Latest / The Virtual Couch / The Family Butterfly Effect: How Your Uncle Ray Changed Everything—And How You Can Change It Back

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The Family Butterfly Effect: How Your Uncle Ray Changed Everything—And How You Can Change It Back · The Virtual Couch

• 0:00
  Every family has an origin story, and it's not always the one that we tell at
• 0:03
  the holidays, but maybe one that's written in these tiny, quiet moments.
• 0:07
  Now, sure, you want to know how did grandma and grandpa meet?
• 0:10
  Was grandma always so quiet?
• 0:12
  And was grandpa always this inappropriate?
• 0:15
  And why is it that I see everybody laugh at dad's jokes when we're at a party,
• 0:19
  but at home, all I see is mom roll her eyes?
• 0:22
  And why can cousin Kevin say something and completely get away with it,
• 0:27
  but cousin Keith can say the exact same thing and all of a sudden everybody takes great offense?
• 0:32
  Because over time, you learn about the family rules and more importantly, the family roles.
• 0:37
  Who eventually found themselves in the role of the helper, or the hero,
• 0:41
  or the problem solver, or the mascot, or the peacekeeper, the fixer, or the scapegoat?
• 0:46
  And by the time that we even learn what role we
• 0:48
  play in the family system it's pretty much already set in stone and those roles
• 0:53
  follow us well into adulthood even into our own relationships and our own families
• 0:58
  sometimes we're not even aware that we're playing those roles and then let me
• 1:03
  add a little twist today we're going to talk about the butterfly effect.
• 1:08
  The idea that a tiny action can create massive ripples.
• 1:12
  I'm going to make the argument that it doesn't just shape weather patterns or
• 1:15
  world events, but it also shapes families.
• 1:18
  One unhealthy coping mechanism, one unhealed wound, one survival strategy, or one act of courage.
• 1:25
  Any of those things can send shockwaves through generations.
• 1:29
  Take a scientist who was studying lizard venom and how he changed the future
• 1:34
  of medicine, or a wrong turn that helped ignite a world war or a rounding error
• 1:39
  that reshaped chaos theory.
• 1:41
  And don't even get me started with your Uncle Ray. Oh, we will be talking about
• 1:45
  Uncle Ray today. But all of these have something in common.
• 1:48
  There are these small moments that may seem inconsequential at the time,
• 1:53
  but they can have massive consequences, especially in a family system.
• 1:57
  Family systems can work the same way.
• 1:59
  One person's fear or avoidance or emotional immaturity can ripple through an
• 2:05
  entire lineage, but so can one person's awareness, one person's healing,
• 2:09
  one person's willingness to show up differently.
• 2:11
  Today, we're going to dive into a story of a family where one emotionally overwhelmed
• 2:16
  parent, bless their heart, set patterns that then echoed for decades and how
• 2:20
  those patterns show up long after the original players are gone.
• 2:24
  And I think as you listen today, you might start to see your own family in a
• 2:28
  new light because you're not just part of a story that started before you were born.
• 2:33
  You're also the one who gets to decide how it continues.
• 2:36
  All that and so much more coming up on today's episode of The Virtual Couch.
• 2:41
  Welcome to The Virtual Couch.
• 2:44
  Please take a seat for a pillar.
• 3:02
  Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining me today on The Virtual Couch.
• 3:05
  And most likely, this one is going to go up on Waking Up to Narcissism as well,
• 3:09
  because there is so much to share.
• 3:11
  And I am finding more and more. I forget, I guess it's the guy who records both
• 3:16
  Waking Up to Narcissism and The Virtual Couch.
• 3:18
  The assumption is, oh, well, people are listening to both, but they have very different audiences.
• 3:23
  This is a crossover episode because we're going to talk a lot about emotional
• 3:27
  immaturity, family systems, and things that I think will apply to anyone who
• 3:32
  is part of a family, who can basically spell the word family.
• 3:36
  My name is Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
• 3:39
  And I would love for you to follow me on all the social media things on Instagram
• 3:44
  at virtual.couch, on TikTok at virtualcouch, on Substack. Go learn about Substack.
• 3:50
  There is a lot of content and it's short, bite-sized content.
• 3:54
  It's at substack.com slash thevirtualcouch. I would love to have you there.
• 3:58
  And there is a paid subscription version there as well, where you are getting
• 4:02
  a lot more content, some behind the scenes things, and a little bit of a deep
• 4:06
  dive more into the world of emotional maturity, narcissistic traits,
• 4:10
  behaviors, and a lot more there on Substack.
• 4:13
  And reach out to me if you have questions or if you identify with the work that
• 4:17
  I do and are looking for some coaching, some therapy.
• 4:20
  If you are interested in working with me, tell me a little bit more about your story.
• 4:23
  I sometimes have availability, some openings, and I'm finding that I'm a little
• 4:27
  more picky, a little more choosy with the people I work with.
• 4:29
  But in doing so, I really have felt a connection with the people that I have
• 4:33
  the opportunity to work with. But let's get to today's story.
• 4:36
  In the early 1960s, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was running computer
• 4:41
  simulations of weather patterns. He was essentially trying to predict the weather.
• 4:44
  One day, he wanted to rerun a simulation partway through, so instead of starting
• 4:48
  over, he manually entered numbers from a previous printout.
• 4:51
  The computer calculated using six decimal places, for example, 0.506127.
• 4:57
  The printout only showed three, 0.506.
• 5:00
  Lorenz figured the difference was insignificant, because we're just talking a few ten-thousandths.
• 5:05
  Entered the rounded number, started the simulation, and he took a little break.
• 5:09
  When he came back, the weather patterns had diverged wildly.
• 5:13
  What started as nearly identical conditions now produced completely different
• 5:16
  weather. And at first, Lawrence thought the computer must have been broken.
• 5:21
  He actually stumbled onto something fundamental. In certain kinds of systems,
• 5:26
  very small inputs can amplify in unpredictable ways.
• 5:30
  He called it sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
• 5:33
  Kind of a little bit of a nerdy version of what in 1972 he would later present
• 5:38
  with a much better title, does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
• 5:45
  Also known as the butterfly effect.
• 5:47
  And what's important is that the butterfly effect doesn't mean every small action
• 5:51
  causes enormous consequences, but it means that in complex dynamic systems with
• 5:56
  a lot of interconnected parts, a lot of variables, small inputs can amplify unpredictability.
• 6:02
  That's why weather forecasts are still unreliable beyond a week or two,
• 6:06
  or maybe even a day or two, or an hour or two. It's not about the computing power.
• 6:11
  It's that the atmosphere is inherently chaotic.
• 6:14
  Now, let's talk about one of the most fascinating things I've heard in a long
• 6:18
  time, Gila monster saliva. Stay with me here.
• 6:21
  In the early 1990s, Dr. John Ng, an endocrinologist at a VA hospital in the
• 6:25
  Bronx, became obsessed with something that most people would overlook.
• 6:29
  And the therapist in me would really like to find out what his initial motivation
• 6:32
  was, why this was so enthralling to him.
• 6:35
  He became fascinated with the Gila monster, this slow-moving venomous lizard
• 6:39
  from the American Southwest, and how it only eats about five to ten times, dramatic pause, a year.
• 6:45
  It can go months between meals, and somehow it keeps perfectly stable blood sugar the whole time.
• 6:51
  Dr. Ng wanted to know how, so he did what I think any of us would do.
• 6:54
  He ordered some dried venom from a serpentarium in Utah, and yes, that is a real thing.
• 6:58
  And he found a peptide that he named Exenden-4. It was almost identical to a
• 7:05
  human hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar.
• 7:09
  But in humans, GLP-1 breaks down in just a couple of minutes.
• 7:12
  The Gila Monsters version stays active for hours.
• 7:15
  Dr. Ng sees the potential immediately.
• 7:18
  One problem, nobody else cared. So for three years, he pitched pharmaceutical
• 7:22
  companies and they all passed.
• 7:24
  Lizard venom for diabetes. Sounded a little too weird and even his own hospital
• 7:28
  wouldn't help him patent it.
• 7:30
  But he did not give up. In 1996, he stood next to a poster at a diabetes conference
• 7:35
  pitching anybody who would listen.
• 7:36
  And finally, a small biotech company bit.
• 7:39
  Pun intended. That moment, one scientist refusing to give up,
• 7:43
  waiting for somebody to believe in lizard spit, set off a cascade that nobody predicted.
• 7:47
  That compound eventually became Ozempic or Wegovi, and today over 25 million
• 7:52
  prescriptions and counting, and it's not just for diabetes anymore.
• 7:56
  Research is showing benefits for heart disease, kidney disease,
• 8:00
  potentially Alzheimer's, and even reduced addiction, alcohol,
• 8:04
  cigarettes, tobacco, and even in early trials with some drug addiction.
• 8:09
  So from a scientist studying lizard spit in a VA hospital to a compound that
• 8:13
  may transform how we treat addiction, dementia, heart disease,
• 8:16
  and obesity, one small discovery, one person who refused to give up.
• 8:19
  Ripples still expanding. That's the butterfly effect working in our favor.
• 8:24
  Now, let's talk about when it doesn't necessarily work in our favor.
• 8:27
  June 28, 1914, Sarajevo. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian
• 8:32
  throne, was traveling through the city in an open car with his wife, Sophie.
• 8:36
  That morning, Serbian nationalists had positioned themselves along the route
• 8:40
  with pistols and bombs and cyanide pills.
• 8:42
  The first assassination attempt
• 8:43
  failed. A bomb bounced off Ferdinand's car and exploded behind them.
• 8:47
  Shaken, he continued on to City Hall, and afterward, he made a fateful decision.
• 8:51
  He wanted to visit the wounded. The motorcade was supposed to take a different
• 8:54
  route for security's sake, but the driver didn't get the message.
• 8:58
  So he turned on to Franz Josef Street, the original route, by mistake.
• 9:02
  And when somebody shouted the error, the driver stopped to back up.
