Breaking the Inherited Pattern

Sometimes what feels personal is actually an old cultural or family pattern asking to be seen differently.

In this episode, I explore how family, culture, and inherited expectations can quietly shape the way we see ourselves and the choices we believe we are allowed to make. Through reflections on orthodoxy, fashion, anger, belonging, and ancestry, I consider how stepping back and studying our patterns more objectively can loosen their hold. When we begin to understand where the pressure came from, we can stop confusing inherited rules with truth—and become the person who interrupts the pattern rather than simply carrying it forward.

Walk with me.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, good morning. Welcome to Body Wisdom Walk and Talk with Dr. Brook. And again, live from my neighborhood.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Um so I was just doing some research and it occurred to me that walking and talking it out would be very helpful to me, and I hope that could be helpful to you. Um I mentioned this before, but if you ever want to use this as a technique, you're having trouble, you know, working something out, and you go, you don't have to walk and talk it, but you could speak it out to yourself and then even look at a transcript of it if you don't want to listen to it back. But it is a healing technique for self-expression to record what you're saying and listen to it back so you can hear yourself. And um interesting and way to approach what I'm getting at, but I didn't expect to go this direction. Um it's like exciting to see what pops up because I think so much of the time, I don't know, at least I stay in some version of a regimen. Probably just uh the nature of indoctrination and conditioning. Stay in these order, maybe also, you know, their natural, maybe part of your natural way of being. And then when you step out of that kind of routined organization, uh you get to experience things that's unexpected. So that's why if we live too rigidly or strictly, we don't get to see what unhap what happens. So it's like a great exercise to talk and see what comes up because maybe you'd be surprised. And then a lot of times people don't like to listen to themselves because of the critique piece, which is really what I um some of what I was gonna get to. Um, so they don't, you know, so but uh ironically, I will tell you, I don't think that'll happen. In fact, I think you'll be that whatever the thoughts are and whatever's going on in your mind is like a lowest common denominator space. It's not a it's not, I'm gonna say it's not what it seems. So when I say it's like a lowest common denominator space, I mean that you're gonna undermine yourself and your mind. But when you listen to yourself, I think you'd probably be more impressed than you would think. That's what I'm gonna say. So putting that out there for anyone who wants to use a technique like this. But when we think about that, the idea of the critique, you know, that I was doing all this research on ancestry uh this morning after a realization I made regarding the level of orthodoxy, um, and what in this context what I mean by orthodoxy is I mean you're given ideas about the way things are, and you know, so like um, like God's gonna punish you for this or that. Like, so an orthodox idea would be that there's a there's an underpinning to have to spirituality. Okay, there's a it's religious in its nature. So let's say spirituality is wide wide open energy field and it has endless possibility, and it's all what you do with it, and that's sort of your spiritual frame. But what orthodoxy does is it takes that wide open possibility spiritual frame and it puts it into uh you know, it's not that there's not infinite possibility. There's if you do this well, we will be safe. So in my community I grew up in, you had to do everything well to be safe. It's no joke. And it's actually it did the research, and it's really the nature of the values of my heritage that like you have to have this like very intense pressure cooking like way of being. You have to look great, you have to be super smart, you have to be high achieving, you have to um have a huge social circle. I mean, it's a lot of work to be that way. Um, and got and now it's like, and I wanted to add this in too, it's like, wow, was I angry about that? I hated it. And even if I could fit the part, depending on the circumstances, I hated it. Hated it because I couldn't be myself, whatever that was. And I don't even think I knew what that was, especially at the time. And this is where we lay the groundwork for eating disordered behaviors and things like that, because it's like a way to rebel quietly. I can get back, I can get that in the cut. That can be a big, big thing, not to untangle that type of thing. But what I what it does is it holds space for the rebellion of you not being able to be who you are when you don't know that you're not being who you are, you're just suffering. So, that what I say orthodoxy is this means that you have to be good, then God will protect you, and you will get these good outcomes, and the tribe will love you, and we will all be safe. Now, the thing is when I read about this, I it's like fluid in my mind. But when I go to talk about it, I can't I can't get the words, I can barely digest the meaning behind all that. But I could tell you easily, I hated this and I hated this and I hated this, and all those things are real. But maybe it's because when I read about it, it's so objective. So if I was to say, um, these are the values of my culture grew up in. It would be very objective, and when I'm reading about it, it's very objective and it's actually very interesting. And then I do more research and I look at the history, makes even more sense. And what it does is it objectifies the hatred, and it's kind of like wait, wait. So every person in the lineage experienced this