Your Kids Don’t Need a Hero, They Need You! with Dr. Brad Reedy #90

I stopped trying to be a “good parent” and started being brave enough to look at myself and now I have a deeper relationship with my kids through less teaching & more listening 🤍

My conversation with Dr. Brad Reedy is one I wish every parent could hear. He is truly a Fellow Traveler & Heroic Parent that I have learned so much from. 

We talk about shame, blame, guilt, listening without fixing, breaking old patterns, and what it actually means to become the “heroic parent.” Not the perfect parent—the parent willing to do their own work so their kids don’t have to carry it.

Dr. Reedy has a way of saying the hard things that somehow leaves you feeling more compassionate toward yourself AND your kids.

If you’re raising children, healing from how you were raised, or trying to become a more conscious human—don’t skip this one. 🎙️🤍

➡️ https://www.findingyouprograms.com

➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-you-with-dr-brad-reedy/id1157223571

➡️ You can buy books by Dr. Brad Reedy, such as The Journey of the Heroic Parentand The Audacity to Be You, online through major retailers like Amazon, Audiblefor audiobooks, or secondhand platforms like ThriftBooks. 

💫🪬🩵

➡️ Listen Crystal Zinn Podcast 🎙️ 

➡️ Message me for guest speaking, workshops, retreats & corporate event planning inquiries 

➡️ Reiki/Energy Healing 🪽Book at calendly.com/crystalzinnyoga

➡️ Follow me on instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook 

➡️ Website crystalzinnyoga.com 

➡️ Breath Work, Sound Baths, Speaking, Anatomy Education, Meditation, Workshops & Yoga 

📧 Email crystalzinnyoga@gmail.com

#yoga #meditation #podcast #gratitude

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Welcome to the Crystal Zen Podcast. I believe our bodies are a living map of the entire universe. All the answers reside within. Remember, you are sovereign, whole, and infinitely valuable. And the best gift we can give to the world is our own healing. Join me as we explore holistic tools, spiritual practices, and paradigms that are shifting the way people experience life, business, and relationships. I love to share education on the most recent medical research and cutting-edge technology on anatomy, neurology, trauma development, and more to give us a foundation in understanding how to align, utilize, and upregulate our physical systems. Ultimately, this podcast is a witness and support to people on their journey of remembering, an inspiration for all of us to keep going and a reminder that we are not alone. Welcome to the Crystal Zen Podcast. Today I had a very exciting morning preparing for this, and I feel so grateful to have Dr. Brad Reedy with me today.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Thanks for having me, Crystal. Means a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:08

Thanks for coming. So Brad is a marriage and family therapist, and he also runs retreats and programs all over the United States. I don't know if you're in other countries yet, that are so beneficial for relationships, for families. He's an author and he's got a YouTube channel and things that I personally and a lot of my friends have benefited from this year. We've been diving in, and he doesn't just give you the superficial taglines and the little things you see on TikTok, but there's some depth in the lectures he puts out and a lot of even his free content. And so I once again am so grateful for that and the impact it's had on my life.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

So it's an honor to be here. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

Is there anything else you want my audience to know about you?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

No, no, just as we go, we'll we'll kind of let it unfold as it should, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

Okay. So the very first thing we do is a tune in meditation, and my listeners are used to this, so I'll invite you to join me. If you are in a place where it's safe to do so, go ahead and just close your eyes. It might be the first time you have had a moment today. And there's no need to change anything. Simply observe and notice how your breath is moving right now. No right or wrong. Shallow, deep, fast, slow. And your assignment today is on your next breath. When you notice the inhale coming, do less. And then when you exhale, fall as if you're falling into your voice. You might even make a sound. And continue like this. Just noticing if you can begin stringing together. Just in allowing. Stillness is such a gift because in stillness we learn we are not actually the doer. The universe keeps moving. You become aware of frequency, vibration, events, ideas. They're all still here. And so on your next exhale, just relieve yourself of any over-responsibility, anything you've picked up that is not yours to carry. And start to breathe deeper into your belly a bright yellow color of I am enough. My value goes with me wherever I go. And if you need more, simply pause this video and turn it back on when you're ready to join us. And if you are ready, come back, blink your eyes open.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

We should always start that way.

SPEAKER_03 4:14

We should. One of my coaches once told me that rushing is an element of a lack mindset. And I really had to look at that and still do.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, right. Me too. I talked about that this morning with my therapist.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah.

unknown 4:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

I actually was gonna dive right in and ask you, what are you personally working on the most right now? What's alive for you and your personal practice?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

I'm having the pleasure right now to prepare for being an empty nester for the first time in 33 years. So our youngest is getting ready to go to college. And what that's bringing up for us, it's been this beautiful and and yet painful process between the two of us where we've spent a lot of nights talking about how we've hurt her. How we've hurt her, the ways that we've dented her, kind of what she carries, it's our responsibility. And while that sounds pretty unpleasant, it's given me the opportunity. It reminds me of some of the words you use during your meditation. It just happened this week. I have to just be present with her. Because my instinct is to fix, to solve, to offer rational solutions to whatever dilemma or pain or discomfort she's bringing up. But when my child's telling me about how I hurt her, there's nothing really that I can do except for just to be present with her in that. So my work, and this morning, you know, as it came up with my therapist, we were talking about this idea of just being with her, doing nothing, doing less, not trying to be helpful. And for me, that I I was saying to her, I had a moment this week where I was able to practice this, but the reason I'm sharing it with her, I said, is because it's in contrast to what I usually do, because I usually have a difficult time being present, especially with my children's pain and discomfort. So I'm just going through a a grief and a joyful time with my daughter, where I get to have these kind of last conversations of childhood with her. And I'm grateful for, I said this morning, I'm grateful that she's comfortable enough to tell me all the ways that we've hurt her, to tell me all the ways that we've dented her. And to me, it's just been a mixture of feelings, but that's the thing that's first and foremost in my heart and my mind these days.

SPEAKER_03 6:32

Wow. There is a depth in everything that you said there. And what you're talking about is probably what I hear about most with friends and even on the internet, being able to sit with people in that and the added layer of she's leaving and you're the parent. That they're just, I don't think, are words to describe the things that we feel when when we're dealing or trying to practice our skills at that level.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

Hopefully that's the highest level and nothing else is coming.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

You know, I I always say that I'm I'm pretty good in the abstract of admitting that I'm an idiot. Like I can admit that in my speeches and what I write, but in real time, when somebody in my close circle is hurt by something I did or angry with something I did, to be present without the defense, because my experience is what everybody expects, including my children and my wife, is the defense. I'm upset, I'm hurt. The defense on the inside doesn't feel like a defense. It feels like, let me explain myself to you so you understand where I'm coming from. But what that's aimed at is I need to be good. You need to understand my intentions, you need to understand what I was thinking and why I did what I did so that you're not upset with me. That's really what's being communicated. So the ability that my daughter has given me, or the opportunity my daughter has given me to practice just being present with her in her pain that I cause has been a great gift. And I don't always do it really well in real time. Sometimes, like the other night, Wednesday night, she had to say to me in a moment of distress, she said, I thought you would be better at this. You think you're good at comforting people, and I thought you were, but you're not doing it, which just was a nice, again, I'm grateful that she said that, and it was a reset for me to put down all of my ideas and tools to strip myself kind of emotionally naked, and then just to sit with her as she shared her distress with me, and as I could take it in and hold it. So, yes, I I can do that in the abstract, but in real time, I think that's where most people are challenged. Because in real time, it feels like they don't understand my heart. They don't understand my intention. And while that feels like that on the inside, on the outside, it just feels like a defense.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