• 9:05
  And the car came to rest directly in front of a 19-year-old named Gavrillo Princip.
• 9:11
  Princip had been part of the plot, but he hadn't acted that morning.
• 9:14
  And now, by pure chance, his target sat motionless feet away.
• 9:17
  He stepped forward and he fired twice, and both Ferdinand and Sophie were dead.
• 9:20
  Within weeks, alliances pulled the continent into war.
• 9:23
  Russia mobilized, Germany declared war, France and Britain followed,
• 9:26
  and World War I went on to kill some estimates, say, up to 17 million people.
• 9:32
  Four empires collapsed, the Russian Revolution happened, and the Treaty of Versailles
• 9:36
  planted seeds for World War II that would take the lives of another 60 million.
• 9:40
  One wrong turn, one driver who wasn't told about the route change,
• 9:43
  one 19-year-old on a specific street corner at a.
• 9:47
  The ripples from that wrong turn are still shaping our world today.
• 9:50
  So we have three stories. Scientist persistence leading to a compound that may help millions.
• 9:55
  A driver's wrong turn contributing to 17 million deaths.
• 9:59
  And a rounding error revealing that some systems are fundamentally unpredictable.
• 10:02
  So here's what I've been thinking about lately, and this is where your Uncle Ray comes in.
• 10:06
  Family systems are complex too.
• 10:09
  A family system is the emotional ecosystem that develops between the people
• 10:13
  who live together, who grow together and psychologically wire themselves to
• 10:18
  one another in a sense, often,
• 10:20
  long before they're even aware it's happening, if they ever are aware of the
• 10:24
  way that they co-regulate and that it's happening in the system.
• 10:27
  It's the web of roles and rules and expectations, alliances,
• 10:31
  unspoken agreements, and emotional patterns that form in response to how each
• 10:35
  member relates to the others.
• 10:37
  And a family system isn't just the sum of the individuals, it's also this invisible
• 10:41
  operating system that shapes how everybody inside it learns to communicate and
• 10:45
  solve problems and express emotions and react to each other and essentially
• 10:48
  try to make sense of relationships.
• 10:50
  Sometimes the butterfly in a family system isn't an event.
• 10:54
  I think it can be a person and that person can tilt the whole system in either
• 10:58
  direction. Sometimes the butterfly in a.
• 11:05
  Just as often, and this is the part that I don't think we talk about enough,
• 11:08
  the butterfly is the one who quietly decides this pattern ends with me.
• 11:12
  One person's courage can be just as contagious as somebody else's dysfunction.
• 11:16
  So the system shifts because somebody was willing to step out of the role that
• 11:20
  they were handed and do something new, something different, something healthier,
• 11:25
  and it can be uncomfortable and feel like you're going against the grain.
• 11:29
  I've seen families where the first person who decides to go to therapy becomes
• 11:32
  a different kind of catalyst, Not the kind that creates drama,
• 11:35
  but the kind that creates space.
• 11:37
  Space for honesty, space for healing, space for somebody to finally say,
• 11:41
  hey, I don't really want to feel this way anymore.
• 11:43
  And sometimes they get mocked by siblings or dismissed by parents who have never
• 11:48
  confronted their own guilt or shame or who say, I don't even think therapy works
• 11:52
  as the person who's never been to therapy.
• 11:54
  This person goes anyway, and before long, somebody else in the family starts
• 11:57
  wondering, maybe I could do that too.
• 11:59
  That one person's willingness to step into the unfamiliar begins to shift what
• 12:03
  the whole system thought was possible.
• 12:05
  And I've also worked with people who were discouraged from doing anything that
• 12:08
  fell outside of the unwritten rules of their family system.
• 12:12
  One client enlisted in the military, even though nobody in their entire family
• 12:15
  had ever done it. And in some cases, it openly ridiculed and mocked the idea.
• 12:19
  And then, almost quietly, two cousins followed. The moment one person breaks
• 12:23
  this invisible barrier, the barrier loses a lot of its power.
• 12:27
  That is the butterfly effect in real time. One act of courage creating a path
• 12:31
  where no path existed before.
• 12:33
  Or I worked with somebody who decided to join a church choir after years of
• 12:37
  being teased and mocked for wanting to sing.
• 12:40
  And they showed up anyway, shaky voice and all. And then something kind of remarkable happened.
• 12:45
  Then their mom, who spent decades silencing her own voice to avoid her husband's
• 12:48
  mocking, starts joining them every Sunday, finally choosing courage over conditioning.
• 12:53
  So you got one person's willingness to reclaim a small part of themselves opens
• 12:57
  a doorway for somebody who thought that doorway had been closed years ago.
• 13:01
  And I think I see this most profoundly in people navigating faith transitions,
• 13:04
  which is still one of the things I enjoy working with the most.
• 13:07
  When someone steps out of a high demand religion that has shaped the family
• 13:10
  for generations, they often feel
• 13:12
  like they're violating some sacred script because in essence they are.
• 13:15
  But when they make that move, and not necessarily out of rebellion,
• 13:19
  but out of their own personal integrity,
• 13:21
  they often free themselves from layers of inherited shame that they didn't even
• 13:24
  know that they were carrying, that they thought was just part of what everybody
• 13:28
  goes through and what you deserve.
• 13:30
  And what's extraordinary is what happens next. Often, other family members who
• 13:35
  never felt permission to explore their own questions suddenly find themselves
• 13:39
  wondering if they are allowed to think and feel for themselves as well.
• 13:42
  One person's courage to step out of this is just what we do kind of mentality
• 13:46
  can loosen the grip of generational expectations that everybody else assumed were immovable.
• 13:52
  I've lost count of how many clients I've seen become what I like to call transformational
• 13:57
  figures in their families.
• 13:58
  They're the ones who finally stand up to these unspoken rules,
• 14:02
  who decide that their life is worth living in alignment with their own personal
• 14:05
  values rather than the family's fears or the family's absolute expectations.
• 14:11
  They become the quiet example that says, hey, you're allowed to grow.
• 14:14
  You're allowed to change.
• 14:15
  You're allowed to choose differently. And then that example ripples forward.
• 14:19
  Giving oftentimes their siblings or their cousins or even their parents,
• 14:23
  eventually their own children, permission to believe that they can do something
• 14:27
  difficult and meaningful too, even if it goes against the expectations of the
• 14:31
  family system that they were born into.
• 14:33
  And then we're going to talk a lot today about Uncle Ray, a person whose emotional
• 14:38
  immaturity, whose need for drama, whose patterns of behavior create ripples
• 14:41
  that spread through an entire family system for generations in the opposite direction.
• 14:46
  And to be perfectly clear, the Uncle Ray's and the family systems aren't changing
• 14:51
  things through necessarily grand betrayals or even sometimes obvious abuse,
• 14:55
  although those things happen too.
• 14:57
  Usually it's through something a little more subtle. Constant, low-grade chaos.
• 15:02
  Manufactured conflict. The kind of drama that slowly erodes family traditions,
• 15:06
  fractures relationships, and teaches children patterns that they will unconsciously
• 15:11
  repeat with their own family someday.
• 15:13
  I like to think of this as the family butterfly effect. So the family that I'm
• 15:18
  about to describe is based on a real family, but of course, I've changed a lot
• 15:23
  of things to protect the innocent.
• 15:26
  Several years ago, a friend shared a story that is the basis for today's episode.
• 15:33
  I changed the identifying details, but the dynamics are real.
• 15:37
  So let's meet the players. My friend.
• 15:39
  Let's call her Sarah. Sarah comes from a family with the usual cast of people,
• 15:43
  parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, holiday gatherings, where at grandma's,
• 15:46
  the traditions that families build over decades were played out in her family
• 15:50
  system. But there's one person who stands out.
• 15:52
  Sarah's mother's brother. And we will call him Uncle Ray.
• 15:56
  Uncle Ray is not a bad person. That's important to say up front.
• 15:59
  I don't think that he wakes up planning to create chaos, twirling his snidely whiplash mustache.
• 16:04
  But here's what Sarah told me almost verbatim. He needs a problem with something.
• 16:08
  It is always, always a thing. That's the key.
• 16:12
  He needs a problem. He needs drama. Without conflict, without some grievance
• 16:16
  to nurse, Uncle Ray doesn't quite know who he is.
• 16:20
  For some people, chaos feels like home. It's what they grew up with.
• 16:23
  It's the only emotional temperature they know how to regulate.
• 16:26
  And here's something fundamental. We don't really know that we exist until we're
• 16:30
  interacting with another human at our most basic level.
• 16:32
  Our sense of self is relational to others.
• 16:35
  We need people to interact with, to reflect back that we're real, that we matter.
• 16:40
  And for most of us, hopefully that interaction can be cooperative,
• 16:44
  connecting two people, genuinely curious about each other.
• 16:46
  But the further down the emotionally immature scale somebody is,
• 16:49
  the more they need to find a one-up position when they're talking to somebody.
• 16:54
  They don't just need interaction.
• 16:56
  They need to win the interaction.
• 16:58
  This one-up position is fascinating. It's this psychological stance that emotionally
• 17:02
  immature people, and this is where I'm maintaining that we're all emotionally
• 17:06
  immature until we're not, but that the emotional immaturity in us, let's just say,
• 17:11
  we instinctively reach for when we feel unsure of ourselves.
• 17:15
  It's this illusion of superiority, being above the other person,
• 17:19
  because staying one-up protects them from the discomfort of vulnerability or accountability.
• 17:24
  In a one-up position, they don't have to consider your perspective or acknowledge
• 17:28
  their own impact or tolerate any uncertainty.
• 17:31
  They simply position themselves as the judge, the knower, the correct one.
• 17:34
  And this is significant because the moment somebody shifts into the one up position,
• 17:38
  real connection becomes almost impossible.
• 17:40
  You can't be curious and defensive at the same time. You can't collaborate with
• 17:45
  somebody from a pedestal and you can't build intimacy when the relationship
• 17:49
  has turned into a scoreboard.
