The Roles We Inherit

The masks we wear. The roles we inherit. The self we forget.

From the achiever to the helper, the scapegoat to the lost child, this episode explores the roles that shaped us, why we cling to them, and how we begin the journey back to our authentic selves.

Unmask. Awaken. Live.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I'm Madley, and welcome to Cake for Breakfast, a podcast about the joy of remembering who you are, discovering what you truly want, and giving yourself permission to live it. Even if that, and hopefully it does, means eating cake for breakfast. Thank you for joining me. The last time I was joined in studio by my good friend Gillian, and there was a lot of debating and fun to be had. Firstly, I need to say that Gillian mentioned a website, um, cakeforbreakfast.co.za. That isn't up and running, and we don't know when it will be. So for now, you can download this podcast on Apple or Spotify or go to Brass Sprout. You can leave us questions there and we will gladly answer. Um, also tell us about different subjects that you want to be discussed. I will address them as soon as possible on my side. Okay. So let's look at what we spoke about last time. Jillian gave me a lot of hell about allowing yourself to be. And I understand where she was coming from from. The fear there was that what happens if we allow ourselves to be and we lose motivation? So the emphasis there is on the questions you have to ask yourself. Determining whether this is intrinsic motivation for yourself. You have to ask yourself, is whatever I am striving for something that I truly want? Is it my motivation? Am I trying to prove something to somebody else? And even if I do get it, will I still consider myself being good enough? And these aren't easy answers to get to. You have to distinguish who you are, what you want, and then distinguish that from what society wants you to have at a certain age in a certain country, what is expected of us in a relationship. Um, so many expectations in social media is adding on to that. So to really make sure that what we are striving towards is something that the heart wants, that the true self wants, that's a lot of work. And like Jung said, it's the journey of a lifetime to figure out who we truly are. So to get back to the arena model, um, the first step in getting out of the ring is understanding that there's a ring in the first place. We spoke about that. We spoke about you in your role as the gladiator, and you are busy surviving for the audience. I like to be dramatic sometimes. But we also have to look at where it started and who this audience is, who they were, and if they are real or imagined. I honestly believe it starts at birth. I believe we are born whole. I also believe we are born with a purpose. But this can be problematic if we spend a whole life with that sword hanging over our heads to figure out the one true purpose. But for now, let's just talk about your essence, being whole and being perfect when you are born. Maybe perfect is also a difficult word. Let's use whole and pure, okay? And then all the qualities are still intact. As a baby, all the qualities, even the ones that you now deem undesirable, are intact. You are unique. You are truly yourself. And if you kept that and weren't socialized at all, you would be eccentric as hell, as we said. Um, and very few people are actually naturally what society wants them to be later on in life. Very few people want what society wants them to want. There are so many beautiful variations of wants and personalities, but we suppress so much of it to conform, we suppress so much of it to be accepted and to be loved and to be seen. To be seen and to be part of a community is such intrinsic, beautiful human needs, but we oftentimes offer ourselves up for it, and we are not even aware of the parts that we cast aside. So, how does this happen? You have this beautiful baby with all of these wondrous qualities, and then some of the suppression starts. Like I said, I understand that some socialization is needed to avoid chaos, but there's a lot of it that is done. Firstly, you get the parents, and this is often unintentional, and not always, it's sometimes intentional, and oftentimes it is subtle. There are also times when it's done openly. So let's start about looking at that. Let's start at looking at the role the parents play in the suppression. Sometimes, if we grow up in traumatic households, and I will have a whole podcast just dedicated to complex PTSD, which is a wonderful buzzword. We're having, and we're understanding the role of neglect and what that is playing, how how that is playing out. Some even say that there are positive aspects of neglect. So we'll talk about that, the eras, the trauma. But for now, let's assume it is a pretty, oh goodness, I don't want to use the word normal. Say run of the mill, child. There's not excessive trauma. I can't believe I'm using that sentence. And there's not excessive neglect. You're being taken care of emotionally, physically, um, you're being kept safe. Yet still, there are roles cast upon you. What are these roles and who are they cast upon? Who casts them? Firstly, the parents, then your siblings. Oh my goodness, they play a really important role in casting this. Then the teachers do, your peers do. Um so let's take a little look at what these roles are that we are often cast into. These roles are also often described as archetypes if you are into union psychology. Um, you get personality types measured by very popular and wonderful measurement tools like the Enneagram. Um but mostly if you're not measuring them, they're just cast into your normal everyday roles. Let's look at them. So the five most common childhood roles are the euro. The euro is your, the credits are your high achieving, you're responsible, you're organized, you're perfectionist. These are the kids that sit and they study and they achieve and they push themselves. But the theory behind this here is that they don't start pushing themselves all by