Seeing Through Family Dynamics

My brain isn't in a place where I can trust my thoughts. So I'm gonna go get my brain in a place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts, where I'm out of my trauma so that I can think clearly. Because if I'm acting out of the trauma, I will recreate it over and over and over and over again.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Yeah, so wow, that was quite an opening Q&A.

Yeah, Art of Accomplishment is on. Yeah, holy, holy crap.

Yeah, people went there.

Oh my gosh, unlike any start of anything I've been in, there's amazing how vulnerable it got, how quickly it was. It was really cool.

Yeah, I remember like last year, the first, the first Q&A after the first week of work went really, really deep and we were all blown away. But this one was just like the orientation, like you're going through a bunch of PowerPoint slides, and it's like, oh man, I can bet half of the people here are probably bored to tears. And then like, before you know it, a couple questions come through and it's straight to the core, straight to it.

Yeah, yeah. Sarah was saying to me, she said, oh, I was scared at a minute, like last year we got lightning in a bottle and it might not happen again. She goes, that fear is completely gone. She's just like, I— first thing she said when I call, she goes, I miss AOA calls. This is great.

Yeah.

It was awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, so something I wanted to talk about today is something that I saw today in this call. So many of the things that we do in this work, so many of the times that I see you work with people, it often boils down to some form of family dynamic. And we've talked about this before, that we have these projections that we carry from our childhood, people who are caretakers or parents or family members, but also projections of society. Projections of money. But in particular, these— there's something to this concept of family dynamics that just continually comes up. And I've noticed it come up in my life a lot, in my relationships. I've projected my mother onto basically anybody I've ever dated, uh, to varying levels of effect. I've projected my mother and my father onto like the management in the company, in my company, and in friendship groups. And so a lot of times when we do this work, there'll be a group It's often in a group setting. And I know that you size those groups such that family dynamics can come up and then be worked with. So yeah, let's, let's talk about that a little bit. Tell me a little bit about what family dynamics means to you and what makes this important.

Something that's most interesting about it is like family dynamics are cool in the fact that they allow you to see why things are coming up. And they're also cool in the fact that it gives you one way to heal patterns that are no longer useful to you in your life. That's what makes them cool. It's also, if you look at Freud's work or a lot of the early psychotherapy work, it was all very focused on that early family stuff. And there's a lot of ways to have significant transformation without ever really going into any of it. So I say that at the front end just to say that it's like, there's lots of avenues of transformation. There's lots of ways of healing. There's no one way. And so this is a cool thing to talk about, but if anybody's listening thinking that this is the only way, like, please let that go in your head. But the way I think about it, the, the best explanation I've ever heard is that our brains, you know, there's many brain waves that we're like hanging out in. And so there's delta and alpha and beta and theta. And theta is kind of the, the brainwave that we get into right before we go to sleep or right as we're waking up. It is the brainwaves that happens when you're under hypnosis, and it's the brainwave that you're in basically from like 0 to 7, 8 years old for the majority of it. And it's really a way that you're being programmed, just like you would under hypnosis. And so as kids are young, they're in these theta brainwaves. It's why that like fairies are real for them and It's why that, you know, they're in a magical reality. It's kind of that dream state between that dream and awake space. In the American Indian culture, it was represented by dragonflies, which I just think is a beautiful, you know, imagery of like what that is. And anyhow, and so there we're being programmed in that young age, and we're in that brain state that tells us what reality is. And so This is love. Love is what we experience mom and dad doing and how we experience their interactions with us. This is what money looks like. This is what power looks like. This is what nature looks like. So we get taught all this whole way of looking at the world in those young times. So if you're 3 years old and you're scared and you run to mom and she's like, "It's time for you to be strong," that's what you're gonna learn. If the mom pulls you up and holds you, that's what you're gonna learn. If the mom slaps you and says, "Why do you always bug me?" That's what you're gonna learn. And that's how you're gonna react to fear. So that's the way I think about it. It's just like that 0 to 8 years old particularly is very much your programming. I think it continues. I think we learn things, traumatic events can teach us and unteach us things. So there's other experiences that we can have. Therefore, that's reality. And if we stay in that path, whatever we learned in that timeframe, Even though it might be painful, it's very easy to stay there. It's when you move out of that path that it becomes challenging. And the other thing about this, which is ancillary but I think cool to think about, is that most of the transformation techniques that I've seen be very useful tap into the theta brainwaves. Like, oftentimes when people say finish a Groundbreakers, the week-long course that we do very rarely, people are like, I can't remember anything that happened. I don't know what happened. And when you and I did ESF together, people were like, what the hell happened? It's been 3 days, but I don't know what happened.