• 17:51
  The one up position isn't always loud or it's not always aggressive.
• 17:55
  Sometimes it shows up in a much subtler form. The victim stance,
• 17:58
  It sounds counterintuitive because being a victim looks like being one down,
• 18:03
  but emotionally immature people often use it to elevate themselves above others
• 18:06
  without taking responsibility for anything.
• 18:08
  When somebody can go into the poor me, what they're really saying is,
• 18:12
  I have the moral high ground here.
• 18:14
  I have been wronged more than anybody else. I am the most injured party.
• 18:17
  And from that position, they don't have to self-reflect. They don't have to
• 18:20
  be accountable. They don't have to consider the other person's perspective.
• 18:24
  Victimhood becomes its own version of superiority, and it's untouchable,
• 18:28
  it's unquestionable, and it's pretty much insulated from growth when it gets to that point.
• 18:32
  So it's still a one-up move because it shifts all the emotional labor onto everybody
• 18:36
  else while allowing them to remain blameless.
• 18:39
  You'll see this when somebody says things like, well, I guess nothing I ever
• 18:42
  do is good enough for you, right after being asked to take responsibility for
• 18:45
  something really small.
• 18:46
  Or suddenly the conversation isn't about the issue anymore, it's about comforting them.
• 18:50
  Or when a person responds to a boundary with, wow, okay, I didn't know you hated
• 18:54
  me, forcing the other person to now backpedal and now soothe and reassure rather than stand firm.
• 19:00
  When somebody says, no, you're right, I'm just a horrible person,
• 19:03
  what they're essentially saying is, hey, I'm going to say these words and then
• 19:06
  I need you to make me feel better.
• 19:07
  So in all these cases, the victim stance becomes a shield and a weapon at the same time.
• 19:12
  It keeps that person protected from accountability and it places them in this
• 19:15
  superior emotional position, the one who is wronged, the one who deserves repair,
• 19:19
  the one others must know, you now must work to appease me.
• 19:23
  It's still this one-up position, but it's disguised in a softer,
• 19:26
  more manipulative form.
• 19:28
  And then once somebody's operating from that one-up position,
• 19:30
  whether through a superiority or victimhood, they're not looking for connection anymore.
• 19:33
  They're looking for material. They need something to push up against,
• 19:36
  something to react to, something that lets them reinforce their elevated stance.
• 19:40
  And that's where the dynamic gets even trickier because the moment you open
• 19:43
  your mouth, you've given them something to work with.
• 19:46
  They might ask you a question, but I don't often think it's genuine curiosity.
• 19:49
  It's like they need you to start moving your mouth and saying words,
• 19:53
  saying something, anything, so they can then attack what you say and take that
• 19:56
  one-up position. This is what I like to call the attack surface.
• 20:00
  So let me give some examples because I see this very regularly.
• 20:03
  One spouse says, hey, just tell me what you need me to do. Honestly, I'll do it.
• 20:06
  That sounds very helpful, right? The right mouth noises and the right intonations. Right.
• 20:11
  And the other spouse says, okay, I could really use help bathing the kids for a spouse.
• 20:15
  Yeah, that kind of hurts my knees, right? But anything else,
• 20:18
  anything else you tell me, I will do it.
• 20:20
  You can kind of see what happened there, right? Tell me what you need wasn't
• 20:23
  actually an offer. It was a setup. The moment their partner gave an answer,
• 20:26
  it became a bit of an attack surface.
• 20:28
  Now they can reject it and look reasonable and say, hey, I said I'd help,
• 20:31
  but you picked something that I can't believe you picked, like you know about my knees.
• 20:34
  And all of a sudden now they asked you if they could help you.
• 20:39
  And now you're apologizing to them. Yeah, sorry, I forgot about your knees because
• 20:43
  it sure seems like your knees were fine when you were playing soccer over Thanksgiving, but I digress.
• 20:47
  Or here's an old favorite. Hey, where do you want to go to dinner?
• 20:50
  I don't care. You choose.
• 20:52
  So you pick a restaurant. Oh, wow, really? I thought we had that last week.
• 20:55
  Or, oh, I didn't think you'd actually pick that or I would have told you anything but that.
• 21:00
  The question wasn't genuine. It felt a little bit more like bait.
• 21:03
  The moment you provide an answer, you've given them something to attack.
• 21:07
  Now they're in the one-up position without having to be vulnerable.
• 21:09
  And don't get me wrong, when somebody is aware of this, if I really don't know,
• 21:13
  I don't have any ideas that are in my head.
• 21:16
  It's okay to be aware of that and to say, you know what? Throw something out
• 21:20
  there at me. I got to be honest. I'm not thinking about anything.
• 21:22
  I'm probably going to react to the things that you're going to say.
• 21:24
  If you're going to say Thai food, oh, well, there we go. Now I've just formed an opinion.
• 21:28
  So we can even get to that point just by being aware.
• 21:32
  But this is why conversations with emotionally immature people can feel so exhausting
• 21:37
  because you feel like you can't win.
• 21:39
  Not that it should even be a game of win or lose, but it's because you can't.
• 21:44
  The game's rigged. It's kind of like one of those carnival games where you're
• 21:46
  supposed to toss a ring onto a bottle, except the bottles are slightly tilted
• 21:49
  and the rings are just a little bit too small.
• 21:50
  But you keep trying and you keep adjusting and you keep thinking, maybe this time.
• 21:54
  But the setup itself is designed so you never quite make it.
• 21:58
  And it's not your skill that's lacking.
• 22:01
  This game was engineered to keep you chasing a wind that isn't coming.
• 22:04
  Or like a classic whack-a-mole booth.
• 22:07
  You think I've finally responded in the perfect way, said the right thing,
• 22:11
  stayed calm enough and clearly clarified myself.
• 22:14
  And then another mole pops up on the other side of the board with a brand new
• 22:16
  complaint or criticism You can't win because the goalposts aren't just moving
• 22:20
  The person that you're dealing with is the one that's moving them and kind of
• 22:24
  laughing and saying chase me.
• 22:26
  This actually gives me a great idea, emotional immaturity whack-a-mole,
• 22:29
  because that's exactly what it feels like.
• 22:30
  You answer one thing and boom, another contradiction pops up before you can
• 22:33
  even put the mallet down.
• 22:35
  Okay. Immature person says, hey, where do you want to go to dinner?
• 22:37
  You, maybe Thai food. Immature person, Thai? Seriously? Whoa. Okay.
• 22:41
  Hey, anyway, what are we doing this weekend? Whack. All right.
• 22:44
  New mole. Me. Maybe we could take the kids to the park. Immature person,
• 22:48
  the park with my allergies.
• 22:49
  Do you even think before you talk? Immature person. Hey, also,
• 22:52
  I missed my dentist appointment today.
• 22:54
  Why didn't you remind me about my dentist appointment. Whack,
• 22:57
  there's a new mole. Me, I assumed it was still in your calendar.
• 23:01
  Immature person, oh, so now it's my fault. Nice.
• 23:05
  Immature person, hey, so what are we going to do for your mom's birthday, by the way?
• 23:08
  Whack, new mole. You can answer every question perfectly and it still won't
• 23:13
  matter because the goal wasn't information. It was friction.
• 23:17
  They're not collecting answers. They're looking for these attack surfaces.
• 23:21
  So back to Uncle Ray, a phrase that you're going to hear several times today.
• 23:25
  Uncle Ray is married to Janet and Janet is what I often call pathologically kind.
• 23:29
  Now that word pathological can sound harsh or clinical. So I want to clarify
• 23:34
  what it means in this context.
• 23:36
  When something's pathological, it simply means that it's moved maybe beyond
• 23:40
  its healthy purpose or identity. And it's crossed a little bit into territory
• 23:44
  where it can cause harm, usually quietly or gradually, and often with the very best of intentions.
• 23:50
  It's when a trait that is very beautiful in moderation becomes so overused or
• 23:55
  automatic or so tied to survival that it starts working against the person instead of for them.
• 24:01
  You can see this in a lot of areas in life. Confidence is wonderful until it
• 24:04
  becomes almost a form of pathological overconfidence where somebody can't hear
• 24:08
  feedback or acknowledge mistakes.
• 24:09
  Or order and neatness can be really grounding, but it can also become pathological
• 24:13
  when it starts looking like perfectionism, where nothing ever quite feels good
• 24:17
  enough and a person's self-worth rises and falls on these impossible standards.
• 24:21
  And even love can become pathological when it turns into pathological caretaking,
• 24:26
  where somebody believes their entire worth depends entirely on keeping everybody
• 24:29
  else happy and keeping themselves in a kind of a one-down position.
• 24:34
  So when I say that Janet is pathologically kind, I'm not saying she's broken.
• 24:37
  I'm not saying she's flawed. I'm saying her kindness grew out of its healthy
• 24:41
  container and became so tied to her identity, so necessary for her emotional
• 24:44
  safety that she no longer has access to the other side of the equation.
• 24:48
  Confidence, assertiveness, boundaries, her own needs.
• 24:51
  Healthy kindness is more balanced. It breathes. It allows generosity and self-respect to coexist.
• 24:56
  Healthy kindness lets you say, hey, I'm happy to help, but also I may not be
• 25:00
  able to today, or I've got a hard out at five o'clock.
• 25:03
  It recognizes that giving is part of a relationship, but it's not the entire job description.
• 25:08
  Pathological kindness is different because it's reflexive. It's fear-driven.
• 25:11
  It's the kind of kindness that says, if I take care of everybody else well enough,
• 25:15
  maybe, maybe I'll finally feel safe.
• 25:17
  It's prioritizing everyone else's needs above your own essential needs and over
• 25:22
  and over again because the alternative feels dangerous or selfish or disloyal.
• 25:26
  It's about feeling guilty for even thinking about setting a boundary.
• 25:29
  It's staying in painful situations because leaving might upset someone else.