oppression without knowing it, and I hate it, but I'm not allowed to hate it, right? Because that means I'm rejecting the heritage. But they hate it, they probably hate it, or maybe they don't know the difference, but it's a whole intergenerational oppression of who you are because you have to be this, that's the orthodoxy, to um be be that. You you you you have to be that to be a so this is what happens, you try to break out of that, and then it's I'm disloyal, you're disloyal. Meanwhile, you're like the most loyal of the whole bunch, you're trying to break the whole freaking thing for the heritage, but but you're being told you're disloyal because you're freaking people out, even the dead people, and then they get all freaked out, and then they start haunting you. And this could be your mother, your grandmother, it could be ideas that you know what they would say if. Oh, that's normal for that generation. Oh, that's normal for that heritage or that time frame. And I'm like, normal? This isn't like in the real that didn't feel normal. That felt like I wanted to kill everyone every day. That I still want to murder people in the heritage for being so oppressive. But um, wait. Now I'm realizing I didn't even know how oppressive I am. Not just to myself, but to others. This judgment I carry around. I think it's only for myself, but it's not. It's the judgment of the orthodoxy of the heritage. And so a long time ago, one of my teachers suggested that I study fashion academically. Because I didn't really understand what fashion was. I understood from my orthodoxy what having to look a certain way, which is also in it, also in the the whenever I see anyone dressed that way, my entire body gets a reaction like I should be dressing like that. Meanwhile, when I left in the morning, I loved my outfit. Like loved it. It's like the days where I love my outfit, and then that type of thing happens to me, ooh, it makes me really angry. Because this is not, this isn't fair. Not fair. Hanging out. Morning. Um I don't know. I what I f what I what I discovered was very profound and changed and literally set me free to dress how I wanted to dress. Because when I saw it as art, when I saw fashion as art, not as strengths, not as trying to fit in, not as trying to look this way with this certain neat jean, cashmere, little shoe, um way. Depends, I guess it depends on the day and the nature and the season and the nature of the culture when I say these things, but I will tell you there is definitely an outfit, even if it changes season to season or year to year, but there's like a code with the certain things in the outfit from the orthodox community. And I'm not talking here, I'm talking about normal, I am not talking about extreme communities and also gobblet, they're just more extreme versions of what I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about normal people and this expectation. So I very purposely did not live in that community, and I'm gonna tell you it was just for pure sanity. Because I didn't want to live in a community that was gonna sneer at my outfit if it didn't look like that, and there's nothing wrong with that, except sometimes we don't really know what we're doing, we don't really understand the nature of our upset, we don't understand the nature of our conflicts, not on this level, because they feel so personal. So, anyway, this dive into this idea that fashion is art, I mean, and meanwhile, like I don't want like intellectually, maybe this is the same divide I have with the studying the ancestry more objectively, is it's not like I didn't know that fashion is art, and I'm gonna say that intellectually. If you asked me, is fashion an art form? I'd be like, absolutely, but that's not what it meant to me in my experience, it meant a way you had to look, and when I discovered that that's not what it is, oh my god, I was so excited because it opened my world up and it became a space for self-expression, and although I will say there will be the naysayers, like, what is she wearing? I'm positive, I don't live in that community that does that. Occasionally I go to those communities, but I don't live there, and of course, when I go to those communities, I get the comment. But I should know that going in. But if I don't understand these things, so I'm gonna move into I don't even care if I'm wearing something super cool, trendy, whatever. It's still not the way that's not that prescription. I'll use it as a prescription, and so once I understood that, it gave me God, leverage. This is all gonna be yucky words, over my heritage's view because I believed it was a more spacious view, a more respectable view, and I still do. And when I listen to fashion designers talk and speak, oh my god, so fun. Because they're talking a language I speak, and then they'll even say, like, they didn't expect whatever to get trendy, especially before they might have had their breakthrough stuff stuff. They're just doing what they're doing, and they're talking about how it's influenced by their past. Oh my god, I thought, oh, this is a whole realm I didn't understand. So when I understood it, it opened me to change the way I dress and for me to sit and comfortably with that. Without, I'm not, it'll be like, I can't believe you can pull that off, and I wouldn't really know what they were talking about. And it was really because I had this understanding of the importance of this for myself and others, and and not everyone's gonna express it through clothes because everybody has a different way they express these things, but now I was better represented in something I have interest in in a more objective way, so I didn't see that as really a technique, but for me it is because I like to be studying something like that intellectually is it's a strength of mine, and so I used it as a strength, and I didn't know it was offered to me as an idea. I didn't know how well it will work, and even