20. Parental Blindness
Catherine Roebuck joins me to talk about parental blindness and how to fix it.
Transcript
Catherine: One of the things that some of my clients are reluctant to talk about is their parents. One of the reasons people can be wary of talking to someone is that they don't really want to get into their family of origin or their childhood. They want to stick with the idea that it was all fine, but there's this kind of protectiveness. And I've heard you call that parental blindness.
James: Yeah, that's what I call it. This idea really appeals to me because I had such an intense case of it, and changing my view of my parents had this massive impact on my ability to become a better person. And so because of that, it's so precious to me, and I have seen it really impact other people. I guess it's the only shortcut I've ever found to personal growth. Where in general, personal growth is slow and difficult. But in my case, when I made these shifts around my parents—and there were many of them—I would make a shift and suddenly I would see myself in a different light and I would stop doing the thing I was doing. It would happen in a day.
Catherine: It's like when you are getting evaluated for glasses and they put the correct lens on.
James: Yes, exactly. And you're like, that's it.
Catherine: Whoa, I can read.
James: It is exactly like that. And I do think we are basically programmed to have fuzzy lenses towards our parents.
Catherine: I think this can happen in different areas, like anywhere that you're pretty foggy about reality. When you get clear about it, you can have rapid change. Maybe the top area where that could happen is around your parents, because there are some things that are very challenging as a kid about seeing your parents clearly. If you've got really good parents, there's no problem seeing them clearly. It's just going to hurt if you realize that your survival depends on people that are very limited in their ability to care or that are cruel.
James: Cruelty is a really good example of this because basically all parents are cruel to a certain extent to their children. That's kind of universal; there's a huge spectrum there. To the extent that I experience cruelty from my parents and I'm not aware of it or have not really faced that fact, then I'm more likely to be cruel to my own children.
Catherine: A lot of people are not going to like the idea that most or all parents are cruel to their kids.
James: I was just reading Tift today, and he was explaining this so beautifully. He was saying that a child is so vulnerable that the amount of effort it takes to not harm the child emotionally is basically off the charts. And so when I accept a child into my care or have a child, I have accepted this level of responsibility that is kind of crazy, especially if my goal is to not create emotional harm for this child. Realistically, the rough edges of my character are going to create harm for my child no matter what. There's ways of mitigating that, but that's definitely what happened in my parenting. I've been spending a lot of time with my children this week and just watching them interact with each other and with me, I see things they learned from me. The way I look at that is, as a father, I do not get to blame my children for their immaturity. That's not appropriate because a lot of these things they picked up from me. For example, a parent who's really upset about their children arguing or being mean or cruel to each other—if I were upset at my children for being cruel to each other, it would behoove me to look at myself and see in what way I have exposed my children to cruelty.
Catherine: Parents are people, and any relationship where you live together closely for 18 years is going to involve some deep emotional pain at some point. It's going to happen. And so I think it's accurate to say all parents are going to do things that really hurt their kids on an emotional level. Cruelty is talking about the intent to hurt your kids. I do think that's probably true in most cases as well. If you look at a lot of parenting techniques that people use, especially when they're not doing well, there is a lot of using negative experiences to try to mold a kid's behavior.
James: Yes, exactly that. It used to be a lot of physical punishment. These days it's much less of that, but still a lot of emotional punishment. And emotional punishment is intentionally designed to make the child feel bad.
Catherine: Right.
James: And that's cruel.
Catherine: So the level we're talking about with cruelty is doing things that you know will make your kid feel bad. And that's part of the point.
James: It is the point. It's like, "I want you to feel bad so that you won't do the thing I didn't want you to do in the first place."
Catherine: In my view, there are better ways to influence behavior than that, but it is so commonplace that it is pretty much universal that parents do something along those lines.
James: I think it's universal, and it takes an intense amount of effort and creativity to do something better. If I am going to raise my children without physical or emotional punishment and I have a normal amount of time, intelligence, and creativity to offer, then the only option is to give my children a lot more freedom than most parents do.
Catherine: Yeah, and that can mean giving up on some of your goals as a parent.
James: Yes.
Catherine: That your kids aren't as high-achieving, aren't as impressive, aren't as helpful around the house.
James: That’s a great example. In the long run, children mostly learn positive behavioral patterns by observing their parents. And most of the really good stuff—like I want my children to grow up and thrive, be courageous, have good connections with other people, be loving, and have a lot to offer the world—is all stuff that they will learn primarily through watching me when they're young. The smaller stuff, like I want them to eat good food when they're 10, is basically impossible. But if I'm not going to engage in emotional punishment and I don't have unlimited time for my children, then I'm just going to have to give up on that. As the child grows, if my children grow up in a home where the parents value good nutrition, the children will also value good nutrition, unless they are in a compliance-defiance system where they start eating bad food as a way of claiming their individuality.