Wow. Can we dive in there into the how? Because, like you said, I think the embodiment of that is such a brilliant gift of what I've seen you share and some of the understandings and tools you've given. So to double-click on that and to clarify, absolutely, when a defense comes up, the person who's perpetrating that will always feel like they're fixing it or maybe they're even giving, right? And it takes a lot of self-awareness to understand you're actually providing an ask. And it's actually kind of self-involved, and you need something out of that. Um, and what I heard, what I heard you say this week was all of those points on listening. And you said something like the only way to truly listen is to heal. Your ability to listen is directly related to your ability to heal. Otherwise, you will be grappling for your footing, right? And your control and your image and keeping your ego alive, which is natural. And our bodies are gonna do that. Thank you for keeping us safe. And it's never been safe to do that before. So of course we're perpetrating that. And so I wonder if you would expand. There's so many little subjects in there, but what you feel is important to understand when you're the receiver and when you're the perpetrator of that kind of interaction.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

The first two thoughts that come to mind are these. First of all, I think the first step in any bit of progress in in the mental health space is you have to come to terms with who you are. That the greatest barrier against everything that we're seeking is who we have become up to this point. So I'm the greatest barrier to what I want. But those adaptations, those ways that I've learned to kind of be in the world, were ways of surviving my childhood, like it is for all of us. And so the first thing is acceptance. Carl Rogers, the great therapist, said it's only the great paradox is that it's only when I accept myself that I can change. So when people approach self-help and psychotherapy with the idea that I can get good enough so that I'm beyond reproach, right? I can get good enough so that nobody can criticize me. That's a dangerous and slippery slope because what's likely to happen if that's the instinct, if that's the goal in the on the front end, is that I'm going to quickly go back into denial. I'm gonna quickly see that the way that I'm showing up is good again. Because I need to be good, I need to be fixed, I need to be beyond reproach, beyond criticism. So the first step really is acceptance, and that's the hardest one to accept. I'm I'm damaged, I'm dented. I'm not all damaged, I'm also gifted and wonderful and warm and kind in other ways too, but I'm all of it. And so to accept that part of ourselves, I think is the biggest hurdle. Once we accept that, we can offer repairs when we do make mistakes with our children. We can catch ourselves and our kind of instincts, our impulses to fix to what we think is to help. And we can pause and just wait and listen and stay silent and be. But like you said, I think this is the second point that I would say is most important for me. I think we have to understand what we're doing to our children. We have to be have the courage to be able to see that we're showing up in defense of what we need. If you can't, this is the strange idea. If you can't temporarily set aside your need to be seen. And by the way, everybody on earth needs to be seen. Everybody on earth ideally is heard and seen in a profound emotional way. That's important. That's part of our development. That's a that's a healthy desire and need to fulfill. But when you're in the process of listening, you have to set that aside first. Because what most people feel when they're struggling to listen is you don't see my side. You're not understanding where I was coming from. So your inability to sit with that discomfort of being bad, making a mistake, not showing up the way that somebody needs, the acceptance of that, and then understanding that my need to be seen has to be temporarily set aside to be available to you to listen. And I don't think that's intuitive, and I don't think that's talked about a lot, and I don't think people would understand for the most part, the greatest barrier to listening is their need to be listened to. And and like Tik Nan Han says, that the goal is to empty out your heart and mind so as to offer the other person peace. Or like I wrote in one of my books, if you're gonna understand somebody that you love, you have to lose your mind. You have to be able to not need at that moment because listening is a giving thing. It's not a taking thing. And so I think that acceptance followed by this by this idea that I have to be healed enough, both in in terms of my overall life trajectory and art, but also I have to be well fed, I have to be well rested, I have to not be stressed out from work or whatever burdens I carry in my life. So it's it's a it's an overall thing, but it's also a daily thing, because there are moments during the day when I can't listen to anybody. And there are moments of the day when I have no capacity. And again, if I can own that and take responsibility for that, I can avoid further damage. Because my daughter said this the other day. I asked her for something in the evening. And she started to say it was about school. She said, I don't want to work on it, but I guess I will. I said, You were about to say yes because you think you should. You can say no. And she said, What a relief. And I said, Most likely, if you had just said yes and we'd followed through, we'd we would have ended up in an argument 10 minutes in and we wouldn't have known why. And why it was is because you were already trained for the day. You didn't have the energy, but you said yes because you should say yes, because that's a good thing to do.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

Well, thank you for that. And that is actually where I first learned compassionate listening with Sitchin Uhan when he had talked about it. And when, like you said, if you can view it as I set myself aside and I'm just here letting them empty their heart, and I'm just in here in service. And I really appreciated what I heard you say on your YouTube channel this week when you said that is not a skill we're taught. That is not a skill that comes easy to us, that is not something that everyone should know. And um, I love it when you quote Ram Das too, because he's one of my favorite, and he says that as well. He says, you can't awaken and then go running down the streets awakening everybody as well. It's not gonna work that way. And so you have to continue your own journey in that. And the ability to set yourself aside comes from what you said, healing and the ability to grasp onto, to circle back to the skill that's a learned skill that is very hard, takes a lot of work. Um, and Ramda says most of our suffering comes from us expecting other people to show up as their best selves. We expect people to know this, we expect people to not show up tired, human, angry, all these things. And so we need to release that and release them from those obligations. So, my favorite question I wanted to ask you today was when did that moment happen for you and how would you describe it?

SPEAKER_00 15:47

There there definitely have been some kind of real grand moments where I've had that awakening and that awareness. But again, uh another maybe idea is and I I'm so glad to be answering this question in this way. I think people when they see teachers or speakers like me that they that they like and respect what we have to say, I think they assume that we've got it all figured out, right? That we're that we don't show up as as as incapable as as others. But the fact of the matter is, including me, first and foremost, me, every therapist struggles with everything we're talking about. In fact, I would argue or or suggest that the thing that we talk about the most is the thing that we most struggle with. Otherwise, what wisdom would we have to offer if that wasn't something that we were challenged by? Right? C.S. Lewis says in the introduction to mere Christianity, he says, I can't speak to gambling. I don't have that vice. Neither do I have its virtue, of which gambling is the excess. So you have to have some experience with the mess in this process. So for me, yes, there's moments where I've I've had that experience with my therapist where I've been heard, but it's still a process. This week, the lesson that I just shared with you with my daughter, I share that because, like I said, it indicates how difficult and how rarely I do it. I'm really skilled. If it's about skills and knowledge, I wouldn't be here right now. I would have learned the skills I I've studied my whole life around parenting and relationships. I have the skills. Having the emotional, spiritual, psychological energy and capacity to execute those skills is a different thing entirely. And what I often like to teach is we all, I'll use the Buddha as an example. People will say, you know, be the Buddha. Can you be the Buddha? I always point out being the Buddha in the way that you're talking about is not the test. The test is he goes and takes care of himself. The Buddha left his wife and child and family in the palace, left his home. And he sat under a tree until he had enough in his belly, as often is symbolized by his big belly, enough in his belly to offer love. So it was all that he did up to that moment that was the real hard work. The hard work is taking care of ourselves because of the shame and guilt, attending to ourselves, saying to somebody, I can't hear you right now, I have to take a break. That's not easy for people like me or others to do because I want to be good. I can't be the one that's limited here. So I'm gonna make you you bad. So we have to own our lack of capacity, our lack of spiritual energy. That's the real barrier to being able to sit with somebody in a compassionate way. If you just try to execute the compassion and you haven't done the kind of fill-up work, the self-loving work, the self-care work, then you're gonna be coming from an empty place and eventually you will leak. Eventually the the process will be um sabotaged in some way because capacity, spiritual, emotionally, psychological capacity is the fuel that we need to be able to sit with somebody in their pain. It takes a lot of capacity, not just knowledge and skills, but a lot of emotional capacity. And I think that's what most people don't attend to because of guilt and shame. They don't want to do those self-care things because they have been taught that those are self-indulgent or those are self-centered, but it's the only way that we can show up to the people that we love.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

It's counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Totally.