• 25:33
  And it's absorbing mistreatment and apologizing for not handling it better.
• 25:37
  That's the place that Janet lives in. She doesn't push back.
• 25:40
  She doesn't set limits. She explains away Ray's behavior.
• 25:42
  She smooths conflict before it forms. She sacrifices her own needs to keep Ray calm.
• 25:47
  And somewhere along the line, she came to believe that if she could just give
• 25:50
  enough, accommodate enough, love enough, then Ray would finally get it.
• 25:53
  He would have his aha moment. He would finally soften.
• 25:55
  And again, none of this is a moral failure. It's a childhood imprint.
• 25:58
  It's the emotional equivalent of learning to walk with one leg slightly shorter
• 26:02
  and not realizing decades later that your whole posture has been shaped around it.
• 26:06
  Janet learned early that she was safest when she managed other people's emotions.
• 26:10
  That was how she stayed connected. That was how she stayed valuable.
• 26:13
  That was how she stayed needed.
• 26:15
  And this is why my friend Ross Rosenberg, author of The Human Magnet Syndrome,
• 26:19
  describes relationships like theirs as breakup resistant.
• 26:22
  Because they're built on dynamics, not compatibility.
• 26:25
  Ray is somebody who needs friction to feel alive. He needs somebody to push
• 26:28
  against, somebody who absorbs his storms so he never has to confront the fear
• 26:32
  underneath the bluster.
• 26:34
  Drama is Ray's emotional currency. It really is the air he breathes.
• 26:38
  And then Janet steps into the picture, somebody whose entire emotional identity
• 26:41
  is built on absorbing storms, smoothing chaos, and believing that love means to erase yourself.
• 26:48
  She knows how to caretake chaos. She's done it her whole life.
• 26:51
  It feels familiar, even if it's painful. For her, it just is.
• 26:56
  So for Ray, she's a perfect partner who won't challenge the narrative,
• 26:59
  won't require accountability, and won't pull away when he creates emotional turbulence.
• 27:04
  For Janet, well, Ray's familiar.
• 27:06
  He keeps her in the role that she learned in childhood, managing,
• 27:09
  soothing, compensating, fixing.
• 27:11
  Ross calls this the human magnet syndrome, two people whose wounds fit together
• 27:15
  so snugly that it feels like destiny, even though it's actually unconscious
• 27:18
  patterning, pulling them toward each other.
• 27:21
  And right in the middle of that dynamic is their son, Tyler,
• 27:24
  quietly absorbing all of it, learning not from lectures or rules,
• 27:27
  but from the emotional choreography that he's watched his entire life.
• 27:31
  And when you see the world through that lens, it's hard to blame him for repeating
• 27:34
  what was modeled. Let's get to the wedding, which ended up being a masterclass
• 27:38
  in emotional immaturity.
• 27:39
  Before I go into those details, let me say something very important.
• 27:43
  I believe we are all emotionally immature in certain ways. It's not a negative,
• 27:49
  it's human. It's a place to operate from.
• 27:51
  If you have not heard any of the Waking Up to Narcissism podcast because you've
• 27:55
  been afraid of the word narcissism, which I have received a lot of that feedback...
• 27:59
  Since early on, 150 plus episodes ago, I wanted to be very clear that narcissistic
• 28:05
  personality disorder is a very, very small percentage of the population.
• 28:09
  Some estimates between 3% and 5%. But we throw it around like it's at 50%,
• 28:13
  60%, 70%. Everybody's ex, everybody's boss, everybody's bad friend is a narcissist.
• 28:19
  But in reality, we're all just emotionally immature until we're not.
• 28:23
  Until we do the work to find the tools. And even then, we still have to embrace
• 28:27
  a lot of discomfort, admit the things that we don't know that we don't know.
• 28:30
  But at least if you can identify the areas in which you are emotionally immature,
• 28:34
  you're on a path of healing.
• 28:37
  Emotional immaturity is when the survival skills we developed as kids keep running
• 28:41
  into adulthood, even when they no longer serve us.
• 28:43
  We don't arrive in adulthood with fully developed emotional skills.
• 28:46
  We arrive with whatever we learned in childhood, strategies that helped us navigate
• 28:49
  our families, our schools, our early relationships. And the problem is that
• 28:54
  those childhood strategies don't automatically upgrade when we turn 12 or 16 or 18 or 25 or 40 or 50.
• 29:01
  They keep running in the background. It's like old software on a new computer.
• 29:05
  There's a line from an Alex Michelaitis novel. He's the author of The Silent
• 29:09
  Patient, an amazing book.
• 29:10
  In a follow-up book called The Fury, he has a line that captures this so well.
• 29:14
  He says, when we are young and afraid, something happens.
• 29:16
  Time stops. A version of us is trapped at that age forever.
• 29:20
  A frightened child's hiding in your mind. And you were meant to liberate that
• 29:23
  child, but instead you ended up becoming their jailer.
• 29:26
  The child who learned to please others becomes the adult who can't set boundaries.
• 29:30
  The child who shut down emotions becomes the partner who can't be vulnerable.
• 29:33
  The child who learned that disagreement meant abandonment then sees every conflict as a threat.
• 29:38
  I think part of why that quote is so good is because I believe when we're kids, we feel everything.
• 29:46
  Our bodies are wired to send up little flares, fear, excitement,
• 29:49
  confusion, shame, sadness.
• 29:50
  And our nervous system is doing its best to say, hey, something happened,
• 29:53
  pay attention. But the problem is almost none of us were ever taught what to do with those feelings.
• 29:58
  Even the kindest, most well-meaning parent would say things like,
• 30:01
  hey, don't worry about it, bud.
• 30:02
  Or it's not a big deal. because they wanted to soothe us, but we were still
• 30:06
  worried. And to us, it was a big deal.
• 30:08
  So right there, we learned that our internal world was somehow incorrect.
• 30:12
  And then on the other end of the spectrum, you had parents who said,
• 30:14
  stop crying or you're fine or the classic, I'll give you something to cry about.
• 30:18
  And on both sides of that coin, there's the gentle minimizer or the harsh dismisser.
• 30:23
  The message lands the same way. Your emotions are too much. And if something
• 30:27
  feels overwhelming to you, you're wrong for feeling it.
• 30:29
  So what does that child do with that? Their body still registers the experience.
• 30:33
  Their nervous system still reacts, but without anybody helping them name it
• 30:36
  or regulate it or make sense of it, those big feelings get filed away like the quote describes.
• 30:42
  Like these little pockets of unfinished business that the child assumes that
• 30:46
  their future self will come back and sort out.
• 30:48
  It's almost as if the kid inside of us, the inner child, is saying,
• 30:51
  okay, tuck this away into the vault.
• 30:53
  And when you grow up and become the big kid, I'm sure you'll help us. You'll heal us.
• 30:57
  But then somewhere along the line, we totally missed the memo.
• 30:59
  Nobody circles back, teaches us that adulthood isn't the finish line where emotional
• 31:03
  maturity magically downloads.
• 31:05
  It's not like just you can update the software. You have to do the work.
• 31:08
  You have to be your own programmer.
• 31:10
  And then those old survival strategies, the pleasing, the shutting down, the fear of conflict.
• 31:14
  Now they show up in our adult relationships with the emotional logic of a child.
• 31:18
  Not because we're broken, but because that younger version of us is still holding
• 31:22
  those old feelings, waiting for us to finally come back and help them make sense of it.
• 31:26
  But then they just come out. They're reactive.
• 31:28
  So back to the story. Sarah has a brother, Michael.
• 31:32
  Michael got engaged and wanted to get married in roughly about eight months
• 31:35
  and have a summer wedding.
• 31:38
  Uncle Ray's son, Tyler, had also gotten engaged, but booked the venue a year
• 31:42
  and a half, two years out.
• 31:43
  Long engagement, big production. Now, there is no rule anywhere,
• 31:47
  at least that I'm aware of, in any etiquette book or any tradition that says
• 31:50
  you cannot get married before your cousin who chose a longer engagement.
• 31:54
  It's not as if they called dibs on weddings and until they run its course,
• 31:58
  no one else is allowed to marry.
• 31:59
  But Uncle Ray sees it a little differently. So let's talk about the patterns
• 32:03
  of emotional immaturity.
• 32:04
  When you look at Ray's reaction to Michael's wedding, you can see several patterns
• 32:09
  that show up again and again in emotionally immature family systems.
• 32:12
  And these are random behaviors. their childhood adaptations that are being replayed
• 32:17
  in adult form here are these survival strategies they worked once.
• 32:22
  Now in adulthood, they create confusion and conflict and in a sense that nothing
• 32:27
  you say or do is ever quite right.
• 32:29
  We're going to go over a few of these. Pattern one, black and white,
• 32:31
  all or nothing thinking.
• 32:33
  Children make sense of overwhelming situations by seeing the world in absolutes.
• 32:37
  Everything is good or bad.
• 32:39
  It's a lot of extra work to sit with the gray because our brain craves certainty.
• 32:44
  We want to know and we don't like to be uncomfortable.
• 32:46
  We see things as kids and as adults as all good or all bad, with me or against
• 32:51
  me. It's developmentally normal, but when that thinking doesn't mature,
• 32:56
  it turns into ultimatums, extremes, and emotional rigidity.
• 33:00
  So for Ray, Michael's wedding couldn't simply be a joyful moment for someone
• 33:04
  else. In his framework, if Michael was getting married first,
• 33:06
  it took something from Tyler.
• 33:08
  It's a zero-sum game. There's a winner and a loser. Someone had to win, someone had to lose.
• 33:13
  There was no room for the mature adult truth that two things can actually be
• 33:17
  true at once. that Michael could be excited about his own timeline and Tyler's
• 33:21
  wedding could still be wonderful as well.
• 33:23
  This is the same mechanism that is behind ending a relationship after one argument.