Yeah, I can still hardly remember 95% of what happened there.

Yeah, and so it's very much, it's 'cause you're in that theta space, and that's where you're doing the reprogramming.

Yeah, yeah, so to bring some examples into this, on the Q&A today, somebody had just made a comment in a, in a session with you, and they were like, "Well, I'm enduring the storm," or, "I'm weathering the storm." And you were like, "Wait a minute, in that there's still an enduring going on." And like, you can see the whole fractal family dynamic show up of like, okay, I was taught that life is a storm to be weathered. And you could see how that might create a pattern where, you know, if I'm carrying that belief, then I will be attracted to people who are also experiencing life as something to be endured. And then we find this thing where we're enduring it together. And that could be one way. If my mother was that way to me or was that way with life and taught that to me, then I might find myself in a relationship. And even if I'm resisting that, if I'm like, I don't want to live the life that feels like enduring, then I'll find myself living a life where I'm resisting the perspective that it's being endured and finding others in my life to feel that resistance with.

Yes, so sometimes you're finding people who are seeing the world the way you see it, but you're also finding people to prove that the way you see it is right. So if you're somebody who believes that the world should be endured, then you're probably also finding somebody who makes you endure life. So you'll find people who both become the thing to be endured and the people who you can say, "Oh, isn't it true we have to endure life together?" That seems to be the pattern that you recreate over and over again.

Right, right. So yeah, let's, let's talk about a couple of other like example patterns just to make sure we're not in one particular zone here. Um, like another thing that might happen is that you might have, somebody might grow up with a father who's somewhat emotionally absent. They're always working, but they're providing for the family and sort of their role is creating, creating the space in the home, but they're not as present maybe because they can't be. And then that person grows up and then they find themselves doing the same thing or also just expecting the same of others.

Yeah. Or marrying that.

Marrying that.

Yeah. Yeah. So they might become the role of the father or they might marry the role of the father and expect that that's just as normal.

Yeah. Maybe, maybe another example to paint like a third example into this picture is, you know, a mother who has a hard time accepting the way that, uh, the way that her child is different from her or following a different path. And struggles with that. So then the child grows up with a belief that— and then dating people who have a hard time accepting parts of them and feeling judged.

And there's an intermediate step there, right? Which is, mom doesn't fully approve of me, therefore the voice in the head doesn't fully approve of me, therefore I date other people who don't fully approve of me. That's all part of that scheme. And, and those are all We can find one of those for all of us. We can all find one of those. But there's also ones that almost pertain to almost everybody, not everybody, but almost everybody. And I'll just give a really simple example of that. As a kid, one of the things that you learn is that there is a mother and a father, and they're authority figures, and they have control over your life. And so most people walk around the world with a boss. Who's an authority figure who has control over their life. Not everybody, but most people walk around the world with that. Now, I'll often tell clients, you don't have a boss. You have a client. You have a customer. Unfortunately, you're not diversified. You don't have lots of customers. You only have one. But you have a customer. And they're not your boss. They're not your authority figure. They're somebody who's a customer, and you can lose them, or you can get another customer. Or another client, whatever you, however you wanna look at it, just even the perspective that you have a boss who has some sort of control over your life is a projection of a family dynamic typically.

Yeah, and that points to something that this family dynamic thing is, which is when you were growing up, it was real. You know, your parents had authority over you. You didn't have certain kinds of power that you do as an adult, but the perception continues Yes. And then that's the way that the lives that we lived in our family become the lives that we recreate in, you know, subtler and subtler ways as we mature and develop.