to this day, I didn't understand how well it worked because now I'm doing the same thing with my hatred. And whew that rage of being oppressed by the orthodoxy, God only like think about what it makes, I mean, please, what it makes people do. It's it's takes the air out of you. I mean, literally, like chokes you to death. So if you're dying, what are you gonna do? You're gonna fight against, like kind of like that idea of like being suffocated, and you'll fight, you'll do anything to find your way out of it, as you should. But you know, who are we hating? Now I come from a heritage. I am one 100% in my DNA. I'm 100% that heritage. That means that nobody in my human lifeline stepped out of the orthodoxy. It started somewhere, right? But not one, which creates a very tight bottleneck of intergenerational, I would say positives and strife. But what happened in my heritage is uh the the I feel like it got really tied up. So the benefits of a culture, which I which there is many of my culture. I I don't I didn't really experience them because I think the bottleneck had gotten too tight in the heritage, like that it got too knotted up with all the anger, and so nobody could even be good to each other, even in the ways that they would respect, because everyone was just so angry at this point. Um and I would watch and I would see and I talk to a lot of people, and I could see, well, oh well, they they hated this and this, and they felt oppressed, and there was orthodoxy in their life. And again, this was not how I was thinking about it at the time, but wow, they have such a sense of peace or love or connection in the ways their families connect, they cook together, they laugh together, they have fun at their family holidays together, they have real true enjoyment with one another. Not just, I can't believe you didn't get here on time. That's what almost every family event would turn into. And I mean, not just on my end, if I got if we went somewhere else. And it didn't matter the circumstances on either end. There was never ever just grace. So good to see you, so happy you traveled to see it. Nothing. Ever with anybody. And everyone claims they wanted it to be whatever they want, but they they didn't they didn't. They were angry from the get-go, they were jealous from the get-go, and I mean everyone on all sides, except for maybe the children, but no one was paying attention to them intergenerationally, so it's in all of us the anger. So everyone's pushed the figure, it's him, it's her, it's yeah. If you stop blaming and you just realize you're the hater too, it gets a lot easier because then you can look at it like I looked at fashion. What are the values that my culture? Why did it get bottlenecked? What happened? And it doesn't have to be, it could given my hair given I'm a hundred percent where I came from, I could just study what happened to the Ashkenazic Jew throughout time, and I will be able to probably track exactly on a level how this happened, maybe not individually, but definitely culturally. So if you are somebody who is able to understand these things, then you can become the circuit breaker in your heritage. And basically, a circuit breaker makes sure the house doesn't burn down. So it's a really respectable job because where certain heritages, certain family lines are headed is to endless despair and torture. And if someone doesn't break that circuit, doesn't isn't the one who can see from both sides and say, you know what? What's done is done. No one knew what the hell they were doing, so there's no one to blame for your hatred. And now you can free yourself and move on. But this isn't flowery, it doesn't look, it's not easy, it isn't designed to be easy. And I would argue whoever invented a circuit breaker and had to have an that wasn't easy either. And maybe not that we can ask a circuit breaker. I guess I could ask a human circuit breaker what it's like to be one, and every single one will say, everyone, I'm working my ass off. But they don't give themselves a proper credit. If you think you're a wire in the nature of what's unfolding in your life, but you're a circuit breaker, you understand it's a different job that requires different levels of expertise, different wiring, and not everyone's designed to do it. Some people are just designed to be wires. So if you got wires and you know, what and how I look at a wire, just whatever energy just runs through it. It's just there, and the energy just runs through it. So if you have some crazy ass wires, live wires, crazy people, you know, and you're like, this is so crazy, that's you because you could see it because you're the circuit breaker. But I I'm I'm warned like they can't see it because they're just a wire. Got some people coming up here. Okay. So if we treat ourselves as wires, but we're circuit breakers. And what we're trying to break is an endless good morning. An endless um what we're trying to break is hundreds of years of patterning. You have to be able to see the pattern. But this is the thing about the hatred. If you don't go and study what does fashion really mean, what is fashion? What is intergenerational strife? And it started because people were starving to death. I mean, you're kind of like, oh, that makes more sense than me just wanting someone's approval on my outfit. You're gonna do this so you don't starve to I mean, this is where these things started. Or if we can, we sometimes in my culture, I'll I'll be like everything so incestuous. Just like feels incestuous. No, I don't mean that like anybody's like it's emotional. It feels emotionally incestuous. And I would argue the emotional incest happens in all cultures. So I'm not saying this word in a negative way, like that this is involved any kind of sexual abuse, or I'm gonna argue, even though it could be emotional abuse, what we're gonna talk, what I might talk about here, it's not, it's not, you know, it's I would argue