Do you ever feel trapped in the cycle of "good cop, bad cop" with your partner when it comes to parenting? Have you wondered how the echoes of your own upbringing have shaped the way you parent? Tag along with us as we navigate these intricate dynamics. In the authenticity of sharing my personal journey as a newlywed, you'll find an enlightening take on how I broke a destructive cycle before it could take root.
Unraveling the intricacies of harmful cycles that breed confusion, we illuminate common pitfalls parents often fall prey to. From the undermining of authority by one parent to conflict avoidance, we're dissecting these patterns and their ripple effects - extending even into the workplace. Also, we highlight the unwritten rule of honoring those who aren't present. The second act of our journey scales the highs and lows of interpersonal cycles, breaking them down to build up stronger, healthier relationships.
Lastly, we delve into the bedrock of any relationship - trust. We're spinning a new narrative around trust, exploring how it can be nurtured and solidified through intentional, respectful, and supportive communication. Here's an open invitation to introspect, reflect, and identify patterns within your own family. You'll find practical ways to improve communication, deepen trust, and appreciate the lasting impact your conscious actions can have on your family. Empowered with this newfound knowledge, let's revolutionize parenting together.
Do you ever feel trapped in the cycle of "good cop, bad cop" with your partner when it comes to parenting? Have you wondered how the echoes of your own upbringing have shaped the way you parent? Tag along with us as we navigate these intricate dynamics. In the authenticity of sharing my personal journey as a newlywed, you'll find an enlightening take on how I broke a destructive cycle before it could take root.
Unraveling the intricacies of harmful cycles that breed confusion, we illuminate common pitfalls parents often fall prey to. From the undermining of authority by one parent to conflict avoidance, we're dissecting these patterns and their ripple effects - extending even into the workplace. Also, we highlight the unwritten rule of honoring those who aren't present. The second act of our journey scales the highs and lows of interpersonal cycles, breaking them down to build up stronger, healthier relationships.
Lastly, we delve into the bedrock of any relationship - trust. We're spinning a new narrative around trust, exploring how it can be nurtured and solidified through intentional, respectful, and supportive communication. Here's an open invitation to introspect, reflect, and identify patterns within your own family. You'll find practical ways to improve communication, deepen trust, and appreciate the lasting impact your conscious actions can have on your family. Empowered with this newfound knowledge, let's revolutionize parenting together.
There are as many ways to parent as there are parents in this world, but there is one way to parent that wins every time, and that's doing it intentionally. This show is about helping things go right before they can go wrong. Each episode is chosen to help parents like you who may be overwhelmed or uninspired, and the ideas and motivation to give their best efforts to the people and place that matters the most. I'm Dr Tim Thane, author of the book and host of the podcast. Not by Chance. I believe that a family's success and happiness is not by chance, so welcome to the podcast. Built especially for intentional families. Let's jump in. Thank you for joining me today on this podcast. I am really excited about the topic. I'm going to go into why it is I'm so excited about it, but essentially it is something you can visualize.
Speaker 1:What I'm going to talk about today is the interpersonal cycles between parents as they try and deal with the challenges they face as parents. We get into these patterns, so we're going to go deep into that today and I'm going to take you way back to when I was a graduate student at Brigham Young University. I started to learn about family systems theory and models in my undergraduate work at BYU and then, of course, when I got into the marriage and family therapy program there at BYU, it kicked up a notch and my observation skills at noticing patterns between people and especially between me and other people, because I was now not just living my life ignorantly. I was starting to learn about how my perspective, my thoughts, feelings and actions were influencing the thoughts, feelings and actions of other people around me, and particularly my new marriage. My wife and she probably thought I was a freak because I was so worried about patterns that we might begin in the very beginning of our marriage that ultimately would hurt our relationship. But one example of that is I told myself I never wanted to get into a pattern of when we had a conflict or argued about something and were mad at each other. I didn't want to sleep on the couch, for example, or her to do that. I wanted to create a different pattern than that.