That's right. That's exactly how it works.

What are some examples of how this has shown up in the workplace? You just had the boss projection. How about like within a team? What are some ways that perhaps some people's family dynamic issues interact with one another? What are some examples that you've seen?

One of the coolest things— you just said in the team. One of the tricks that I will teach to executives is that if they aren't the authority figure in the room that everybody's reporting to, then a lot of these dynamics diminish. So one really cool way to stop those kind of projections that we're about to speak to is to make the team report to itself. Meaning every time you have a team meeting, somebody else is responsible for holding accountability. Meaning that the team, when somebody fails, it's not the boss who says, hey, what happened? It's the team that says, hey, what happened? Like, to really make the accountability to the team, which is really where the accountability lies. It's not to a boss. And so that's just a cool way that you can create a structure inside of an organization that changes a lot of this. Kind of dynamics, which is just a drag on an organization. The drag can be so many ways. It can be, I project onto my boss that I need to please them. I project onto my boss that they're never happy with me. I project onto my boss that their opinion matters more than my opinion or that they have more authority than me. One of my favorites is I project onto my boss that they're a bad authority figure and I need to rebel against them. One of the more destructive ones that I see a lot of is, you know, if I grew up with, say, a father or mother who I always disappointed, I will recreate ways to disappoint my boss. And you see that happening all the time, where people are creating ways to disappoint their boss, but they can't see that they're recreating it. So all of that happens. And then the boss also has projections back, like, I'm responsible for these people. No. That the boss is not responsible for, that everybody's responsible for themselves. Or these people, I can't depend on them. I have to do it all myself. Or I can't let them down. Or nobody can do it except me. Or I'm necessary. That's one of my favorite ones that bosses have, is that— and you see this especially at, like, not exactly the top tier of an organization, a big organization, but that level below that. When I work with executives that are not quite at the C-level, oftentimes those people, the big thing that they have to do to get to the next level is learn that their job is to become unnecessary, that they aren't necessary anymore, that they can create a structure that basically makes them irrelevant. And when they do that, boy, they just take it to the whole next level. It's when they think that they need to be needed or that they offer something special that the team can't offer without them, that they hold themselves back. And all of those are projections and family dynamics as well.

Yeah, absolutely. And that kind of points to something that you said earlier about how family dynamics is an interesting way to think about things and it can be useful, but don't get too hung up on it. Because I can imagine some of these, some of these dynamics that come up, like issues with authority, might not actually have come from your family. It might have just come from your school. It might have come from a mixture of those things.

Yeah. Like there is a tremendous amount of men in Silicon Valley who are in the top tier of their game who got bullied pretty heavily in the— you know, these are a lot of the billionaires, a lot of the, like, biggest players in Silicon Valley are men that don't have a, like, inherent large social intelligence that they got fully bullied. And so they learned that there is such a thing as power, and it's real, and that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and they need to be in the place where they have the power, and they're incredibly smart and they can do it. And so, that also in itself is a projection. Obviously, it's not the only people who are in the top tier of Silicon Valley, but there's quite a few of them.

Right, yeah, it seems like a common cluster characteristic.

Yeah.

So this then also brings us back to what can we do about this? If we're using this kind of framework to start recognizing that a lot of the patterns that are occurring in our lives are being recreated from our family of origin, and then kind of spreading out from that to our community, or whether we were bullied or whether how teachers treated us, how church treated us, various things. And we're still recreating these patterns. Let's talk about like an example of a team or a personal relationship or a group of friends. When people's stuff comes up, they start to slot into these roles where one person will have a set of projections onto the group, and then that will just happen to click into place when someone else has their set of projections, and so on around the group.

I would say it doesn't click into place unless they meet, uh, the right opposite or right corollary projection. Yeah, yeah. It's like they find themselves and they're like, Click. And this happens in almost every marriage I've ever seen. I think every marriage I've ever seen where their traumas overlap in this perfect way where they can play the opposite roles with each other, where they can therefore learn to grow and transform because of the relationship.

