18. Getting Clear on your Parents

James: I had a new client come in last week with his partner, his fiance. He's a very ambitious, very performance-oriented person. And he was super set on fixing this fast. What I told him is, "I share your mindset. I believe in fixing things fast. I really like to work efficiently," and most of the work that I do here is like fitness work where there are no overnight fixes. If you want to get a lot stronger, then you will need to do uncomfortable things on a daily basis for many months. Just as if you're getting physically stronger, that mental strength comes the same way. I said the only exception to that is I have seen incredibly rapid and extreme behavioral change when people get clear on their parents. So has that been your experience too? Have you seen behavior change really, really quickly when people suddenly see their parents more clearly?

Catherine: Yeah, I have. And the client that comes to mind most just had such an incredibly negative relationship with himself. And then as he came to understand his parents better, then he understood where this feeling came from and that it had nothing to do with his character or anything inherent to him as a person. That freed him up in a lot of areas, including as a parent, because it's really hard to parent well from a place of fundamental insufficiency or wrongness. But I have seen that I think there can be a real clarifying effect to people being able to see their childhood and their parents more clearly.

James: It's so hard to do because we don't want to give up. It feels like I'm betraying my parents if I do this work. Because when we're getting clear on our parents, we're almost never getting clear on my parents being much more kind and much more caring than I thought they were. It's almost always the other direction. Well first, why is that? What do you think?

Catherine: I think sometimes you can, after you've worked through some of the blind spots around the problems with how your parent raised you, that you can actually free yourself up more to have a softer view of them as well.

James: But you're not changing. So there's a difference. I tell people, it's like you will at the end of this process, you will have more compassion and more care and more love for your parents than you did before.

Catherine: Yes.

James: But you will not see them the way you do now.

Catherine: Yeah.

James: So you will be evaluating, you will have a new view of their behavior and their shortcomings, and you will care about them more than you did, which seems like a paradox. But the problem is that even if I had a good childhood, I probably am still viewing my parents through an overly idealized lens. I chalk that up to two reasons, and I'll see if you agree with this, but I think it's partly because the child's brain is designed to see parents as mostly innocent, and I think that most parents reinforce that in their children because most parents want their children to see them as mostly innocent.

Catherine: I think there's a survival mechanism where it would make sense for kids to not focus too much on their parents' flaws because you're in a very real power differential where you are literally dependent on your parents. I mean, in adult life, lots of people feel like there's a power differential and feel like they're dependent on someone. As a child, this is the truth for everybody. And so you depend on your parents' benevolence to some degree.

James: So one way to think about it is over a thousand thousand generations, the children who got mad at the parents and ran away and got eaten by wild animals did not have children. And we do not have those genes.

Catherine: Yeah, or I mean, it doesn't even have to be that extreme. It could be that they didn't get as much help and support from their parents when they were young adults trying to figure stuff out or, you know, like there would be real benefits to keeping some type of a positive, affirming dynamic between you and your parents.

James: To the extent that when I work with people who have cut off their parents and who are very angry at their parents, they are still, even though they have cut off their parents and they're angry at their parents, they're still seeing their parents in an unrealistic, positive light usually.

Catherine: Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, this is when you or I talk to people about their parents, it's much more about the parental voices in their head than about, you know, mom and dad. Sometimes it's about in current day real-time interactions, but much of the time it's about what got wired in in childhood and where your blind spots are, and those can exist whether or not you're talking to your parents, whether or not your parents are alive. I've worked with clients in their seventies on dynamics with their parents who are long gone and had that improve their functioning. But yeah, I think there is a real benefit or like a lot of survival level pressure on kids to just not pick too many fights with their parents, especially when they're younger. And that can mean that when there's something that's a problem, you're not equipped to take your parents on anyway. They don't have to listen to you. They have way more power than you do. And so it can be the best thing for your brain in childhood to come up with a cover story, wrap it in a prettier facade, you know, put a stamp on it that says they tried their best and leave it there.

James: And the other stamp I see on it is that they had my well-being in mind while they were doing this harsh thing. Or whatever they were doing is, if my parents neglected me, it's because they had so many responsibilities. And if my parents were harsh with me, it's because it was for my benefit or because I deserved it in some way. And these are all explanations that paint the parents in a very innocent light. I also think it's worth saying that it's not really about the parents, it's about the tradition of behavioral patterns in the family system that goes back hundreds of years. And so, like you said earlier, it's like, well, if I was working with your parents, then I would be talking about their parents. So it's not that your parents are bad people, it's that your brain was affected by the patterns of behavior that have been ingrained in your family system for many generations. And your brain was affected. The point of interface was between you and your parents. That's where you encountered this tradition. And so we're gonna talk to you about your parents. It just doesn't have as much to do with your parents specifically as what is the energy that's been alive in your family for a long time.