themselves. Okay, something casts them into this role. And we can also have a hefty debate about whether they have a tendency to go into certain of these roles before they are cast into it. I think so. And then the order of birth also plays a part. What they see, mirroring of the parents and which parent they associate with most also plays a part. So it's complex. But for now, let's just look at the rules. So we've got this euro, and this euro's unspoken purpose is bringing pride to the family. The mask, underlying shame, and often underlying chaos. So the adult risks of these are intense fears of failure. You connect yourself worth to achieving. So oftentimes when you don't achieve, you feel that you are a failure as a human being and you didn't just fail in doing something. We often get your workaholics here. Burnout is rampant under this role. Then you get the scapegoat. The scapegoat is the role that I very often see in therapy. The scapegoat comes and sits on my couch because they were oftentimes flung out of the family. So what we need to understand here is these roles, imagine labels with Velcro on them tossed to you as you are a child, right? These roles of you, oh, you are the difficult one, you are the stubborn one, you are the positive one. Even if these are positive roles, we they stick to our skins, to our jerseys like Velcro, and we carry them through our lives. We start believing that these roles are us, that this is how who we chose to be, that this is how we were born. And we have to get some distance. Well, well, it helps. Let's not say have to, helps to get some distance for these roles, to start to figure out who we truly are and what we buried in childhood. But how to let's get back to the scapegoat. The scapegoat is the one I often see on my couch. This is the one that all the faults are inherently given to. They're difficult one, the rebellious one, the one that was constantly in trouble, that was defiant and that was hostile and didn't conform to the rules. That's your scapegoat. Okay, the purpose of this in the family, remember, these roles always have a purpose. And if you take them away while kids are growing up, then it's difficult. The whole family system has to adjust. Okay, so this the purpose of it is they act out family stress to distract from the real core problems. So they become the problem. Hey, people, all focus on me. There's nothing else going on here in the back. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a lot is happening. The wonderful thing about the scapegoat is they are often the time, they are often the ones that is cast from very traumatic family systems. So they come to therapy because they need the help, they feel alone, they need to figure out who they are much quicker than the other roles. But there's also always the risk that they take the rebellion to far and that there are legal troubles, toxic behavior, um, addictions, self-destructive behavior. So then you get the lost child. This is the quiet one, the one that never stirs, the one that always just accepts things, that tries to keep the peace. The daydreamer, the solitary one, the invisible one, the one that never wants to become a burden. For them, it is often, well, let's look at their purpose first. Their purpose is to they avoid making demands because they don't want to add to any stress to family. So they just the family is having, they just don't want to be a burden. Okay. But this is very hard because for them as an adult, it's difficult to stand up, even in the face of massive injustice, because they don't like conflict. They are scared to stand up for themselves. They, one of their biggest needs is to be seen, but of some of the biggest fears are also to be seen. Sometimes for these individuals, it's easier to stand up for somebody else. You often find them coming to therapy when it's really important that they need to stand up for their children. Or for elders, if they see somebody vulnerable, they have to stand up. And then it is difficult, then they reach out for help. The adult risk here is they oftentimes have difficulty forming attachments. The self-worth isn't great because they really still believe that if they speak up, they will be a burden. And there's a lot of isolation that we find. Then, two more rules we're going to discuss today is the mascot. We all know them. The kid from school that was always charming, always funny, oftentimes hyperactive. These are the class clowns, they make everybody laugh. Their purpose is just to make everything a bit funnier and a bit lighter, to take the focus away from the drama that is happening within the household. And oftentimes, as we know, so many comedians suffer from major depression. It goes unnoticed because we just see the persona, we just see the mask that they put on. So all of these roles can be seen as masks. Masks that are cast upon us in childhood, masks that hide the true light, the true essence of who we are, masks that have become that we have worn for so long that we believe that this is our face when we look into the mirror. Okay, so if we look at the mascot, the adult risk is, like we said, anxiety, not acknowledging your true feelings, oftentimes not even to yourself. And then seeming superficial in conversation. Well, back at the ranch, there's so much, it's like seeing the tip of an iceberg where the body is underneath the water and you don't know what's going on. It's why people so oftentimes say that they in Afrikaans we say stille water dipekront. It means that if somebody is really quiet, we don't know what's happening underneath the surface. Okay, and then what I also see in therapy so much is the care, the caretaker, the helper. And the negative term, therefore, with a negative not so great one, is the enabler. Okay, this is the the one that always takes care of somebody else. They are always emphatic, they sacrifice themselves, they tend to be codependent and they want to please everyone. And I know that I said that I'm not going to talk about trauma in this session, but we have to just