So Maybe Family Isn't Your #1 Value. Let's Talk About Why. (with Therapist Vienna Pharaon)

Hello. Hello. This is. I want to be shocking at the beginning of this episode of Becoming you. And it's very relevant because what this podcast is about, which is family. And every single time I think about family, I think about the to me famous poem by Philip Larkin. And I'm not going to use the F word. We've debated it. So I'm just going to say F instead of the F word. And here, here's the poem. Okay. Just to set the tone for our podcast today. They F you up, your mum and D. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you. But they were effed up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats. Man, hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself. All right, we're talking about family.

For this episode of Becoming youg because I just had an op ed in the Wall Street Journal about the American views of family and to open it up and make it so much better. And Richard, I am so lucky today to have an incredible guest here with us, an absolute expert on family who's going to, we're going to Explore why family Fs you up and you have your own line of poetry. Go ahead before I introduce you.

Not mine, but the extension. I always say, as I said to you before, right around the holidays, the Ram Dass quot of if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family. And it's so perfect.

I love this. If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family. We're talking all about family. I'm Susie Welch. Welcome to Becoming youg. If you're listening for the first time, I'm out of my mind with excitement that you're with us. And if you're a returning listener. Hi. Welcome back. Big hug. Let's get going. I'm joined today by Vienna Ferrin, who's actually an incredibly highly respected family therapist, one of the most sought after therapists for families and couples in the New York area and beyond. Thank you for joining us. So happy that you're here to enlighten us. It's very hard for me. I mean, I report the data and I say, look, here's the data about families and how we actually feel about our families. And of course, the follow up question is why And I'm like, I'm just the, I'm just the messenger here. So that's where we're going with this. But tell us a little bit about you before we get going, how you came to be a family therapist and what you do with your. With your incredible expertise.

I think most people who are in the line of therapy come to this work whether we know it or not, because we're trying to resolve what's unresolved in our own lives. And I think initially I didn't realize that. I think my narrative was I'm just the person that everybody comes to for advice and I'm just good at looking at relationships. But the reality of it is is my parents went through a nine year divorce when I was in first grade.

That's some kind of record, isn't it?

It was a record. It was actually a record in the state of New Jersey at the time. I think it's been beaten now, but it was a record at the time. And, you know, complicated and la. And so, so hard. It was, it was. But for a really long time I pretended like it wasn't. I'm an only child, so I was the only kiddo in the family system that was experiencing all of the stuff. And I was the observer, the viewer, the witnesser of all the things the victim. Ah, it was a lot. It was a lot. And you know, I. My survival strategy, my protective mechanism was to fly under the radar, get good at the things that I did and pretend like I was fine and I was unaffected. Under that was a real desire to understand what makes some relationships work and what makes some relationships not work. In that I went and became a marriage and family therapist. I have a book called the Origins of How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live in Love. And I talk about our childhoods and obviously we know it's what shapes the way that we relate to love and communication and conflict and boundaries and navigating all of those things. But that we accrue wounds through our childhood.

I'm sorry, I keep on. As you're speaking, I'm thinking to myself, they eff you up. Your mom and dad. They don't mean to, but they do. I mean, this is exactly. Sometimes the parents with the best intentions leave these wounds that we. That we perpetuate forward. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons of all time was they showed sort of two people looking through a window and the sign above a large auditorium says convention of Functional Families in the hall is completely empty. So are there Successful functional families.

I think there are some successful functional families, but I think what it requires is that the adults, the people in the family system, are really willing to look at themselves. And I think it really requires responsibility and ownership and accountability. We are not perfect, but to be in relationship. Well, Right. Means I can say I'm sorry, or I can say I really see that I hurt you in this way.

I think, actually, probably true of you and probably true of everybody listening to this is that one of the gigantic motivators and engines of my life has been trying to rewrite the script to create a healthy family. Sure. It's our life's work.

That is.

I agree. Okay, I agree.