Mm-hmm, yeah, it's like people find each other based on the complementary surface area of their traumas. And that's the thing that makes a team.

Yeah, yeah, and the best part is that when they get into blame, Like, one of the main moments when I'm working with a couple where something gets undone is when they realize, oh, it's perfectly matched. There's no one to blame here. I'm holding my side, you're holding your side. That's like a great moment when people see that. It loosens the whole thing.

Yeah, and then the dynamic can change and loosen. The relationship can grow or develop, or they can move in separate directions, whichever is right.

If they move in separate directions without healing it, they will most likely create another relationship that's very similar.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's interesting. There's almost this way that you could frame like our family dynamics or our projections, our family projections as something that holds us back in the world. But it's also exactly the kind of thing that is like heat-seeking, seeking us into exactly the kind of situation we need to resolve those dynamics and grow, growth through them in connection with people.

Yeah, the reason I said don't make too much of the family dynamics is because I don't find knowing this doesn't help you heal it very much. A little bit it does. But let's take this exact same metaphor, but we'll talk about it on an emotional level. Like, instead of saying family dynamics, we'll say what's happening emotionally. In your family, you were taught certain emotions, you couldn't have them. And your body needs to get to homeostasis, just like if you were taught you couldn't pee you'd be walking around trying to find a place to pee. So your body's trying to get the emotions to move through so that you can get back to homeostasis. And so what the subconscious is doing is it's recreating patterns where that emotion can come up so that it can be felt. And as soon as you fully allow that emotion, you fully surrender into that emotion and let it move all the way through you, then you'll stop recreating the pattern. On an emotional level. So the intellect understanding it is useful. It loosens it up emotionally. Feeling the thing that the pattern has taught you not to feel will very much loosen it up. That'll change it pretty dramatically. And the other thing that helps on a nervous system level is that when you are in that pattern, there is a felt sense that's different. Right? And so, if you think about like the time that you got most angry for no good reason, or most— felt most out of control for no good reason, even though you might identify the reason, you realize, "Oh, this doesn't make logical sense that I'd be this upset." That's the sensation that you have, not the upsetness, but the sensation that's carrying that upsetness, that's how you know you're in your trauma. And so there's a felt sense of going, oh, I'm in my trauma, I'm in the pattern here, I know this. And then that's where the rational brain can be really helpful and say, oh, when I'm in my pattern, I just can't believe my thoughts right now, I can't believe this. And I remember in my journey, there was this really wonderful moment where somebody came to me, it was in a business thing, and they were like, hey, what do you, what should we do? And I said, I can't trust anything I think right now. My brain isn't in a place where I can trust my thoughts. So I'm gonna go get my brain in a place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts, where I'm out of my trauma so that I can think clearly and we can get to— because if I'm acting out of the trauma, I will recreate it over and over and over and over again.

Yeah, it seems like a great way for the rational intellectual mind to be able to support the emotion in its process. And then on the opposite side of that, I can see that The thing you just said, like, my emotion that just came up is way more than it should be. I could also see that being a rationalization for, well, I should downregulate that emotion and not have it because it's clearly too much for this situation. Somebody just looked at me a certain way and I'm all upset. But another way to frame that is this is exactly the amount of emotion that my system needs. And this thing brought up a bunch of bottled up, pent up stuff that maybe I don't wanna bring up right now in this environment and attack people with, but it's a pointer to the fact that it's there.

Yes. And it wants to be felt and it wants to be processed and it wants to be loved. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's beautifully said, better than I could have said it.

So like keeping on the topic of family dynamics, there's another thing that I can kind of see that occurs is that people will go through a story of life. This is maybe one of the ways that this can be a trap. Is that they will say, "Oh, I just keep dating my father. I keep dating my mother." And then that's a story and becomes a belief about themselves. And then there becomes sort of a learned helplessness within that. And it seems like the emotional stuff we were just talking about is a way through that.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't know. It seems like there's something useful about recognizing these things and be like, "Oh, I can see what's happening here because that might be one breadcrumb back to," the thing for me to work with, the emotion to be felt. And it also might only be a breadcrumb back to the thing next to it. And it might actually not have been a family thing.