SPEAKER_03 19:15

And I heard myself ask you the question: how have you arrived? And I kind of heard you say, I have not.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Correct. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

I am I am in it, and that's where this wisdom is coming from. And that brings a lot of resonance and compassion and kind of relief I'm feeling in my body to hear you saying that. One of um one of my most beautiful mentors that I never met in person, but took some of her courses online and actually did a book club on her book last year. And it was my most attended book club, my most impactful one. Um it was on, it was on Shadow Work. She's a Carl Jungian student. She took her life last month. And so we're kind of reeling in this community. And and people are saying a lot of really important things, like you just said, that let's remember that the people who have this potent medicine to offer us, the people who are making the biggest change in the world, are not the ones that are free of it and living on the other side. They're in it and they're mining the depth of that potent medicine they're giving to us in real time. And and they're human. Thank you for that reminder and also permission for us to kind of course correct as you were talking. I was thinking it our aim is grasp these tools, listen to Brad, figure out how I can get from point A to point B. But a lot of what you teach and what you said today is that you are there.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

And it's the authenticity and the honesty and the acceptance about being there. That's the portal. That's the threshold to getting anywhere. Otherwise, that door is locked shut.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 20:50

I am wondering about some actual logistical, actual tools in that process when you said you did have some big awakening moments, because everyone does have the question, still, even in hearing that and even in feeling that. And I've been through that a thousand times. And then the next morning I wake up and forget. And I want to know how can I move the needle? How, how can I actually do it? How can I convince someone? How can I help someone? How can I remember the places that move the needle for me? And I've had experiences, I have been through a divorce. That was a big experience. And I know in one of the podcasts I send around, you said our biggest, one of the biggest things that can affect a change in us is failure. And I've had a lot of plant medicine experiences that can neurologically break certain concepts and things in your brain, especially like we talked about earlier with veterans and PTSD and their certain population we call treatment-resistant. So, as a therapist, like actually with your hands dirty in the work, what are some of those things that work for people?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Well, it's an interesting I had two thoughts about your question. The first thought is the failure thing, is what I was gonna say. Everything I have to offer that is I think of value to my clients and to the people that I serve is due to my failures. Carl Jung said famously that if you want to understand the darkness in others, understand your own darkness first. So I go back to this darkness, to my own wounding, to my own trauma, to my own maladapted behaviors. So failure is a handy tool and it's been consistent in my life.

SPEAKER_03 22:36

Does that mean we have to let people fail?

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Um yes. But going just a couple of steps steps deeper, letting somebody that I love fail, for example, if I'm still talking about me, means that I have to cope with my own inadequacies in that moment. Right? That I can't help. And to embrace and embody my own sense of inadequacy and powerlessness, that's a that's an important task. That's grief, that's accepting who I am and where I am in relationship to the other person. So, yes, letting them fail is a sign that I can sit with myself. You know, I often say that I can sit with other people for years. My therapist says in one of her one of her books, she teaches that a psychotherapist must accept scanty results. And I was just thinking about the the Odyssey, which is out right now and very popular because of the most recent movie. And I've heard some friends and colleagues, folks say, gosh, it was long. And my response is that's the point. If the goal is to get back home, which was not to Penelope or to Telemachus, home was him to find his authentic self. And they were just symbolic of that place. Um it takes forever. It takes a lifetime. So failure, you know, I joke about the fact having having a wife and having children is the best teacher because there's nowhere in my life that I fail as much. I I'm more successful at work. So work is easy, comparatively speaking. I know what to do, I know what my job is, I can do it well. Coming home, the first thing I get is you screwed up again today, dad, and you didn't do it right, and we're mad about this, and we're upset about this, and can you help it? And it's like sitting with that because I was not willing, and this is maybe the most important part, I was not willing to let my children struggle and just assume I had nothing to do with it. I just wasn't willing to project my inadequacies and my sense of my undone work onto them. So when my daughter said, I feel like being around you sometimes, I just want to hurt myself or or her mother or whatever, this family for whatever, I decided to believe her. I beloved, I decided to not tell her she was crazy or that she had a personality disorder. If I did, she would say, Well, you caused it anyway. That's how smart she is. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't want to just say, well, I'm doing fine. You're the one that's damaged and hurt, you need to go get help, and so let's get you help. I assumed I was part of the problem. And that idea has really facilitated a lot of my work. So now when I go to therapy, I'm not saying, tell me what to do to fix my wife or my marriage or my child. I'm saying, here's what's coming up for me in my own body, here's what's coming up, here are my thoughts, here are my impulses, here's what I want to do. And I explore my own wounding so that when I come back to my spouse, when I come back to my child, I'm just different with them. It's hard to explain, but when I come back with an understanding that you and I are the same, we're on the same journey. I might be farther ahead in some parts of it, you might be farther ahead in some parts of it. I don't have an instinct to fix. I have an instinct to wait because I know how long it's taken me to wake up, and I'm still waking up. So why would I expect my 18-year-old daughter to have some of these figured things figured out? So the most important tool is my own failure. And then I do believe, I think it can be done with yoga, meditation. I do believe in psychedelics as an opportunity to catapult us into this next kind of consciousness. But for me, psychotherapy is a big deal. I have to be with somebody who's larger than me. And sometimes you can get that in support groups like 12-step groups and Al-Anon, and those are great for people who can't afford therapy. But I have to be with somebody that I can, like my therapist said to me, and I share this in one of my books. She said, if you came in here, Brad, when I was ashamed to confess to something I'd done to somebody in my family, something I'd said or done. She said, Let me explain to you that if you came in here telling me that you were having sex with a chicken, I would assume you had a good reason, and I'd I would just want to understand. That was in 2011, and that was one of those moments where I thought, that's the medicine. The medicine is me. From my journey, like in the hero's journey, the thing that I bring back to my clients is me. And the thing I bring back to my children, like it happened this week when I could sit with my daughters, this is the medicine. If I can bring my regulated nervous system and my perspective, having been maybe a few steps farther along the path and hold space for you, that's the healing balm. That's what cures. Somebody sitting with us, seeing with us, not panicking, not getting upset, not eager to fix or to help, but just being with us and reflecting back a sense of okayness, that's what heals and that's what cures. So that's the that's the dirty hands part of it is I have to sit and listen and wait and wait and wait. And not be in a hurry and not think you need to get there and you need to get there now, but just stay with you. And my presence changes your nervous system over time. Your nervous system starts to become a copy of this new experience rather than the one that you grew up with. And that nervous system kind of reset, rebuild makes all the difference in the world.

SPEAKER_03 27:47

That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:49

And it makes so much sense. And it also seems pretty rare. And I hear you say that, you know, in some of your talking head offerings you give us. If you can't do this, go get someone, go get support, go get someone to do that for you. And when I hear you saying that, I'm like, he gets it. He gets it on such a depth. I don't know if people listening to him are getting what he's saying because we weren't traumatized alone, so we can't heal alone. I know you read a lot of the same people, Richard War, Esther Prel, things like that, that I read. And that piece of getting in front of somebody and co-regulating over time is so important. It reminds me of how we're training my new horse right now because he has a lot of fear and a lot of trauma. And it is, it is pushing me to the edge of my vulnerability. And it's also every time I do it, flashing in my brain symbols and places where I'm inadequate in my life or where I haven't been able to do that in my life and where it's causing problems because it illuminates it in such a like real and metaphorical way with a horse. And I'm like, this is exactly how I show up in these other catastrophes. And do you have advice for people who are trying to find that? Because I like you said, I think the problem with people who need that also presents with not being able to ask for help.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Well, what my therapist says to folks is keep going. And I know that sounds really simple, but I think the greatest barrier to the work, and and this goes back to the Odyssey reference I made, I think the biggest barrier for the work is how much time it takes and how slow it is. And so we're used to wanting a pretty quick fix. And we have so many tools and technology in this world that we can accomplish so many complex things in a short period of time. But this machine, if you will, this mechanism doesn't work on that timeline. It takes a long time. So the first thing I would say is just keep going, keep asking, keep looking. Just because you haven't found it, don't assume. Because I think that you're you're you're searching for home even if you don't know that you are. You know, I said this in in a podcast recently, uh, what I was interviewing about my Mormon story. And I was describing, he was asking the question, you know, in the past we've thought of people who've left the church as those who just want to sin and party and do whatever they want. And now sometimes he said, we think people that leave are leaving because it's the next moral step for them. And what I said to him was, I don't see a difference. I think the people that are leaving because of the symptoms or the sins are just afraid to leave through the front door. And so they're sabotaging it so that they're finding a way out through that door. And that's okay. I don't judge the two. This one I just think maybe can do it through the front door because they feel enough safety, and this one can't. And I honor both of their steps. So keep going, keep looking. Um for those that are listening to you, I would imagine they're far enough along that they're not going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. They can't go back to not knowing and not waking up to what they've already realized. So just keep looking, even if you haven't found it, because the fact you haven't found it is not evidence that something isn't out there. And for me, I've I've thought about quitting therapy a couple of times. I have quit therapy a couple of times, but I always find that I need, I need that place to go and find myself again and again and again. And I would just say I have empathy for how slow it is and how hard it is and how small the gains are, and how we cycle back and regress and get caught on detours all the time. Everybody does. But we're doing it together. You know, we we don't we can go, we don't have to do this alone. We can have somebody walk beside us. So keep going would be my advice.

