeah so back um over a couple of years ago now um my eldest daughter wanted to spend more time with me and that caused a lot of friction and challenges with everybody with my youngest, with me with my eldest and with their dad and after I instigated a mediation process to have a bit of a chat about the arrangements for care it went downhill quite quickly from there so the father would not come to the mediation process so that kind of ruined any chances i feel like saying of coming to some kind of arrangement in a peaceful way and my youngest daughter started to become quite angry toward me i would say um she didn't really want to spend as much time with me as usual and at that time I was like oh okay well you know like she's a teenager as well like they're going through their emotions and maybe she does need a little bit more space from me how can I help her things are obviously changing in our family but she started to spend more time with her dad And I was like, okay, you know, I wanted to be that person that gave people space. It's like what I've built my life around is letting people make choices. And also be supportive of a relationship between a father and a daughter. Yeah, and that was always important. You know, like it's not just me as a parent. There are two parents. But what was happening behind the scenes was my daughter was starting to be more influenced by by viewpoints about me that just weren't true so she would say things like you don't care about me you're not listening to me like really quite out of the out of the ordinary so I went from my daughter you know writing me love letters almost like writing me love notes yeah I went from my daughter writing me love notes to her basically saying that she didn't want anything to do with me um There was a stage there where she said that she hated me and this was very sudden and it was very out of character for my youngest daughter who I've always had a very close bond with. And there was one particular incident in particular When my eldest daughter was crying on the phone, she was on the phone and she brought the phone in to me and she said, My dad's on the phone. He wants to speak with you. My youngest daughter was with her dad, and so she put it on speakerphone, and basically the dad said that he was going to take my youngest daughter and take her to a different country, and they were going to live there permanently. Mm-hmm. Is he a citizen of that country? Yes. Yes. So that shock raced through my body so quickly. And I've never felt that sense of... actually being really afraid and out of control. Everything felt out of my control. And I remember I was like, I can't let this happen. What am I going to do? How am I going to stop this? And my daughter was crying. I was crying. I actually asked to speak with my youngest daughter on the phone and I remember that I was talking about how much I cared and I loved her and I wanted to have a relationship with her and it just almost felt like I was speaking into a wall. And I didn't know that much about like parental alienation. I knew nothing pretty much about parental alienation, which is why I feel like this story needs to be heard. Do you think your ex was saying he was going to take her out of country to get a response from you or because that was what he wanted to do? I think there were other factors that were happening for him in his personal life. Okay, yeah. So he was going to follow through? I believe so, yeah. So something that I've never really understood is basically by saying that it was like abandoning my eldest daughter, like just being like, I'm okay with leaving you. And that's something that I know has... ripped ripped my daughter my eldest daughter in particular she's been quite ripped apart by that because he was going to leave her yeah to move back to the other country yeah yeah and no consideration for her um And my daughters had a very close relationship. They had such a beautiful connection. You know, of course they fought. They were siblings. But underneath all of that, they had a deep love for one another. They spent a lot of time together. They communicated well together. And slowly but surely... that's really changed quite significantly. But yeah, so after that I went and I got a lot of adrenaline rush and I was on the phone with every single legal service that I could possibly get in touch with that would have an appointment. I knew that I had to act very quickly and I stayed up night and day to figure out what I could do. And in a week I had put together a whole like case to go to court everything um you know I obviously have um I didn't have the opportunity to actually go and see a physical lawyer because they were like, you need to book in a time, you need to book an appointment, you need to have a consultation. I was like, I don't have time for that. I don't want my daughter to leave the country. What can I do? So I found out more about putting my daughter on the airport watch list. And you had to have a compelling reason why. Fortunately, I had already actually called the police because I was like, so like how can this happen this can't happen like I've got I've got parenting orders already in place so they had already visited me I had already like I was freaked I was in freak out mode I was in freak out mode I think that's a natural response to what it sounds like you're going through yeah so I was in freak out mode and I was just calling everybody up and that got submitted very quickly and she but basically she wasn't able to leave the country anytime soon because they approved that there was a risk there for her being basically abducted but I don't think that I went out of the traumatic shock of that even though it was in place and she had to stay in the country pretty much I didn't feel as though I could access some of those emotions because I felt super numb yeah I felt really stuck I felt really frozen and you know I had to continue on in my professional life which included showing up every day and generating that ability to provide for my family while my heart was breaking while I woke up every morning crying when I was like I don't know if I'm a mother anymore um I didn't know I mean I knew I was a mother to my elders but I wanted all of my children um They all have a piece of your heart, don't they? Yeah, so that was really hard. I went into a lot of really ugly emotions. I felt really challenged to get up. I just need a moment. Thank you. Thank you so much. You