Catherine: Yeah. It's who had the biggest role in shaping your brain and in your early childhood handing you answers to questions of who am I, what matters, how does life work, how do relationships work, how do we solve problems, what do we do with our emotions? And that's gonna be your parents or your caregivers. It doesn't really, I mean, for some people this is multiple people. It's not just two. It's also stepparents or grandparents, or a sibling or an older sibling. And so it's not limited to mom and dad.

James: It's whoever influenced you most. Especially between the ages, I mean, zero to 10, but I think especially between five and 10. Well, maybe zero to 10, but your first 10 years especially, I think is when a lot of this kind of imprinting takes place.

Catherine: Yeah. I mean, before five, it's not as verbal or conscious, but it's still having a really big impact on you.

James: It has an impact. It's harder to deal with the stuff before five because it's not as clear.

Catherine: Yeah. You have fewer memories to work with. Less verbal clarity. But that's why it's really about understanding yourself and your own wiring. And we're only focused on the parents because they're the people that had the biggest impact there. Absolutely. And all of this in the context of knowing, like your parents came by it, honestly. They got their wiring from somewhere. They didn't wake up after a nice life. They didn't invent this stuff and decide to be mean to their kids, if that's the kind of issue you had with your parents. In general, I do think most parents want to give their kids a good life. And I also think most parents do things that cause long-term harm to their kids that are difficult to work through. And some of this is just like you were saying, the completely normal progression of some things that are adaptive in childhood are not adaptive or are maladaptive in adult relationships. It's like you need different skills to navigate a relationship where there really is a power differential and you really are in a dependent position, than you need to navigate your marriage. Where you're not in a power differential and you're not genuinely dependent on your spouse.

James: And getting clarity on what exactly I was up against as a kid helps me differentiate between the two environments. And so my wife has never been a threat to me. It's not even, that's not the best way to explain it. It was never wise for me to be as concerned about my wife's anger as it was for me to be concerned about my parents' anger. Okay. And so, it's been really important for me to get more clear on what kind of undesirable treatment I faced from my parents and get a more detailed understanding of what I was up against as a kid so that, because the more clearly I can see that, the more clearly I can see the difference between that and what I get from my wife, and they really are incredibly different. But in my mind, before I did this work, my mind was treating them as one and the same, and I was having these intense traumatic responses to my wife's anger or my wife's disapproval that were much more appropriate for a child facing parental disapproval.

Catherine: And the other real difference I see is that your options in responding as a kid are extremely limited.

James: Oh, yeah. There's basically nothing you can do.

Catherine: Yeah, you can kind of pull on your parents' emotions.

James: One thing I talk to couples about a lot is if your partner's yelling, please, please leave the room. Do not stand there and get yelled at. And when I was a child, I didn't have that option, but as an adult, I almost always had the option of not getting yelled at. There are very few circumstances where I really have to get yelled at for some reason. But if my partner's yelling, it's not good for my brain. I should not be subjecting myself to that. And I should not be blaming my partner for a choice that I'm making to stand there and get yelled at.

Catherine: Right. And that's one of those differences between, as a kid, you didn't have that choice. You know, there's someone who really is bigger than you, who really does have way more power over you. And even in marriages where people experience a power differential, absolutely. It's still gonna be less than what's true between a child and a parent.

James: In more traditional cultures, the power differential is real. But even in those cultures, like you said, it's not anything like what children experience.

Catherine: Right. And then you have other options, like having a fully developed brain gives you more possibilities for what you can do about your situation.

James: So the main tool that I use, well, the main tool that we use to work with this is called a parental dialogue or a written mental dialogue.

Catherine: Mm-hmm.