SPEAKER_03 31:40

That's beautiful advice. I like that a lot. And and the reframe and the perspective of really trying to embody that maybe we do live a thousand times. Maybe this is the point, right? Maybe this is supposed to be slow.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:55

And that is something I don't know anyone who's ever been said that to or taught. Right? Like that is not, I think, part of our culture and our expectation, right? And those expectations cause so much suffering. I wonder if we could kind of riff off that, but circle back to once again, uh more logistical, um, like tools in the moment. Like, if you if we need to balance this out, because when I hear you talk, it does remind me a lot of Ram Das, which is when we are actually embodied in that place of love and fulfillment and our Buddha bellies are full. I have found, and I've heard you say, and it sounds like you have found too, there's nothing outside of our capacity. And so when we're talking from that place, it's very compassionate. Nothing can harm us. Um, in my world, the heart chakra is called anahata, it means unstruck. So when we're in that place, we truly can embody and feel that we are okay. And our cup overflows and we can give. And more moments than not in my life are not in that place. And so, where do boundaries come into play and decisions and how do we enact those things in the different relationships? In parent to child, is it always giving? Are you always emptying yourself to listen to your kid? Or is there ever a certain time when that becomes boundaried in a spousal relationship, a peer relationship? How do we how do we want to look at that? So I guess my question is a lot of like new age and my listeners, and we here, um, you should just keep using the mirror or using your experience to better yourself, right? And on the one hand, it's true. I hold a paradox. On the one hand, I'm like, yes, that's infinitely true. But then on the other hand, it can also feel pretty gaslighting and like turning it back on you. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

You know, the difficult that's a great question. And I think it speaks to a really important issue, which is a lot of our mental health issues are around our inability to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity. And I think even in in in I was in Santa Barbara a couple years ago at my son-in-law's graduation with his doctoral degree, and uh, we were on Main Street in San Diego, there they're they're a big street, and there was a Christian science, I think, church, and it said, are you feeling uncertain about laugh life? Come in here and we'll help with that. And I thought. But it's it's it's an acceptance of the not knowing. So when you ask about specific concrete things, I think the most painful part of my answer is there's nothing that necessarily will be true today at one o'clock that'll be true this evening at four o'clock that'll be true tomorrow. Something I might do with one kid doesn't work with the other. Something I might do with a kid when he's six doesn't work when he's seven. Something on a Tuesday doesn't work on a Wednesday. So the work is to become a person. To be, in my estimation, the work of psychotherapy is to become yourself, which means, as Ramdas said, he said a lot of people want to avoid the feeling of I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable above enough to repeat in a in a mirror, like I am lovable, I am good. And he says the problem with that mentality is it still keeps the world at the level of polarities, so we have to go beyond the polarities to I am. I am sometimes generous, I am sometimes stingy, I am sometimes kind, I am sometimes cruel, I'm sometimes wise, and I'm sometimes very ignorant. So I think part of your question is you won't get it right. You will fail more at parenting and boundaries than you will fail at anything in your life. So you just keep going and understanding that to allow yourself to be human in those ways is your great gift to your family. As I say to my children, my my daughter was asked one time, my first book is Paul, is called The Journey of the Heroic Parent, based on Joseph Campbell's work. And my adult daughter was helping me sell it the first time I was selling it in public. And somebody came up to her while I was talking to somebody else and said, Is your dad a heroic parent? And she paused and she said, No, he's an idiot, but he knows it and that makes him tolerable. And so I do talk about boundaries and I go over the pros and cons, but mostly I'm going back to why is it difficult to set a boundary? You're afraid somebody's gonna react offensively, or you're afraid that you're gonna be abandoned. I wonder where that came from. I wonder where you were not allowed to hold boundaries in your past, where you were told that if you did, your needs were too much, or your needs were inappropriate, or your needs was were unacceptable. So it always goes back to that wounding about who we are and the stuff that we do comes out of it. And and I'll just kind of conclude this answer with this. If you're doing it from a place of self-love, it's hard to get it wrong. And if you're doing it from a place of fear, it's almost impossible to get it right. So it's not the behavior, it's not the boundary that you set, it's not the thing that you say, it's who you are that makes the difference. And that will come through energetically when the words themselves will only at times touch on the real energy.

SPEAKER_03 37:23

That's a cool quote. Thank you for that. And would you also say it's also not indicative or the response you get is also not necessarily indicative of if you were doing it from fear or for love. And so you need to let go of that as well. Because I have noticed when I've stepped into some things and felt really proud of that and embodied and authentic. I wasn't always praised and lifted up and said, Wow, you really helped me, or that was wonderful. Sometimes the opposite's happened.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:56

And vice versa. And so that also shouldn't be the feedback. It sounds like you're saying the feedback will just be within you and you know if you're acting from love.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

I mean, that's in in the Gospel of St. Thomas from the Gnostic Gospels that were found in the 1940s, there's a quote that says, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. Now he doesn't talk about it being good or bad. He just says, if you don't know yourself, you're in trouble. So I think what you're talking about, there's so much truth in that because if you get mad at me and I don't know myself, I have no idea what your feedback is about. Is it about me? Is it about you? If I know myself and you get mad at me, I can see where I might have missed up. I can see my fault, or I can see that you're just scared and this has nothing to do with me. So self-knowledge orients me toward you and others in a way that I can see you. That's the great paradox, is the more I know myself, the more I know you. Otherwise, your reactions become this thing that, like I said, like you said, that I hang on and that I worry about and that I obsess about and that I look at managing you. So self-knowledge, self-awareness clears me to a space where I can be present with whatever you're feeling. And if I'm if I have some accountability, I can own it because I know myself. And if I don't have some accountability, then what will what it will look like is not me saying it's not my fault. That's your stuff. It will look like really deep compassion. It will look like I'm so sorry I did that to you. I'm so glad that you're telling me, thank you, and I'm sorry that I hurt you. I'm listening to what you say and I'll I'll try to do better, but I know I did that. That's what self-awareness looks like. It looks like compassion and patience. And I think what people think early in the stages of their work is they think self-awareness looks like that's your defense mechanism, that's your addictive mind, that's your, you know, that's your anxiety speaking, because I don't want it to be in me. I want it to be the problem and the issue to be in you. But when you become big enough, because you know yourself, I can hold your stuff too, temporarily. I can hold your pain, meaning I can listen to it, I can sit with it, I can tolerate it.