But. And so I think to your point, to discern between an entire family system being functional versus getting to a place where you can have functional relationships individually with people, I think that's worth discerning because I do think that we can get to a place where we have. Where we get to a place of acceptance, where there's grace, where there's compassion, but there's also the ownership, accountability, and.

Responsibility, where you can actually be going home for a holiday and not have a sick feeling in your stomach.

Yes.

Right. All right, so let's talk about this, because it's sort of related to my data I was gathering. We look at our data from the values bridge, which you took, by the way. Thank you. We have 100,000 data points. It's a gigantic data set about values, probably the largest of its kind. And we. We were looking at all the data. Of course, we have 16 different values to look at. And as Thanksgiving was approaching, I thought, gee, I wonder what the scoop is with family. And so we have a wonderful team of data scientists, and I asked them to cut the data every which way but sideways. And I went into it thinking, you know, the American narrative is that family comes first. And in fact, it's not just the American narrative. If, you know, you went to Italy, they would say family. And what culture in the world says family doesn't matter? I mean, all around the world. I mean, in many Asian cultures, we talk about. I mean, it's almost sort of a universal. Family comes first. And lo and behold, what does the data show? Okay, we took a look at it, and one of the things that we looked at was a data point is like, what percentage of the population across. We looked at it by generation, but it was pretty similar across all generations. What percentage has family as their number one value? And the number was 11%. Okay. Were you surprised when you saw that.

Data point, I'm more surprised that you find it across generations.

Okay.

I think, you know, you talk a lot about eudaimonia on the show. I've heard you discuss that. And I think what I have seen is sort of what. How I've understood it when you describe it, right. Is this like checking in with oneself of like, what does self care look like?

It is self care feels good.

What feels good? Is it good for me? Does it align with me to go and spend time with people who activate me, who trigger me, who don't respect my boundaries, who whatever, fill in the blank? And so I think when we look at it from that angle, the people who are asking themselves, will this enhance my day or will it make my day worse? Will it make me feel good or will it make me feel horrible? Is it going to be something that rewounds me or is it going to be a peaceful, easeful experience?

Here's the thing, Vienna, is that when I was coming up and along, you had those questions, but you went and saw your family anyway. Right. And you still claim family came first. Right. But I think generationally, eudaimonia, which is the value of self care, personal flourishing, what feels good to you is a top value. A top five values for 62% of respondents. 62%. Okay, so I think what's happening is there's an interplay between values, of course. And so eudaimonia has risen.

Yes.

And therefore family centrism, people are saying less, I think less frequently, I'm going to do it, even if it makes me feel bad, I'm not going to do that. Only 11% rank family number one. All right, now then we say, okay, how many people have family in their top five values? We call those core values. And you would think, oh, yeah, well, probably it's in the top values for the majority of people, surely, right? No. 48%.

You have to remember that the folks who are valuing eudaimonia are in a family, right?

Yes, correct.

And so those folks who are now experiencing their children, prioritizing their self care and telling them, mom, dad, I don't like that you did this, or I'm not coming home, or I'm gonna spend it with friends or I'm gonna go do this instead, they're experiencing that. And I wonder if that's something that actually then impacts the other generation, saying, well, I don't have a great relationship with my children, or, you know, they're not prioritizing me, so why would I prioritize them? Or Know, if we're, you know, there's a lot of narratives that I think have come up and in the world of social media and us on our phones and everybody's a therapist online and has all of the lingo and terms. Right. It's like you hear people talking about our friends are our family, or, you know, our chosen family, or you hear all of this about how you should be setting a boundary with a parent or what, you know, should you be estranged or not? Or this and that. Right. It's like there's everywhere you look, you're seeing that. And I think that feeds into a lot of the separation and divide that that is happening now. There's absolutely dynamics where estrangement makes sense. Yes, should be there, of course. But I think there's a lot more of the prioritizing of what makes me feel good. And I'm gonna override maybe the narrative I was given. Family matters most never, you know, but.