just take the drugs you need. Thank you. I felt very hard to be engaged with the world again. It felt as though I was moving through something that nobody else really understood. I started to learn a lot more about alienation. and what occurred in systematically removing my youngest daughter from my life and how that was impacting everybody. And I did go through a very, very selfish stage as well, where everything was about like how this was impacting me. And that was not very helpful, but I think it was also very necessary. Survival. It was, it definitely was. And I can imagine, because it's something that we don't talk about, and you've just said that you couldn't really talk to anyone about it, that brings shame and fear of judgment, which makes all of those emotions far more compounding. And then you just spiral because there's nowhere for those emotions to go. Yeah, and I want to say that I felt like I was two different people. Like I was a person... that was strong and actually I want to rephrase that I am a person that is strong I've always been considered a rock I've always been you know like the I feel like the stable one in my family and it was just such a different way to touch into different ways of being soft of being vulnerable of being a complete are we allowed to swear? a complete fucking mess you know tear strained moments you know very lost very confused and you know a lot of crying in the shower and then using a lot of tools to pick myself up and keep going. But things happen like trying to take my daughter away to a different country, removing her from the school system, removing any way for her to access my home, and also limiting the way that she could communicate with her sister, that she could spend time with her sister. So could he just remove her from the school system without your permission? How does that work? That is an interesting question. So... Basically my youngest daughter was going to see a guidance counsellor. Both of my children were getting support because obviously there was a lot happening in our family life that was impacting their ability to come even to the school grounds. And my youngest daughter in particular was sharing lots of things with her guidance counsellor. I'm not privy to that, but... There was challenges in her social circle with... There was challenges around the people that she was hanging around with that were influencing her in very destructive behaviors. There were indications and alerts around, you know, self-harming, very unhealthy ways of coping with different stresses in life. And I did send quite a few messages being like, i'm a bit worried to the school uh to their dad okay yeah um and that you know i wanted her to get more support or to have that conversation and get that out in the open and uh Basically, they set up a meeting with the school and because she had had a lot of truancy, the dad and the school came to an agreement that she would move on and that she would access homeschooling or distance learning. I didn't find that out until around a week later. that my daughter just wasn't at the school anymore. It wasn't that she wasn't just at the school, but that was actually a place where my two daughters went to the same school. So it was an opportunity for them to connect together. And that was really upsetting. I think my eldest daughter even said to me that her dad's taking her... her sister away from her you know and it was kind of confirmed again and again in all of these different ways And so when I contacted the school and I explained to them about, you know, moving in the court system, sorting out child arrangements, that we had parental orders in place around the education, you know, major educational decisions, they... they basically denied any wrongdoing. So they were really basically saying that they feel as though There was a consultation process that they had been in connection with the father, that my youngest daughter was residing with him, and in their opinion that there had been an agreement, basically. And I was like, well, there hasn't, I'm telling you right now. That really broke me. More and more I felt... Yeah. Yeah. was really hard and to have an institution that also was kind of supporting this um alienation and um stopping that connection between my my daughters you know having them not be able to have been time together or see each other every day was yeah it felt like i was slowly being um yeah discarded yeah yeah i felt very abandoned also by my youngest daughter and that's something that feels really embarrassing to say but i felt very abandoned yeah i felt very like i've tried to give you everything And that sounds really silly, but... I don't think so. The emotions that children can withdraw from us don't always make rational sense, but they're still valid and they're still felt. Yeah, so... It was a really ugly time and then going through the court system and I feel as though when I went through the family court system as well and when I went to go and see, finally got an appointment with a lawyer that would talk to me, they weren't interested in the... in the um in the process I only wanted to be um involved when there was like a judge and at that time there was the judicial register that we were in front of so they just kind of you know they they're kind of like the people that um decide which direction the matter's going to go in and um I mean, it made a lot of sense as well. Like I did have an informed choice around that because of, you know, the outlay of finances, the probability, like all of the things, like they were very open about it. So they actually said to me that, you know, you are very well spoken, that you do have that capacity. Like they said, basically the case that you put together in a week costs like$3,000. thousand dollars so and I was like well I did that on adrenaline yeah yeah I um yeah it's not it's not my day job um but yeah so I had to weigh up a lot a lot of factors and I feel like I didn't have um Because I was so, I felt really stuck in this really dark and ugly place that financially I was impacted by that because I was the provider in my own business. So that was really highlighted. Was I going to be able to rise above this or with it or however you want to say? Yeah. But um... I just find that the more that I learned about the signs around parental alienation, I just kept ticking all of the boxes. And I was like, when they move from having a loving connection to spitting