Speaker 1:So the first time that happened she was really angry at me. I don't remember exactly what she was mad at, but she said she was going to sleep on the couch. Well, we were newlyweds, we had almost no money, we had hand-me-down furniture and there was a. Our couch was actually more like a love seat very small, not a lot of room. She went and made her bed on the couch and I remember trying to think through this and think I don't want this to happen, how am I going to prevent this? And so, without making her mad, so I very quietly tipped out into the front room, sat on a chair close by. She knew I was there, I didn't say anything and very slowly I made my way to the one little section of the couch where I could actually sit on, and over the course of probably 20 minutes I slowly worked my way onto the couch with her and there really wasn't room, so it would have been quite the sight to see me squeezing in. And by the end of this she just kind of slapped me in humor and laughed and that was the end of the argument. And I can say we never started that pattern because I was ultra sensitive to whatever pattern we were going to start. It could lead somewhere we don't want.
Speaker 1:So the great thing about this topic is that as you develop skills to notice your thoughts, feelings and behaviors and recognize that you're influencing everybody around you, you can begin to change yourself, because in changing yourself you are inviting those around you to see you differently, to experience you differently and therefore have a completely different dynamic between the two of you. Now I admit, even though I have all this knowledge I've watched it hundreds, thousands of times with different people we've worked with I admit that even in my own life, sometimes I will tune out to these internal things going on, the emotions, the thoughts and find myself stuck in a vicious cycle that is definitely not moving me closer to my vision in that relationship. It's taking me away from it. So I've got work to do as well, but I'm going to give you some tools that I think are incredibly helpful. Before we dive into all the details, you may not like this, but I want to give you a little bit of the philosophical underpinnings of understanding how a dyad two people in a repetitive sort of cycle. They have a relationship that is existing and continuous.
Speaker 1:What are the philosophical underpinnings of this interpersonal cycle dynamic? Well, there's quite a few underpinnings to this. One is attachment theory, and essentially that states in a really basic way that the kind of relationship or the attachment that we have with our mothers, our father, our caregivers will have a lot to do with how we parent later on. Whether we have a secure, anxious or avoidant style of parenting can be affected by the way we were parented ourselves, and so one of the things we might watch in ourselves is if we have an anxious attachment, for example, it's really common for the anxious parent to to be anxious about that child and what's going on in their life and they end up having more of an enmeshed relationship where their emotions are attached to the emotions and experiences of the child, therefore making them less effective at being able to be the leader and support their child in a healthy way.
Speaker 1:Another one is social learning, and essentially we learn from the example of other people. We're watching how things are done as we grow up. We watch our parents, we watch how they parent and, based on what we learn and what we see, we find ourselves doing it, most of us as kids, or maybe when we were young adults and got married and started a family, we said I'm not going to parent that way. I've seen it and I don't want to do that. Then we find ourselves, unintentionally a lot of times, sounding just like, in my case, my dad. Most of the time, that's okay, but sometimes there's some things that I would like to change, but it is something I have learned and something he probably learned from his dad and so on, so we carry that with us and until we become aware of those things, we really can't change it.
Speaker 1:Another one is the cognitive behavioral therapy or theory, which is essentially that our thoughts and our emotions and our actions can be changed if we're aware of them, and essentially we can start to change the way we think about the world and ultimately have an effect on this dynamic going on between us and our spouse or our co-parent. Family. Systems theory basically means that we grow up in a system, we grow up in a group, a family that has got its own culture, dynamics, the way they handle emotions etc. And that influences us, and then we become a part of that system and we influence the rest. Now let's dive into that a little bit, because that's a pretty powerful idea and it basically is that one person in the system can affect the whole and so, where there's awareness and skill and caring, that one person can actually change the dynamic of the entire family. Not that it should be put on one person's shoulders to change it, but isn't it empowering to know that that person can. So those are some of the philosophical underpinnings of the interpersonal cycle.
Speaker 1:Now let's get into some of the specifics of what are some of the negative interpersonal cycles that commonly happen between parents. All right, so we're going to talk about interpersonal cycles that are negative, and I remember back in my college days the term was used vicious or virtuous cycles. We can have positive ones, just like we can have negative ones, but let's talk about some of the vicious cycles and keep in mind that when we get into a negative interpersonal cycle loop with somebody, the trust between us is hurt, and that's at the core of all relationships is this idea of trust. I'm going to do another podcast very soon on how we can build back trust throughout the entire family system. In fact, I'm starting a pilot group right now with just 10 sets of families, their parents. The title is six weeks to boost everyone's trust in the home. Who wouldn't want that right? And what I've learned over the years is that if I can intervene in these different interpersonal cycles by helping at least one member of the cycle make a change, then trustworthiness emerges out of that. Now you can't force trust on anybody, but you certainly can produce more trustworthy behaviors and, as that happens within the family system, you get this rising of trust inside the family system and it's a wonderful thing when that happens.