it's a normal normal-ish phenomenon. Now it's a normalish phenomenon in my culture, and I'm like, this is like so icky feels and why is everybody like in everybody else's mm? And like, oh, because early in the heritage, everybody bred within the heritage, which is incestuous, and I'm like, oh, it started at hello, and I'm taking this out of context, which listen, we all do this, and now I'm just annoyed and I'm angry, and I hate where I came from. Hate it. Because I'm so angry that I don't get to be myself because nobody did anything to me, but they just lived by this orthodoxy and this incestuous line that no one could do anything to change because nobody knew. Just wires with the no one knew. Or no one could see, they weren't circuit breakers. So what I'm sort of coming to offer or realize is that is that if we can study objectively where our pain is coming from. So if we look at this through a more objective lens, where it's coming from is history. So these horrible feelings you have inside of you, because you don't feel like you can do what the hell you want for whatever reason, you don't feel like you can do it, or you feel like you you can't be your true self, or you can't figure out what your true self is, because you're not allowed to be that, because the pressure of the heritage says, uh-oh, nope, you can't be that. Nope. Um, because it means something dangerous. So if you're operating at I think this is where, like, are you gonna choose fear or love might come from? Or I'm thinking about right now, and fear is stay in the orthodoxy of your thinking. Don't study fashion, don't study your heritage, don't be objective about it, just stay in there, fear, just do what they say, because it's a hell of a lot easier than not doing what they say, because they're inside of you, so you're gonna threaten yourself. Now, you could also, I mean, if you're very deeply spiritual, they're harassing you from the other side, and I don't care if you conceptualize this as inside or outside, upside down, it's happening, it's hauntings, ghosts, and you know, spiritual think ghosts are real, but let's say even the more mundane sides of religion, or my heritage, at least what I've heard rabbis say, is they're with you in your heart. And they're with you in your heart, even if they broke your heart, right? So you carry them. So this grief, because it is grief of having to maintain a certain pressure cooker lifestyle, because um that's what would get will get you love. But that's the conditional kind of love. But that's not bad. That's intergenerational existence. But if we base it on the other kind of infinite possibility, if you break free of this, but this is hard to see to break free from because you're so in it. So you end up subscribing not to the endless possibility that spirit, that understanding, the nature of the truth, the Tao, the middle way, the qi, the you know, what however the life force, the little voice within, whatever you want to call it. Find your way back to that, that purity, that consciousness, that that moment you have where you go, oh, everything's gonna be alright. And not because it's like a moment of awe, even just because you had a moment where you saw everything's really interconnected, you had one of those experiences. And if you understand that's a space you can go to, not where that you can stay as a human. The goal's not to stay there, it's hard to stay there, especially if you're not in a cave. Well, and if you're in a cave and you could get eaten by, yeah, it's hard to stay there too. But we're talking like the stimuli are very obviously coming from inside or outside, but not when you live in the complexity of human existence. Much different thing to manage. And even those people say, give me the, or I've heard some or I've read, give me 10 years in that cave over needing to come out in this one. Right? Like the urban jungle. So, but again, I think it's because it fires off all of these hauntings. At least you know they come from within if you've been in a cave for that long. But for those of us, maybe you don't even know that because once you're out here, just neurology changes. I mean, this is it's complex stuff. So, but the more you focus on the big love, which and the big love is we all come from this. We all can't see it, we all can't touch it, we may not be able to maintain it, but it exists, and what it exists there is just like a nothingness, a void. And when you think about spirituality that way, not from this more religious order, you're good if you do this, you're excuse me, worthy if you do this, not worthy if you do that, um, things open up. But every person comes from a heritage, so it's got you gotta pay the piper, and what I mean by that, you gotta deal with the crap, and if you don't, it will haunt you. So, if you have an area that you are wondering about that you would want to engage in more, do not listen to yourself about it. It's subjective and probably conditioned and probably coming from an orthodoxy. So do research yourself, objective research, and see if what you were thinking. This could be even looking, listening to your own voice, and see if what you're thinking is true, because I think a lot of times what we are upset about is that we're wrong. And we've been living in this way, wrong, wrong, wrong, because what the orthodoxy said. And the greatest example I could offer this is like thinking you're fat, but you're not overweight. It's a big one for for me, my parent. So like, you know, it's like that type of thing. You don't have to live in a lie. And I could I'll or I'll say this. Oh, you know, he's not in a relationship because he doesn't take care of his body. He's overweight. Like the lowest common, not in play, yeah, no. He might not be in a relationship because that means there's too much weight on his body because you told him that. So, anyway, uh food thought. Uh thanks as always for walking in. Opening away.