out hatred and using words that you've never heard from them, like the way that I was removed in all of these different areas of their life, the way that she started to blame me for anything that happened that was not great there was like these this strange sense that I was to blame for why she couldn't leave the country as well that I was to blame for why she couldn't leave the school system with ease and I was like this is I don't even know what reality this is because it sounds like ludicrous if I told anybody else this would be like what and also she's still a child she's a child and you're the parent you're well within your rights to make it difficult for her as long as you know you're making a rational decision that's supported by a thought out process like she doesn't she can have a say but at the end of the day ultimately like you're the parent yeah well I'd like to say that sounds amazing but I didn't really feel like a parent yeah I definitely didn't feel like a parent and just the dynamics like I felt very angry towards my daughter I felt like I felt betrayed as well like oh you know you know like I almost like that pitting against one another was really highlighted and I was like I don't want to play that game I don't want to I've never wanted I mean I had from when my daughter was two is when we started to move through you know parental orders and care arrangements and I've never wanted to isolate them away from having a relationship with either parent I've always wanted them to have connection with both of us because I wanted them to experience that I didn't want them to feel as though they couldn't receive love from both of us I mean I grew up in a environment that had a lot of um you know walked around on eggshells a lot i grew up a lot of aggression a lot of violence a lot of chaos and i wanted my children to receive love whether that was from me or from others like i didn't want that i didn't want to be a barrier to that But yeah, so it has been seven months since I have seen my daughter and the The court system was extremely challenging. When I sat through people that were asking me questions about me as a mother, about my relationship with my children, there was so much judgment because I didn't... I didn't cry enough, I feel like I didn't cry enough. I know that sounds really strange but I feel like I came, I wanted to be a strong motherly presence and I feel like that worked against me because I wasn't breaking down, I wasn't I wasn't on the yeah I didn't I didn't didn't sound distressed I didn't look distressed I came in there like I need to be able to communicate I need to be able to find an avenue so that I could open up a doorway for my daughter to come back into my life because it's at the end of the day that's all I really wanted so I always always wanted was for my children to be with me. But I think that's the turning point as well. For me in particular, I have a lot of connection with my soul, with my spirituality, and I feel like that's when I started to really move out of that space of crying every morning, feeling really frozen and start feeling as though I was numbed out from the world. I feel as though that that was... It opened me into a deeper understanding of being a spiritual being in a human body. Because if I truly believed that we have our unique spark of source or universe or God... then is it okay for that to be wherever? So when I started to realize that I had been trying to hold on to my daughter and our relationship in a certain way. Like I wanted her to be physically in my presence. I wanted her to listen to me. I wanted her to, you know, like have this, I wanted to have the banter and the to and fro and I wanted to be able to see her every day and I wanted to ensure that I could do this and And when I came to more of a realization that that was actually keeping me stuck, It was keeping me in a pattern of feeling as though I was hard done by, as though I was a real victim, and there is truth in that. I have been a victim, and I'm okay with that, but what do I do with that? I don't want to stay there. And I felt myself spiraling down into that sense of, I don't know who I am anymore. And there's a lot of power in that. When you completely release that control of the identity that I had constructed about motherhood, about me being a mother, when I really let that go and I was like, maybe I'm not a great mother, maybe I'm a crap mother, maybe I'm a toxic mother, maybe I'm a shitty mother, maybe I'm just all of the yuckiest things in the world about being a mother. Maybe I am. And maybe I'm also an incredible mother. Maybe I'm a brave mother. Maybe I'm a strong mother. Maybe I'm a weak mother. Maybe if I could explore all the ways that I can be a mother and just be okay with all of it. That's when I really started to realize if I could just surrender into what was happening more and more and more. Whether that meant having my daughter physically with me or not, that would be the way that I could move through this. And it's really from that moment of feeling like completely out of control and Just being okay with absolutely not feeling loved at all. Then I found that line again of just being like, I'm actually okay. I'm okay. And my daughter is actually okay. And even though the reality that I had pictured for us that I had dreamed about, that I had built may not be happening right now doesn't mean that that's not a reality that can happen in the future. So I need to prepare again. And the way to prepare is coming back to the very basics of actually I am a spiritual being in a human body. And that she is a spiritual being in a human body. And that she has her choices. And that she has her own life and another path. And that doesn't mean that we're not going to reconnect in the future. It just means it's different to what I imagined. It's different to all of the hopes and the dreams that I had. And it was really hard to come to that place. Because you stop betraying yourself as a mother that's not capable, that's been abused, that's been treated in a certain way, you feel guilty because you're actually starting to live again. I noticed. A lot of people gravitating towards me when I was in that space of despair, when I was sharing more about the heartbreak. And I had very few people that were with me when I started to really live again. As a mother that didn't have that physical connection with my daughter, with my youngest daughter, that I started to live with this