Catherine: And you're saying they'll value it eventually, but they may not value it at 10.
James: They would probably not value it at the age of 10. I don't know any 10-year-olds who do.
Catherine: Oh, I know a couple, but it's not the norm. So, you think everybody has parental blindness?
James: I think everybody has parental blindness. Yes. I think some cases are very mild, but this is all conjecture. I really think a child's brain is programmed to see parents as more innocent than they really are. And I think almost all parents put an effort into getting their children to see them that way. I would guess that all parents portray themselves to their children as more innocent than they really are. And I think all children's brains are programmed to see their parents as more innocent. But almost all of the adults I've worked with who grew up with abusive parents start out on their journey... well, I have worked with some people who see their parents remarkably clearly, but it's pretty rare. It's the exception. In general, people tend to specifically look at the intention. What I'm looking at is not exactly what your parents did. It's, given that your parent did this thing, what did they know about the impact they were having on you? And how did they feel about having that impact on you? So, the classical example is if I make my child cry, what do I know about how my child feels and how do I feel about making my child feel that way?
Catherine: What are you thinking about that child and how are you feeling toward the child while they're crying?
James: And specifically, am I unhappy with myself because I made my child cry? Do I see it as a really bad thing that has happened?
Catherine: Am I callous to it?
James: Yes, that's a good way of saying it. Is it okay with me that my child is crying, for example?
Catherine: Do you have any compassion for them in that moment or not? And in many cases, the answer's no.
James: It is very often no.
Catherine: I think about what you're trying to do as simply seeing parents as people. They're not demigods.
James: That's the exact word I was going to use. I think a child's brain is kind of programmed to see the parent as a divine figure.
Catherine: Well, it's hard to know what the limits of the parent's power are because the parent certainly has more power and capacity than you do. And there's a lot a parent can do that you don't know how they're doing it. And there's a lot of abstract concepts that you don't comprehend yet. So I think it is easy to relate to parents as God-like, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, when they're not. And I've seen this distorted lens go both ways. You've talked mostly about people not seeing the ill intent or cruelty in their parents, but I've also worked with people who have an unreasonably negative view of their parents and have no compassion for them as people. Like most things, there are both extremes and you're trying to find a holistic view.
James: I have definitely worked with people who have no compassion for their parents. I still think those people often underestimate the degree to which their parents knew what they were doing when the child was younger. But I think you can have compassion for a person and still see them clearly. You don't have to pretend a person is better than they are. Especially if you've had your own children, you have an inkling of just how difficult this task is.
Catherine: I think it's possible to over-emphasize cruelty in a parent's motivation. And the parent could be working from a place of very poor functioning. They might come from a really bad place themselves and have never worked through it. They are spread thin in life and are doing a bad job. They're not putting a lot of thought into what they're doing, and while they are aware that their child is hurting, it doesn't mean they have the awareness that things could be better or different.
James: Awareness and intentionality are so hard to describe because it's a very rich spectrum. I like the word you used, which is callous. Callous or insensitive or uncaring or not focused on it. A perfect parent would be very concerned about their child's welfare at all times, especially about their own impact on the child. A really good parent is concerned about whether they are helping their child thrive right now. That doesn't mean making my child suffer right now so they will thrive later, 'cause that's the usual justification. Making a child suffer, especially causing emotional suffering for a child, rarely leads to the child thriving later on.
Catherine: The callousness is closely related to what Schnarch talks about as emotional dead spots. This is in the context of brain functioning. One aspect of your brain not functioning well is you'll have specific areas where you don't have what would be an appropriate emotional response.
James: Or even a normal emotional response. I can think of some that I had with my children. I was quite callous to my children crying. When my children cried, I would conceive of it as a protest behavior and I had very little compassion for the distress they were feeling at the time. I would call that an emotional dead spot. When my children cried when they were young, it was annoying to me, but I had no compassion for them crying or for the intensity of the experience that they were having.
Catherine: I think that's extremely common in the kinds of parental behaviors we're talking about, that someone is really not feeling much other than maybe some annoyance or a little bit of contempt or frustration. But they're not feeling compassion, they're not feeling concerned, they're not feeling caring or empathy for their child.
James: You do all this without coddling. When my kids were young, I kind of believed in tough parenting. Not to a great extent, but I really did want my kids to be strong. And part of that was just that I never felt strong when I was a kid.