• 33:28
  You never supported me or seeing coworkers as either perfect allies or then
• 33:31
  total backstabbers and flip-flopping back and forth.
• 33:33
  It's the emotional logic of a child navigating a complicated world with really
• 33:37
  simple categories and simple rules.
• 33:39
  Let's go to emotional immaturity pattern number two, mind reading and assumed intent.
• 33:43
  Children assume others feel and think exactly the way that they do.
• 33:47
  Exactly the way they do. We still do this. Adults carry this forward and we
• 33:51
  start to create entire narratives about other people's intentions without actually
• 33:54
  checking any of the facts.
• 33:56
  So Ray never asked why Michael wanted a sooner wedding. He didn't approach it
• 33:59
  with curiosity. He decided that he knew the motives and it was selfishness, attention seeking.
• 34:04
  And he treated that imagined narrative as absolute truth because if he thought
• 34:08
  that, then everybody must think that.
• 34:10
  And this is the same pattern that leads adults to think my partner didn't text
• 34:13
  me back, they are mad. Or my friend didn't say hi, they are obviously upset
• 34:17
  with me without ever checking.
• 34:19
  It is not malicious. It's, again, an outdated emotional operating system that
• 34:23
  never learned to pause and verify and be genuinely curious.
• 34:27
  Emotionally immature pattern number three, difficulty with accountability.
• 34:31
  Children absolutely fear being
• 34:33
  wrong because being wrong often meant punishment or withdrawal of love.
• 34:36
  If you never were able to feel safe making mistakes, then accountability becomes
• 34:40
  threatening even in adulthood.
• 34:42
  So the nervous system scrambles to avoid it at all costs. I didn't do that. You didn't tell me to.
• 34:46
  It's where gaslighting comes in. Later, Ray insisted he didn't say that Michael's
• 34:51
  fiance was selfish, even though that is what people heard.
• 34:55
  He said, oh, no, no, she was being selfish, as though that's a meaningful distinction.
• 35:00
  It's a subtle rewriting of reality to try to avoid responsibility.
• 35:04
  And this isn't unique to Ray. Adults do this all the time.
• 35:07
  Oh, I didn't yell. You just took it that way. Or I didn't forget. You never told me.
• 35:11
  When that habit gets called out, many people immediately shift to defensiveness
• 35:15
  or shame because the stakes of simply being wrong just feel as high as they did in childhood.
• 35:20
  In family systems work, this is described as a childhood defense mechanism masquerading as adult logic.
• 35:27
  This is why gaslighting is a childhood defense mechanism.
• 35:30
  I couldn't have done that or else that means that I did something that has disappointed
• 35:34
  you and then you will leave me. So I didn't do it. You never told me.
• 35:37
  The dog ate my homework. Pattern four, emotional reasoning.
• 35:40
  Children treat emotions as facts because feelings were their primary way of
• 35:43
  navigating the world. But if this continues into adulthood, I feel it becomes it must be true.
• 35:48
  So when Ray tells people that his sister attacked him on the phone,
• 35:50
  a sister who, by all accounts, avoids confrontation at all costs,
• 35:54
  he wasn't necessarily lying.
• 35:56
  To him, disagreement feels like an attack, and when people are attacking you,
• 35:59
  they yell at you, and that feeling became the fact.
• 36:02
  This is why conversations with emotionally immature people can feel so disorienting.
• 36:05
  You can be the most calm, measured, and kind person ever, and they will still
• 36:09
  insist that you are harsh or critical or aggressive.
• 36:11
  It's when your kids say, stop yelling at me, and you know you're not yelling
• 36:15
  because you find yourself wanting to say, I'll show you yelling.
• 36:18
  Their emotional experience becomes the objective reality, and they expect everybody
• 36:22
  else around them to dance accordingly.
• 36:24
  I feel it, so it must be true. I think you're mad at me. So now I need you to
• 36:27
  prove that you're not mad at me, even though you're probably not.
• 36:30
  And I don't even actually know what it would take for me to feel that way.
• 36:33
  But you need to start dancing.
• 36:35
  Pattern five, external validation dependence. Because children rely on caregivers
• 36:39
  for reassurance and their own sense of self.
• 36:41
  A kid gets their sense of self from external validation. That's why they're
• 36:43
  continually trying to look and see, what do you think? What do you think about
• 36:47
  me? What do you think about this thing I'm doing?
• 36:49
  And adults who never internalize that sense of identity look to other people
• 36:53
  to stabilize their emotions.
• 36:54
  I interact with people in my life on occasion who say, no, I need you to tell me what to do.
• 37:00
  And what I hear in that is that so that then if it works, great.
• 37:04
  If it doesn't, I can blame you.
• 37:06
  Ray needed the entire family to co-sign on his perspective. He told Tyler,
• 37:11
  he told other relatives, he built a case.
• 37:13
  Because without external validation, without this affirmation,
• 37:16
  the grievance didn't feel real enough, solid enough, justified enough.
• 37:20
  It didn't feel right for him. But here's the spoiler alert. it won't because
• 37:25
  he doesn't know how he feels.
• 37:27
  He has this lack of self on the inside.
• 37:30
  So, it won't ever feel like the right thing.
• 37:33
  But if others don't validate his view, then he can definitely hold it against
• 37:37
  them. And this pattern shows up everywhere.
• 37:40
  Obsessively checking social media engagement, needing others to agree before
• 37:42
  making a decision, feeling deflated when an idea is immediately praised. And it's not vanity.
• 37:47
  It's a nervous system still searching for the parents who were supposed to say,
• 37:51
  hey, champ, what do you think?
• 37:53
  And help it feel more secure. And then a couple more. Pattern six,
• 37:57
  magical thinking. One of my favorites.
• 37:58
  Children believe their thoughts can control reality. If I close my eyes, you can't see me.
• 38:03
  Or if I don't leave my stuffed animals on the bed in a certain way,
• 38:06
  then when I get home, they'll be mad at me.
• 38:08
  Or I love, I heard a podcast recently where the person said,
• 38:11
  hey, I'm in my 30s and I still think I got to wear my lucky socks in order to
• 38:15
  be successful in certain situations at work.
• 38:18
  Or people with their superstitions and sports.
• 38:21
  Adults outgrow this for the most part. But in emotional situations,
• 38:25
  magical thinking resurfaces.
• 38:26
  And Ray fell into this too. He believed that if he felt wrong,
• 38:29
  then surely everybody else must see it in the same way. that if he declared
• 38:31
  Michael's timeline selfish, then others would intuitively understand and they
• 38:34
  would rally behind him. And when they didn't, it felt like betrayal.
• 38:37
  Adult magical thinking also sounds like some of my greatest hits.
• 38:41
  If I avoid checking the bank account, the problem isn't real.
• 38:44
  Or people who say, if my partner loves me, they should just know what I need.
• 38:47
  But even a bigger one, if we don't talk about it, it'll just get better.
• 38:51
  If I don't deal with my problems in my marriage, they will just magically work out.
• 38:55
  Now, the beliefs aren't silly. They're emotional shortcuts formed long before
• 38:59
  logic entered the picture. but it is magical.
• 39:02
  Magical thinking. And one more, managing other people's emotions. This is big.
• 39:07
  Children learn early which emotions are allowed and which ones get them in trouble
• 39:10
  or get ignored. So they become scanners and fixers and they manage others to stay safe.
• 39:15
  So for Ray, managing emotions look like controlling the narrative.
• 39:18
  If he could get everybody on his side, he wouldn't have to feel the discomfort
• 39:20
  of uncertainty or disagreement.
• 39:22
  For Sarah's mother, managing emotions looked like smoothing conflict or taking
• 39:26
  responsibility for everybody else's feelings and trying to keep the peace.
• 39:30
  A lot of managing people's emotions is, I don't want that person to be mad.
• 39:33
  I don't want that person to think that I don't care.
• 39:36
  I'm managing their emotional experience rather than allowing them to have their
• 39:39
  own emotional experience.
• 39:41
  And there is a version of this where somebody becomes aware of it and they say, no, I am doing that.
• 39:45
  I'll at least acknowledge that because there's a chance that person won't respond
• 39:49
  the way that you are worried about them responding. Both Ray and Sarah's mom
• 39:54
  learned these things for good reasons.
• 39:56
  Both adapted to survive in their childhood home. But then these same adaptations,
• 40:00
  when carried into adulthood, unchecked, create dysfunctional dynamics that leave everybody exhausted.
• 40:05
  So when you put all these patterns together, black and white thinking,
• 40:08
  mind reading, difficulty with accountability, emotional reasoning,
• 40:10
  external validation dependence.
• 40:12
  You got your magical thinking and the pressure to manage everybody else's emotions.
• 40:16
  You can see why a simple wedding announcement sent shockwaves through the whole
• 40:20
  family system. It wasn't just about a date on a calendar.
• 40:22
  It was about decades of emotional templates that start playing themselves out in real time.
• 40:27
  Ray wasn't trying to destroy the family or cause conflict. He was reacting from
• 40:31
  the only emotional playbook he'd ever been given.
• 40:33
  And that's the heart of emotional immaturity. It's not a lack of intelligence.
• 40:36
  It's not even a lack of love, but a lack of updated tools.
• 40:40
  And this is where the butterfly effect kicks in.
• 40:42
  So Ray tells Tyler, his son, his version of events.
• 40:46
  Tyler responds in kind. And Michael, who has been close with Tyler growing up
• 40:51
  as cousins, reaches out to smooth things over. Tyler takes a few days to respond.
• 40:55
  Then he responds and says, Hey, I think we're just not going to be able to make
• 40:58
  it to your wedding. But if that's not a priority for you to come to ours, I guess I understand.
• 41:03
  So again, he's being very passive aggressive saying, if that's not a priority for you, I understand.
• 41:07
  It's not conflict resolution. That's a passive aggressive missile launched.
• 41:11
  We're not coming. And it's your fault.
• 41:13
  Tyler learned it somewhere. Before we get there, I want to talk about curiosity.