Speaker 1:You've definitely heard of some of these cycles. We've all heard of the good cop bad cop cycle that happens and usually how that starts is one of the parents will assume the good cop role. Who doesn't want the good cop role? Right? So somebody takes that on and, as a result, the other parent feels obligated to take the other role and they feel like they need to balance out the good cop and essentially what that is. The good cop is the one that seems to be more in tune with the wants, the emotions of the child, less likely to be strict in their consequences and much more flexible and in tune with the emotion side. So this parent is definitely the permissive one. On the other side, the bad cop is the one that is seen as maybe more authoritarian than the other parent and of course it's not fun to play the bad cop role, but this person feels like they need to institute rules and hold boundaries and consequences and structure and all of those things, those expectations. So you can see that the conflict can be pretty intense in a vicious cycle like this.
Speaker 1:Think about a teeter totter, for example. Let's say you've got the two parents kind of more in the middle, but one is on the more lenient side, the other one's on a little bit more strict side and something happens inside the family with that child and the good cop parent will feel that emotion, maybe they're even a little bit amashed with that child and they will step a little further that direction on the teeter totter and it feels like it's out of balance to the other parent. The natural thing to do is take a step the other direction, just like you would on the elementary playground, to offset the weight on the other side. To keep that balance in the middle. You step out a little bit on the teeter totter this way and over time, if it's not checked because they're reacting to each other in this negative loop, this negative cycle, they end up on either end of the teeter totter, the continuum between this permissive and authoritarian style where missing that sweet golden mean in the middle. So that's one of the most common negative cycles that we see parents have. Another one is the undermining of authority by one parent to the other and of course this is really confusing for the child because if you've set expectations and maybe you have rules that you've set yet the other parents giving permission to do things that are outside those rules, for example, then that creates a lot of confusion for the child. It again places one of the parents in more of a favored position in the eyes of the teen or the child and the other one's kind of seen in more negative light, and so those two can kind of go hand in hand with each other at times.
Speaker 1:Another cycle is the avoidance of conflict. Now, most of us don't love to address conflict and especially if it's really an intense conflict that we don't have the skills or the tools to manage the emotions. So every time we get into that topic it goes bad and it spirals down further. And so there's this avoidance of that topic, of our differences between us and our parenting styles, and this might delay the conflict and we get to keep somewhat some peace during that time. But inevitably it won't take too long before that avoidance ends up creating lots of really difficult situations. You'll be very inconsistent as parents because you haven't addressed this underlying issue. Now there are a lot of other patterns that we can get into within the family and it's a good study. It's actually an amazing thing to understand the many different cycles and then notice how many of those cycles you actually fall into unaware.
Speaker 1:During my PhD program at Virginia Tech, I started a leadership development program I called Solution-Focused Leadership, and what it did is it took some of the same philosophical underpinnings that I've just shared with you, and it looked into the role of a person in a business organization, and so it was basically realizing that every human system that we're in, especially if it's a consistent relationship that we have to engage in, there are these patterns that emerge, and these interpersonal cycles can also exist in a business relationship, and so I created this program, solution-focused Leadership, and one of the things I love to do the most is to learn how to communicate with the community. Was I love to invite or ask for volunteer in the group, and we usually had about 12 to 18 people in the group and, by the way, I did this inside a large healthcare system and so they had existing relationships. They were peers in the workplace, and so it was an incredibly vulnerable thing for them to do to come to this workshop, which was five days long, a couple months of coaching them in their workplace and in their families and then bringing them back for another three-day training, teach them how they could take the skills that we'd been working on into the workplace and help the people that they managed. One of the things I'd do is invite them to come forward. The volunteer come forward and I would diagram these interpersonal cycles. It's a lot of fun to actually see it and keep in mind there would be somebody that would be not present in our group. That would actually be the other side of the interpersonal cycle, so we tried to be very honoring of the one who was absent. My job often was not just to diagram it and, by the way, if you could imagine it, it's like a circle A person A influences person B, which influences person A. It's not a linear line from one cause and effect, from person A causing person B to do something. It's a circular experience and that's the first really important principle to breaking a cycle. So, if you can imagine me up there with the flip chart, we're, you know, have the volunteer up there, alice volunteers and I say who do you want to have here and she might choose her husband, her boyfriend, a colleague in the workplace, and so we had this strict rule of confidentiality and to honor those who were not present.
