Episode 388: What Drives You

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No need to whine, it's Whiny Palooza!

Have some wine and join us on the Whiny Palooza podcast with Rebecca Greene.

Welcome to the Whiny Palooza podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Greene. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Greene for the Whiny Floozy Podcast, and I am very excited because I get to talk to talk to the wonderful Ellen Schutt. Ellen, thank you so much for being here with me today.

It is my pleasure and honor. Thank you for having me.

Well, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about this wonderful lady. Ellen is an LMSW and an ACSW. You're going to have to tell me what the A is. Should I ask you that now?

You know, it's, it's just one of those letters, one of the letters you acquired. Acquired a long, long time ago before actually social workers were licensed in Michigan.

Okay, interesting.

Right.

So she is a— Ellen is a renowned practitioner, consultant, and educator with a lifelong commitment to empowering individuals, families, and teams. As the president of Empowerment Partners of Bingham Farms, Ellen has transformed countless lives through her work as a clinical social worker, providing psychotherapy to individuals, couples, and families. She has also been an adjunct lecturer at the University of Michigan School of Social Work since 1998, sharing her expertise with future generations of professionals. Through her groundbreaking workbook, What Drives You? How Our Family Dynamics Shape the People We Become, she invites readers to embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery, unlocking the secrets of their past to shape a brighter future. I mean, that is like so fascinating to me. I'm so excited to talk about this. What a great title. I mean, thank you. Let's talk about it. I mean, what inspired you to even write this workbook? Let's start there. Okay.

So the workbook is a culmination of my teaching young social workers at the University of Michigan. And one of the classes that I regularly taught was about how to work with families. And I just somehow came up with this metaphor for a family of a car. And that this— it is how I— my goal was always to help my students who were graduate students in social work to know more about themselves in order to help them to help others to know more about themselves. So We— I developed the metaphor of a car. It's something that I would actually act out in class with them. And I use a car to represent a family, and every family member has their seat in the car, and every family member has their role to play in the car. And the car is a very powerful system that we become who we are in that seat and with that role and in relation to who else is in our metaphorical car with us as we grow up. Much of it is not intentional. It's just how our brains and bodies develop within the context of that system. And putting it in terms of a car just somehow makes it so easy to understand that, um, where you, where you think you sat in your car growing up. And it doesn't have to be actually the real car. It's where you see yourself as sitting in your car growing up has made such tremendous impact on who we think we are, what we think we deserve, what we think we don't deserve. Yes. So helping people understand that much of why you got to be the way you are is because of this learned experience in the car as we were growing up. And some people, we learn very positive things about ourselves in the cars, and we also learn negative things about ourselves in the car. Not that anybody was specifically trying to tell us that, but it was our perception of what went on in the car that really has the most impact.

Well, I love that. I've never pictured it that way. So I'm picturing, you know, my family in the car. I mean, can you give us some examples of how where we sit then impacts our identity? Like, how does that happen?

Yes. So I like to talk about myself, and I, I'm, I'm unique in that I'm an only child, but I'm gonna—

I feel— I always feel bad for only children.

Uh, yeah, I do too. I feel sad for only children. Um, I, I, I think that being an only child is, is a very unique position because there's nobody else other than those two parents to put input into the car. And in my case, It just so happened that both of my parents were also only children, so it's not like I had close aunts and uncles or cousins that we would spend time with. It was really just the three of us. And, um, when I, when I talk to people about their cars, I ask them who they think was in the driver's seat of their car. When they, when they grew up. And sometimes people will say, you know, my mom or my dad. And then I'll ask them if the other parent was also in the car and where they sat. And it's very interesting answers. People would say, oh, my dad would think he was, but it was definitely my mom. Or yeah, my mom was in the driver's seat. Oh, and where was your dad? Um, he was maybe in the trunk.

Oh gosh.

But think how much that tells you about how disconnected this person felt from their father. You know, the father wasn't even in the car. Um, and then I ask people, where was your seat? And so I like to talk about seats in the car. That I produced. So I grew up as an only child in my car. I was the one in the back seat. My father was in the driver's seat. My mother was in the passenger seat, even though my father only did what my mother told him to. But her, her position was in the passenger seat. And my role in the car was to be the little girl in the back seat by herself. In my day, little, little girls were to be seen and not heard. And whenever I tell that to people around my age, they all just shake their heads, as you are. And so my job in this car was just to be a good little girl, not cause any fuss in the back seat, you know, only participate when invited. And so that's where I grew up. And in my family, the rule was not only that I should be back there and not cause any trouble, but that I should also look perfect while I was sitting back there. That—

oh boy.