Catherine: How about when you were parenting them? Were you strong then? You wanted them to be strong. Were you strong? Did you feel strong?
James: Was I strong when I was parenting my kids? I'll tell you about one specific incident. I had woken one of my kids up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He would sleep very deeply and wasn't fully awake. He started crying in his sleep as I was trying to take him to the bathroom. At that point, no, I was not strong. I got severely dysregulated and overwhelmed. It felt like an impossible task. You have a kid who... it felt like it was really important for me to take this child to the bathroom, and he was asleep, not in control of himself, and he's crying, he's miserable. So, no, I didn't feel strong. That's an interesting question though, that I would not have been capable of leading my children to strength unless it had been coming from a place of strength.
Catherine: My view is that almost everything that we succeed in giving our kids is through example.
James: Yes, I agree a hundred percent with that.
Catherine: If you want kids that are kind, but you're not kind to them, you'll fail. If you want kids that are strong, but you're not strong, you'll fail. If you want kids that are resilient, proactive, and take good care of themselves, the only shot you have is to do those things yourself. And that is so hard. People go around all the time trying to hand their kids values and skills that they don't yet possess themselves. My view is you can't do it.
James: One way that I frame this is that you can't teach children behavior by talking to them. You have to model the behavior. Specifically, if I want my child to be courageous, that child needs to see me being courageous. I need to look at times when my child is going to see me facing something that I'm afraid of. The most common thing is my child needs to see me talking straight to my partner in a kind way. Not with anger, obviously, but with courage and saying something uncomfortable. In a normal marriage, there are dozens of opportunities every month for each partner to demonstrate courage in front of the children by talking straight to each other in front of the children. Couples will often say, "Well, we don't fight in front of the children," which is okay, but do your children ever see you disagree with each other in a civil way?
Catherine: And how do you talk to each other? Your kids can tell how you feel about each other.
James: Oh, they know.
Catherine: What you're talking about is so hard to do that I want you to hand me an easier option.
James: It is so hard to do, but it's so good for the children to see.
Catherine: I think you're absolutely right. If you want to instill in your kids the ability to treat other people well, your very best shot at it is going to be to treat them and your partner well.
James: And I think it specifically applies to the marriage-type relationship because that is the relationship that challenges me most as a person. There are more opportunities for me to be courageous by talking to my wife in my home than in most other areas of my life.
Catherine: That's the peer-to-peer relationship. For me, it's really easy to be patient with my kids in general. I have a lot of patience with my kids. I don't get frustrated with them easily. I can answer the questions all day long. It's all fine, but I'm in a position of power. And I know it. It's so much harder with someone that's a peer to hold onto yourself, be fair, be kind, be honest, and be patient. I just agree, it's the most challenging thing, but that's why it's the best thing for kids. They're going to grow up and they'll be trying to navigate a peer-to-peer relationship if their life goes nicely, and their brain is going to have as a blueprint whatever they grew up around, whatever they saw you do. No pressure.
James: I was playing pickleball with my son the other night and I was just watching him exhibit so many behavioral patterns that he gets directly from me. It is sad, not good behavioral patterns, really difficult patterns that are really hard to undo in adulthood. The tragedy in my story is that I started my personal development journey so late in my children's lives that they missed out on a good chunk of this. This is my youngest son, and he did benefit to a certain extent from my journey, but he still had many, many years of seeing me be fragile and rigid and inflexible and demanding. Obviously I did not talk to him and say, "This is how you should be."
Catherine: You don't have to.
James: But he learned those patterns and he learned my way of how to handle it when someone disagrees with you or disapproves of you. How do you handle it when you are not the strongest player on the field or the smartest person in the room? And he handles it a lot the same way I do. Looking back and knowing how much effort I've had to put into trying to unwind some of those things, it's really sad for me to see him having that on the horizon. He will probably have to do some of the same work. Now, I can still help him. He's grown and flown the nest now, but there are some things I can offer him, mostly by talking to him or writing to him about what I see in myself. Let me tell you about me. Because that helps him through his parental blindness. He will struggle to see himself clearly because even as I was demonstrating these things to him, I was telling him it is not so.
Catherine: You're landing here on the difference between when it's a good idea for a kid to see their parents clearly and when it's not. I would frame it as, if you have a parent that's okay with seeing themselves clearly and with being seen clearly, then it's good for the child to see their parent clearly. And that's why at this point you can help your son with parental blindness because you're more and more willing to see yourself and to be seen. If you've got a parent that's not willing, it may not be a good idea to see it, because you're going to be putting yourself into conflict with someone who's much more powerful than you.
James: It is still always a good idea as an adult. But not as a child.
