When Love Feels Conditional in a Child’s Mind | Parental Alienation

Continuing the conversation, Lawrence Joss and Stephanie Sternes, a licensed counselor and family systems expert, further explores the complex dynamics of loyalty binds, attachment, and family systems within the context of parental alienation and stepfamily relationships. Alongside Stephanie Sternes, a specialist in two-family systems, the focus deepens into how children and parents navigate competing loyalties, emotional pressure, and the challenge of maintaining connection across two-home environments.

With both professional and lived perspective, Stephanie brings clarity to how attachment patterns and loyalty conflicts shape behavior within blended families. This episode offers a grounded lens into parental alienation and stepfamily dynamics providing insight, validation, and a more compassionate understanding of the emotional complexity many families are carrying.

Key Takeaways

• Loyalty binds override natural parent-child attachment 
•  Children feel forced to choose one parent 
•  Love becomes conditional in high-conflict families 
•  Attachment trauma shapes long-term emotional patterns 
•  Chronic stress impacts memory and identity development 
•  Sibling relationships divided by loyalty-based dynamics 
•  Adult relationships reflect unresolved childhood attachment wounds 
•  Healing begins through awareness and nervous system safety 

Chapters

00:00 - Exploring Loyalty and Love in Family Dynamics
02:52 - The Impact of Loyalty Binds on Relationships
05:42 - Navigating Childhood Memories and Adult Relationships
09:01 - Understanding Attachment and Loyalty in Parenting
11:43 - Sibling Relationships in Divided Households
14:38 - The Role of Step-Parents and Outsider Dynamics
17:44 - Bad Advice and Misconceptions in Co-Parenting
21:02 - Aha Moments in Understanding Family Systems
23:52 - Finding Help and Resources for Families in Transition

If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:
 
 Email - familydisappeared@gmail.com
 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss
(All links mentioned in the podcast are available in Linktree)

To learn more or connect with Stephanie, you can visit:
https://www.stephsternes.com
https://www.healingstoryranch.com

Resources Mentioned:
Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships by Patricia Papernow
https://stepfamilyrelationships.com/

The Smart Stepfamily by Ron L. Deal
https://smartstepfamilies.com/

Please donate to support PAA programs:
https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=SDLTX8TBSZNXS

Support & Community:
Parental Alienation Anonymous (PAA): Join our free 12-step support group with 16 online meetings weekly for parents, grandparents, family members, and previously alienated individuals seeking healing and recovery.

PA-A.org: Parental Alienation Advocates is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to fostering education, advocacy, and support for individuals grappling with the distressing impact of parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, and fa

This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager

Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email-         familydisappeared@gmail.com

Transcript

The Look Back And Attachment Roots

SPEAKER_01 0:00

There's something called the look back that you look back over your childhood life and you go, wait a minute, there is this side and there is this side. If they're opposites, they have at least hope to go, wait a minute, this one felt better, then I can still choose that. But if they're coming from a place of abandonment, they end up with an anxious attachment. And if you've got a home where loyalty is the currency for love, they may chase that relationship the rest of their life.