Now, not all families have a rule like that, but my family had a rule like that. I never saw my mother. My mother, I never saw her in her sleeping clothes ever, in a bathrobe. Back then we didn't really have lounge clothes like we do now, but I never saw her. She was up and fully dressed and made up before she emerged from her bedroom. Okay.

Wow. Wow.

And there was so much focus in my family on how you looked, really. So my job was to be this little girl who was always just as perfect as I could be, which in my opinion, was never anything near like they wanted me to be, um, in the back seat of this car. So I learned lots of things in the back seat. One was not to need anything. One was not to have a voice. One was to always make sure that you look perfect, always. And then there were many, many wonderful things. I learned to be independent. I learned to depend on myself. I learned to get what I needed and get what I wanted in other ways than by doing that. I learned to be tremendously, um, motivated to, um, to have what I wanted. And I knew at a very young age that I did not like this sitting by myself. Heart. I, I knew that. So from very little, I was a gatherer of people. Um, I now am a grandmother. I have 9 grandchildren.

Wow.

I have, I have 3 children, and, um, all together we have some steps in there.

Um, so you have a big family now.

I have a big family, and every week I happen to be very lucky that my adult children live near me in the same— and every week we have dinner, 16 of us.

That's amazing.

Always we make dinner at my house every week because this— I, I, I just have to have this. This was—

yes, you needed it.

Oh my gosh, it was— I don't mind the work, I don't mind anything, I just want them all to bring them together. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I understand.

All of that is from my car. It's interesting.

Yeah, it is.

Because I grew up in this empty car. Oh, right. It was a quiet, lonely car.

I wanted, I wanted a full house too. So I understand. Okay.

Yes, I did.

So, you know, let's talk about brain development. How, how does our family dynamic influence our brain development?

That? So our little brains develop, um, a tremendous amount. It's the primary brain growth from 0 to 6, okay? And even before we're born, our brains begin making sense of what's going on in the world around us by the voices that we hear, by how we're taken care of in the womb. And we know that within the first 24 hours, a baby will automatically turn towards its mother's voice. It knows that voice. And the, what I call the one Human Design flaw is that it is during the time from age 0 to age 6 that we develop our beliefs about ourself and about others. And so We don't have our adult thinking yet to really make sense of things, and so the only way we can make sense of things is that they— is that it be about us. So if our primary caregiver— this is attachment theory— is not there for us enough of the time, we— our brain learns that we can't depend on people. And, and we keep that learning until something intentionally changes it. So I learned in the back seat of that car that I just really could never be pretty enough. I didn't understand that I was supposed to be— that the fact that I wasn't allowed to sort of talk and that nobody paid attention to me, I took that as being about me. And so I, as I grew up and even as an adult, it, it has been a task of mine always to get people to see me, to get— it's why I'm a therapist. It's why I taught in college for 20 years. It gave me a platform to speak so that somebody would want to hear what I had to say, right?

Yeah.

And so I've spent my entire adult life undoing many of the negative beliefs about myself that I developed in childhood. And that's what I do for a living all day, is help people identify these beliefs, understand that they were just little kids when they learned to think like this. Yeah. And know that as adults, we have much more resources. We see things differently. You don't have to still live by those same old rules. And it does. Therapy changes brain wirement, brain wiring. Yes. Any close relationship changes brain wiring. It does, right?

Yes. Totally agree. Absolutely. I mean, the research shows it, right? And, and, and the repetition of it and, you know, Exactly. So as people use your workbook, can you talk to them about what kind of benefits they'll get from it? I mean, you've already mentioned some of them.

Yes. So the, the benefits that I believe this offers us is the ability to look at ourselves and our siblings in a different light.

Okay.

And most importantly, the main goal of this workbook is to help people develop compassion for themselves, compassion for why they do what they do. They learned it, but they learned it before they made the same sense of it that they would make now. They've learned it. We all learned it. And so I believe that if every child in this world was seen and heard and said yes to and said no to appropriately, Yeah, the world would be a very, very different place. Yeah.

I mean, all we want is to feel important, right?

Yes.

That's—

we want to feel like we matter.

Yes.