• 41:17
  I think there's this spectrum of curiosity.
• 41:19
  Curiosity or the lack of it is one of the clearest windows, I think,
• 41:24
  into someone's emotional maturity level.
• 41:26
  Some people just aren't curious, not because they're lazy, but because they
• 41:29
  didn't see a model, because they can't take in someone else's opinion.
• 41:32
  If you're stuck in black and white thinking, hearing a different opinion feels
• 41:35
  like an attack. If you think differently than me, you must think I am wrong and you are right.
• 41:40
  And if I am wrong, then what am I? Bad? Worthless? Dumb?
• 41:43
  So instead of being curious, they tell, they inform, they explain,
• 41:47
  they talk at you, they control the narrative.
• 41:49
  They even tell you what I think that you are thinking or what you are believing.
• 41:52
  And that's not a conversation. That's a monologue with an audience.
• 41:57
  Performative curiosity, if we're starting to move up the spectrum,
• 41:59
  is curiosity as a checkbox.
• 42:01
  There, I asked. They don't lead in. They don't follow up. They asked because
• 42:05
  they were supposed to, not because they wanted to know.
• 42:07
  There is a question mark on the end of it. Okay, no, yeah, how was your day?
• 42:11
  Then you've got weaponized curiosity. And that's where people ask questions,
• 42:15
  but they're more designed as traps.
• 42:17
  Don't you think it's hypocritical that you're upset about this when you did
• 42:20
  that? It's not curiosity. That's an ambush, again, with a question mark.
• 42:25
  Genuine curiosity means stepping outside of your ego, being prepared to hear
• 42:28
  things that feel like potentially criticism.
• 42:31
  And instead of defending, continuing to be curious, to set your ego aside.
• 42:35
  It sounds like, hey, help me understand. and then actually trying to understand,
• 42:40
  actually actively listening.
• 42:42
  Genuine curiosity is wanting to understand someone's inner world,
• 42:44
  especially when it doesn't match yours.
• 42:46
  And it's difficult. It requires sitting with discomfort instead of reacting to it.
• 42:50
  One of the number one responses I see is that when somebody does say,
• 42:53
  okay, I do want to be genuinely curious, and then you share something with them
• 42:57
  and then they don't respond and they just say, well, I don't know what to say.
• 42:59
  And now we get back into the world of emotional immaturity that you're assuming
• 43:03
  there's a right thing or a wrong thing to say.
• 43:05
  Real intimacy is I want to know you. I want to understand. And you can even say, oh, I have no idea.
• 43:11
  I don't even know what to say or to have the courage to be known and to say,
• 43:15
  man, that's hard for me because I disagree. And so, I find myself wanting to
• 43:19
  defend myself or to attack what you're saying.
• 43:21
  That's a place that we can start from. But Uncle Ray is not good at sitting
• 43:25
  with discomfort. He is very good at reacting to it.
• 43:28
  Now, let's introduce Uncle Dave. Uncle Ray had cut his brother Dave out of his
• 43:34
  life years earlier. Total estrangement.
• 43:36
  And then one Christmas, seemingly out of nowhere, Ray decided to reach out.
• 43:39
  And given their history, that alone took a lot for him. I'm curious of what
• 43:43
  that was really all about. What was the angle?
• 43:45
  But the way he framed it revealed a lot about how he understood repair.
• 43:49
  He said, I'm open to reconnecting, but I want to leave the past in the past.
• 43:52
  And on the surface, it sounds reasonable. And I hear that often,
• 43:54
  especially when couples come in for therapy.
• 43:56
  It's like somebody's trying to move forward and they don't want to drag old
• 43:59
  pain behind them. And I do genuinely believe that Ray thought he was offering something generous.
• 44:03
  But underneath that hope was also a very human attempt to protect himself from
• 44:07
  vulnerability, from discomfort, from the uncertainty that real connection requires.
• 44:11
  Because what Ray was really saying from his emotional vantage point was.
• 44:16
  Hey, I don't know how to talk to you about what happened. I'm not even really
• 44:18
  sure what happened. I just don't like the way it felt.
• 44:20
  I don't know how to hold your experience in mind at the same time.
• 44:23
  So the only way I know how to feel safe reconnecting is if we don't ever touch old wounds at all.
• 44:27
  And that makes sense when you consider the family system you came from.
• 44:30
  Avoidance might have felt like the most stable path. But what it also meant
• 44:34
  was that the reconciliation he offered didn't allow space for Uncle Dave's feelings
• 44:37
  or the years of distance or the very real pain that had accumulated on both sides.
• 44:41
  It was an attempt at some type of connection, but it's framed in a way where
• 44:45
  Ray could feel secure without having to step into emotional territory that felt overwhelming to him.
• 44:51
  And here's the hard truth about being human. Even if we intellectually decide,
• 44:54
  let's not talk about the past, remind our bodies or our central nervous systems
• 44:57
  because they don't operate on that kind of logic.
• 45:00
  Our nervous systems remember things that our minds have been trying to forget.
• 45:03
  A smell, a tone of voice, a familiar pattern, any of it can bring old emotions forward.
• 45:08
  Not because somebody's trying to sabotage the relationship, but because that's
• 45:11
  how wounds surface when they've never been tended to.
• 45:14
  That's part of the human experience. So when Dave inevitably had a moment where
• 45:18
  something felt off or an old hurt might have bubbled up, Ray would have interpreted
• 45:22
  that through the only framework he knew.
• 45:24
  To him, oh, so now Dave's breaking the agreement and choosing conflict over connection.
• 45:28
  And from that place, Ray would get to conclude, see, I tried. He didn't want this.
• 45:33
  So from the outside, it's easy to see that the reconciliation was almost destined
• 45:37
  to struggle, not because either person was malicious, but because the conditions
• 45:41
  it was built on did not give the relationship room to breathe and to just be real.
• 45:46
  Real reconciliation is spacious. It says, hey, I'm here and I want to understand
• 45:51
  and we can take as long as we need.
• 45:52
  And it assumes that discomfort will come up and it makes room for it.
• 45:56
  Ray's version came from a place of emotional self-protection,
• 45:59
  offering connection, but only within boundaries that allowed him to stay in
• 46:02
  control of the narrative.
• 46:03
  And when Dave couldn't meet those conditions, conditions that I would worry
• 46:07
  that anyone with a history and a central nervous system could realistically
• 46:11
  meet, then Ray interpreted that as proof that the attempt had failed because
• 46:14
  of Dave, not because the framework itself didn't allow for healing.
• 46:17
  And I work from this place where I assume that nobody wakes up thinking,
• 46:21
  how can I sabotage reconnection today? that they wake up trying to do what feels
• 46:26
  best or safe for them, what feels possible, what matches, what they were taught.
• 46:31
  And sometimes those attempts, as genuine as they are, don't line up with what real repair requires.
• 46:36
  And before I go any further, I want to own something here big time because I
• 46:39
  am aware of it, even as I'm talking about all of this, I'm projecting.
• 46:43
  And projection at its simplest is when we take our own worldview,
• 46:47
  our own emotional logic, our own lived experience, and we assume that someone
• 46:51
  else must be operating from the same internal map.
• 46:54
  And we don't do it maliciously or even really on purpose, it's just the brain
• 46:59
  trying to make sense of behavior by filtering it through what we think we would do in that situation.
• 47:03
  And I fully acknowledge that I'm doing exactly that right now,
• 47:06
  describing Ray's actions through the lens of what I imagine someone might be
• 47:10
  feeling or trying to do, even if that person themselves doesn't consciously
• 47:13
  understand the deeper reasons for their own reactions.
• 47:15
  And the reason I want to highlight this is because it connects directly to one
• 47:19
  of the most important concepts in my four pillars of a connected conversation.
• 47:23
  Pillar one is to assume good intentions, to give somebody the benefit of the
• 47:26
  doubt, that people don't wake up in the morning and think, how can I cause harm?
• 47:29
  How can I make life miserable for the people that I love? That assumption comes
• 47:33
  from my worldview, absolutely, and probably from my own eternal optimism.
• 47:36
  Years of doing couples therapy, while that has been a game changer for a lot
• 47:41
  of people to operate from, to begin to try and have connected conversations,
• 47:45
  but I've also sat with people who are interacting with others and their behavior
• 47:49
  looks anything but well-intentioned.
• 47:51
  I've sat with people who would curse out their partners, who would manipulate
• 47:54
  or stonewall or weaponize silence in ways that were deeply hurtful.
• 47:57
  And pretty quickly, I've got the kind, pathologically responsible partner in
• 48:01
  my office saying, I know I'm supposed to assume good intentions when they're
• 48:04
  telling me to go jump in a lake, fly a kite, disappear.
• 48:07
  And then I say, oh, hold on. No, not that. Let's come up with something different.
• 48:11
  So, I added a part B to pillar one. And honestly, it does change things in a
• 48:16
  very good way. Part B is this.
• 48:19
  Or there's a reason why this person is doing or saying or acting the way that they are.
• 48:24
  And that matters because it shifts us out of the moralization of behavior,
• 48:27
  good person, bad person, and hopefully into more understanding, more curiosity.
• 48:31
  If somebody learned as a child that emotions were dangerous or that vulnerability
• 48:35
  was unsafe or that connection only came through conflict or control,
• 48:38
  then of course, those patterns show up in adulthood.
• 48:40
  And they're going to think that this is the way that you get somebody to listen
• 48:43
  to you is you have to be very, very mean or rude about it.
• 48:47
  Gaslighting, manipulation, shutting down, overreacting, all those behaviors have roots.
• 48:51
  Now that doesn't make them okay. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to tolerate them. You don't.
• 48:55
  You still get to decide the kind of relationships that you want in your life.
• 48:59
  And that's where boundaries come in.
• 49:00
  If this person does this, then I can't continue in this conversation or the relationship.
• 49:06
  But understanding where behavior comes from can help us approach it with clarity instead of chaos.