understanding that I would carry that grief with me and that I just had to move with it, that nothing would take that away. and as I started to move with that grief and my life started to change and my connection with my eldest became stronger because we started to share about everything that was happening and I started to open up more my heart started to open up more to the experience of life as it is rather than what I imagined it to be and And I started to form more intimate connections with all of my loved ones, with my partner, with my family, and more so with myself. Yeah. When you went through the court process, was the findings that your father had sole custody? How did it kind of get to the point where... I would say you haven't seen her for seven months. She's obviously living with him. You've said that he's limited her connection and access to phones and things. Was that all through the court order or was that something that you just have... was the right place to be for her and where she needs to be. I think what was really highlighted in the court, and this is something that is very relevant for parents that are going through alienation, is that the courts don't recognize that in the process that they have. So they have a process where the children have access to an independent review assessment, and then from that assessment, they will come to different findings and they'll create a like a child report and then that report will be shared and that's why i was talking about like how i didn't cry enough i wasn't in despair enough i didn't i wouldn't show enough distress and i did it didn't look like i was in a space of heartache and despair and the things that were reflected in that report Almost came across like I... I didn't really care. That's the kind of sense that I had. Or I didn't care enough about what my daughter wanted, what my youngest daughter wanted. And I was like, I don't feel like the court understood that my child moved from being loving to hateful. Yeah. And that wasn't because of anything other than this parental alienation that we're going through. And I was like, I don't see how that's not reflected yeah I said we're wanting to get her viewpoint but she's been heavily isolated from anyone outside of the other party she has no friendship groups she has no teachers around her she has no connection with her eldest daughter minimal when it was happening she has no discussion with me so we're wanting to get a view point from a child that doesn't have any influences other than the other parent and that was what I mean about being removed and being like we were both alienated yeah you sound like you're being quite objective and these are the facts these are the influences this is the end result whereas they wanted more of your subjective emotions yeah so there was a cover of things that came up with my youngest daughter and the child representative, I can't remember the name of them, apologies and she actually brought me into the room to discuss it and I felt very numb and when she was talking to me I almost was like, I don't even I felt like frozen and I didn't have any and this is obviously, I know it's quite a common trauma response to not be able to access your words and it's something that I've moved through quite significantly through my whole life and that So you almost couldn't advocate for yourself. Yeah, I felt like I couldn't advocate and talk to them about what was happening and everything was being felt inside of me. And I was like, I'm just so overwhelmed with this whole process. I get so stressful. And they were like, oh, did you know about, I don't want to share that information because that's my youngest daughter's information, but did you know about this? about her and I said um you know parts of it but not everything and then they were like oh well you know what do you think about and I said I don't know like I just said it's okay and I didn't I don't feel like I had the response that they were looking for so that kind of that kind of highlighted to them that I wasn't listening to her or I didn't think that her episode or that her identity mattered or things like that I'd never said those words I was just like I don't know what to say I don't know what to do I guess you probably also had an expectation that they would have an expectation you weren't quite sure what their expectations would be so you don't want to say the wrong thing and change their opinion so you say nothing which again sways yeah like it was I was just like oh I also wasn't prepared because they had told me and I suppose it's just like the things you know like I was saying before like when I go when I go for a walk I put on my walking gear when I go to business I put on my my business clothes the context and the structure of that matters for me because I'm setting myself up I'm preparing but I wasn't prepared to come in after they had spoken to my children so they didn't tell me that that was part of it and so because that was a change as well that it was unexpected I didn't cope well with that so I didn't prepare I didn't feel set up I was thinking about all of these other things so I didn't feel as though I had the capacity to communicate I need to keep my shit together. Keep my shit together. But yeah, there were things in that report that captured an alienated child's perspective. And a lot of that was around not wanting to spend more time at our house. So I had to really release the idea that I was going to get a certain amount of time. My children were getting older. I wanted it to be okay. for my eldest daughter to have access to both houses and we came to a loose structure around access and shared time Mostly because of that report I would say. When I looked at that report I got a lawyer to support me in the consultation process around the probability of outcomes and they did not look good for me. They also made it very clear that if I was to move forward into moving toward the judge, that my children would have to have more I don't want to I want to say interrogation but yeah like they would have to see more representatives experts you know have more assessments they would be scrutinized they would have to go through all of those things again and again and again and didn't know if that was fair yeah like you know do they want to be um um questioned yeah about their mother about their father about their their their capacity to have a relationship with either of them you know like it just felt