Catherine: Your parent's not much more powerful than you anymore once you're an adult. You outgrow this.
James: That's why we need to go back as an adult and reclaim an accurate version of reality. This also ties into an idea I love, which is, as a parent, am I leading my child towards the truth and towards reality, or away from the truth and reality? And if I am trying to claim more innocence than I deserve, I'm leading my child away from reality. That child will then later in life have to do the individual work of regaining their grasp on reality because I helped to take it away from them.
Catherine: You were talking about parents that don't fight in front of their kids. It's never a good idea to have mean, loud, screaming, critical fights in front of your kids. It's just not a good idea to have those. Step one is you get it out of the kids' sight and earshot. But if you've got parents that hate each other, but in front of the kids, they're pretending that they have a nice family, that's creating a false reality for the kid, enhancing parental blindness, making the kid confused. It's setting people up to live with an unhealthy amount of cognitive dissonance. The hard truth is that the real solution here is you have to deal with what's going on that you're having that kind of fights at all. You have to get to where you're not having them, not just where you're not having them in front of the kids.
James: We constantly overestimate our ability to hide things from family members. It's so hard to hide. If my children are living with me 24/7 and I have a lot of conflict with my wife, they know. They feel it, they sense it, they know. And if we pretend to not have conflict when we're in front of the children, it's doing them a disservice. The solution is what you're talking about, which is to settle down and talk straight to my wife in front of my children, in as kind of way as possible. There are obviously limits to this, but they need to know. You need to portray your marriage honestly. "Hey, this is difficult."
Catherine: I like the analogy of a mother bird that digests the food and hands the digested food to the kid.
James: You don't starve the children.
Catherine: The really difficult stuff, you have to work through it to a point that you can hand a digested version of reality to the kids. You're not dragging the kids into the gory details, but you're giving them enough truth and a fair and balanced view, so it's not that one parent's the villain and one's a saint, because that's never reality either. But you can give them something that makes some sense that hangs together and then it'll be less preoccupying to them. They won't ruminate on it so much. They won't be creating false realities in their own head where they're the problem or something. It's just so much better for their brains.
James: That pattern you just mentioned is so prevalent where, as a child, I'm trying to put things together, but I have to start with the presupposition that my parents are innocent. Then I end up landing on myself as the culprit a lot of the time. I've seen that so many times.
Catherine: You could do it that way, or you could pick one parent as the good parent and one as the bad parent. And the person that you're thinking of as the good parent is probably the one that you don't see as clearly.
James: And very often, parents will portray this. It's pretty common for one parent to skillfully maneuver the other parent into the bad parent position in front of the children.
Catherine: One of the unique aspects of Crucible is thinking about partners being in balance with each other in terms of their emotional maturity. And I think that closely correlates with how dysfunctional the things you're doing are, how big of a problem you are to your kids. One of the things that's really hard is you can see your spouse more clearly than you can see yourself, and then you end up having a real problem with the stuff they're doing. It's actually really painful to let yourself or your kids think about this being a balanced, dysfunctional system, that there are similar scale problems on your side. It doesn't mean that both parents are equally cruel or equally deceptive. It can play out in different ways, where the dysfunction on one side can be about being too collusive, looking away, not dealing with something that needs to be dealt with, like an alcoholic and an enabler or something like that. I think that's how it goes. And I wish it weren't so, because it's often a painful thing to look at. But I do think that's how it goes, that it mostly evens out. So when I'm talking to someone about their parents and they're seeing it as extremely unbalanced, that one was a saint and one was a villain, I am trying to get much more information about the saint parent and talk to people about what would've been difficult about living with someone that was always looking down on you, trying to get them to think about how this parent that's positioned themselves one-up would actually be pretty hard to deal with.
James: Oh, I love what you just did. You're shifting your perspective in the story. You say, "thinking about how this parent who positions himself as one-up would be hard to deal with." You're imagining, you're shifting the positions in your mind and looking at things from a different perspective, which is such a powerful thing. That's a technique I love, which is, what is it like to be on the other side of the energy I'm bringing right now? This is powerful for parenting because I am a pretty intense person, and you're a pretty intense person. It's so important for me to think about what it's like to be on the other side of the energy I'm bringing. I've been talking to some of my siblings recently and as I said, I'm a pretty intense person and my siblings are pretty intense, and it's so important for me to remember that I'm hard to deal with.
Catherine: People can be hard to deal with in different ways. It's really difficult to deal with someone that refuses to offer an emotional reaction to anything, that acts hyper-logical all the time. I see this pattern play out a lot where there's one partner that's just hyper-logical.
James: And one's hyper-emotional.