SPEAKER_03 40:06

I have felt those moments. Like you said, they're not all the time. And maybe a really finite and important skill is to be able to communicate honestly when you are or not in those spaces. That's really valuable. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about shame, blame, and guilt? I have a funny story to tell you. And I wonder if you have any funny stories. Okay, well, our youngest daughter, who's so feisty and so amazing, and I'm so grateful for her. Uh, she always has been really emotionally intelligent and literate for some reason. I mean, I've tried, I've taken Brene Brown parenting classes. I'll give myself appropriate credit, but not over credit. She came to us with a lot of these things, and she exemplifies a lot of these principles I get to watch in her. She's only eight now. So it's only been eight years of this. So I don't know what's coming. But when she was little, this was a perfect example of how quickly and unconsciously we shift blame without even a lot of trauma and years behind us. And she would say this phrase, which we all need use now in my family, which is so funny. And it goes like this That's why. And it's when you're ready to admit that you are consciously blaming something else and not taking accountability because she would be two years old running through the house and she'd trip and fall, and she would get up and she would say, That's why you shouldn't have wood in your house.

SPEAKER_01 41:33

Yeah, that's right. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 41:35

A hundred things like that, something would happen and she would be like, That's why you don't buy a dog when you have little kids because they eat your food.

SPEAKER_01 41:43

Right, right, right. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 41:44

So, in just such an innocent way, it exemplified, I guess, the innocence of the human problem, the human dilemma of switching to blame faster than we even have a chance to catch. And what is happening there?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Yeah. You know, the way I think about it these days is the capacity that I'm referring to when I refer to capacity is to be able to hold unpleasant feelings in your body. That's the task. And you have to build up a kind of muscle for that. You have to develop a kind of spaciousness for that. So what happens for human beings is we don't want the bad feeling to be about us or in us. We want it to be out there. So that's why, that's why is simply splitting off the parts of ourselves that are causing us pain and putting it outside of us because if we're causing ourselves pain, if we're the reason for our problem, it is an overwhelming human feeling. It is overwhelming for most people. So the work, Melanie Klein is one of the great psychoanalytic child development psychologists to ever live. And she used to say there are really two phases that humans go through. The first one, she talked about, is the paranoid phase. The problems are out there. The second one that some people don't ever get to, she calls the depressed phase or stage, which is the problem is in me. And it's depressing because at first, when you discover that, or I should say, as you discover that, it's it's continually depressing because I find it still in my therapy. I talked about it today. Like the news in psychotherapy just keeps getting worse and worse for me. Because I seem to be the problem in all of my problems. So the instinct to project, to split off, to ignore, to put into the unconscious, and then to see out in the world is a way of coping. So the way that we combat that or treat that is as parents, we learn to hold it in our bodies. We learn, as my daughter said, the greatest love that a parent can show a child is the willingness to be cast as the villain in the child's story. The other night I was comforting my daughter through a moment of distress. And for 15 or 20 minutes of me comfort comforting her, she was telling me, while I was comforting her, Adequately, I think. She was telling me how usually I'm so horrible at it. So I'm sitting there comforting my daughter, showing up, being present, and for 20 minutes she's telling me what a horrible father I am. I have to hold that. And people will say, well, when are you going to teach accountability to your child? When are you going to teach them about their own agency that no matter what happens outside of them, they still have a responsibility that that speaks to how they respond to it? And my answer to that question is, I show my children that by modeling it. So when I can hold it, when I can be bad, then my children can be bad. Then when they trip later on, instead of saying that's why they can say, you know what? Sometimes I'm clumsy. Sometimes I don't pay attention. You see the shift? They can now hold the bad feelings in their body because I've modeled it for them. And in modeling it for them, I've also helped to regulate their nervous system so that when they experience some aspect that's this that's uncomfortable, they don't have to project it. They can say that was mine. I am my own problem. I'm the one who not in a shameful self-punishing way, but just in a empowering way. Like, yeah, sometimes I don't pay attention while I'm walking and I'm prone to trip over the smallest of seams in the in the carpet. That's how I am. And so holding what I say in my family and my practice, holding badness is the practice. And it feels so intolerable most of the time that we want to see it out there in other people, in our circumstances. Jung said it this way. Jung said, if you don't make the conscious, excuse me, he said, if you don't make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And that's what he's talking about. That's what I'm talking about, the same idea right here.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

Wow. I just had a huge like aha moment, even deeper than like I've had. Uh like we've talked about the difference between having skills and intellectualizing it and like embodying it. Because I have heard that before. Your kids learn from your example. Your actions speak louder than your teachings, right? And because I have just barely, I think, enough life experience now that I'm in my 40s to see it, to like have lived it, I can now think back to moments where that is so mind-bending and true that as opposed to teaching them, say this, do this, say this, do this. This is how you handle these scenarios. We read all the books, we take all the classes. But the moment I need to hold the badness, if I shy away from it or reason it and I can't embody it, whoops, mom made a mistake. Oh, that person's hawking at me because I accidentally cut them off. Oops, I'm sorry, you know, that is doing them such a grandiose disservice because it's teaching them the exact opposite and studying in their nervous systems that that's not okay for them.

SPEAKER_00 46:51

Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 46:53

And I was gonna ask you this question because of my kids' camps. And so I wonder how you'd answer it now because I feel like I just got the answer. Um What is the most important thing that we can teach the kids at these camps? What's what's the most important way we could show up just in your world and the practice and all these things you do? What's the thing out there? What's the big thing? What do they need? How can I show up in service?

SPEAKER_00 47:22

I'm gonna use a phrase that will sound superficial, but I'll give it some texture and some depth. The answer, the headline is personal responsibility. And that's not even a phrase. I don't think I've ever uttered that in in response to this kind of question. It is to own your stuff. It is to say See, I always say children don't need parents to be perfect or guides to be perfect. If they do, they're doomed. That's a fact. If children's development is contingent on parents being perfect, they are all doomed. What parents, what children need from parents and and caregivers is to own their stuff. Like you just said, to own and to model what it's like to be a person, to make mistakes, to be wrong. But children, for the most part, and this is this will sound no matter how much I say it, it will sound like I'm overgeneralizing, but I'm not. Children in across the border experiencing defensiveness from their parents consistently. Most parents need to be good. And that doesn't even sound crazy, right? Needing to be good. I mean, most people say, why wouldn't you want to be good? But the need to be good, as Jung said, I would rather be whole than good. What he meant was if I can be whole, that means I can be in relationship to you and to all of you. You can be mad at me, you can be happy with me, you can be sad with me. So I think ownership, personal responsibility for my they're my feelings of anger. They're my feelings of frustration, they're my feelings of fear. And then to not make you responsible for them is the key. And I'll put this to a real practical idea. The most common mistakes, in my opinion, that most parents make, not the biggest one, but the most common one is I tell my children how I feel and I expect that to be their North Star for right and wrong. So if I'm happy with you, you're doing right. If I'm disappointed or worried or frustrated, you're doing wrong. So we wire children from the first chance that they have being verbal in understanding. We wire them to believe that what other people think about them is about them. And then they go out in the world not knowing who they are and being susceptible to peer pressure, and we think, well, the kid just needs to find it internally. And they'll ask me in in therapy all the time, the parents, like, how did this happen? And I will explain, you were the first one. You were the first one using peer pressure. You were saying to your children how happy or sad that you were about their behavior, and you were suggesting to them that that's about them. And now they have to spend the rest of their lives in in Al-Anon or Koda or therapy learning that what other people think about me is none of my business. And my parents' responsibility to their own serenity is theirs, not mine. And ultimately, what my parents think about me is none of my business. It's none of my business. In fact, I spend my life today, as I'm sure many people in this work do, trying not to be held hostage by what other people think, and yet in my earliest stages of development, my parents were using their emotions to manipulate me and to be responsible for them. That old adage that you can only be as happy as your least happy child, so if you're causing a parent distress, you know, that then you're then then there's a problem. That idea that you're only as happy as your least happy child means that the children are raising the parents. That the children are responsible for the parents' happiness, serenity, peace, frustration, and anger. And that responsibility is crushing to the development of the child. So it's about personal responsibility and it's about not using feelings as a way to control behavior because that will ultimately be communicated as shame and guilt. You have to stop doing what you're doing so I can be happy again. You have to stop doing this so I won't be scared again. Keep doing what you're doing because that makes dad and mom happy. And then the child has no sense of self. All they know is how to make other people pleased with their behavior. And that, of course, then ruins their entire life.