Loyalty As Currency In Two Homes

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Do you know what a loyalty bind is? Can you track your relationship with your kids, with your ex, with the other family, and see like the idea of a loyalty bind? And Stephanie talks about a loyalty bind as a form of currency instead of love. And I I love that. Like I loved my kids so much. I really think I created an open, loving environment, and I was imperfect and I made mistakes, and the other parent isn't like all bad and I'm all good. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that there was a lot of love and I was fighting against this thing. I tried to get gooder and better. And the more I tried to get good and better, the deeper work that I did and the better understanding that I had. But I was trying to create some kind of infrastructure or continuity of love or inertured to my love that would just be able to balance the scale. And I was always felt like I was in a competitive arena. And then it changed. But it was yours. It was yours of just abuse on my body emotionally, spiritually, just taking in so much and trying to figure out. And I was so lonely and so hard. And Stephanie is phenomenal today, really opens up a lot of different thoughts and ideas and introduces some wonderful new terminology. And again, if you're new to the community, my name is Lawrence Juss. Welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. We have some great resources in the show notes. There's a free 12-step program, Parental Alienation Anonymous. We're a 501c3 nonprofit. Please donate. We'd love to help some help with resources and bring you more stuff. And reach out to me at family disappeared at gmail.com. Love to hear ideas for shows. This show came out of Stephanie directly reaching out and saying, Hey, what about this? I forget to ask her how she came to that, but wow, thank you for doing that, Stephanie. And whoever said that or if she listened to a show, really appreciate that because we're not touching on all the nuances. We're not covering all the subjects. We need your help in order to do that. So like, share, tell people about us, let people know these resources are out there. People need to hear this stuff. And that's enough out of me. We're gonna jump into the second part of the show. You were talking about loyalty as currency, which again, love the terminology, love linking those two words together. And like in my family system, like my kids were very loyal to their mother, and like the step parental other male that was predominant in their life connected to their mother, they would spend Father's Day, they would do everything like that. And like I'm qualifying that as you know, for me, it's always like withdrawing of love brings a kid closer because his nervous system goes into collapse. But it sounds very similar to the loyalty as currency, like you're not loyal, then I'm taking away my love. And if you want my currency back on my love, then you come closer to me, otherwise you're gonna die, basically, is what the kids are feeling. Um, I think that's the same thing that you're saying and introducing some more depth to it and different languaging. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to point out that to the adult that is being left out, it does feel like you're dying and you don't know what to do because the kids are in part choosing that as well. Because kids aren't able to navigate that. They don't have the ability to create boundaries to say, hey mom, I love dad too, and it's Father's Day, I should be at dad's. And we can do a Father's Day with stepdad too. We can have more love in our life. They're not capable of doing that. And so that parent that's on the outside, one of the mistakes that we make, which is natural, is to let it go. Because what else are you going to do? And the reality of it is, especially when they're little and we can keep engaged, it doesn't feel right. It feels wrong and we get wounded every time as an adult. And so it's hard for us to stay in it. It's hard for us to send a note once in a while or to ask for a dinner once in a while. It's hard for us to do that. It's just so painful. And especially if you don't have a court order that holds that to it. And if you don't have money to go to court to fight, there can be a turning there. And it can happen naturally because we're all reacting to the loss of our attachments to our biological families.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

And like, how would you track that? Like, we're talking up to 18 years old in the court system, but these kids, as you said, in adulthood is when they can start to process and maybe heal some wounds. Like, how do you track that arc 25, 30, 35? When do you developmentally do you see folks coming in to want to work through that? You know, from my understanding, critical thinking comes on board in the early 30s. So is that really the next big window if there's not an intervention soon, or is there other stuff in between?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

I don't know. You know, it's a both and it's complex because through developmental, if you're growing up and your survival system is a freeze or a flight, the brain actually freezes under high pressure or moderate tension. And so when the brain freezes like that as a protection, we lose our ability to move things that are in our short term to long term because they never make it. And so we actually do, I do see 30-year-olds that have no memory of good connection to their other parent, and their memories are actually erased for lots of reasons. But again, it could be because of their type of fight, flight, or freeze. It could be because of the loyalty bind that they were tied to and less of a natural loyalty bind and one that has been proven as currency through growing up in the other home. There is something that happens developmentally that we can lose all of those connections. That's why I say it's so important if you can at all stay in as much as you can. But if it's causing conflict, it's a place where you feel like your hands are tied because the conflict is terrible for the kids. So dropping out is a natural thing to do. So I think 30, those are probably my hardest cases. They're heartbreaking to me because you've got a 30-year-old that has been told most of her memoried life. I've got one that was at eight years old, her father, she had to face him in the stands and tell him that she didn't want to go with him ever again. And he was in court trying, and she remembers that, and she remembers that her memory of why that happened had a lot to do with her mother's memory of what that was. And we're not here, I'm not here to ever judge or blame because I didn't walk in their shoes, right? I can tell you that mom was super scared of dad, or that probably wouldn't have happened in the first place. Whether it was evidence legit, uh that's not for me to understand. What I understand is that there was a mom really scared about a dad that came over to the eight-year-old. The eight-year-old made a decision to not see her father anymore. And as we started breaking down, she didn't come in for that. So the answer to your question is a lot of times they don't come in for that. But what they come in for is that they're not doing well in their relationship, they can't commit trust to the opposite sex, whatever home. A woman at 30 doesn't know how to trust a man. She's got a background of that. And so we end up going there to find out that wow, the evidence is, you know, he was fighting for you. He brought family around, he created, you know, a bedroom for you. He was trying, but she couldn't see that at eight. She's looking back with these spotty memories. She has the memories that she was told, and then some of these spotty evidence memories that are her own. And she's in a really hard place. She's lost that relationship, and now as an adult, she's starting to see these pieces and she dysregulates and can't handle it. It's just a sad story.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Yeah, no, it sounds really challenging. You hear that all the time, and you know, it's a hard place to come back from, and I'm experiencing that in my life too. So, yeah, it's curious and need more time to see how that turns out. But we're talking about loyalty binds. At some point, does the loyalty bind it replaces the attachment connection? Does it wipe out the attachment connection? Does it confuse or like dismember the attachment connection? How do those two pieces relate?