Catherine: And they're like, "You see what I put up with here? All this crying and yelling." And I'm like, "Okay. But you know, talking to a stone all day is really hard."
James: It is hard.
Catherine: The other thing I talk to people about with this balance thing is coming back to the Tift idea that you kind of hire your partner to embody what you've rejected in yourself.
James: Or you rejected.
Catherine: So if you have a very emotional partner and you want them to settle down, you may need to work on your own emotional expressiveness and be willing to show emotion. And if you have a super cold, shut-down partner, you might have to rein in your volatility.
James: There's a natural polarization. I think this happens on many different spectrums within a relationship, but there can be a natural polarization where the more volatile I am, the more shut down my partner might be; the more anxiously attached I am, the more avoidant my partner might be. I think it happens in any kind of spectrum where the two of you are occupying opposite ends. The further I move to one end, it invites and entices my partner to move to the other end and vice versa. So as I come into the middle, it makes it easier for my partner to also come into the middle.
Catherine: One of the dynamics that plays out a lot between parents and can play into someone seeing one parent as good and one as bad is over-functioner/under-functioner. And it's easy if you're either looking at your parents or you're looking at your own relationship to think the over-functioner is better.
James: It does look better.
Catherine: They're doing all these things, they're so impressive, they're so busy. And then to think about how difficult is it to step up and do anything when you know somebody's going to swoop in, critique it, and take over, or that they're going to do everything faster than you. There's just a lot that's quite difficult about it. Schnarch talked about how he didn't like the term "over-functioning" because he said it's all under-functioning in the sense that it's all bringing the functioning of the system down.
James: I don't like that term either. I feel so validated right now.
Catherine: There were some different terms I was thinking about for that. I mean, it's similar to preoccupied and avoidant, but with daily tasks.
James: I very often talk about "parental energy" for over-functioning because I find it's usually parental, where one partner is kind of just occupying a more parental stance, and the other one is occupying a less parental stance, at least in certain areas of the relationship. I don't ever use the term over-functioning. That's really interesting.
Catherine: Oh, that's interesting. It's a common one.
James: People use it all the time, but it always strikes me as not quite accurate for some reason.
Catherine: Well, it's not, because it's not being more functional.
James: It's hard to describe. I often see it as more of a parental thing where I am bringing parental energy into my marriage and I am inspiring or invoking childish energy in my partner.
Catherine: And then you critique them for that.
James: Yes. Which is all part of the plan.
Catherine: It's part of the system. I mean, it's not really like sitting around and scheming up a plan.
James: No, you're right. But it's part of the system. The way it works is that my partner showing up in a childish way serves a purpose for me. It does something for me. It feeds my ego, or it lets me feel good about myself, or it gives me something to look down on, or it just justifies my parental stuff. It's a difficult thing when I try to talk to clients about this. The childish behavior is so obviously childish. It's like, okay, be responsible. The parental energy is harder to deal with because on the face of it, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. But I find it difficult to describe. I can see it clearly in my mind how there is an energetic connection between the parental partner and the childish partner. And the parental partner is doing just as much to drive this dynamic as the childish partner is doing.
Catherine: It's this destructive spiral.
James: It is a destructive spiral.
Catherine: The more I scold, the more you defy, the more you defy, the more I scold. Yes. And round and round we go to hell. I always talk about it that way, as a self-reinforcing pattern, and that either person can break this. So if you are in that more parental, scolding, one-up place and you're super frustrated that your partner doesn't do much and is defiant and childish and immature, you're going to have to drop the scolding and control. This is like loving on life's terms. You deal with, "I have a problem with what my partner's doing. How can I address that from a same-as, peer-to-peer, friendly place?" Which is so hard.
James: Incredibly difficult.
Catherine: But that's what it calls for. That's the way out of the cycle.
James: It's useful to approach that very difficult problem not as "what can I do that will get my partner to change," but "what can I do that will get me to change?" Because the problem really needs to be framed as, "I have a problem with my parental energy." This is my problem. Okay. My problem is my parental energy. I'm going to deal with my problem. And I very much hope that when I deal with my problem, it helps my partner deal with their problem. But that cannot be the focus, because if my focus is on changing my partner, I will fail. It will be clear as day what I'm up to—that I'm not really trying to deal with myself, I'm only trying to deal with my partner.
Catherine: And your problem is not that you have a partner that won't change. Your problem is that you're letting what your partner will or won't do determine whether you're okay in life.