SPEAKER_03 51:12

To put it lightly. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

Without overreaching it all.

SPEAKER_03 51:16

I'm glad you illuminated that. Yeah. I think I had three of those experiences just this morning on the way here. So uh lived that, been that, perpetrated that 100%. And that's human, and that is just a beautiful thing to illuminate. And I'm kind of giggling because of course that's the answer. Because, like you said, we keep getting more bad news. And when I'm trying to be in service to these children, the answer is once again, it's me. Yeah, it's my self-work, my responsibility, my personal accountability that is going to make the biggest difference if that's gonna happen there. Um, and so good news and bad news.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:54

Yeah. And and also to remember that with the mentors and the people I hire in these spaces to pour into them as the same thing, right? As well. And I I love it. I mean, self-work, this stuff gets me excited. I don't know what thing went wrong or right or wrong in my childhood that makes me dive headfirst into this stuff and like it. I know, like you said, a lot of people really get depressed and shy away from it, but I'm kind of like a glutton for punishment. And I'm like, whatever I have to do, cause me that pain, cause me that death. So it gets me really excited to have those aha moments, even if it is me, even if I'm the problem, that excites me because it opens up a solution.

SPEAKER_00 52:38

Oh, it's I always say it's the best and the worst news in the world that you're the problem. Because if someone else is the problem, or if the rest of the world is the problem, we think that we're unhappy because of what's happening out there. And if that's the truth, we're in a whole lot of trouble. But if we accept or even consider the idea that I might be the reason for my unhappiness, there's a chance. Because I have some impact on this thing right here. Yeah. On the world, on the politics, on the government, on the the state of things out there. I have very little impact, but I have a lot of impact on this. So it is the best and the worst news, all wrapped up into one for sure.

SPEAKER_03 53:12

Yeah, it's empowering in the best way. And it's just another uh false sense of control in the worst way, right? So, with that, maybe you can talk a little bit more about the shame and guilt because I like what you said about shame and guilt really not mattering that much. After we've spent so many years piecing them apart, trying to define them, learn about them, feel these nuances. It really felt good to hear you talk about shame and guilt, the purpose that that serves, and how we can try to get our head above water on those feelings.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm gonna take a little risk here in answering that question. Because I know a lot of people love Brene Brown, and she's done a tremendous amount of good in the world with the topics that she's introduced to the mainstream public, that's for sure. But I use this example of hers just to illustrate still how subtle and elusive these truths are. In her second most famous TED talk, not the very, not the one that catapulted her, but then there was another one right after that where she went more into shame. She's in Houston, Texas. And she asked the audience, she said, she says, she makes the statement that shame is associated with mental illness and guilt is associated with mental health. And she asked the audience, she says, How many of you, for example, if you made a mistake and hurt me, you would fix it? Because if you knew that you'd you'd hurt me, you would fix it. And the the the camera pans of the audience and all 10,000 people raised their hand. And I'm thinking, are these people not married? Like what uh that's not my instinct when I make a mistake. My instinct is to cover it up, to hide, right? To to I mean think think about that that phrase too, to hide, to cover myself up. Right? That's in the first story of Genesis, right? The lie that was believed. The first lie that was that was believed was who you are is unacceptable, cover yourself up. God is coming back. So when Brene Brown said that, she's she's embodying or she's speaking to this idea that is not true. It's not true that guilt and shame are so different than everybody thinks. Guilt and shame prevent us from our growth. In fact, what I would say, I was thinking about this earlier, the one thing you can be confident of, if you're getting healthier in a spiritual and psychological way, you should expect to feel guilty on a regular basis. My daughter, my adult daughter once said, speaking to a group of parents where I was the lead lecturer and she was in support, she said about me while I was there. She said, breaking free of my family's patterns of dysfunction causes me a lot of guilt. So I go to therapy so my therapist can help me carry that guilt. So not only do is guilt and shame not helpful, but it prevents self-awareness, it prevents self-knowledge, it prevents your ability to say, I'm sorry, it prevents your ability to be accountable. So we have to deconstruct our guilt in our shame, is the answer. Otherwise, we'll just assume it has something to do with morality, and it does not. Most people who tell me, you know, I knew what to do and I didn't do it and I asked why, their response is guilt. So we have to be willing to feel guilt to do the right things. And I think that that's so conditioned in us to believe that guilt is about right and wrong in a way that lines up. But yet, the reason we don't set boundaries, guilt. The reason we don't tell people how we feel is because we feel guilty or afraid it's gonna be taking up too much space. So we have to deconstruct, we have to confront it. And ultimately, as Joseph Campbell and Frederick Nietzsche say, you have to kill the dragon of should and should not. And what the dragon will give you when you finally defeat the dragon of should and should not, because dragons hoard treasures, they will give you the treasure that it's been hoarding. And what both of those individuals point out is the treasure that they will give you is you. If you kill the dragon of should and should not, and realize that's just somebody else's idea about right and wrong, it's not necessarily true for you. If you kill that dragon, the thing that you get is you. And it's, as Rumi said, the desire to know your own soul will solve all other desires. It's the most amazing thing to be yourself. But to do that, you've really got to tolerate some really horrible feelings and some messages from the people in your close-knit circle who you love and who love you. You've got to tolerate them saying you're doing the wrong thing, you're being crazy, we don't even know who you are, why are you doing all this work, all the things that they're gonna do to try to get you to move back into the way that you were, it's uncomfortable for everybody and it's gonna cause great distress to get healthy.

SPEAKER_03 57:41

That's so great. Hi.

SPEAKER_00 57:44

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 57:45

I did actually uh take a parenting class from Brene Brown that I mentioned earlier, and one of the questions she suggested we asked our kids, this was about seven or eight years ago, was what can I do better as a parent? What do you wish mommy understood better or did better? And I've probably asked it a total of two times in the last seven years because of that paralyzing fear of feeling the guilt or being able to hear those answers. So I'm re-inspired to lean more into some of those really uncomfortable places because of what you just said. And I have never heard that slaying the dragons of should and shouldn't. And I wonder how many of my listeners resonate with this, but those have been one of the most predominant top five or ten words in my work that I've done on unearthing and knowing myself in the last 20 years is those words come up so much.

SPEAKER_01 58:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:42

And I'm always up against fighting them.

SPEAKER_01 58:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 58:46

Um, it reminds me of have you heard of this story came up when I was thinking about talking to you. The story of the king from Leo Tolstoy. It's called Three Questions.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

Tell me.