And that was, that was my leading thing when I, when I grew up, was that I just didn't matter. I didn't fit the bill that they wanted in a lot of ways. They had no appreciation of this person who I've become. And I feel sad for them. I mean, my compassion now sort of goes that way too. I feel so sad for my mom that she just needed to try to keep me perfect in so many ways and that she couldn't just appreciate me. So that's what I think this book does, is it gives us tools to understand what it is really that we're thinking and how we develop that thought pattern within the context of the car. And so of course we would make those choices, of course we would do that if that's what we thought about ourselves. And being an adult is an opportunity to get to really learn the truth of who we are. The goods, the bads, the imperfectness, the, the struggles, the challenges, and the love and the gratefulness and all these things that are so often locked up in us. First, we have to love ourselves. And I know that sounds so trite, but when I think about that little girl in the back seat, I just have such compassion for her. It must have been so hard for her then. You know what I mean? Um, so that, that's, that's my view of the book. I feel like it literally has the power to just make things so, so different.

I—

this world that we live in today, that's all based on people needing to either have power or anger or something, all because nobody ever really saw that child.

It's so interesting. I'm sitting here thinking, I wonder how my brother and I would paint, would paint, would draw the car. Like, what would we say? And it would be interesting to see if siblings would do it differently. Like, would it be the same or would it be different?

Well, I'd love to, to talk about your car, but I just wanna start it off by a story.

Yeah. Oh.

My, my middle daughter— I have a girl, a girl, and a boy, and they're all in their 40s. And my middle daughter is also a social worker like me. My oldest daughter is a— she's also a therapist, but she's legally a dietitian.

Okay.

A nutritionist. Um, so this social work daughter also taught at the University of Michigan when I was teaching there, and she used to invite me into some of her classes to teach the car. And I would talk about the car that she grew up in. And yeah, we had a minivan at that time, and it, it just plays into this story. So I actually do talk about the actual car, not the metaphorical car. So I say, when we were growing up, her dad sat in the driver's seat and I sat in the other front bucket seat in the minivan, totally turned around to the back of the car. Oh, okay. Because in the back of the car, behind the driver's seat, was my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter's role in the car was to be the high-achieving one.

Yeah.

Okay. Which is just so common for oldest children.

Yeah.

My middle daughter's role in the car was to be the, the one who just always took care of herself. She was born a week apart from the little boy next door, and our families were very, very close. She was always with him. She was always— she just was one of those kids that she didn't really need much from us. She was just a— she came out on a schedule, and she— it was just easy. And her brother, the youngest, in the back seat being annoying. His role in the car was to be the annoying one. Right now, if you would come and see our families at dinner, you would see all that. It's— yeah, just right there. So I'm telling that story, I'm telling her class this story about where they all sat, and after I tell them the story, she says, Mom, that's not how I think of the car. And I said, it's not? How do you think of the car? She said, well, I think Dad was in the front and you were in the front, and I think behind Dad was my sister. And but I don't think I was behind you. I think my little brother was behind you and I was in the back seat by myself with no one paying attention to me. Ah, yes. Ah, that's exactly what I said. When she said this in the middle of class. She's a grown-up.

Okay.

I mean, it was my life's goal to never, ever, ever have a child that felt like I did.

Right.

And here is this child. So, yes, every child has a different view of the car. Every child.

Well, and it's, it's interesting, the whole middle child thing. And I'm not trying to go off on a tangent here, but, you know, my oldest son, is the overachiever that we're describing that I was. My middle daughter is so easy that you have to remember to give her attention. And then the youngest, like, demands attention. Exactly. It's just— it's like the same. It's kind of similar.

Exactly. Yes. In some families, being the— I know this is going to sound funny. But in some families, being the middle child is often the best place to be because you have very overbearing, very controlling parents. They're likely to do that with the oldest one.

Yeah.

And, and then there's the middle one and they've sort of lost some of their energy. But then the next one comes along who demands attention. And the little one, the middle one often survives without any of the ill effects from like over-controlling parents, you know?

So it's just— The little one is like, you are not going to control me.

Exactly. That's exactly right.

Yep. It's true. Oh my gosh. My family is such a typical 3-child family. Let me tell you.

How old are your kids?

So Max is 17, Ella is 15, and Lily just turned 12 this week.

Oh, wow. Oh, you've almost all teenagers.

Oh, yes. They, they keep me very busy and are my greatest teachers, as you know, as exactly based on your experiences. Yes, right.

That is for sure.

Uh, I mean, what, what are you finding the most common challenges people are facing from, you know, like family of origin issues?

Uh, so the common challenges are these belief systems that we have about ourselves that are not necessarily— first of all, for most people, they're not conscious. They just act them out.

All. Yeah.