James: That's part of it. When two people live together in a home, it is not useful to look at one of them individually, and that is what we always do. If I'm living with a partner, then my temptation is just look at all the things the partner's doing wrong, but that is only half the picture. If there are problems in the relationship, then we need to look at them on a relational level. The part that I can change is my input into the system. And so it makes really good sense when I'm calm and settled to focus all of my attention on the part of the system that I control. It's so easy for me to grossly underestimate my power to change a relational system by changing my input into that system. These systems are interconnected and dynamic, and there is so much connection between what I do and what my partner does, how I show up and how my partner shows up. I sometimes tell couples, "Each of you has 80% of the power in the relationship, if you're willing to grab it."
Catherine: Oh, interesting.
James: If you're willing to grab it, because most of what both of you are doing is just a response to the other. If either one of you is willing to really take this step and step into courage and change, then you have so much more power than you think you have. It's insanely difficult. The relationship is constructed to keep us stuck where we are. It's really hard to push against. But to the extent that I'm willing to do that and do the hard thing and say the hard thing and be the better person... it's difficult. It's easy to grow if my partner grows first, and it's hard to grow if I'm the one taking the step.
Catherine: And Schnarch says whether your partner grows or refuses to grow, it pressures your growth.
James: It does, absolutely.
Catherine: So that's the other thing that can help when you're feeling frustrated with a partner that's not growing, is to look at it as, "Nothing is going wrong. The pressure is going up on me to deal with my situation." And it's going up whether my partner... it is much more inviting if your partner will change first. There is something really nice about that. Although sometimes it puts a lot of pressure on you.
James: It does put a lot of pressure.
Catherine: I think it always puts a lot of pressure on you. It's more of an invitation. There is something that I prefer about that pressure. But either way, the pressure system works. And so if your partner's staying stuck, there's a therapist I know that says if you're not getting anywhere, you're not doing anything.
James: I think there's some truth to that. I used to really chafe at this idea that you need to focus on your side of the street or your own growth. But if I can zoom out and look at the system as a whole, then that makes obvious sense to me. I care about the performance of the system as a whole. I care about my relational life as a whole. And there are things I can do about that. Worrying about my partner's contribution to it is not the thing to do; it's a distraction from the real work. There's always work for me to do. For me specifically, I am very hesitant to talk straight to my partner. I talk a big game about this here recording this podcast, but for me to actually say the words to my wife doesn't happen very often. It does occasionally, but I'm incredibly careful about it. So, some of my growth is in becoming more open and revealing to my wife about how I see her and what I want, and even more so, doing that really well. I'm in a double bind where I have a tendency to not say anything, and a tendency when I do say something to get really manipulative. And so it takes an insane amount of effort for me to say the thing and say it well and do it cleanly. It's really quite challenging, but that's the only way, because if I don't say it, then I'm hiding.
Catherine: Yeah.
James: But if I say it in a manipulative way, then I'm driving us backwards, not forward.
Catherine: This is making me think about when we were talking about parenting. You said that if you're not going to use basically coercion and threats to mold your kids, and you don't have unlimited time and energy, you're going to have to give your kids a lot of freedom. I think the same thing is true in a marriage. If you're not going to use coercion and threats and manipulation and guilt-tripping and all those things to maneuver your partner...
James: Maneuver. Okay. I like your word better.
Catherine: It has one less syllable.
James: I can't say manipulate. It's too hard.
Catherine: It's just like I'm trying to get you into position.
James: No, it's better. When I say manipulate, people don't know exactly... I think I'm going to start saying "maneuver." I like that.
Catherine: I like it. I feel like it's got less of a negative connotation to it. Okay, good for you. But if you're going to try to influence your partner but you're not going to pull dirty moves like coercion and guilt-tripping, you're going to have to—and this is back to just love on life's terms—you don't have control over much of what your partner does. You don't have a lot of control here. What you control is yourself. The rest you don't control. And you're going to have to give up the illusion that you do and just accept that your partner has a lot of freedom. It's not even you giving them a lot of freedom, as much as just stepping into reality. They have it. They always have. Whether they claim it or not is up to them, but your partner gets to choose whether they're honest with you. Your partner gets to choose whether they're kind to you. Your partner gets to choose all of these things. And so then you have to deal with what matters most to you, and you use your energy there and try to make a real case. I find all of this easier as a parent than in a partnership.
James: You're saying you find it easier as a parent than as a partner?
Catherine: I do.
James: I agree with that.
Catherine: I really do, for various reasons, including that I do see my children as very innocent, so that helps. But when I'm trying to get traction with kids that I don't coerce and control, then I'm left with making an honest case. So before we left for this trip, I wanted them to help with cleaning the house. So I just talked to them. I was like, "Here's the deal. I've got sessions all day. I know you are eager to go to this reunion and see your cousins, and I am able to leave as early in the morning as the house is clean." So, it's up to you whether you do it or not, but if you want to do some work today and clean the house while I'm working, we can leave first thing in the morning. If you don't, I'll get up and clean the house, and it'll take me a few hours. You know, they did a lot.