Speaker 1:One of the big theories and beliefs I have is that everybody's doing the best they can and I think that really works in most cases is to assume the very best and that these cycles make perfect sense to both people. That's why they keep doing it. The emotions, the thoughts, the feelings all of that connects in a way and goes hand in glove with each other, which is why these cycles are perpetual and they just get more difficult to change over time. So we diagram this up on the flip chart. So let's take this example Alice comes forward, she volunteers. I ask her what the issue is and she'll come up with a short summary of what the issue is and then we will begin to diagram it. And I always start with the other person's actions, because that, from Alice's perspective, there's this action being done or this behavior that's being done that is causing her to have certain emotions and feelings, and she can identify those behaviors very, very easily. So we get the other person's behaviors or actions. The next thing is I'll ask her how does that make her feel? She can easily identify the emotions with my help, and then I will ask her what were the thoughts that preceded the emotions, what were the automatic thoughts that you might not have even noticed or taken the time to examine, and so we take that chance to write down some of the automatic thoughts that she has.
Speaker 1:The next step is really a crucial one, and I'm going through this with you because I hope that you'll get a piece of paper out and try to do this on your kitchen table here, where you can diagram an interpersonal cycle that's not going well. So this next step is difficult. I will say then, with your thoughts and your feelings, what is the actions that you tend to take? So, to demonstrate these interpersonal cycles, I would demonstrate my own, I'd write it up there on the flip chart and I would show one that I had with my wife, and we get to the point where I would have to put my behaviors in there. Now it's really easy to label my own behaviors in virtuous ways and altruistic ways.
Speaker 1:It's much harder to do to have it labeled in a way that rock sand would agree with, and so we had to get really good in these groups of putting ourselves in the role of someone who's not there and we would identify. You know, alice, for example, in this example would say I would do X, y and Z when I felt these feelings and as a group, out of love and out of the theory and the belief that everybody's doing the best they can, we would then challenge her a little bit on what those behaviors were that she was doing, how they could be seen by the other person in a negative light. That would produce some negative emotions, negative thoughts and ultimately, these behaviors that are so troubling to Alice. What was so fun about this exercise is that it was in a setting where they didn't have to protect themselves. They didn't have to. They could be vulnerable. There was safety there. We produced a feeling of trust and support inside the groups so they'd be able to really be vulnerable and listen and open up.
Speaker 1:And so as we diagram this and the beautiful thing about a cycle is that it takes two people to maintain the cycle so if one bows out and says I'm not going to keep doing my half of the cycle, the cycle will change. Now you can't do that to manipulate someone and try to get them to change the way you want them to change, but and we definitely had coached people around that and help them know that you need to change because it's the right thing for you to do. It matches your values. You want to do your part better, regardless of whatever anybody else is going to do. But in the act of actual authentic change by the one person, most of the time the other person would be invited to change themselves and they would. They would change.
Speaker 1:I saw many examples of a person's heart changing for that other party that's not present in the group during that little exercise and then at lunchtime when we had a break, they would go make a phone call and the phone call was always disruptive of the old cycle. The phone call was open-hearted, it was with great awareness of how they may have been contributing. It was often a I'm sorry for this kind of comment and so many times they'd come back afterwards with this huge smile on their face. Oftentimes they'd been crying and they'd come back and share how they had done something that had changed the old dynamic and they weren't doing it to manipulate or change anybody else. They just simply wanted to do it differently themselves.
Speaker 1:So that's the invitation to you is that any of these cycles that you can identify, and especially identify your part in the cycle, you have some power to design that cycle differently. Certainly, you're half of the cycle. You're half of the circle is completely in your hands. Don't try to think your way out of the cycle, though. Only yes, you can modify the way you think and that can affect the way you feel. That's cognitive behavioral therapy. My suggestion is that you identify some actions that you would take if you had the emotions that would be supportive of it, that would change the old cycle, and then do those actions.