Um, But the beliefs are really— the negative beliefs can be really, really debilitating. To come from a family and not really feel like you're lovable.

Mm.

Come from a dysfunctional family and feel like you're broken. To come from a family where you feel like nothing I did was ever good enough. And no matter what I did, it just never made anybody happy. Anxious families, perfect families. I described 4 types of families in this book.

Yeah.

And what we're looking for really are real families. Families. And I'm in the car with my grandchildren and I, and I just, they are just so different. The kids get in the car and they start talking and they tell you exactly what's going on and how they feel. I had a terrible day today, and there's room in the car to hear that, and there's not room in the car to hit each other. And you know what I mean? It's just a much more caring, compassionate environment, and children are taught that, um, that they're— that they matter, that they're important, that what they say matters. And, um, they're encouraged to be the most that they could be. They're not channeled into something the parent wants them to be, even if it doesn't fit anymore. Um, yeah, those are what I call high-functioning parents who can just live with how it is. And when it isn't right, you have a, a good disciplinary method to say that's not gonna happen. Here, and you learn how to give consequences when they're 2 years old, and you keep things from sort of going crazy in any direction. And give— I always say that children are diamonds in the rough, and it is their parents that have to see that diamond in them.

Yes. Oh, I've never thought of it that way. That's beautiful.

Yes.

I also like to think that each generation does better. I would like to think I would, I mean, not always, but I would like to think that we learn from our parents, they learn from us, et cetera, et cetera.

Yes. So a big thing for me, I work in a specific community. I live in the Detroit area. I'm Jewish. I work primarily in the Jewish community here, and I work a lot with what we call intergenerational trauma. Mm. That if you are part of an oppressed minority group that has been oppressed for centuries, you're going to have a level of angst and anxiety inside you that literally, I mean, we know epigenetically is in our genes at this point.

Yes. Yes.

And so many of the adults that I work with who are parents are trying so bravely to change some negative intergenerational patterns that were done to them that, that might not have even looked so bad, but just don't work anymore. Um, so I talk to people all the time about, do you know how big this is that your children are, are not going to have that as part of their experience, whatever the that may be. So I do believe that our society is growing and becoming more mature and, um, more egalitarian and much more, um, allowing people to fully be themselves and, and less restrictive into you have to go this path or this path or this path. And trying to be influential rather than controlling.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've said, you've said so many important things that I want to touch on intergenerational trauma.

Okay.

Because as, as a Jewish mother myself, okay. What I notice is that I am very huge on safety. Very, very safety is really important to me. And I explain that to my kids. I explain, you know, why I have the rules and, and worries that I do. And I will tell you, I don't want to generalize, but my non-Jewish friends don't seem to have the safety concerns that I have. And I know where it stems from just based on my education, you know, just based on our, us being therapists. I know where it stems from.

Yes.

But safety is a huge generational thing for me. And not, not purposely, but I like, I know where it comes from.

You were taught it.

Yeah.

And you were, and people are taught it just by, you know, a parent just saying, take your sweater. You might, you might be chilly. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but there's just this constant belief in our head. Well, something might not be okay. You know, and I, I live my whole life just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I have to say that at this, at this age, I am better. But good is hard for me. 6 and a half years ago, my, my son and one of my daughters and my son had babies within 24 hours of each other. They were next-door neighbors at the hospital.

Wow.

Rooms next door to each other. And so you can— we were— my one daughter went into labor on a Friday morning, and my daughter-in-law went into labor that night at midnight.

Oh, that's crazy.

It was crazy. It was, it was just blessings upon blessings upon blessings, and I was a wreck. Yeah, because you just can't believe that it could be, you know, we say poo poo poo, good.

Yes, can't believe it. Yes.

And so, yeah, and those twin cousins, we call them, are 6 and a half years old now.

Yes. Oh my gosh, are they close?

Oh, they're very close. They're very close, and they fight like siblings.

You know, of course they do, right?

But yes, the generational trauma I don't think ever leaves you. Um, there's a lot of stuff that is just built into us. My, my husband, it was not raised Jewish. He is Jewish now, but he was not raised Jewish. But his body just takes the world now in a very different way than my body does. Yes, it's just incredible. And as Jewish as he is, he just does not have those genes.

Oh, right. Isn't that interesting?

He wasn't marinated in it. He wasn't.

That's great.

Yes, he has privilege. He was marinated that you can just do anything you want. You're, you're a white guy, you know, there's no limits on you. And it's so interesting how, how different that makes you. You take the world in differently in that way.