Why Memories Freeze And Vanish

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Well, I think it goes back to what we were talking about when you use loyalty as currency, the glue that holds a family together, that becomes love. So you're super confused. If you think about how that developmentally changes you, I have couples come in all the time, and a complaint will be, you know, she doesn't have my back, she never has my back. Every time I come up, she picks somebody else. She picks sides with this, she's picked sides with that, she picks her parents, she picks friends, she doesn't back me up. And when I hear all of that, it's a systemic pattern that tells me that he comes from a family where loyalty was number one. He comes from a family where they use loyalty as the glue for their house, not love. Did they love each other? Sure. But the glue was you had to have other people's back. It doesn't matter if they were right or wrong, you have to take their side. It's these families that say, I'm not treated fairly, or there's favorites. Those are all language that tells you that there's people coming from homes that really truly don't understand what unconditional love is. We cannot attain that because we're humans. It's very hard to have unconditional love. But when our house runs on, hey, I'm more concerned about what's going on with you and what you think and what you feel, that's love. Where a loyalty home says it doesn't matter what you think or what you feel, we all have to do this this way, we have to think this way, we have to act this way. If your brother's in trouble, we all cut, and it doesn't matter whether he was wrong or right, we take his side. Those are the subtle languages of whether you've got a house that's running on love or a house that's running on loyalty. And it's very confusing because these people truly don't understand that they are not to them that is love. And so they're just as likely to cut off an adult child that comes back and makes a relationship with the other one, with the other parent, because now they're not loving them anymore and they just can't tolerate it. That's very common and it's very subtle, and we don't talk about it and we don't have language for it.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Oh, that's super powerful and incredible information. There's one piece here that we haven't really discussed in this two-house system. What happens with the relationships with the kids when there's multiple kids in the household? Do they their relationship break apart? Do they strengthen because they're tied into a loyalty bind? Like what happens within that dynamic?

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Such an interesting question. Again, all of this is so complex, right? Because it depends on the kiddos. I always look at their survival system. So if they are fighters in their survival system, they're more likely to be able to withstand that tension, that pressure, depending on their developmental stage. So as a teenager, they might have decided, hey, I'm gonna go this way. But as an adult, they might come back because now they can moderate boundaries. I can love two people. That's the cool thing about having a love loyalty paradox in two homes. They were still shown love. So the hope is as they become adults, there's something called the look back that you look back over your childhood life and you go, wait a minute, there is this side and there is this side. If they're opposites, they have at least hope to go, wait a minute, this one felt better, then I can still choose that. But if they're coming from a place of abandonment, especially young kids that get divorced when they're super young and that attachment wasn't built and it was built on moderate or high conflict tension, they end up with an anxious attachment. And if you've got a home where loyalty is the currency for love, they may chase that relationship the rest of their life because they didn't have it. So the answer is it depends.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

So there's this dynamic that I see quite often. And I don't know if this is related to the two-house system and and the loyalty bond, but there's mom, she's really tied in, or dad or other parent, really tied into the kids, but the kids don't necessarily have a relationship with each other. Everything's triangulated through the mother and the information, or the father or the other parent, and and then the information is disseminated out. How does that play in with two family houses? And does it have a large impact?