SPEAKER_03 58:57

And it comes back and back to me. I actually taught it to our kids. We have, you know, moments before they leave for school, and that might be inspirational, it might be emotional. They they're just something to buoy them up, you know, and remember who's behind them before they leave the door. So it's not necessarily religious-based or a script, it could be a scripture, but it's not always. And this is one of the stories, and I just think I keep telling it because, like you said, it impacts me and I need to hear it, and that's why I keep saying it out loud so that my auditory can come back into my ears and I can hear myself, teach myself. But um, the three questions are what's the right timing for something? Um, who is the most important person or the person to deal with or be with, and what's the most important thing to do? And those phrases vary based on the versions you find. Uh, but they start kind of with a king seeking this out from his advisors and they can't answer him, or he just doesn't, he's dissatisfied with their answers because they all have agendas, political, monetary, whatever. And so he seeks out a hermit in the woods to ask these questions to. And the hermit actually says, I'm not gonna give you the answer to those questions. Well, I will tell you the answer, but first you have to X, Y, and Z and what the wise man in the woods is doing is giving the king a chance to live them, to embody them, to learn them by embodying them. So he says, I need you to help me in my garden, and then I'll tell you the answer. And he looks and his garden is just acres, I mean months of work. And the king decides, Well, I've come all the way out here, so I guess I will. So he's working in the garden. And as he's working in the garden, a wounded man, I guess, comes out of the mountains and he's almost dead. And so the king tends to him, brings him back to life, does whatever. And when he's healthy, the guy says, Actually, I was sent to kill you. And on the way here, your guards caught me and almost killed me. But you've shown me such kindness that I pledge my allegiance and loyalty to you now. And he was coming to kill him because the king had some story about killed his brother, took his lands. So the king gives him his lands back. And then when he goes home, um, he's part of that country that they were going to go to war with. And so then that resolves that as well. So he basically lives this story where the answer is what's the most important timing now?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:18

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:18

Now, wherever you are now, you should be fully present, right? That's the most important place to be. Who's the most important person to deal with? The one in front of you. The one who shown up in front of you, and what's the most important thing to do? And it's the right thing, the good deed, the right thing by the situation that's in front of you, the person that's in front of you. Um, and it reminded me of that because I feel like what you're always alluding and circling back to, and all the things I've read that you've published and all the things you're talking about is that mindfulness component presence. Like you said at the beginning of this podcast, the biggest gift that you are saying we have to offer is increasing our capacity to be with it, the right person, the now and the right thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:10

Absolutely. It's a it's it's such a difficult tour. And what I love about that story, I had not heard that story before is I love that the questions people come to me with questions, and often I just say, that's the right question. You've got to figure that out. And so from that story, what I love is the king was able to figure it out by asking the questions and by living his life in a lot of ways. And you know, the the thing that the thing that gets in the way, I think, of is we think that there are, I talk about it in this way. In codependence anonymous or Al-Anon, the biggest difference between people who aren't in Al-Anon and treating their codependency and people that are active is the the people that are in active codependency are always wondering how to decide things based on how it controls the world around them. What can I do to help my son? What can I do to help my wife, my friend? The people in recovery are saying, what can I do to find peace? What do I need first? Then what do I have left over to give, right? So this idea that there's one right way for one person and that it applies to everybody, that becomes very, very dangerous. But the questions are the right questions for people. I think the questions are when somebody says to me, Should I quit my job or should I leave? I'm like, that's the right, you know, great question. Let's explore that. But you have the answer, I don't. You have the answer, I don't. So I love uh any lesson that starts off with those questions. Like Socrates once explained, he said, I can't teach you anything except for how to think. And so those guidelines are wonderful ways to begin to think about our relationship to ourselves and to the world in a in a much more grounded way than just kind of yeah, just kind of struggling along without any framework whatsoever.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:59

Yeah. And it reminds me of the thing it seems like you do really well, or at least you talk about, which is letting that person have the experience and embodying it because you're also willing to sit with your discomfort. And so I I worked in recovery for 20 years. And so uh even back at the beginning, I was given that purple book, the letting it go book, which is all about codependency. And that's probably the only thing on my paper, Leaf Left Unturned, that I had written down that I was like, I want to know his experience in this because it comes up so much in recovery, is the codependent component of if you're trying to help, you need help. Right. If you are trying to control, you are the one that needs the self-work. And those all-in-on meetings, I think have always been far more difficult, far more uncomfortable than any process group with the people who are in addiction. Their problems, you know, whilst they continue to ail them, I think our percentage rate in the United States is still super awful, like 25% success rate that people are still absent or in a recovery like, you know, state after three years, it's so small. But I would argue that just from my 20 years of experience in the all and on groups, it's like very little. I was gonna say zero, but that's not fair.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:20

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:20

Because I hope to be bringing myself out of my codependent tendencies as well. But it just seems far less because it's a far more difficult thing to do. And my question I'd written on the paper was what exactly is codependency from a therapy standpoint? And then what's the opposite of that?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

Okay. My favorite subject.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:43

I'm gonna really pan out with this one. So we know two things about child development really, really confidently. We know that the number one thing that a parent can do to contribute to a child's well-being is to develop a secure attachment, which is to be Attuned to the child, to be compassionate and sensitive to the child's needs, to meet the needs whenever the parent can, and to just resonate with the child and be there for the child consistently. To be able to take in the child's distress, to metabolize it due to the greater resources that we have, and then to feed back a sense of okayness. If that happens for a child, they develop what we call a secure attachment. So they can weather life storms. If they don't develop that, if I'm unavailable for the child in the ways that I've just described, the child doesn't develop a secure attachment, it develops an insecure attachment. Either ambivalent, which means they're very clingy, very kind of overtly needy, or avoidant, which means that they push people away and run away before any rejection. So they develop an insecure attachment. So if a person comes out of childhood with an inability to weather life storms because they have an insecure attachment instead of a secure attachment, what they conclude is that the way to manage my peace and serenity is to control things outside of me. So codependency, in my definition, is looking for solutions to an inside problem on the outside. My wife says it like sniffing. She says, I don't do drugs, I sniff people. I drink people. Right? So the codependent person thinks that their serenity or the key to it is found by controlling people, places, and things. If I take somebody with a primary addiction like alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, what have you, those just become another version of the codependence tools. If I drink, I feel safe, right? We call alcohol liquid courage. So people that are doing drugs recreationally and and and self-medicating with behaviors, self-medicating behaviors, they're simply trying to create a sense of safety that is absent because they don't have a secure attachment. So codependency and an insecure attachment are the same thing. And it was argued when the diagnostic manual, this most recent one, was being published, there was an argument that was made by the psychologist that codependency should be in the diagnostic manual. But as our system is based on money, the insurance companies successfully lobbied to keep it out because they argued if codependency were in the manual, everybody would qualify. So I think I define it as looking for a problem that's on the inside, looking for it outside of you, looking for the solution outside of you. Um my daughter has two, my daughter Emma Reedy June has two great definitions that I like to use. She said one of them is the illusion that you're taking care of other people when you're really taking care of yourself. Right?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:39

So and then Oh, I love that one. Because I was gonna say, and and could you name us, by what means are some of these codependency things enacted that are kind of unconscious to us? And that would be that's a big one.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:52

It's a huge one. And that's why people that are around codependent really actively codependent feel this kind of ickiness, like it's on them. You know, the the the person can come and say, I love you, I care about you, I just want to help you. But the person on the receiving end just feels the anxiety and the fear. And so the words don't match up and it just feels even worse. And the interactions break down because this person is not conscious of what they're really feeling, what they're really experiencing. So I said Emma had two definitions. I suppose the other one was was very similar to the first one, so I'll just stick with that. If we in in recovery of codependency, we realize I'm responsible for my serenity, you're not. That's the fundamental idea. And if it doesn't mean that I don't have people to support me, it just means that I'm the one primarily responsible. My wife and I, we were separated for a couple of years, and when we got back together, the idea that we both came back into the marriage with was I'm not responsible for making you happy, that's your job, and you're not responsible for making me happy, that's my job. And I think we have this romantic idea in romantic relationships and other relationships that we're responsible for other people feel, and they're responsible for us. And that really destroys all the relationship dynamics that we want for ourselves. So codependency is a wounded attachment experience. Codependency is an inadequate nervous system to weather the storms of life. Codependency is a search for uh solutions on the outside that are a solution for a problem on the inside. So, and the opposite of codependency is connection, intimacy. The opposite is two individual selves who have a sense of self, right? The first ingredient in a healthy relationship and a healthy connection is a sense of self. So I first have to love myself and know who I am to some degree. Then I'm available to intimacy to that extent. So if I have two people that are individual selves, like my like somebody said at a wedding that I attended 25 years ago to the young couple, if you're not fighting with each other, one of you is an idiot. So you have to go through conflict. You have to figure out how to figure out how to compromise because that's what a relationship is. But you also have to figure out there are some things that I'm not willing to compromise, and there's some things that you're not willing to compromise. And that's why having a long, successful, meaningful marriage is a miracle because you take these two people, these two part people that are wounded and dented like people are, you bring them together, and then you see if you can work it out. And it's it's a gamble. It's a gamble.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:23