James: Which, the way I think about it, serves two purposes. One is for me to get really clear on how my parent would handle a situation. So were I to try to talk straight to one of my parents about something that they would not want me to talk straight to them about, how would they handle that conversation? So I have to write my side of the dialogue and I have to write their side of the dialogue. So it's an imagined conversation where I'm gonna say, what if I talk to mom about this topic that would be an uncomfortable, difficult topic. Something where I'd be challenging her. So I write my side and then I write her side. And it serves two purposes. Well, at least two, maybe you can think of some more. The two purposes I tend to think of: it's really good for me to write down exactly how my mom would handle that conversation. Okay. And it's really good for me to write down what would be a very strong and effective and compassionate way for me to handle my side of the conversation in ways that were not available to me as a child.

Catherine: I think one of the things that does is helps your brain understand that you're an adult.

James: Okay. That's true. It just kind of, and it's something, you know, I've done this dozens of times and I ask all of my clients to do it, and it's something that needs to be done a lot because it's just something we don't do. Even as adults, most of us don't regularly talk to our parents in an adult-to-adult fashion.

Catherine: It's like talking to a spouse, people will feel like they're talking to some authority who's got more power than they do. Talking to a boss, you know? They'll feel like they're talking to a parent. You run into this all the time. And at some point if you're gonna go through your life feeling like I am a full adult and I carry my own authority and, you know, if I were to, for example, talk to my parent about something difficult, it would be adult to adult. Yeah. It wouldn't be dependent to authority. Not anymore. Like that's not the truth.

James: No, and the interesting thing is in relationships, both partners will feel that parental power from the other person. And so sometimes there's an imbalance, but it's quite common. Like in my marriage, we both felt this parental energy from the other person, and we both felt like we couldn't say what we really wanted to say.

Catherine: Well, you're talking about it as you're feeling the parental energy from the other person and that could be there because, sure, people talk down to each other. But the other thing you're feeling is your own sense of being a child. Like you're feeling child energy in yourself. And you're attributing that to this person must be domineering in some way.

James: Yeah. Well, and people have ways of, you know, of driving these things and people have ways of manipulating and whatnot. And so, but it takes a deliberate exercise to break out of the habit of facing my partner as if she had a lot more power over me than she really has.

Catherine: Right. And in reality, most of the power that your partner has over you, you're handing to them.

James: Yes. Over and over, almost always. Yes.

Catherine: And it's kind of that you aren't yet willing to take full responsibility for your own life and decisions.

James: So we've talked a lot about how humans will always fight for freedom and always fight for sovereignty, but there are better ways of handling that and worse ways of handling that. And so there's, I guess Bruce Tift would call it healthy separateness energy and unhealthy separateness energy. And so, there has to be a certain amount of separateness. I have to have sovereignty in my relationship, and if I don't know a way of doing it well, then I will do it poorly. Which is usually, you know, fighting and rebelling and yelling or distancing or all these things that we do.

Catherine: And those aren't really getting you freedom either.

James: No, they don't.

Catherine: Like anytime you're acting from a place where you're rebelling, reacting, you're letting another person decide your life.

James: Yes, and you know, you're responding in anger, where anger is always a response to powerlessness. And so when I respond in anger, I'm letting you know that you've already gotten to me. You know, you've already, I'm already in this place where I feel powerless because if I didn't feel powerless, I wouldn't be angry. I would feel powerful. There's no need to be angry.

Catherine: Well, I think you could be angry and still have a handle on yourself. I don't think anger always has to come with being reactive.

James: So that's, yeah. So tell me about that. I guess for me, because people often talk about a more healthy anger, for me, healthy anger just seems like courage. I guess I don't know.

Catherine: Probably.

James: But I wouldn't call it anger at that point.

Catherine: Okay. I mean, I'd say like most people that have been serious civil rights leaders, for example, had plenty of anger about the systems that they were trying to change.

James: Okay.

Catherine: What they had a handle on was the reactivity. So that they could be strategic. And so you can be really angry at someone and you could decide, you know, something has to change here. The helplessness comes from thinking that you can't do anything about it directly.

James: And like in our formative years, we really are quite helpless. Like we have very limited options and we become more powerful as we grow older. In, say, less mature families, you see this power struggle that erupts as children grow into adolescence. And they start to move towards full sovereignty and full separateness. And parents tend to push back on that really hard.

Catherine: Yeah. What's the problem with that? I mean on one hand, this is a completely predictable developmental process. For a teenager to wanna be their own person is what they're doing. That's what their brains are supposed to be doing.