SPEAKER_01 13:17

My sense of that is that if you're running a home on love, first of all, you would be working, and personalities matter, right? And we have true diagnoses that are hard, conflictual kiddos. We have all kinds of things. We have autism, we have all different kinds of things that happen in children that make them difficult to attach to their siblings. So this isn't a one-shot answer, right? There's valid things that in a home, even if it the currency was love, that you could still have siblings that don't get along, right? Personalities matter, their sense of fight, fire freeze matters, the attachment that they have may be opposite, they don't like the same things. There's lots of reasons why siblings don't get along. But when you have a house full of love without higher level diagnosis, the parents, the kids, we're working on, that is what we're working on is loving each other, respecting each other, holding space for his opinion and her opinion. And we don't have to like things the same, but we do have to negotiate. A house that's running on unconditional love as best they can is holding space for each individual and we're blending and we're merging for the betterness of the whole, right? And so those things can happen, but they're less likely to be a cutoff or a split in siblings. Now, people get kids get into drugs, kids get you know these higher levels of diagnosis, those are reasons that people split too. But when you come over here to these binds that are based in the glue, is this loyalty? The loyalty language always has this sense of you like this one better, you like that one better, you take sides, and it's a way to manipulate the other one. So if I make this child my favorite, this one is going to be put under pressure to do what I want them to do, so they'll be a favorite too. And then that splits the siblings. I've seen cases where at one home the kiddos will not be around each other. They choose different corners, they don't like each other, but when they're in the other home, they actually play and get along. It's really a phenomenon that's really interesting. That's a an experience that I've seen in my own clinic working with kiddos, that they get along great in this home, but in this home they don't because it's built on loyalty and there's pressure to pick sides here.

How Loyalty Replaces Love In Adults

SPEAKER_00 15:41

Yeah, and you know, I used to take my kids on family trips when I was separated and the kids would get along great as teenagers, and they would have a great time and they get back in the environment of where we live locally, and they they would not like each other. And it's sad. I don't even know if they even know each other at this particular age because they're so stuck in the dynamic and the loyalty bond. And I think that might be one of the most heartbreaking things. And I'm just gonna go a little bit sideways now. Like traditionally, when you walk into a therapist, it's this idea that if you just do the next right thing, you act as a good person, that everything's gonna be all right. Like that's something that I heard over and over again, and it seems to be one of the most harmful mantras, keep your side of the street clean and everything's gonna be okay. I think that was probably the most devastating thing in my relationships with my children because I believed that and and thought that's how the world functioned. Can you talk about from a therapeutic lens, I don't know, some kind of something on that?

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Yeah, there's a a real crossover there for me, both personally and professionally. And that is probably the line where I ended up deciding that that I must move towards this. There's just not enough help out there. I myself, early on, had a 23-year marriage and then married a man that had young kids. And it was difficult. I came in very naive, thinking everybody's just gonna love everybody. I I used to have dreams we'd be best friends and thought that all of that would just magically somehow work out because we love kids, right? And it got sideways pretty quick. And going to professors at the time, I was a student at the time, and asking them, like, what is this dynamic about step families and like how do you navigate that? And we as a couple would see counselor. We saw three counselors early on, and the worst advice ever, not because they weren't trying to help, but they were doing like counselors do with kiddos. There's what you can control, and here's your coping skills. Now go along and practice them. We do that with kids all day long when we don't think about them from two systems. That's what they do to us as adults. Okay, you guys have two different, you know, ideas about what child you know rearing looks like, and this isn't going to be a best friend situation, so accept that and just keep your side of the street clean. After years and years and years now, I fortunately came across Dr. Prapper now because I couldn't find anybody that I could get help from, and she's the expert and such a kind human, a Harvard graduate. She's the world's expert on step families, and she took a phone call from me as a client when she wasn't doing client work. And I said, Look, I'm in a program and we need help. Like, professors can't help me. I can't help myself. Like, what is going on? And so she became a mentor to me and pulled me up for the last 12 years and taught me these systems and how hard it is and how unknowing counselors are when they give us the information that you got and that I got. It was the worst information because it kept me from seeking help on the co-parent relationship. The co-parent relationship is what I'm looking for. It's the first thing I assess is what does that look like? And is there a chance that I can help that? Is there a chance that they're willing to find a bridge to show that these kids need love? We have more research now than when you went through it, probably, than when I went through it. 2024 and 2025 is gangbusters coming forward. And so we have a lot more information that's telling us if we get help in that co-parenting relationship, if we get help to reduce the tension even from moderate, that we can create these childhoods where we don't have that happening. It is bad advice for us as well. What else? What other bad advice did I get? Just do what you do in your house and don't worry about what they do in their house. Horrible advice because every time my husband would say, Look, this is how I want to do it, okay, I'll back that up. This is what we're doing when it goes over. That didn't work out so well because that family had a whole different idea about how they did it. And we're not talking about blame, we're not talking about right or wrong, we're just talking about completely separate and different. And then the kids having to navigate that because the co-parents in that story didn't have a working relationship, and so it's just sad all the way around. And we do get bad advice just because we didn't understand. We understand a lot more, but it's still not getting out there.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