What I'm fascinated about by what you're saying is that the older generations, which you would not expect to have this data presentation, are reacting to the younger generation saying to them, I'm not prioritizing it. And really, as a myself, if my kids said to me, family's just not that important, started expressing that. I think that the only reaction, you can't force your kids to want to have family as a priority. You have no choice but then to deprioritize in your life. And I actually have friends whose kids did that. They basically said, we're not coming home for Thanksgiving. We're all going to be with our chosen family or whatever. And the parents, who were very, very used to appear to me to be highly family centric, went on Thanksgiving and they took a safari. They actually deprioritized family. They said, what can we do? You know, you can't make your kids value family. So I think you're right. There may be. What's going on here is a chain reaction.

I think there is a chain reaction. You know, I know that it is heartbreaking for parents. I know. You know, there's. There is so much that parents tend to sacrifice. There's so much that is given in those early years. And I think a lot of people, not everyone, but. But a lot of people go into having children for loads of reasons. But I think one of them is that when we are older, right, here's what our relationship is going to look like.

Right.

There's a fantasy of what that adult child and parent relationship is going to be, whether it's best friends or, you know, we're going to get to do things together or you're going to care for me in some way similar to how I cared for you. And when that doesn't happen, you know, I think that there is a tremendous amount of disappointment, let down, sometimes resentment that builds.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I have a really good friend. And her son went into therapy and then for reasons that he never explained to her, he told her that he wanted an estrangement. And as you said online now there's all sorts of conversations about like chosen estrangement, where your child actually informs you, we're going to now be estranged, like officially estranged. And he did that to her without explanation. And.

After five years, it repaired itself because of a bunch of events that happened that drew them back together again involving health. But those five years were like a death for her.

Absolutely.

She was every day brokenhearted and devastated. But here's the thing. She had no ability or permission to tell him he dropped the wall. I mean, he and she had, you have no agency. You can't change that.

I think we don't know how to repair relationships and we don't know how to move through hard things that have been building up and have festered over the decades. Right. Because a lot of times what happens is, as I was saying before, we have this wounding that happens in our childhood.

Right.

And maybe we didn't feel prioritized by you as a parent, or maybe you made me feel worthless or like I was only valuable if I was perfect or I looked a certain way or I got straight A's, or I was the best athlete on the field, or you didn't like our differences and I never felt like I belonged in this family. And so when those things aren't addressed, which I find that the older generation really does struggle to acknowledge, a lot of times it moves into a victim space. Oh, I guess I was the terrible mother, wasn't I? Right. Like, it moves into this space where they become so self protective, which is what we do in relationship. That's not a relational answer.

Right.

We have to be able to move from self protection into relationships, interrelational protection. And that's what I see as a huge divide. I know you love the word bridge.

The bridge, right.

To having healthy relationships is for us to be able to tend to these things that we are sharing with each other, hear the feedback without it being something that plummets our worth or plummets us as an individual.

It all comes back to the Bridge, right. I mean, it took me a long time to come up with the name of the tool. I struggled and struggled and searched and searched. And finally it dawned on me. The whole point was to create a language where people could cross a bridge and talk to each other about values, differences. But the point you make is so. You make so many interesting points. But the point that I'm riveted by is that the reason why these people are sort of deprioritizing family is because they don't know how to fix broken relationships. There's just no skills. And maybe that's always been true, but now people are willing to, or people have more permission to come out and say that relationship's broken. It doesn't serve me.

It's celebrated more too.

Right.

You know, you get the approval from your peers and the folks around you who are saying, good for you. You should set that boundary. You're not in a hurtful, harmful relationship anymore. And I think what is atrophied or maybe was just never strong to begin with is emotional maturity.

Right?

We lack emotional maturity. And when that is not there, it's so hard to mend or bridge relationships. It's nearly impossible. We don't have the skill set to hold ourselves up in high enough regard to be able to hear somebody's feedback to us. And that's the thing that's disconnecting. Look, there's probably plenty of little paths we could go down on this topic, but this is the one that I see happening. And then when I talk to the parents of adult children, it's like there is a. There is a immaturity there where they can't quite put down that self protection to meet them there. So what happens is I don't want.

To be around you, right?