to me if i did that would that mean that i kept pulling them back into it pulling them back in like would it be traumatizing for them um There was a lot of factors to the way up because when I first went into it, I was like, I'm the mother and I need to have it this way. But then when you start to unravel and look at, okay, well, from now, if I made this decision, what would actually happen? Would this bring my youngest daughter back into my life? Would this actually make her more resentful toward me, which is going against what my main objective is, which is to have kids. connection with her and the physical so it was um it wasn't a process that was as supportive to any parent yeah you know not just me but to the other side as well so yeah it was um it was a tough decision but one that I live with. So yeah basically the parental orders say that they can have access times in this day, this day, this day but at the end of the day they have a choice. That's how we came to a close in family court. And does your eldest daughter go between houses? I know that you said that you've got a close mother. Yeah. So my eldest daughter she was going over to the other house and it broke down she would say to me I want to go because I want to see my sister but the ways that she felt she was being treated differently she felt quite ostracized yeah And she's very perceptive. She picks up on things very quickly. She would come home quite often crying and very upset and very angry. She would have a lot of screaming matches on the phone in between visits. She wasn't very happy. She really did feel as though her younger sister was kind of used as a weapon to make her do things, to make her go there. So she had a bit of a discussion with me. They don't really have a lot of contact. She doesn't stay over there. That's been going on probably since the beginning of the year, I'd say. So she has not seen... her sister for quite a long time too. Does that feel validating for you a little bit? To know that you do have a good relationship with your daughter so that the relationship breakdown you know I think as mothers we often will internalize the guilt and blame ourselves for everything and I don't know if you did this but you said that you searched through am I a terrible mother am I this am I that when you can hear that you have this connection with your mother it is like okay I wasn't wholeheartedly at fault with this there are multiple aspects because I can form a good relationship here does that make sense or do you just know that different people different circumstances it's a tricky question you don't have to answer no it's okay i just i just want to answer truthfully I think I just feel sad mostly because I have a lot of opportunities to have a really loving, nourishing relationship with my eldest daughter. I can be present with her, I can communicate with her. you know the ability for her to be like get out of my face or you know or I just need you to listen to me or you know I have opportunities for her to you know be angry with me or be upset or love on me or you know all of the juicy ways we have intimate relationships where I don't have that ability with my youngest daughter that's been taken away from me that's been taken away from her yeah okay so it's very different yeah yeah that makes sense that's parental alienation to a t is that you don't have access to have a relationship amazing well thank you so much for your vulnerability through sharing that journey um always feel when people get emotional it is a blessing because you can you just know that they're being genuine this isn't a pre-recorded interview with questions rapid fire this is a woman sharing their journey sharing their lived experience to help someone else um so i'm really grateful to you for sharing that with me uh the final thing that i asked i've started asking all of my guests is um if there's a woman out there who's going through what you have been through or even advice for younger you what's something that you would like to share what's the lesson that you feel is most paramount to move forward first a practical one I spent a lot of time not avoiding my feelings because I thought that I had to be strong to get through family cord and to get through all the things and that was not helpful in any sense the practical way to that I would suggest for anyone that's going through alienation and separation from their children is to really find a safe person that you can share that with that is not going to allow you to step back into the mother role but really be vulnerable about all of the other activations that come about from being in that situation like a lot of times I felt like a child myself and I think I just needed someone to hold me and let me cry so be a safe space and definitely the BSA space and whether that's through a loved one or if you don't feel like you have a loved one pets are amazing and also obviously psychologists and coaches that focus on accessing the full spectrum of emotions you might not agree with this but there are government support also women's legal services they were incredible if you ever have anything that comes up that you think is going to go into the court system call them, they are amazing DV Connect as well they are incredible at pointing you in the right direction direction even if you don't know I remember when I didn't know and I was like I don't know what I'm going to do having those resources and someone that deals with women that are in like heightened emotional states and may not even make any sense and just bringing them all the way back down and being like this is the next steps I feel like that is Never feel as though you can't do anything. There's always someone that you can call, whether that's through state agencies, whether that's through online communities. There's always someone that you can connect with on a practical sense. For the younger version of me, which was two years ago, I would encourage her to come back to her sense of self and meditation and conversations with her higher self to not feel as though the mother was the only way that she could live and to remember her connection with Something far greater than her. Something far greater than her experience. Something far greater than this moment in time. That's really beautiful. I love that there was something practical. The higher planes. So thank you for that. That was amazing. Thank you for your time and sharing your journey. Thank you.