The Trick to Finally Becoming an Adult

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Hard Things. If you have not listened to last Tuesday's episode 428, Family Roles, which part did you play?

Speaker 2 Please do. We are discussing today something that is, oh my God, it's just got to be one of the most important answers to why are we the way we are?

Speaker 2 And what that is, is family roles, meaning we live in ecosystems. We're born into ecosystems, every single one of us.

Speaker 2 Our family shape, size, all of it is different, but there's some kind of system we're born into.

Speaker 2 And in order to keep that system in homeostasis, everyone is assigned or takes on themselves a role, a family role. Okay.

Speaker 2 And that role, we play and play and play until we are so typecast that we become these one-dimensional human beings.

Speaker 2 And at some point in our life, we realize that in order to have full lives, we are going to have to step out of this character and fight our way to wholeness, to fullness, which is an incredibly complicated and difficult and harrowing journey.

Speaker 2 So can you, Amanda, briefly go through the six roles

Speaker 2 that have been identified, and then let's all discuss where we found ourselves

Speaker 2 in these roles.

Speaker 3 Okay, super quick. The first one's the hero, the perfect one.

Speaker 3 They're the ones who, through their accomplishments, are proving that despite anything that's going on internally, the family must be okay because look at this shiny, bright little trophy over here.

Speaker 3 Second one is scapegoat, black sheep, or rebel. This is the person who is the caller of bullshit in the family.
They are externalizing

Speaker 3 an angry, action-based way that

Speaker 3 they

Speaker 3 don't think that what's happening in the family is right. They are like the screw-up of the family.
They're deemed that. The third one is the rescuer, caretaker, enabler.

Speaker 3 These are the people who mediate all the tension in the family. They're trying to make peace desperately and

Speaker 3 they are trying to get rid of the tension that way. The fourth one is the lost child or the easy one.
They are trying to reduce stress by having no needs and becoming invisible.

Speaker 3 The fifth one is the mascot, comedian, or class clown. They are interrupting and deflecting stressful or volatile situations with humor and jokes and introducing levity.

Speaker 3 The sixth one is the identified patient or struggling one. This is the one that is showing up as the person who has the internal problem, the person who is struggling.

Speaker 3 And therefore, the family knows that this is the person with the problem. We are all going to try to get this person better.

Speaker 3 So they're internalizing the pain and stress of the family, but they're the ones who are showing as if they're uniquely affected by the family stress.

Speaker 3 And the family thinks that it isn't the family stress that's causing it. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So the idea now is

Speaker 2 if you can find yourself inside of one of those roles, and you know, they might not be black and white, you might be in a couple.

Speaker 2 It might, if you can find yourself in one of those roles, you might have a certain set of challenges as an adult because of that role that you've lived your whole life. Okay.

Speaker 3 And we talked about those last episodes. So go back and listen to those for sure.

Speaker 2 Right. And then there's this

Speaker 2 quest

Speaker 2 invitation in life, which is

Speaker 2 once you figure out what your role is and how you've become one-dimensional, you can open up this much larger human experience by kind of taking this journey that will allow you to break out of your role.

Speaker 2 Okay. To not be typecast anymore in your actual life.
And so I'm sort of thinking of that as like the hero's journey for each

Speaker 2 role, even though we all know Joseph Campbell, masculine, whatever.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying the hero's journey is the only way to describe a character arc, but there certainly is a character arc for each of these archetypes that might lead to bigger, fuller, more free life and better relationships where you are not just acting in one of your roles or parts, but you are bringing your full self to your family, to your relationships, to your work, to the world.

Speaker 2 So in order to play with that concept that we each maybe have a hero's journey that we can embark on, why don't we each just talk about where we found ourselves in those roles and anything that you were thinking when you did this research.

Speaker 2 Amanda, do you want to start?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 So I find myself in the hero,

Speaker 3 perfect one. role.

Speaker 3 And interestingly, I think these can morph over time, which is interesting. You can have more than one.
And then, over the course of the family, as the family adjusts, there is a new balance set.

Speaker 3 So, often, like if the identified patient gets well, sometimes the other shifts will happen, right?

Speaker 3 Because the other people will find themselves in different roles because they no longer need to offset the one or the other. So, I think that's interesting.
So, I think I had a little bit of

Speaker 3 a tiny bit of rebel

Speaker 3 after college period. But definitely it makes me feel one-dimensional and kind of sad.
And I can see how

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 by performing or accomplishing, I was trying to

Speaker 3 do a little bit of the easy one thing, like say like, don't worry about me. I'm fine.
Look, everything's fine over here. And also kind of bring the flowers to the family.

Speaker 3 So it's like everyone's super proud and feels okay about how everything's turning out to do the work of proving that we're okay as a family. And

Speaker 3 also,

Speaker 3 clearly, I

Speaker 3 internalized that that is the way that I prove that I'm okay

Speaker 3 and that that's the only indicia that is relevant to knowing whether you're okay. So, when I think about the years that I, you know,

Speaker 3 spent with my finger down my throat and miserable and

Speaker 3 so deeply depressed and sad, but didn't think that was an indicia of not being okay.