I don't want to be close to you. Walking in, you're gonna make the same comment that you've made for the last 30 some years.

So interesting. And yet people drive to their. Or fly to their family Thanksgivings. I've always often thought it would be really funny to sort of get snippets from planes, trains and automobiles of people talking to their families as they're going to a family reunion. Of all the things that they. And then yet we go and we sit and we sit down and we make it through that meal because there's some sort of larger societal narrative that that's what you do. And yet people are suffering and.

All these open wounds are everywhere.

Well, what you'll hear from people who are not going home for the holidays is. I feel embarrassed and ashamed when I tell people that I'm not going to see my family.

That's right.

And so it's. Let this sell it. You know, we might say, oh, good for you. Amazing. You're standing up for yourself. But there is still something that happens in the inner world that says, oh, gosh, this is. I don't have that.

I think it's so true. I think that people, even though it doesn't feel good, there is this mass migration on the holidays where people go because they cannot bear to say they're not going. You rather feel bad sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner as your. I had an uncle, he's no longer with us, who just. He had. Okay. It felt very personal that every single time he was with me, he said some terrible things. Like, I remember one time he said to me, right after I got into college, I was really proud I'd gotten into Harvard. And we were all gathered at Christmas, and he. Or it was Thanksgiving, and he said in front of the whole family, how does it feel to have gotten into Harvard just because you're a girl? Like, he was just. He was like an expert in finding, like, the button to push on me. And yet every year I showed up knowing he was going to be there. Because the alternative was to say to people, in a way, I have no family to go to. And so we do.

You're gonna sit lonely while. I mean, not when you were at that age scrolling Instagram, you know, but, like, sit alone and watch everybody else, you know, show that they're having these wonderful celebrations, which may or not have been true at the time, but still you're watching it.

We say family's important. That's the great big myth. I mean, that's why the data that I reported is kind of has a little gasp factor to it. And why there was a reaction to it is because, you know what? Isn't family much more important? But the reality is for almost Everybody, I mean, 90%. Right. Family, or as a top value, at least half, family's complicated. I mean, family is complicated. Family makes you feel more bad than good. And it's because, if I hear you correctly, is that. But we don't have the tools without good help to.

Repair the wounds. That's the really hard stuff. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting because people will come. We started the show off today with a poem and then a quote from Ram Dass, which was, I'll just remind the listener, if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family. And so you'll have you know, I have people in therapy with me for the entire year. And they are working those muscles and they are breaking those patterns and they are expressing themselves and they're setting the boundaries. They're navigating conflict with their partner differently and they're feeling good about themselves. And then they walk into their childhood home and mom raises her eyebrow. She doesn't even say anything. Mom raises her eyebrow. Or dad, you hear dad pop the top off of another beer. Or your brother makes a snide comment like your uncle used to. And all of a sudden your nervous system, which is constantly scanning for whether or not things are safe, dangerous, or life threatening, right? Says we've got a whole database here of information because we live together for a really long time and we have a big old history together. And I'm scanning and I know what that look means. You're judging me. You've got something to say about my outfit? You're gonna comment on my weight? Here we go again. Dad's about to get wasted and now I'm gonna feel awkward and my brother's an asshole and all the things. And now I need to go into a place of self protection. Happens like that. We know that, right? And so, boom. All the things that we have been practicing about how do I want to engage with people? I'm not going to get caught in this dysfunctional dance with you. And then all of a sudden we do because we don't feel safe there.

How do we get out of it?

Well, I think it's a lot to do with the checking in of. Can I. I know this is going to sound. This word, I think has more of a negative connotation to it, but can I tolerate this and still actually feel okay?

Right?

And I also think so. I'd say the checking in and where are my boundaries and what's going to work for me? Like, do I go and spend the night? Do I only go for the five hours? Like, what am I doing here? That's going to help me be okay in this situation. But I also think, and look, this is coming from a therapist, so take it for what you want to be. But I really think that the more healing that we do around our origin wounds book. I talk about the five origin wounds, which are worthiness, belonging, prioritization.

What are they?