say, I have to just say here, that oftentimes, if there's trauma, remember the fight-flight of fawn um responses. The fawning is the pleasing type. And we don't even know why we're doing it. This role is just the mask that we put on as a child to try and keep ourselves alive, oftentimes, if there was trauma. Okay, so this role definitely doesn't like conflict. This is the typical mediator, the one always trying to sort out everything. Um, you manage somebody else's emotional crisis, you manage somebody else's addictions, and you oftentimes burn out. So the adult risk of this is attracting needy partners, attracting partners with really difficult psychological problems, and then believing that you are the one to fix them. I'm very much looking forward to our session about relationships as well, and the reasons why we often find ourselves in difficult or toxic or other relationships. We will talk about that some more. So, another of the adult risks are losing your sense of identity, losing yourself completely in this helper role. And then, thank God, having some resentment. But if you carry some of too much of that resentment, you also become the poor me. Look at me suffer, look at me putting myself aside all the time. I spoke to somebody today, and I'm very sure she would be very happy for me to share this, that said that it was such a shock to her that these roles at a function was even celebrated. At a toast, everyone was celebrating the selfless one, saying, like, look at this person, they're always putting others' needs in front of their own, like it was a wonderful and a great virtue. Like sacrificing yourself like this is always beautiful. I'm not saying self-sacrifice isn't beautiful if it occurs sometimes, but sacrificing the whole of yourself always that's dangerous and excessively sad. Where did the persona go? Where is the true self? What about you? There's a difference of giving of yourself and giving up yourself. I had another discussion today with somebody about the roles that we are cast into, that are cast upon us, that we cast ourselves later in life. And we also spoke about the olden days and being male and female and how rigid those roles were in terms of what was expected of us. And thank God for the openness in the society today, that we try our damnedest not to cost people into these roles anymore. But if we have to be honest with ourselves, it is still happening. And I don't think we have truly figured out what Jung spoke about when he spoke about the anima and the animus, the male and the female parts inside each of us. What is it supposed to mean? What does it mean? Or maybe it shifts from individual to individual, maybe it's just about what it means to you. But the work that has to be done to free yourself from all the conditionings, all the expectations, we still know so little about what this entails. And I think that is wonderful. There's a lot of freedom in admitting how little we know. Because if we know so little, then we are free to kind of describe and figure it out, at least for ourselves. What do we stand for? So, what do we look for? If we now look at all these roles, how do we remember who we are? And we will also look at the other ways, other roles, other eras that influenced us, that formed us. The peers, like we said, the teachers, the media of then, the media, social media of now, the audience has gotten real large. So we will look at all of that still, but for now, please do not give up hope. You were born whole, you were born in true essence, you were born with all your qualities intact. This has not gotten lost, this has just been forgotten. And there are a lot of keys back to your childhood. The keys are in firstly, remembering that you are inside a ring. Secondly, maybe questioning that you have a mask on, and then thirdly, look at what you loved. Like I said, the keys to the self lie in the childhood. It lies, of course, in the hurt, but it also lies in the happy moments. Martha Beck wrote a book. It's called How to Find your North Star. And it's a lot about, it's a wonderful book, by the way. It's a self-help book, but it's a lot about, and it's very funnily written. It's about looking at what you loved, what you instinctively did when you were little. I had a discussion with one of my friends where I remembered dreaming about a white horse when I was about six years old. I dreamt I rode it away from my parents' house, which is a whole other story. But the white horse, today I have a white horse that I ride on regularly, and it brings me such joy. And the things that you did that was adventurous, and just remembering what it was that I loved, and then looking at how much of that has permeated throughout my life, even unconsciously, and how much joy this is giving me at present, gives me such hope for everybody that we can find those missing pieces of ourselves, that we can truly look at the roles we play. And if we want to take them on, if we want to say, yes, these are the roles that I would like, I love it, I will continue with it, then great. But if it's not working for you, if it does not resonate with who you truly feel you are, then by bloody hell, cast them aside and see what it is that gives you joy. I once saw a movie with Reese Witherspoon in it where she went to a psychiatrist, and that psychiatrist said to her, Well, she went out because she didn't want to see him, she ran back in and said, Listen, don't have a lot of time, just tell me exactly, just tell me one piece of advice that can work for pretty much every client that you see. And this therapist said, figure out what you want and then find a way of asking for it. I so agree with this, but I want to add something. Figure out who you are, then figure out what you want, and then find a way of asking for it. Okay, this was this today's episode about the roles we play. Until next time, may you recognize the roles that you play. Figure out which ones you want for yourself. Remember who you are, honor what you want, and occasionally celebrate with cake for breakfast.