James: I think for me as a parent, if I've depended on, you know, if I get this validation from my child being subservient to me, like if I see myself as powerful because my child is subservient to me and now my child's 13 and no longer wants to be subservient, then that causes a problem for me because I've been building my own ego around the idea that my kid is subservient to me and now they're not, and that's gonna be problematic.

Catherine: People that don't have much of a self have a hard time letting others have much of a self as well.

James: Yeah. And adolescence is a time when you're struggling to have a self, when you're building that.

Catherine: And so if you're in your forties and you still feel like you are basically being controlled by your parents, which lots of people in their forties still feel this way, very common. You know, I can't do or say that, I can't wear that. You know, at least I can't let mom and dad know. Then watching your child carve out more independence for themselves than you allow yourself is gonna be upsetting. Like, if you are buying into, this is just how the system works. Parents control children and children are a reflection on parents and kind of an extension of the parents' sense of self and identity and reputation in the community and all that. Then you're watching your kids as teenagers, if they're differentiating, you're watching them kind of break the system to where you're getting the cons but not the pros. You're like, well, hang on, I'm being controlled and I don't get to control the next generation. This isn't such a good deal anymore. So yeah, there always has to be somebody who's willing to break the pattern. And I think it's a really good thing if a parent can be willing to break the pattern. That's powerful. If you can be willing to give your child room to be a self, even if your parents didn't give you that, and if your parents still aren't handing that to you on a platter. If it's something that you're having to give yourself, I think that's ideal. But the other way this goes is that at some point a teenager or a young adult kind of gets their ability to have a self by getting more distance from the family often.

James: How would you describe the process of gaining a self as an adult?

Catherine: It has a lot to do with seeing yourself as an authority in your own life. So you have to trust yourself. And the way I trust myself is I trust I will make the decisions. Not that I'll always make the right ones, because that's too much pressure. No one can. That's assuming that you'll always be clear on what the right thing to do is, and you won't. But it's, I'll be the chooser in my life is how I develop more of a self. What about you?

James: One of the things that's been powerful to me has been to tolerate intensity. So sometimes I think I talk about feelings-driven behavior versus values-driven behavior. And I was just very, for most of my life, a very feelings-driven person in that, for a pretty significant chunk of most days, my behavior was determined by me trying to avoid feeling this intensity, this unpleasant intensity. So for me it was usually a pain in my chest or burning in my face. And I felt that a lot and I did a lot of things to try to avoid feeling that. And so I would avoid conflict and I would distance myself from people I loved and I would, you know, control my kids and all this kind of stuff. But a huge chunk of my behavior was based on me trying to avoid feeling unpleasant intensity, and I'm calling it unpleasant intensity. It's, you know, for me it was a tightness or a pain in my chest and a burning in my face, and it feels unpleasant. These days, it still feels intense. Well, it feels less intense and much less unpleasant. Like my face is burning a little bit right now as we talk, and it doesn't bother me at all. I'm just kind of used to it. But I had learned as a child that any intense feeling was something to watch out for because it was very tied to, you know, emotional and anxiety levels in my home. And when anxiety levels were high in the home, then things didn't go well for me. And so as an adult, you know, I can face these higher anxiety situations and things do go well for me, and so I have to learn to feel the feeling and still do the right thing anyway instead of doing whatever's going to get me outta this intensity fastest. Which is usually the wrong thing.

Catherine: We were talking the other day about courage, and I think you could define it as doing the right thing while feeling something difficult.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Which, when you define it that way, it puts it in line with discipline. Because I was trying to think of this overlap between courage and discipline. Courage is usually strictly defined as I'm feeling fear.

Catherine: Mm-hmm.

James: Carl Jung used to say that the two things that keep us from becoming who we want to become are, he says there's only two, which I think is brilliant, which is fear and lethargy. And so, you know, the solution to that is courage and discipline. But the way you're talking about courage... I was thinking about it the other day because I'm like, is there really that big a difference between courage and discipline? You know, is there really that big a difference between I don't want to do it and I'm afraid to do it? There is a slight difference, but the ability to feel the feeling and do the thing anyway is exactly the same on both sides. So I feel fear, and I'm going to do it anyway. I feel lethargy and I'm going to do it anyway. Right is the solution on both sides and I think there's a pretty strong correlation in building those.

Catherine: Yeah, I agree with that.

James: Which is interesting because you know, I spent 25 years in the military and I was never in combat, but I worked with some people in special operations who were, to the man, both incredibly courageous and incredibly disciplined. And so I almost wonder if there's some sort of correlate there that as you develop that, as you build that muscle of feeling the feeling and doing it anyway, then you learn how to work through fear and you learn how to work through lethargy, and it just becomes part of who you are.