What are the five origin worthiness, right? So I, when I sat down to write the book, I said, okay, like, can I put the human experience sort of in like these, these buckets?

Right.

These are my words. What I feel like we come up against in our family of origins is do I feel worthy?

Okay.

Right. Do I feel important, valued in this space?

You know, I want to say, as you're saying this, I just want to tell you what's going on in my mind. I. My regular listeners know that my brain has been wired by my granddaughter, who's now the absolute. When I talk to her, I talk to her every day, and I sing a song to her called the best part of my day is you, you, you. And now it has a second verse, which is the best part of the world is you, you. So as you say these, I'm going to be listening to whether or not any of these wounds are being visited on her, because if they are, I'm going to go. Go and get her. Okay. So.

Which.

Is what. Truly, I really mean that. What a gift to say. I'm willing to reflect on this and to see is there anything that I am doing that could ever make you feel this way?

All right. Because parents, you're too busy to do it, but maybe this is the role for grandparents. Because I'm.

I would encourage parents to do it also.

Right.

Grandparents get a little more.

I want to tell you right now that ship has sailed for me. So. Okay. All right. So worthiness. So worthiness, where you may have felt, made feel worthy. Okay.

It makes me feel valued here. And not because I am performing, not because I'm pleasing, not because I'm serving a role. A lot of times a worthiness wound will develop because of conditional love.

Right.

Okay.

So just. Just her sheer showing up. I'm sorry, I have to personalize this to the most important person in the world. Just what we're saying is. So the way to prevent a worthiness wound is that just they are made to feel worthy just for their being.

I love you.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I love you, too, by the way.

Right back at you. Belonging.

Okay.

Oftentimes this is where a child will feel like they either have to trade attachment for authenticity or authenticity. Authenticity for attachment. So I. Fitting in is not the same as belonging.

Okay.

Right. So belonging is. I get to be me here.

Okay.

Even though we might have differences, even though you might not understand all of my differences, but a lot of times family systems have the. The message of, this is how we do it.

Right.

If you want to be here with us, this is what we believe, what we think, how we feel. This is how we do it. And if you don't do it right, if you move away from that, then you are not part of us.

This is about, this is about the wound of not am I a part of. You're part of the family. No matter how who you are, your authenticity belongs in this family as well.

Okay, what's the third prioritization?

Okay.

Am I important to the most important people in my life or are my parents and caretakers chronically prioritizing other things over me?

I did that. I did it. I did it. I did it. All is forgiven. Thank God. All right.

But yeah, my hand can go up with that sometimes too.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, actually I heard somebody say, how often, how many times a day does your child see the back of your phone? I think that's a really. I didn't have to deal with that. There were no phones, thank God, when I was raising my kids. But I definitely think that's, that's how we show prioritization.

Okay, so what's are my eyes right.

Here with you right now?

Yeah. Trust. Right. So this will point to family secrets. Did you grow up with family secrets? Did you grow up with lies, deceit, infidelity, betrayal?

Right.

And sometimes we are the observer of it. Sometimes it happens to us. Right? Somebody who says they're gonna pick us up from school, and every day they miss it, or they're late, or they promise this, they make empty promises over and over again. When I talk about these things, I'm not talking about one offs. I'm not talking about a parent who has to prioritize a work thing every once in a while. I'm talking about chronic things that leave a person feeling like they can't trust the important people.

What's the fifth one?

This fifth one is safety.

Right.

And obviously when we're talking about the absence of safety, we are often talking about the presence of abuse. So it's a really touchy and tender one. But that my, my safety and my well being is not protected, acknowledged, respected in this space.

What a great framework to think about as a parent. I know I have many listeners who are, who are parents. And I mean, I think this is an incredible one because I think.

Look, when I was raising my four kids, I was just in survival mode. But that's no excuse. I mean, you can be thinking, am I in any way causing these wounds? And I think that just to get back to the general topic is that when we look at why not that many people prioritize family, it's because these wounds have to be healed. That's right. And if they're not Then we will will deprioritize the system that keeps re injuring us.