And when you're training and the teaching and stuff like that, what's like one of the biggest aha moments you get when you're talking about two house systems with the clinicians or the students or whoever's going through? Like, what's like a light that goes and they go, oh, wow.

Siblings Split Under Loyalty Pressure

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Well, I think, gosh, it's been going on for 15 years, right? These aha moments are still coming. I'm still getting them. This oppositional parenting, that there hasn't been a lot of research about putting language to that so that people can see it, that we can assess that as visuals to that. That was an aha moment for me just a couple of years ago. And so it comes all the time. But the big ones, if I go back to the truth about how these two systems work, I have to go back to Dr. Papernow. She has five things that now I look at those five things, and those are aha. A Christian perspective that was really helpful if you've got Christian clients, is Ron Deal. He's got seven steps. And between those two, the aha moments are very systemic. You can see them, you can count on them, they're predictable. And so the insider outsider, I think personally for me was one of the huge aha moments in my own experience that through the lens and the work has become a professional understanding. But man, you know, when you're in a home, I had four kids that were pretty much adults. My youngest was a senior when we married, but I married an older guy that had kids when he was a lot older. So he had a two-year-old and a six-year-old. And so our household became a household where uh it was me and him and every other weekend, his two kiddos, right? So we call those insiders. They have an insider biological attachment. We call those insiders and I was an outsider. Biologically, I'm an outsider, and with that comes a lot of things, right? But not having language for that, I didn't understand that when we would sit down and play, when they got a little older, we'd sit down and play Monopoly or a game. And if dad got into trouble, they would bail him out. Like, here, Dad, you can borrow my money, or I won't land on that, I won't charge you for that. I'll just when you go by, I just won't charge you. You know, they're both doing that, right? And he's doing it for them. And then when I get in trouble, they're like nail me to a cough and take me out and give me no mercy, right? And that feels like rejection. You feel like an outsider, you feel like you don't belong. And so for me, when I could put theory around that and understand that that's normal, I still would take the hit, knowing that I have something from my own childhood, some kind of rejection or abandonment wound that that's hitting, that makes it harder for me. Those were aha moments that I had some work to do from my own childhood so that those didn't hurt so bad because I had been taught now that that's part of this and it's gonna stay. There's insiders, outsiders, and depending on the you know, 67 different ways a family comes together, we could have ours children. That kiddo is an insider on both sides and puts him in a really different situation. So how these all come together, there's these five different things that tell us normalizing. So long answer, but normalizing that these systems are different, they don't look like a first family, they don't look like a nuclear family, they don't run the same, and we get super edgy against it. So if I keep freaking out and never playing with them, then the kids are gonna think, wow, she doesn't like us. And then they're gonna go home to the other system and say, yeah, she doesn't really like us, whatever that is. That didn't happen. But that's just kind of how that can go, is we're all reactive instead of actually attaching because we don't understand what's normal. It's normal for me to feel like an outsider. They had a story before I got there, that's going to take years. I still feel it. I still can feel it. I feel it, but I have no reaction to it because I understand it's par for this course. It's normal. And when I'm under stress or they're under stress, we feel it more. It's just part of it. And there's four other things that really start to sink in as all home moments. Oh, we really can do this step family thing. We really can have more love. We really can understand it and stop fighting with each other. It's getting normal.