Catherine: Well, and those are both related to this idea of being the chooser in your own life, of exercising your agency. Making the decisions.

James: As opposed to leading a feelings-based life where I'm just constantly responding to what I feel in the moment.

Catherine: Yeah. And so if you're gonna have a sense of self, you have to be the one deciding what you do. And feelings are like the weather and they can't... it's like if you wanna be a runner, but you only run when it's 70 degrees and not raining, you're not gonna get very far. I guess I don't think as much about the word discipline because it has this kind of connotation, a parental discipline or even just being harsh on yourself.

James: Oh, that's interesting. I don't think about that at all. I mean, I can understand how you get there.

Catherine: Like maybe commitment might be closer to how I'd think about it.

James: Yeah. Discipline is often, like in men's circles, discipline is often talked about as a virtue of the ability to do something I don't want to do. Something that I know is good to do and I don't feel like doing it. And so it's, once again, it's like the feeling is not going to determine what I do and what I don't do. I'm going to base that off my goals and my values. Like who do I want to be and what do I want to do, like from the deeper, better part of myself.

Catherine: Right. And one way I talk to myself is I want to have done that.

James: Interesting, future me. I've never heard that before.

Catherine: Yeah. Like when there's something that I absolutely am not gonna enjoy, I want to have done that.

James: Oh, that's nice.

Catherine: Yeah. It's like that can help me sometimes because it's connecting me more with... it's easy when something sounds hard to go to, I don't want to. And this is a way to have it still be about desire, even while I hold onto like, I'm not gonna enjoy doing it, you know? But yeah, I want to have done that. I'll respect myself for having done that.

James: I talk to people all the time about earning their self-respect. And the way I usually frame it is at the end of the day, look at yourself in the mirror with kindness and with compassion, and you start with the idea that it is okay for me to be who I am today. Like it is completely okay for me to be who I am and where I am, to have behaved how I behaved, and I want to do better tomorrow. And what does that look like? Like what do I want to change about my patterns of behavior tomorrow that is different than today, even though today was good enough? And I just think there's so much power in living from a place of sufficiency. And there's all this talk about abundance today. And you could talk about that in terms of personal abundance. Like, am I good enough? Do I start... like just the fact that I'm human, is that enough for me to be good enough? And is it also okay for me to accept myself fully the way I am and really, really want to do better in the future?

Catherine: So I think these connect with what we were talking about with parental blindness and that as you work through seeing your parents more clearly and just realizing that parents are people, not saints, on the other side of that, often you feel more compassion.

James: Oh, so much more. Of course.

Catherine: And one of the benefits of seeing your parents more clearly is you're gonna be like your parents.

James: Yes. 'Cause we already are like our parents. You don't get a choice if you're like your parents. Guess who programmed your brain?

Catherine: Well, there's that and there's the DNA level, like the genetic, you know, you're gonna be like your parents. Yes, you are. And so if you want to have a shot at seeing and changing your own patterns, you're going to have to be able to tolerate the intensity of seeing this in your parents. And facing it and not hating them for it. Because that's the same stuff you're gonna have to do with yourself is to see, like, turns out. And for a lot of people, my own experience and also people I work with, when you start to wake up to this more, you're already a parent yourself and you've already had an impact on your own kids and so you're trying to relate in a way that is clearheaded where you're like, I can walk right up to reality, look it in the eye, and say, I love and accept you anyway. To my parents and to myself.

James: Yes, absolutely.

Catherine: And I wanna be better. But it's hard to see yourself clearly if you are holding up blinders around your parents because you're going to be like them. And so, you know, I started to be more able to catch myself in moments where I'm like, I'm hearing my mom's voice coming outta my mouth, saying stuff that I have a problem with. But to be able to have a problem with that without like rejecting my whole self as a person. But just be like, no, like, you know, this is probably enough generations that have mindlessly repeated this phrase. It could stop here. It could. And I could turn to my kids and be like, I don't agree with what I just said. I take that back. Like that, you know, this is just something that my brain had programmed in there, but it doesn't actually line up with my values and we're not gonna do it that way anymore.

James: Let's end it there.

Catherine: All right. Thanks, James.

James: Thank you, Catherine. I'll talk to you next time.