That's right. One of the things that I think that we can do to help ourselves is when we understand what our origin wounds are, we can do work around healing that. And what's so beautiful about healing work is that we don't actually need the person who put the wound there in the first place to be part of the healing process. Now that doesn't mean that it's gone. It doesn't mean that we'll never get re triggered. It doesn't mean that we're not going to get activated the moment that that eyebrow goes up again. But the charge around it lessens. And so one of the things that I really think is important is tending to these wounds. Because as we do that, our ability to accept who is in front of us or not.

Is to say, I see your limitations. You can't do what I would really.

Love for you to do, which is.

Acknowledge me and maybe apologize to me and all of this. But you have a limitation. You can't go there for whatever the reason, I don't need to understand it. And if I am choosing to accept that, then how do I want to interact with you? And now that might not be my favorite, best, most ideal version of what our relationship.

Wouldn't it have been great to have it a different way? But this is what it is.

Right? But I think that's if you don't want to never see your parents again or be estranged, which by the way, most people don't.

No. Right.

And what you're saying is it's in you. You don't need the other person to make this happen. Which I think is very freeing. It's like the other person doesn't have to even cooperate with me. This. You can get to a place where you understand the origin of the wounds and you can make an accommodation to it where you say you've got your limitations. It's not going to be the relationship I wanted, but it. But you can't re injure me.

Look, it requires grief. You know, that's a huge part of this work is to grieve both some of the things that we've lost along the way and then also the fantasy of what the relationship might be. And you know, that is so hard. But I would really encourage people to. We're gonna have listeners from both of us to both take the origin wound quiz and then take this values bridge quiz.

They should go together.

Yes, yes.

We'll make sure that we post Your.

Yeah, because I think that is one of those things of like, okay, what do I value? And then what's the work that needs to be done?

I love that it's in your hands. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm so personalizing it right now. When you said that thing about grief, I was so struck by it, because when my dad died, I cried so much more than you would expect, given our relationship. I cried and cried so much. And I wrote about it at one point in one of my newsletters, and my sister wrote me. She said, are you really crying about dad? And I said, I'm crying about the relationship I never had with him. And that's like, grief was so real.

So I just had a conversation with a client yesterday who's facing an aging, dying parent, and we talked about the grief of seeing them not get to a place of resolution, both within their own lives and then within the dynamic. Because I think we all hope that at least by the end of life that we will have resolved. Doesn't always work out, and it doesn't always. And it's very painful to experience it and to also bear witness to it.

I know. But the good news is.

Where family falls is a value to you doesn't have to come with pain. And I think that what we're seeing from the data is that the majority of Americans do not have family as a top value. And I understand so much better from speaking to you the reasons for that. But I also understand this other thing, which is that it doesn't have to be a source of pain, and it doesn't have to. You have. There are tools like understanding what the source of the wound is, tools like the values bridge, which help you understand what your actual values are. And together with that, even if family doesn't rise as a value for you, and maybe it isn't, and it can't, and it shouldn't, but at least it's something you can be at peace with, which is what the bridge is all about, walking us right over to a place where we're at peace. So I am so grateful to you, for I am now so much more in a place of understanding about this data, which kind of came to me as a shock, but now it's so much less, so. So thank you for explaining that. Now I have to go back and personally think about everything you said in terms of my own childhood wound, the ones I inflicted on my poor children. So, anyway, thank you so much for opening my eyes and the eyes of my listeners. I hope you come back again sometime and talk to us again. Tell us how we can get more of you, you, you.

My main channel on the socials is Instagram, so you can find me at mindfulmft, as in marriage, family therapy. Newyorkcouplescounseling.com viennafarren.com, and then we have that origin wound quiz. That's a free quiz very similar to what you have out in the world, too, which helps you identify your primary origin wound and then supports you. And then we've got something fun coming out in January, which is a wound workbooks that will really help people love through that healing process.

Thank you so much. Enjoy your family as much as you want and can. And that's true for all of us. Take good care to Susie. I'll see you next week.

Sa.

Sam.