Yeah, uh-huh, definitely. I definitely see that with people. It's interesting to see the backgrounds and how people were raised and what the culture is and all the differences. You and I are just fascinated by that Absolutely.

Oh my gosh. And it's so much a part of who people are, even, even when they're not conscious of it.

You know, I think there's a lot of misconceptions. I think people don't understand how their family dynamics influence them.

Yes.

Can you talk about that?

Oh, yes, absolutely. People like referring to their parents And people have ideas about how their parents should be or shouldn't be. And, um, and some people have a very hard time understanding that our parents, all of our parents, only had the best intentions. I really, truly believe that. Um, and, and, but even with our parents' best intentions, we make interpretations out of things that they don't intend. I never intended for my daughter to feel like she was by herself in the back seat, and I didn't, I didn't know it. Yeah, I didn't know it. I, I, and I, and we were very close, but I didn't know it. And so, um, I, I think that it's really just a process of of truly accepting what you learned and deciding, I don't think I agree with that anymore, and I'm gonna try to, try to act differently. I'm gonna try to encourage myself that I do deserve stuff, that I can go for that promotion, I can um, I can ask for what I need. I mean, I'm so bad at that. My daughters are me without the fear.

Oh, I love that.

It's crazy. It's just amazing how this was just baked into me, and they are so me, but they're not scared. They go get what they want.

That's awesome.

I know, right?

Well, I mean, I think that what I try to teach people is that their brain is not always telling them the truth.

Oh, for sure.

And I think we tell ourselves messages that aren't accurate, and people don't necessarily realize that.

That's for sure. I use the metaphor of the hamster wheel. I talk about, about us having a hamster wheel up here, and sometimes when we get an emotion, It just goes right up and we climb up into that hamster wheel and we just spin around in it.

Yes.

Ruminating, worrying.

Ruminating is perfect. Yeah, right.

We just, we just are stuck there. And most of us are not conscious when we're stuck there.

Right.

That's what I help people with, is learning how to be conscious. Because what most people come in with The problem they come in with, we don't solve. All we do is help them to not spend their time up there ruminating about it, because anything we think while we're in that hamster wheel is never going to help us. It's just— it's— and so I try to help people just become more aware of, wow, okay, I've been up there for about an hour now. I think I'm gonna climb out.

Yes.

And when, and when we climb out, we can take a breath. We can just— I have this little exercise I do with people where I ask someone to close their eyes just for a second and take a breath in and a breath out and to look around. And I say to them, is there any danger right now, this second? Is there any danger And no one has ever said anything to me other than no. And I say to them, that moment is available for you whenever you remember to get it for yourself.

Oh yes.

Um, because I find that I, I used to say whenever you want it, but it's not whenever you want it, because sometimes the hamster wheel really keeps us, keeps us from getting it. So whenever you decide you want to have that moment, you can have it. It's—

we, we all need, we all need lots of those moments.

Oh my goodness, many times a day.

Yes, yes, yes.

As a therapist, I can admit to you that sometimes my clients say something and I realize I didn't hear the last sentence. Yeah, because I was up here. Okay. Yes, I do that very quickly, indiscriminately. I, I, I move my body, I uncross my legs, I cross them the other way. I just blink for a second, I take a breath, and then I'm back there, back in the moment, centered. So we all do it. We all get lost in our thoughts. It's impossible not to.

Yes, right.

But we, we all can have a choice.

Well, and I'm wondering, you probably have so many success stories, but anything sticking out to you of someone who had family dynamic things that Yes, cause them issues, and then you move them to a more successful place.

So I'm going to tell you about my husband. He's the youngest of 5 boys.

Wow.

Yes, and he's 7 years younger than the next oldest. It was like 2 years, 2 years, 2 years, 2 years, 7 years, and then him.

Whoa, I can imagine that stuff.

Yes. So His role in his family— I mean, we figured this out together— was to be the baby, and all four of his older brothers and his parents were invested in keeping him the baby. His name is Paul, and his brothers called him Wog.

What?

I said, why did they call you Wog? He said, for pollywog.

Oh gosh.

So a pollywog is like an unformed frog.

Yep. Yeah.

So they still call him wog. Okay. Now, the first time I met him, his, his family lives in another state, and I had known him for a while. We were very much together before I met him. No, before I ever saw him in the context of these brothers. And he, he just emerged in that context as someone who I, I had never seen before. He's also a therapist. I had never seen this person. I mean, they just are physical and they just like literally push him on the ground and sit on top of him. And everything he says, they just dismiss. And it, it's just unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And so together, he helped me so much work on this. He was able to understand how each one of his brothers had their way of being one up on him. Oh yes, always. Well, now there's 3 brothers left. 2 of them have passed away. One of them is the second oldest, and one of them is the next one above my husband.