• 49:11
  And I can't tell you how many times I've been in a session where someone gets
• 49:14
  caught, for lack of a better word, caught in a lie, caught in manipulation,
• 49:18
  caught in an inconsistency.
• 49:19
  And when we slow the moment down, when we stay in the conversation long enough
• 49:23
  that they can't wriggle out of accountability, something profound happens.
• 49:27
  You see this flash of shame across their
• 49:29
  face, not guilt. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad.
• 49:33
  I am broken. And that shame almost always traces back to childhood where the
• 49:37
  internal safety mechanism wasn't, hey, let me learn from this.
• 49:40
  But if I am bad enough, if I show that I am broken, then maybe someone will
• 49:45
  come rescue me. Someone will finally see that I am hurting.
• 49:47
  And sometimes, tragically, even that didn't work. The parent didn't come.
• 49:52
  The soothing didn't arrive. So the child internalized the belief that they actually are bad.
• 49:56
  And that belief didn't evaporate the day they turned 18. It followed them into
• 50:00
  adulthood. It shapes so many conflicts, relationships, moments of defensiveness.
• 50:05
  This is why I ask clients, especially early on, can you do me a favor and set
• 50:09
  aside right and wrong for a bit?
• 50:10
  Not because behavior doesn't matter, but because the moral framing keeps people
• 50:14
  stuck in shame. And when shame is there, it shuts down curiosity.
• 50:18
  When we can step back and simply look at ourselves through the lens of why do
• 50:21
  I do that? Why did I say that without declaring ourselves as good or bad?
• 50:25
  We start reclaiming our humanity because the truth is we're all just reacting
• 50:30
  to life for the very first time in that moment.
• 50:32
  That is the thing. Check that out. This is how I reacted.
• 50:34
  Then I can look at it with more curiosity, with more grace, with more compassion.
• 50:39
  We show up with these emotional tools that we were handed from childhood.
• 50:42
  Some of those tools serve us, but a lot of them don't. But our worth doesn't
• 50:46
  rise and fall based on whether somebody else approves of how we show up.
• 50:49
  So when I ask people to suspend right and wrong and instead follow their own
• 50:53
  pattern with gentleness and curiosity, it's because I want them to begin and
• 50:56
  separating their worth from their behavior.
• 50:58
  You're allowed to look back at your reactions, your triggers,
• 51:00
  your habits and say, oh man, that is fascinating. Instead of, what is wrong with me?
• 51:06
  Curiosity is where the growth begins. Shame, that's where it ends.
• 51:09
  And most of us have spent a lifetime living in the latter when what we truly
• 51:12
  needed was permission to explore the former.
• 51:15
  So when we talk about Ray's reaction or the way he approached reconnection with
• 51:19
  his brother Dave, it's not about judgment, at least the way I'm trying to present it.
• 51:22
  It's about understanding the emotional history that shaped him.
• 51:25
  Because these things don't come out of nowhere, which leads us right into the heart of it.
• 51:28
  Where did Uncle Ray learn this? So Sarah's grandparents divorced when her mom,
• 51:33
  her mother, and then also Ray and Dave were teenagers.
• 51:36
  And like many divorces, especially in that era, it was painful and it was complicated.
• 51:40
  And Dave went with their dad.
• 51:42
  Sarah's mom and Ray stayed with their mom. And here's the part that really stands out.
• 51:46
  In her hurt and in her overwhelm, Sarah's grandmother cut off Dave,
• 51:51
  her son, a teenager, because she felt that he had sided with his dad.
• 51:54
  And it's heartbreaking, but it's also very human.
• 51:56
  She was responding with the emotional tools that she had, shaped by her own
• 51:59
  upbringing, her own fears, and her own sense of what loyalty and family were
• 52:03
  supposed to look like. here's where projection is not a great thing.
• 52:07
  It's easy to project into that situation and say what I would have done had
• 52:11
  I been, and I'm literally talking me, a 56-year-old male human being living
• 52:16
  now, what I would have done as a female 40 years ago.
• 52:20
  That's kind of silly. Of course, I would have no idea what I would have done
• 52:23
  based off of all the things that brought her grandmother to the point where she was.
• 52:27
  From her perspective, Dave's choice felt like abandonment. She experienced it
• 52:30
  as betrayal, and in the emotional framework that she had learned,
• 52:33
  families were either united or divided.
• 52:34
  There wasn't much space for nuance or for a young person simply choosing the
• 52:38
  parent that they felt safest with or that they felt obligated to or they felt
• 52:41
  bad for or the one that they needed most at that moment or even as a way to
• 52:46
  break away from the way that they felt about their birth order,
• 52:50
  where they were with their siblings.
• 52:51
  As an adult, we hope that we can start to see the shades of gray,
• 52:55
  but when somebody is hurting, scared, or emotionally flooded,
• 52:58
  the world can shrink down to these stark categories that feel protective with us or against us.
• 53:03
  Not because they're cruel, but
• 53:04
  because that's the only template that they were taught, that they know.
• 53:08
  If you imagine the years that followed, it's not hard to see how she might have
• 53:13
  tried to make sense of everything by talking to the two children who stayed with her.
• 53:16
  She may have shared her pain, her fear, her narrative about what had happened,
• 53:19
  not to manipulate them, but because she truly believed her perspective was truth
• 53:23
  and that she needed them to be there for her. She needed them to hear her to keep them close.
• 53:29
  And so, Ray learned a version of love where loyalty meant agreement,
• 53:31
  where disagreement felt dangerous and where choosing differently could mean losing connection.
• 53:36
  So for him, it's normal. It's the familiar. This is how family works.
• 53:41
  You stick together, you share the same grievances, and you protect each other
• 53:43
  by seeing the world the same way.
• 53:45
  And when he mirrored his mother's feelings, she most likely felt understood,
• 53:49
  which reinforced the pattern.
• 53:50
  That's how he got his external validation, I'm guessing.
• 53:53
  He wasn't being conditioned maliciously. He was being loved in the way that she knew how to love.
• 53:57
  Sarah's mother learned something different, but equally understandable.
• 54:00
  Growing up in that emotional environment, most likely she became the one who
• 54:03
  watched for tension, who anticipated the reactions, who softened conflict before it erupted.
• 54:08
  That role can feel like the safest place in a family where emotional storms
• 54:12
  are very unpredictable.
• 54:13
  She becomes the peacemaker, not because she wants the burden of it,
• 54:17
  but that's just what she does.
• 54:18
  That's what her nervous system learned early, that harmony was survival and
• 54:22
  that her well-being depended on managing the emotional climate around her.
• 54:25
  So if you fast forward 40 years and you put Ray and Sarah's mom in the same
• 54:30
  room, of course, those childhood roles show up.
• 54:32
  Ray's tendency to see disagreement as threat makes sense given the emotional
• 54:35
  history he lived through.
• 54:37
  Sarah's mother's instinct to soothe and smooth and stabilize also makes sense
• 54:41
  because she was shaped by the same system carrying forward the strategies that
• 54:44
  once protected her and kept the peace.
• 54:46
  Neither one trying to really be purposely difficult or dramatic.
• 54:51
  They're simply doing what their nervous systems learn to do. What is the familiar?
• 54:55
  And before we go any further, I want to acknowledge something really important.
• 54:57
  I'm sharing all this from the tiny sliver of information Sarah was told,
• 55:01
  which she heard through the proverbial family grapevine, and then told me.
• 55:04
  I don't have her grandmother's full story. I don't know what her marriage really
• 55:08
  looked like or what led her to make the decision she made.
• 55:10
  I'm just illustrating this as a way to show how family systems evolve or show up.
• 55:15
  Because if we wanted, we could turn this part of the episode into a whole separate
• 55:19
  Choose Your Own Adventure podcast and talk about a narrative about her grandpa.
• 55:24
  Maybe her grandpa was inattentive. Maybe he struggled with his own wounds.
• 55:26
  Maybe he was a lying, cheating, no good son of a gun, or maybe he wasn't any
• 55:30
  of those things. But the truth is, we don't know.
• 55:33
  Family stories are rarely clean, but for the sake of today's conversation,
• 55:36
  we're focusing on the impact of the grandmother's emotional patterns,
• 55:38
  not to judge her, but to understand how one person's pain and coping strategies
• 55:42
  can ripple outward through generations.
• 55:45
  None of this happened in isolation. It's the long shadow of learned roles,
• 55:49
  survival strategies, and the stories that felt true at the time.
• 55:52
  Again, the family butterfly effect. Now what's the cost? They don't do Christmas together anymore.
• 55:57
  And when you say that out loud, it lands with kind of quiet sadness.
• 56:01
  Decades of traditions, meeting at a familiar house, navigating schedules,
• 56:04
  creating memories across generations, pictures, videos have simply fallen away.
• 56:09
  A lifetime of shared holidays, gone. And at one point, unfortunately,
• 56:12
  Tyler told family members that, yeah, now the more I think about it,
• 56:15
  coming to Sarah's family's home all those years, we were actually doing them
• 56:18
  a favor and that we had been putting up with it.
• 56:20
  And that's one of the most painful realities of living in the orbit of somebody
• 56:23
  who sees the world that Ray does. So emotionally immature.
• 56:26
  Even good memories have to get rewritten.
• 56:29
  It can't be that things were good until they weren't. Traditions that once felt
• 56:32
  warm and consistent get reframed as burdens.
• 56:34
  Moments that were shared in joy become evidence of being wronged or inconvenienced.
• 56:38
  And then there's Sarah's mother, the peacekeeper, who still doesn't want to
• 56:43
  cut Ray out to rock the boat, even after everything.
• 56:45
  Part of that comes from a genuine emotional maturity. But part of it is the
• 56:49
  old childhood programming still running in the background. If I can keep the
• 56:52
  peace, maybe everybody will stay okay.
• 56:55
  And what does that cost her? It might mean being accused of attacking simply
• 56:58
  for disagreeing gently.