Speaker 3 That's very sad

Speaker 3 to me.

Speaker 2 Why did you not think that was an indicia of not being okay?

Speaker 3 Because being okay

Speaker 3 was an externally measured

Speaker 3 determination.

Speaker 3 Being okay were these things that happened on the outside.

Speaker 2 It didn't even matter. Your personal experience didn't even matter to anybody.

Speaker 3 It couldn't have mattered. How could it have,

Speaker 3 how could that have actually mattered

Speaker 3 if I kept doing that over and over and over again?

Speaker 3 Like, how could I have believed that it mattered that I wasn't miserable

Speaker 3 in my body, in myself,

Speaker 3 in the quietness of me in my room.

Speaker 3 To me, the evidence is that I believed that didn't matter

Speaker 3 because I continued to allow myself and perpetuate myself being miserable.

Speaker 3 If it mattered, I would have paused and been like, hey, we have a problem here. Right.

Speaker 3 But I didn't. Right.
Because it was the appearance of things.

Speaker 3 So when the world looked at you, your parents, the world, they saw perfection still. Do you think that throughout your life you've been going through more of an internalized battle?

Speaker 2 And does everything feel like the stage to you? Like, as long as you're playing your role on stage, it does not matter what happens behind stage, backstage. It doesn't matter who you are backstage.

Speaker 2 As long as you come, when you hit the stage and the light goes on you, you nail it, you deliver your lines, you're the star of the show.

Speaker 2 And if you go backstage and you're suffering and you're puking and you're whatever, that just doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 think

Speaker 3 that that is how I lived for

Speaker 3 up until a few years ago.

Speaker 2 I bet that's a universal experience for the heroes. It's heartbreaking.

Speaker 3 As I've been thinking about this, like a lot of

Speaker 3 real grief,

Speaker 3 even just when I think about

Speaker 3 the gross things that I put myself through when I think about the

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 3 and the years lost to that

Speaker 3 of having a very very

Speaker 3 one-dimensional experience

Speaker 3 not being able to connect with people

Speaker 3 and the grief of

Speaker 3 I was promised that if I was just perfect,

Speaker 3 things would work and things would be okay.

Speaker 3 And I have been,

Speaker 3 and things have not worked, and things are not okay.

Speaker 3 And that is an entirely

Speaker 3 different

Speaker 3 level of grief:

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 was

Speaker 3 part of a scheme

Speaker 3 for a long, long, long time.

Speaker 3 And also,

Speaker 3 if that doesn't make me okay,

Speaker 3 what does

Speaker 3 or does nothing?

Speaker 3 And so, anyway, it gets very existential. Yeah, but I think that that's what this is about.
Like, how are you reconciling this now?

Speaker 3 You said until you realized a couple of years ago, like, what is something or what are some things that you're doing that

Speaker 3 are trying to alleviate some of that grief? Are you working on? I'm just curious. Because I know I'm thinking about my sister, Beth,

Speaker 3 as being you in this role. And like, it's making me super emotional thinking about you and how just hard that must feel to be made to be perfect and need to be perfect.
And

Speaker 3 I just love you so much. Like, I want you to feel like you can be your full self, you know? Like, are you doing anything now?

Speaker 3 When I'm working in therapy, I'm working a lot of this through and with my kids because that is like,

Speaker 3 you know, that's the trigger in some ways.

Speaker 3 And I hope that I can give to them

Speaker 3 in a way that

Speaker 3 reparents me a little bit, but it certainly has every bit of my triggers up trying to, it is like a perfect storm trying to deal with it. I, I,

Speaker 3 I think I do have a lot of grieving to do for a lot of things. Like I just,

Speaker 3 I think for all of these things, like if you were the scapegoat and you were outcast by your family and vilified, if you were the one who had to like not be a kid because you were mediating between people, if you were the invisible one who never got seen and so you think you're not worthy of being seen, if you had to make everyone laugh, even when you should have been like being taken care of and avoided that, or if you were the struggling one who everyone told you you were broken and really your family was broken, there's a lot of grief in all of these.

Speaker 3 And I feel like maybe

Speaker 3 that's something that we like get to the work, right? We're like, well.

Speaker 3 Our identified thing we need to do in therapy is deal with our shame or whatever. But I don't think that we

Speaker 3 at the end of the day, it's like, it's sad.

Speaker 3 it's probably good to like

Speaker 3 mourn that for a little bit.

Speaker 3 But the good side of knowing that it's

Speaker 3 been

Speaker 3 a scam

Speaker 3 is knowing that it's a scam. Yeah,

Speaker 3 that like there's no way to be perfect, there's no way nobody is

Speaker 3 you can't love a hero.