Okay.

And the one who's the second oldest used to be tremendous bully, um, but he and my husband now are very, very close. But the one who was just above my husband, still, whenever we're together, he'll say things like 'Okay, I got the day planned,' and, and he's got these plans for what we're all going to do all day. Okay, and those plans have nothing to do with what my husband and I want to do. And, and, but that— it, it's just, it was always, we just do what he says. And my husband now says, 'Well, actually, Ellen and I are going to do something different. You're welcome to join us.' Oh, wow.

That's progress.

But literally, when he does this, it, it just, it just disrupts. He, it's not out of a place of, it's hard work to do it for sure. Yeah. So those, that's, those are what I call success stories.

Yes.

That I did use my voice. I did ask for what I need. I mean, asking for what you need is one, what you need is one of the biggest relational problems. People either demand what they need or they don't ask for what they need, and then they feel victimized, you know, and helping people either develop a voice or helping people learn how to, how to use their voice to really get what they want, not just make people feel bad. Um, all those things are left over from our cars.

Now I'm always going to think about a family in a car. That is just— oh, I've never thought about it that way. It's so helpful.

Oh my gosh, really helpful to ask the children where they sat.

And I'm gonna ask them. I'm scared.

My husband, when I asked him, well, where do you think you sat in your car? He says, we had this big old station wagon, and in those days the back seat in the station wagon faced out. And he said, that was my seat, and I would just sit there in the back waving at people in the cars next to me. And if you would meet him today, you would see it within 10 seconds of adorable.

That's just him.

Yes, he can't help it.

That's adorable. Oh my gosh. What would my high achieving son say? My parents expect too much from me. Uh-huh.

Right. But he's really the one that expects from him.

Oh, he, he says he sent me a, you know, like a funny, he likes to send me funny memes.

Yeah.

And it was like, did my mom forget how to parent my third? The third child.

That's what my girls would say about my son. Mom, what— where were you? Like, it all works out.

Yep, they're all very unique. Okay, so speaking of unique, so somebody is struggling to accept their unique selves.

Yes.

What, what advice do you have for them?

My advice is, um, is to help them to understand that we are all unique. When, when, when one person feels unique, they feel like everybody else is all together in this one group and they're— yes, yes, we all have our uniqueness, we all have our challenges. Every human has our challenges. We all have things that we're good at, things that we're not so good at, and we all have our uniqueness. And sometimes we live in an environment that doesn't recognize our uniqueness. If you think about traditional classrooms and how we just channeled people into sitting at these desks and how, how the world missed out on such tremendous energy and creativity. Um, and that's, that's how I talk to people, is my job as a therapist is to find the uniqueness and to, and to like it and to, and to see it as something special.

And beautiful.

Yes. And I know from my own life of being in therapy that if not for therapists seeing my specialness, I would never have known. Never, never. Because it wasn't something that was recognized in my circles. It just wasn't. Being this deep thinker, being very insightful, being, being sensitive, being an empath, you know, that just wasn't Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing. Well, well, you know, I'm going to ask my children where they sit in the car tonight. That's going to be the conversation of the evening.

Okay, good. If you ask them where their seat is, ask each of them where they think their sibling's seat is.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm on it. I have homework. That's awesome. That's great. That's really great. So tell everybody where to find you and your fabulous workbook.

Yes. So this is my workbook. It is What Drives You. It literally is something you could read in a couple of days. It has questions. It's very powerful, but it's easy to read. This is not a scholastic book. I like the picture of the people in this car.

Oh my gosh.

Yes.

You know, now I understand why it's called What Drives You. Exactly.

And the book is illustrated, and there's workbook pages. The book is available on Amazon. It's called What Drives You. It is $14.99, I think. And, um, all of my, my contact information is on here. I do have a website. I was also doing podcasts for a while, and then I just sort of went out of the podcast world temporarily. Um, but you can look me up at ellenyshute.com and get all the information you need. Feel free to send me an email, anything.

Well, I mean, I have loved talking to you. You are so fun and so insightful. Thank you. I loved learning from you today. This was wonderful.

Thank you so much for having me. I truly enjoyed it.

This is Rebecca Greene, and I want to remind everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving.

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I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

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