Speaker 1:Whether you feel that way or not, the other party, your co-parent, whoever that might be that you're going to practice breaking these cycles on. They might be very skeptical at first, and they probably should be, because all of a sudden there's a change, and wouldn't you be skeptical if they made a change? But this is really not about them or what might happen. This is about you feeling good, taking action, making a change and something that you know you should do on your end and watch what happens. It's an amazing thing. You can use this same thing with your children, people at work, anybody where there's a key relationship you want to preserve that, you want to build the trust back with. This is what you can do. It's one of the most action-oriented things I could teach you to do. I hope you will take the time to diagram a cycle, a real one that's going on, and get really honest with yourself, be vulnerable, look at it through the eyes of the other person and ultimately make some changes on your side and just watch what happens. I think you'll be amazed at the difference in feelings that you have for that other person, and out of that will come some very genuine, authentic actions you can take.
Speaker 1:I can't help but want to give you a quick example of a parent-child cycle, and because I think it's pretty common and I'd like you to try something here too we get into these vicious cycles with our kids all the time. Adolescence is a time of differentiation, it is a time to push back on boundaries, it's a time for them to find themselves and their identity, and all of that At the same time. Parents still need to play their role and be a leader and support that child in the very best way they can. It makes me think of an experience we had a long time ago at Homeward Bound, where I was working with a family. The father regularly would get really, really upset, and so there was a lot of anger, a lot of shouting and losing control emotionally going on. Well, as we talked to him about changing his part of that communication cycle, he really took hold of it. He decided that he was not going to lose his cool, that he was going to really practice this hard and it was amazing to watch and he did. I'm always so amazed and honored when people will take coaching and they'll actually implement those principles that we teach and they end up having positive results.
Speaker 1:This father did that and he started consistently managing his emotions during these topical things that they had to discuss between them. Later on he asked his son and it was pretty interesting dialogue between the two of them he said hey, do you like it more when I'm calm and in control emotionally, or do you like it more when I'm angry? His son said to be honest with you, dad, when you're calm like this, it makes me think that my manipulation skills are slipping. So there was definitely this power dynamic going on that when the dad lost his cool, the son knew that he was in charge, that he was in control because his dad was not. And pretty interesting dynamic when his dad stopped that part of it, things shifted. This interpersonal dynamic between them changed and, ultimately, the manipulation that was going on just couldn't happen anymore. Better things came out of that going forward.
Speaker 1:So how does all this apply to trustee, the app that we're building? And, by the way, it's getting very, very close to beta testing. I mentioned earlier that we've got this group of 10 families that's going to do this pilot group with us. They're also going to be beta testers of the trustee app and, as I mentioned, it really is all about trust, and so, if you think about what trustee will do, it's essentially helping people inside the family do things that are trustworthy. If you think about the interpersonal cycle, the thoughts, feelings and then the actions If we do actions that are trustworthy and we can get multiple people in the family to do this at the same time, that level of trust goes up across the board, and so that really is the magic behind trustee is that it will create trustworthy actions and behaviors that can be tracked over time, that can ultimately almost be data points for parents, for example, to look at that and say you know, I haven't been trusting my team very well, but this data, this streak that's going on, this communication that's happening through the app and the other tools in the app is showing me that I really probably should trust him more.
Speaker 1:One of the real problems that trustee will solve is that when two parents are in any of these negative interpersonal cycles, inconsistency is usually undermined, and what trustee will do is it will help the two parents break some of those cycles between the two of them, help them become more united together, create expectations that are clear, that don't change, that are on the app, and then there'll be check-ins where the team can check in and report on how they're doing with these particular issues that have been identified. Now, as that's tracked over time, it's going to give real data as to the trustworthiness of the team. So one of the things we're working on right now is how to, first of all, measure trust, but also how the behaviors of the team map to trustworthiness and ultimately affects the trust. So stay tuned. It's coming soon.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to get it into your hands, get your feedback and see how this is actually in the real world, helping you either develop trust for the first time in a long time or enhance trust, both between you and your co-parent, you and your teenagers, and ultimately help us achieve the mission we have, which is to strengthen Hill and fortify families. Thank you for listening to this podcast today and I hope you'll share it with other people that you think might find it helpful, and I really do hope that you'll take the challenge and diagram out a interpersonal vicious cycle that you have and identify what you can do to change that cycle. Thanks again for listening. Parents, your time is valuable and I'm grateful you spent some of it with us. What you're intentionally doing in your home life is inspiring and unmatched in its importance and long-term effects. Ask yourself what am I going to do because of what I've learned today?