James: Did they really? They really jumped in and did it. So they were excited to come here, I'm guessing.
Catherine: It was something they wanted. They cared about it. I knew that. But it's not like manipulation because I'm just laying out reality. Like, here's how it is. I'm not going to make you do this.
James: There's a key point here in that you did not force them into rebellion. There was no emotional punishment attached to this.
Catherine: No. It was just a real choice. I was willing to do the cleaning myself. It was stuff that I see as my own responsibility. I was willing to do it myself. That was fine. But I was just being real with them about, "Here's my schedule. I'm not going to be doing it Friday. I would be doing it Saturday, and that's when we're going to leave."
James: The thing that would've driven them into rebellion would've been if you had laid on some sort of guilt or some sort of emotional pressure, some sort of punishment. Then they would've been faced with the idea of, "Do we yield our sovereignty and do this thing, or do we hold onto our sovereignty and refuse to do it?" You would've been forcing them to choose between their integrity and compliance.
Catherine: This kind of thing plays out between partners all the time where, one of the stereotypical ways is that the wife says, "Well, I can't get in the mood for sex unless the house is clean." And then the husband does a bunch of cleaning, but there's this undertone of pressure, and "I'm going to be mad at you if I do all this work and then you don't do what I want." You can engage in a way that's really, you're just dealing with reality and you're doing things in hopes of an outcome, but you're being clean about it. Or you can do something that looks quite similar, add on a layer of guilt-tripping and coercion, and that's when people come to you and say, "I tried that, it didn't work," but they had that layer of emotional punishment added in there. It actually is making me think about when one of our mentors says, "You take the 'eff you' out of it when you have something to say to someone." That's part of digesting what you have to say. That's exactly what you're talking about. So you take out that poison dart of emotional punishment and you lay the rest out as, "Here's reality."
James: The emotional content matters more than the words.
Catherine: Right.
James: We just pretend that the words are what matters, but words are important, but they carry much less weight in human communication than the nonverbal portion. Especially to a child, the child is mapping your emotional state so closely.
Catherine: Between family members, spouses map each other's emotional state all the time, which is how you can angrily wash a dish at somebody or something like that. When you live with someone, the words are a small part of what's being communicated, very small. It's your footsteps and your eye contact and the tension in your shoulders.
James: And it's how you... they really are mapping "How do I feel about you?" "How do you feel about me?"
Catherine: Right.
James: And we're good at mapping that stuff.
Catherine: So I think another part of helping your kids with parental blindness is to just let your kids see more of your mind. One of the daily ways to do this, I think, is instead of offering, "Because I said so" as a reason for why they need to do something, just tell them the real reason. If it's worth doing, there's a real reason that it matters to you. Sometimes you're under time pressure or something, you can't do that. But a lot of the time, like if a kid wants to know why they have to eat broccoli or something, you could have a real conversation with them about it. Now, my kids don't find the broccoli arguments compelling at all.
James: They're running an n=2 experiment on this.
Catherine: The results speak for themselves so far. But I think that kind of thing, it's just being willing to reveal your mind. But you kind of drop the authority aspect to do that. Instead of playing off of, "You have to because I'm an authority," then you let your kids see, "I have reasons that make sense for a lot of the stuff that matters to me."
James: That only works in the context of speaking from a friendly, open place.
Catherine: And I think this is the same thing that you can do with a spouse, is offer them the real reasons.
James: Sometimes I call this the third way, where I'm going to reveal my mind to you and you're going to know I'm on your side. Usually when I reveal my mind to you, I'm going to give you a piece of my mind. It's like, "I am so not on your side right now and let me tell you what I think about you," as opposed to, "You and I are on the same team." But I can't be telling you that. If I tell you we're on the same team, we're probably not right now.
Catherine: Depends how you do it.
James: Well, it depends whether we really are or not. My wife knows when I'm on her team and when I'm not on her team. She knows. So can I settle myself down enough to be on my wife's team and reveal my mind to her at the same time? It's hard work, but that is the way, and it's the same with parenting as well.
Catherine: And that often means instead of just making a critique, you are pushing yourself. It's not just, "Here's everything in my mind." You want to be thoughtful about what you reveal. So if you can process it beyond the level of critique and get to, "This is really hard for me because I really wanted to have a nice evening with you, and I am having a hard time figuring out what I can do to give us a shot at that with how things are going right now."