Bad Therapy Advice And What Helps

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Totally, and the insider and the outsider, and some of the dynamics with the step parent. I we missed not that we missed an opportunity. The conversation was so phenomenal. I don't think we spent enough time and attention talking about that dynamic. So at a later date, we're going to invite you back. And if you have time, really just concentrate on that because there's a huge part of the population that we're or our community that's not really getting that need, Matt, to talk about that on a deeper level. And we are getting close to wrapping up here. So I just have one last question for you. Do you have parents, step parents, people listening out there that are struggling to find therapists and clinicians and stuff like that? Like, what would be the one or two top things you'd say someone that they could actually do today to advocate for themselves, to find some information, anything like that? And I'm gonna get those five steps and seven steps from you, and we'll throw them in the show notes because I think those will be greatly useful. But besides that, what are one or two other things you think try this out today? Maybe it'll shift something.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah, I think with the world that we live in today, if you know where to go, I'm always gonna put first Dr. Patricia Pappernell on Amazon. She's got a book that we use for therapy, but she also has a handbook for us to share with clients that are going through these processes. It normalizes those five different things. So if you're a self-help kind of guy, I would send you that way. If this is above moderate conflict in the co-parent team relationship, I absolutely would tell you that without intervening, especially if that conflict has been more than a year and a half, there will be long-term outcomes for your kiddos that you don't want. So I would tell you to absolutely get on the internet and seek a step family specialist. I would even go as far, because of the way of our world, that if you can't find a counselor, that you would find a coach that has credentials for that, because there's lots of coaches out there that are step-family specialists. And then I would also add to it, kind of at the end of it, there's something called ACES. It's a test that we take in in mental health that says these 10 top childhood issues, we use them in both medicine and mental health. Just know that of these 10 things that wreck us as far as relationships and the anxieties and the things that we end up having, even heart attacks are linked to these top 10. The number one issue in all of that, you would think it's abuse. The number one thing that's claimed the most in that ACES assessment is divorce. And so when we think about that, it's not the divorce that hurts them, it's how we divorce. Conflict is in there too. Those are two things that pop up. And so, as parents, as step parents, the conflict and the divorce are everlasting. We need to take a different look at that and get help.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Well, what an incredible interview and conversation and loved all the different terminology you have up there. We'd love to get those couple links to Dr. Papanel's book that you just suggested, so we can actually put them in the show notes too. And you know, any other information you'd like to share, we'll throw down there as well. And thank you so much for taking the time. We're gonna bug you to come back and talk about specifically the step parent dynamics, the inside or outside. I'm like, oh my God, like let's do it now, but I can't.

Practical Resources ACES And Closing

SPEAKER_01 27:48

I appreciate that. And you've been awesome. Thank you so much for letting me share my passion and try to get it out there that that there's hope and hope. We just didn't know where to find it.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Wow, wow, wow, wow. What a great show. And we're ending the show, and I'm realizing how much I didn't get to ask or cover. It kind of got in the dynamics and the conversation, which was fantastic, but really talking about a stepparent's role, their feelings, what's coming up for them, how that affects the dynamics, how incorporating these different stakeholders that aren't the insider, like she was saying at the end, you know, we're definitely gonna tap back to that. And thanks for coming out to play in the sandbox today. Show notes, resources, 501c3 nonprofit, donate, like, share, parental alienation anonymous. Great 12-step program that's about growing personally, spiritually, emotionally, and need community. I would not be here without community. We would not be building community if I hadn't found community. And this community or the 12-step community mean might not fit you, but find community, find folks that are doing interpersonal work, that are available for conversation, that want to learn, that want to be wrong, that want to be right. The more people we get involved, the better opportunity we have to shift the system. So, with that being said, if no one's told you yet today, I love you. Wow, wow, wow, love the show. I'm moving, my brain's moving fast. I'm feeling emotional. I'm feeling like uh, I know some of you share sometimes there's a little bit of emotional hangover after the show. I experience that myself too, especially on a show like this. So thank you again. Love you, have a good day.