And I can't speak to gambling like C.S. Lewis.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:25

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:26

But I am on my second marriage. It sounds like you're on your second marriage to the same person.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:32

Yeah. Well, I have two Michelles.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:35

Michelle number one and Michelle number two, they are two separate people. But my wife, Michelle that I'm married to now, we were separated halfway through. So I thought I was going to get a second divorce out of the deal.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:43

So that's what Esther Perel would say. That's your third marriage. Yeah, right. So you can have multiple marriages in your life, some of them to the same people.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:51

Ideally.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:52

I think if you don't have multiple marriages to the same people, you've wasted your time because that tells me that neither of you have changed. And if you go 10, 20 years without changing, I would argue or at least make the case that you may have wasted those years.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:06

Yeah. I feel that. And now that I'm on my second marriage and we've come up against some really difficult things. Like I told you, my husband's a veteran. I'm a recovering. The list is everything. Everything that could possibly be on that list. And I've always said when we get to these big precipices, you know, these knife's edges, I will go do my work, whatever that means, therapy, EMDR, plant medicine, soul searching, whatever. And if I come up empty-handed, then that may be the end of it. But if I come back learning something about myself, if I see that there is some place where I still need improvement, honesty, unconscious to bring conscious, I will stay and use and do the work here because running somewhere else. I did that a lot as a kid. I moved a lot of places. I left to California when I was 18. Then I moved to Arizona. And I this I learned in my body the thing that they always tell you is you can't run from your problems, as simple as it sounds. It's just those same patterns and energy show up wherever you go. And so to this day, and I actually think I know enough about myself now to realize that I'll never come up empty-handed.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:22

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:23

That's that's a process that is really validating to hear you speak of that that stoic stoic idea of knowing myself. I love the Gnostic Gospels. That makes it even older than stoicism, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:35

I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:36

I'm not sure either. I'm interested. I love that stuff. Um, and I feel so like complete and full of knowledge and grateful to you for being willing to sit with me, see me, say the things that you, you know, felt to say and offer your time and service here and service to my listeners and let the universe expand on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:01

Can I say something about that?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:02

I just feel joy to be here because when you reached out to me, I wanted to do it because your reach out was so personal. You wanted to know things about your life and you're working on it. So it's an honor to be here with another person, fellow traveler on this path. That's why I'm here. So thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:19

This year has been a practice in my authenticity and my vulnerability. So that email would have made me crawl out of my skin a year ago. And I only crawled out of half my skin to get brave enough to send it to you and be like, I am in this process. I want to co-regulate in your presence, and I know it's a long shot, but I'm asking anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

Thanks for asking.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:41

So thank you for responding that way with that. My last question, though, is for you, and what is on your heart when you lean back and you're just in service, you know, to the world, which I know you're really great at. Is there something you've seen in the world, something on your heart, something left unturned or unsaid that you really just want to add to this container before we end?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:09

You know, the first thought that came to me was an intellectual one, and I'll share that, but then I'll tell you what what's the emotional kind of experience. But the first thought I had was I just want people to understand that there are no rules for this work. There's just fear and love. And and fear is not bad or wrong, but if we're moving the way through life the way that fear moves us, it's very different than if we're moving through the world the way that love moves us. So that's the intellectual idea. I I wish, like George Lucas wrote in Star Wars, I wish people could understand their relationship to fear because that's what's causing so much of the world's suffering is our unconscious relationship to fear. So that's the intellectual idea, I suppose. And I think the emotional thing that I would share is I don't know how to communicate this, but it's really, really, really hard for all of us. You know, when I talk to a parent or an individual or a spouse who's working through this stuff, I just want to say, this is impossibly painfully difficult. And you will feel shame and you will feel fear and you will feel all of the horrible feelings, and you'll struggle, and you'll limp along, and you'll make a thousand mistakes. And I just want to tell people, I'm with you. And I want them to know that the people that are out there pretending that they're not struggling through this stuff, maybe they're not, and I don't know how to relate to them, but there are plenty of us that are doing this work and teaching, and we are still struggling, and we are still in it, and we are still not arriving. And so we're really doing this together.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:43

Thank you. I can feel that. I know it will be felt through the camera, but I want to say out loud that the felt sense of you know, your embodiment of that is palpable, and it was such a gift for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:57

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:57

So thank you again. I will close the emotional container with that and kind of say, Satan, thank you for being with us and stay with us for just a second because you have so many cool things. When I was searching around on your website, and I wonder uh if you would be willing to just rattle a couple of those off, the biggest ones to you. I'm super interested in what happens on your couples' retreats.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:24

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:24

And I saw those offerings, and they all each one I was reading through and was like, oh my gosh, it's just so fun to see what you're creating.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:33

Finding you programs.com, finding you programs.com is our website, and we offer our flagship program is called Finding You Intensive. So people come for five days, and in fact, one is going on right now as we speak. One of my my son-in-law, actually, who's very gifted, is running this one. And it is a delve into your history. It's looking back to your childhood and then understanding how those dynamics, the soup that you were cooked in, is playing itself out in your marriage, in your parenting, in your your life's journey, to make the connection, to develop compassion. We do couples' work the same way. We bring couples together and do family boards and work. And so what gets accomplished by that is in my experience is that you learn to fall in love with your partner's dilemma all over again. And that changes you. Instead of being frustrated with their codependent behavior, now you see where the wound was that created it. Now you see the culture that created it. And there's still work to be done, but there's a there's a compassionate perspective that comes from it. So our finding you intensives, five days, seven people, experiential, psycho drama, attachment-based is our kind of flagship. We're also just starting ketamine retreats, multi-day ketamine retreats. And then we have customized individual and family and couples intensive that we can design for just about anybody. So all of that's available on the finding you programs. And then I'm not, I'm gonna say this. This this is self-promotion in a sense, but I'm doing it because I think it can reach people that sometimes these bigger asks, these bigger projects don't. The finding you, my podcast is called Finding You. And the reason I bring that up is because it's just listening to a certain sensibility, listening to a certain psychology, a certain consciousness, over and over again until it starts to catch hold of you. So I think the podcast, and of course, the books that I've written, but those are kind of my my main things is the intensives. Um, of course, I do private coaching and therapy and the books and the podcast. And for me, the podcast is a labor of love because all I want to do is offer people the same grace that somebody offered me. And being offered that grace by my therapist made all the difference. Saved my life. And I want to offer that same gift. I want to pass that gift on to everybody else with as many people as I can.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:50

Well, thank you. I'm receiving that gift. I will put a plug-in for that because that's been exactly my experience with your voice, your words, those ideas. Uh and yeah, it's just, I see you in that. It's fulfilling when when, especially when you get as big as you do and have marketers and business people telling you why you should, right? There's that word could, what you're supposed to do. And to feel that calling in your heart to say, no, I'm gonna plant my feet right here. And I know this is important, so I'm gonna do it. And that's what I feel embodied with you. And as I'm listening to you, and I'm I'm like, that that's a different take. He's not just here for the other stuff. There's a depth there that I think is actually healing. So once again, thank you. And all of that information I will tag and promote.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:34

So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:36

Thank you for listening. Connect with me on Instagram at Crystals in Yoga. Subscribe on my website at crystalsinyoga.com to receive tools and practices for your holistic journey and to be the first to know about offerings, workshops, trainings, and retreats. We live in powerful times that require courage, bravery, compassion, authenticity, community, and grounding. You're not alone. Check out my free content classes and meditations on YouTube under Crystal Zinn Yoga and have a beautiful day. Satnaut, you can't get away from the city.