• 56:59
  It means watching special moments get overshadowed or pulled into conflict.
• 57:03
  It may mean using emotional energy to manage someone who, through no malicious
• 57:07
  intent, may never be fully satisfied or soothed.
• 57:09
  And these patterns don't just stay contained.
• 57:12
  Now, Sarah's future children will grow up hearing stories about Uncle Ray.
• 57:16
  They'll learn which relatives are difficult, which holidays come with tension,
• 57:19
  which topics are safe or left alone. and those lessons quietly shape how children
• 57:22
  start to understand family and connection and belonging.
• 57:26
  Tyler's children, closer to Ray's worldview, may absorb a different set of rules,
• 57:30
  that disagreement equals attack, that cutting people off is an acceptable way
• 57:33
  to resolve conflict, and that loyalty means alignment rather than honesty.
• 57:37
  They may not even know that they're learning a template. They just absorb what feels normal.
• 57:41
  And then those children will grow up, form relationships, and start families of their own.
• 57:44
  And someday one of them might be planning a wedding and a small detail,
• 57:47
  a seating chart, a date, a perceived slight, could activate the same patterns
• 57:51
  that started years before they were even born.
• 57:53
  That's how these dynamics echo through a family system.
• 57:56
  Sarah's grandma made some choices decades ago, and they were shaped by her own
• 58:00
  pain and her own worldview and her own emotional inheritance.
• 58:02
  And then those choices shaped how she raised Ray and Sarah's mom and how those
• 58:07
  patterns are echoing into the next generation and the next.
• 58:09
  This is how emotional DNA travels, quietly, subtly, through stories and reactions
• 58:14
  and expectations and roles.
• 58:16
  Your grandparents' parents made decisions, handled conflict in certain ways,
• 58:19
  expressed or suppressed emotions in certain ways.
• 58:21
  That shaped your grandparents, which shaped your parents, which shaped you.
• 58:24
  And unless awareness steps in, those patterns continue forward,
• 58:27
  unexamined, unchallenged, and unnamed. And the powerful truth,
• 58:31
  the hopeful truth, is that each cycle can be interrupted.
• 58:34
  Awareness gives you options. Doing the work gives you tools.
• 58:36
  And choosing differently, even when it's hard, can create an entirely new set
• 58:40
  of ripples that move forward into every generation that follows.
• 58:43
  So what do you do if you have an Uncle Ray? The first hardest truth is this.
• 58:47
  You cannot change Uncle Ray.
• 58:48
  You can't love him into emotional maturity. You can't explain clearly enough
• 58:52
  or accommodate thoroughly enough or give him the aha moment or the epiphany
• 58:55
  or be patient long enough to transform him.
• 58:57
  But he's also not broken. He's simply running the emotional operating system
• 59:00
  he learned in his family, just like everybody else.
• 59:03
  Uncle Ray is going to Uncle Ray. It's not cynicism. That's reality.
• 59:07
  Now, what you can control, what you do have your own agency over is how you respond.
• 59:12
  You can set boundaries, not as punishment, but as protection for your emotional well-being.
• 59:16
  Boundaries that sound like if the conversations go in this direction, I will not be engaging.
• 59:20
  If someone is wanting me to be in the middle of passing messages,
• 59:24
  I will not do that. You can refuse triangulation.
• 59:28
  When Ray tries to pull you into the story he's spinning, you don't have to play
• 59:31
  the part he's assigning you. You can say, oh, that sounds really difficult.
• 59:33
  I hope you can work that out and step out of the emotional crossfire.
• 59:36
  And you can grieve because there is grief. People spend years exhausting themselves
• 59:40
  trying to create a normal relationship
• 59:42
  with somebody who isn't necessarily capable of meeting them there.
• 59:44
  You're allowed to grieve the version of the family that you wish you had and
• 59:48
  the holidays that didn't happen and the uncle that you hoped he would be.
• 59:51
  That grief is real and it deserves to be acknowledged. And if you're the peacekeeper,
• 59:54
  this is a moment to examine that role too. Peacekeeping often feels noble.
• 59:58
  And yes, refusing to cut people off at the first sign of trouble can be a sign
• 1:00:02
  of maturity. But there's also the shadow side.
• 1:00:04
  Sometimes it's maybe not maturity. it might be this childhood strategy still running the show.
• 1:00:09
  The belief that if you work hard enough, you can calm the emotional waters of
• 1:00:13
  the entire family system.
• 1:00:14
  That if you keep everybody else steady, then you'll finally feel safe.
• 1:00:18
  And sometimes peacekeeping is simply the nervous system repeating what it learned
• 1:00:21
  early on. Real emotional maturity isn't just refusing to cut people off.
• 1:00:25
  Real maturity is being able to disagree, hold a boundary, allowing somebody
• 1:00:29
  else to be uncomfortable and stay grounded in your own worth without abandoning
• 1:00:33
  the relationship or yourself.
• 1:00:34
  That's differentiation. That's the goal. And then there's the deeper work,
• 1:00:38
  looking inward at the patterns that you absorbed.
• 1:00:40
  Because growing up with an Uncle Ray doesn't just affect how you view him.
• 1:00:44
  It shapes how you view yourself and conflict and emotions and intimacy.
• 1:00:48
  Maybe you learn to walk on eggshells. Maybe you learn that conflict must be avoided at all costs.
• 1:00:52
  Maybe you absorb some of Ray's own survival strategies. And so breaking the
• 1:00:56
  cycle isn't just about managing the difficult person.
• 1:00:59
  It's about becoming aware of how their pattern lives, maybe even in you,
• 1:01:03
  and then you get to choose differently.
• 1:01:05
  And this is where I want to gently turn the focus to you, my wonderful listener,
• 1:01:09
  because every family system has its own butterfly effect and that includes yours.
• 1:01:13
  Somewhere in your family line, someone learned to shut down,
• 1:01:16
  somebody learned to explode, somebody learned to please and to disappear and
• 1:01:19
  to take care of everybody else and to perform and to control and to avoid and to rescue.
• 1:01:23
  And those patterns, whether spoken or silent, got handed down.
• 1:01:26
  And eventually they reached you.
• 1:01:29
  So here's the question I would love to have you sit with. If you became the
• 1:01:32
  butterfly in your family system, the catalyst for change, what might that look like?
• 1:01:36
  Not changing for your family, not performing to meet expectations,
• 1:01:39
  but becoming more you, more grounded, more differentiated, more authentic,
• 1:01:43
  more of the person that you would like to be.
• 1:01:45
  And here's the thing that most people don't anticipate, that as you begin to
• 1:01:48
  show up differently, the system around you will often push back.
• 1:01:51
  Not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're disrupting your
• 1:01:54
  familiar role. You're no longer the peacekeeper or the problem solver or the
• 1:01:57
  invisible one or the overachiever or the comedian or the caretaker or the quiet one.
• 1:02:01
  You're stepping into a new version of yourself that creates friction and systems
• 1:02:04
  built on predictability.
• 1:02:06
  But please hear this. Your growth can be the catalyst.
• 1:02:10
  Your change can be the flap of wings that shifts the emotional climate for generations.
• 1:02:14
  Your clarity, your boundaries, your healing can plant seeds that ripple outward
• 1:02:18
  into your children and their children and their children's children.
• 1:02:21
  And long after you're gone, your courage can be the reason somebody else in
• 1:02:25
  your lineage feels emotionally safe, understands themselves better,
• 1:02:29
  or chooses healthier relationships.
• 1:02:31
  We tend to underestimate our impact in a family system, but every meaningful
• 1:02:35
  shift starts with one person saying, you know, I think this pattern ends here.
• 1:02:38
  And that brings us to hope because the butterfly effect works both ways.
• 1:02:42
  One person's dysfunction can ripple through generations, but so can one person's health.
• 1:02:46
  Every time you respond differently, every time you set a boundary instead of appeasing,
• 1:02:50
  tell the truth instead of placating, stay grounded instead of escalating or
• 1:02:53
  process your emotions instead of projecting them onto somebody else,
• 1:02:56
  you create a new ripple and your children notice, maybe not consciously,
• 1:03:00
  maybe not this year, maybe not even in the moment, but they notice that conflict
• 1:03:03
  can be faced without catastrophizing.
• 1:03:05
  Disagreement doesn't mean disconnection and that it's possible to hold onto
• 1:03:08
  yourself without losing others and they'll carry that
• 1:03:11
  forward and then those ripples continue you got
• 1:03:14
  dr johnning standing next to a simple poster continuing to believe in something
• 1:03:18
  nobody else could see good old gila monster saliva the ripples of that courage
• 1:03:22
  are still expanding preventing alzheimer's reducing addiction saving lives addressing
• 1:03:26
  obesity a driver made a wrong turn and it changed the course of history edward
• 1:03:30
  lorenz rounded a number and the world discovered that small inputs can shift entire systems.
• 1:03:34
  So the question isn't whether you'll create ripples. Oh, you will. We all do.
• 1:03:38
  The question is, what kind of ripples do you want to create?
• 1:03:40
  So thanks for listening, everybody.
• 1:03:41
  I know this one went deep. If it stirred something up in you,
• 1:03:43
  memories of your own family, your own patterns, your own internal Uncle Ray's, completely normal.
• 1:03:47
  I would love to hear it. Send me your comments. Send me your questions.
• 1:03:50
  Send this one to somebody if you think it would help them. We're heading into
• 1:03:53
  the holidays and we're going to have a lot of people that are going to be around a lot of families.
• 1:03:56
  So hopefully those will be these opportunities for you to maybe show up a little bit different.
• 1:04:01
  There's the work. We don't explore this because it's easy. We explore it because it matters.
• 1:04:04
  Taking us out per usual, the wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence with her
• 1:04:07
  song, It's Wonderful, because hopefully you get the vibe that you can truly
• 1:04:11
  start to make things feel a little more wonderful for you and your family system.
• 1:04:14
  I'll see you next time on The Virtual Cat.