James: It could just even be so much as, "I am disappointed that things didn't turn out the way I was hoping they would turn out." Once again, if I say that and I'm blaming you in my mind while I say that, you're going to know.
Catherine: That's the toughest thing about all of this.
James: It's so hard. There's no magic incantation. There are no magical words. It is not a thing to be solved by words. It's a thing to be solved by becoming a better person.
Catherine: Because if you're going to show your kids or your partner what's in your mind, you have to deal with what's in your mind and clean it up.
James: We cannot cover it up. We have to fix it. We have to change it.
Catherine: And so it could be revealing that you're having an emotional reaction and taking responsibility for it, like, "Yes, I'm really losing it here. I'm going to take myself somewhere else and calm myself down because I am not in a place to talk to you right now and be fair to you."
James: And the way you presented that is 100% your responsibility, not your partner's. This is the problem we get into when we talk about our feelings. We're not so much sharing our feelings as saying, "My feelings are your fault." That's mostly what we're doing, which isn't true. It's quite delicate to be able to share intense emotions without blaming the other person for them.
Catherine: Ted Lasso shows several of the characters get clearer on their parents. You see it with Rebecca and her mother, and her father too, actually. You see it with Ted.
James: Ted's mom comes and visits.
Catherine: Oh yeah. And he talks about his dad several times. But yeah, his mom comes and visits. And then you see with... who's the one who starts out really stuck up? The hotshot?
James: Oh, him and his dad. With Jamie.
Catherine: Jamie, yeah. You see him work through some stuff with his father. He gets clear that his dad doesn't care about him and never will. There's actually quite a lot of adult child-parent dynamics in that show, and it's such an emotionally intelligent show.
James: The show is beautiful because the parent-child dynamics all add up. They make sense and hang together. The parents that show up for the characters are the parents they would actually have. Like Jamie, for example, that is the father he would have.
Catherine: And then Jamie starts to make sense when you see that.
James: And it helps you drive so much compassion for Jamie, for all the characters. Even Ted with his dad and his mom. You can see where his neuroticism comes from and you can see where his soft side comes from. Even the way his mom bakes for him is a way to show love, which is the same thing he does for Rebecca.
Catherine: Oh, I didn't think about that.
James: His mom abandons him and leaves the casserole in the oven for him. It's the same thing he does for Rebecca. He bakes for her.
Catherine: So parents really matter. The ones you have, the one you are.
James: It does matter. It's so important. The beautiful thing about this is it's never really too late. For me as a father, I wish I had started sooner, but it's not too late. There are still so many things I can offer my adult children. The most precious thing I can offer them is, "Let me tell you the things I know about myself that I actively hid from you when you were younger and that are now impacting you." And I can just allow them to see me more clearly, which will then help them see themselves more clearly.
Catherine: And you've seen the impact of that even on your adult kids?
James: I have. And one son in particular has had this unbelievable transformation over the last two years, and that came after I had several deep conversations and wrote several deep letters that were exactly what I just said, where "I'm going to tell you about the things that are true about me that I tried to keep you from seeing when you were younger."
Catherine: I think it's never too late. People daydream about a deathbed reconciliation with their parents.
James: They hope to the very end, to the very last breath, they do.
Catherine: People always hope that their parents will one day come closer, tell the truth, care more. And at any age, if your parent's willing to take off the mask, care more, be more honest, I think it always matters immensely. It's so powerful. It's such a gift, to whatever degree that you'll do it.
James: I treasure my relationship with my adult children so much. It's such a beautiful thing to have. It's this unusual thing where this person is an adult—independent, smart, capable—and yet they have this very special, unique, and beautiful relationship with me. So it's really quite something to have that and to really treasure that. It's really sad that so many parents don't have solid relationships with their adult children. But that happens if my relationship with my children when they were young was built around my ability to control them. Obviously, my adult children will generally not allow that.
Catherine: Right.
James: And so then the relationship disappears.
Catherine: That's actually another compelling reason to take this on. If you want to have a lifelong relationship with your kids, you have to at some point figure out how to do a relationship that's not based on hierarchy, control, or authority. None of those will work. And to whatever degree they do work, they'll be hampering your adult child's functioning and happiness and their own relationships. It's just a loss. So, the sooner you take this on, the better, because this is the only way you get to be close to your kids throughout your life. And given how hard parenting is, it seems to me that it would be worth a lot to have the reward of a long-time, warm relationship with adult kids that no longer depend on you, but still care about you.
James: Should we end there?
Catherine: Yeah.
James: Thank you, Catherine.
Catherine: Thanks.