So you can learn this stuff intellectually. You can learn this stuff, oh, this is a family pattern, and then it cannot change. And then you can start the belief system of, oh, I can't change this. And then you can start the belief system of, oh, I'm always gonna be in this. Or you can notice the pattern and you can have the belief system of this is gonna be really tough to change. And then you can say, oh, look, I've changed it a little bit, but I'm not making progress quick enough. All of those things are more of the projections from your early childhood.

Right, the belief that I'm not quick enough.

That emotions are hard, transformation is difficult. I'm not quick enough, I can't do it, I'm helpless, mom was helpless. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So it's just—

I'll always be controlled by my emotions.

Yeah, yeah. It's just pi— or I can't trust emotions. Emotions can't be trusted. All of these things are learned from somewhere in the childhood. And so what often happens is somebody sees the first thing that they've been working on, and they stick right there on that thing, but they don't see that it's held in place by a whole bunch of other ones. Yeah. And so as 1 or 2 start falling apart, it's easier that the rest start collapsing.

So then if somebody's listened to this episode and they're starting to look for family dynamics in their life from this perspective of this might be interesting, it might be helpful, it might be a trap, not to take it too heavily, and they start to see something, I mean, what's the next step for somebody who starts to recognize, oh wow, I've had this pattern all of my life, I can see how it comes from some form of these dynamics, and how can I start to see people as an individual unique human that they are and not as the people that I was raised by.

Yeah, so the next step to take outside of learning to recognize it, and the best way to do that is when you're triggered, to know that you're in it then and to feel through it, which is another great step. The other thing that's like a couple really cool tricks to play with are, first, if you find yourself in an emotionally triggered space, stop everything you're doing, feel the emotion, and without any intellect, just feel that emotion, trace it back to the first time you ever felt it. And that will really teach you where this thing came from. So that's a really useful trick. And sometimes just feeling where it came from, and this happens oftentimes with like things you don't expect, like you might be triggered over a boss and you find out it has something to do with a babysitter, or you might be triggered over money and you find it has something to do with a dad. So that's a cool trick. And then another really cool trick as far as like next steps of kind of dilapidating the programming is to remember that all of these programs came for a good reason. You know, like if you were striving your whole life to find your dad's love, and so you're programmed to strive for love, well, that's your job as a kid is to make sure you're loved by your dad or you might not survive. It's like, it's just instinct and it's, And it's beautiful. And so can you love these patterns? Can you respect them for what they tried to give you? Can you just help them find new ways of doing it more effectively rather than move into, "You shouldn't be doing this," "Why I keep doing that?" "What's the problem here?" 'Cause that's just more of the pattern. So learning what the pattern has done for you, how it's served you, that its intent, even if it's mean and vicious, its intent is to take care of you and to see that and to honor that also is really effective in allowing the patterns to become more useful and more effective and more functional.

Yeah, it's almost like honoring your path to have been perfect as it is and your behavior to have developed according to very logical environmental shapings. Makes it easier to step forward and say that my future behavior is also going to make perfect sense in some regard, and I don't need to be self-critical, and I can just feel what's true for me.

Yeah, I was just dealing with a person recently, someone, old friend who I love dearly, and just going through the heat. And at some point he looked up and he said to me, he said, you know, I realized that it doesn't matter who would have been put into my position, this is what would have happened to them. Like, he saw that it wasn't personal to him, that the, the life, the patterns, all of it wasn't personal to him, that anybody put into that situation would have ended up that way. You could just— it was so much relief in that.

So do you have any integration questions for us about family dynamics?

Oh, yeah. The first one would be, what's the pattern in your life that you most feel holds you back? And then the second question would be, what's the way that you try to avoid it that's actually keeping it in place? What's the way that you're trying to avoid that pattern that actually holds the pattern in place, would be the other way to say that. And then the third question is, What is it about this pattern that's been serving you, has tried to serve you, and, and has served you in the past?

Yeah, great questions. Thank you, Joe.

Thank you, Brett.

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