Speaker 3 And so I want to be a fully human person

Speaker 3 and I don't want to make

Speaker 3 everyone close to me try

Speaker 3 to be perfect because then I won't be able to love them either.

Speaker 3 So I don't know. It's like very, very sad and also kind of very

Speaker 3 intriguing. Because it's like, that would be a very different way of trying to understand

Speaker 3 myself and the world.

Speaker 3 You can't love our hero. I can't stop thinking about that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if you're thinking about why and how we pick up our roles,

Speaker 2 they're all symbiotic, like they're all in reaction to each other, right? So

Speaker 2 I was not surprised to find out that when I took the quizzes and I didn't need to take the quiz because

Speaker 2 that's what my whole last two years have been about, but I was the struggling one. What are some other words? The identified patient.
Yep.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 for me,

Speaker 2 I think the therapy I've done over the last couple of years, which has been a wide range of things, has been mostly about this and generational trauma,

Speaker 2 but it hasn't been presented as this. Okay.
It's like this weird, windy, twisty, turny thing where I started to question

Speaker 2 my own identity about myself. Why do I do the things I do? Why am I the way that I am? And then over time, I started to realize, oh my God, wait, why do I have this story about myself?

Speaker 2 And is it even true?

Speaker 2 And so the story that I have had about myself forever since I, you know,

Speaker 2 everybody who listens to this pod knows the whole thing, but you know, I became bleem when I was 10 years old. And then

Speaker 2 I think my family found out when I was 12 or 13, and I was just in and out of therapy by myself

Speaker 2 till now.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 So I think it probably happens often that the identified patient can have a lot of different presenting issues over time

Speaker 2 because from my perspective now, what I understand is that it was my job to stay sick. That's right.

Speaker 2 It doesn't matter what it is. It can be anxiety this year.
It can be depression. It can be bulimia.
It can be alcoholism. It can be cocaine addiction.
It can be whatever it is.

Speaker 2 It doesn't really matter

Speaker 2 as long as I am sick.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 And I think the reason for me, when I'm listening to you say

Speaker 2 that person, we can all rally behind and like say that's the sick person.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure that that's exactly how I experience it

Speaker 3 at all.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 feel like it was more like that person is almost like a threat, like an excuse.

Speaker 2 like an excuse, like a.

Speaker 3 Oh, like they're going to tell our secrets. Yeah.
A little bit. A little black sheepie.
There's like an overlap with black sheepie in it, I think, for you too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like the scapegoat is another word for this person, right?

Speaker 3 And no, scapegoat's a different one, but there's overlap.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it's like, I think the idea of a scapegoat is the same as like a sacrificial lamb. The goat is where we like put all of our sins and then we sacrifice the goat and then our sins are gone.

Speaker 2 That's what a scapegoat is, right? Or the sacrificial lamb is ancient religions, we don't want to make a human sacrifice. We don't want to sacrifice ourselves.

Speaker 2 So we bring this lamb in, which is the picture of purity and goodness, and then we kill the lamb instead. And that's our sacrifice to the gods.
So

Speaker 2 I actually

Speaker 2 truly, I mean, I've said this before, but I, you know, in my first book, I wrote, I had a magical childhood period. So I don't know why I'm so fucked up.
My best guess is that I was born broken.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So my

Speaker 2 entire life, I have been trying to figure out why I'm so fucked up and what's wrong with me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if you are a person who's the identified patient, you will find that not a lot of people in your immediate family argue with you about that.

Speaker 3 They're like, good call. That's what you should be trying to figure out.

Speaker 2 Nobody. Yeah.
Nobody says that.

Speaker 3 We also are trying to figure out why you're so fucked up. Yes.

Speaker 2 Nobody says, oh, honey, that's not right. You weren't born broken.
Nobody says that.

Speaker 2 The first person that said to me, what the fuck with this sentence, after millions of people and everyone in my family has read this book, was Oprah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oprah looked at me and said, What the hell with this?

Speaker 3 Do you believe this?

Speaker 2 That you were born broken? Okay, I think about that all the time because my answer is yes.

Speaker 2 I do. I understand that that, but yes, I do believe that.

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Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 have

Speaker 2 come to the conclusion over the last my hero's journey, and if you are the identified patient, maybe the scapegoat, whatever,

Speaker 2 nobody's born broken. You were not born broken.
There is nothing inherently, internally come out of the vaginal canal like broken.

Speaker 2 Your brokenness was required.

Speaker 2 Your perceived brokenness was required for the family unit. Because, you know, we all have the capacity for brokenness in different areas.

Speaker 2 Every single person in a family, you need it as the hero as more permission for brokenness, right? But nobody is all of that. Well, other people are not that.

Speaker 2 It's just something we all dip in and out of and explore.

Speaker 2 I have been, the hero's journey of the person like me is to flirt with, think about, consider what if you're not broken at all?

Speaker 2 I remember, and I wrote this down, I wrote the sentence, I will not pretend to be sick for you anymore.

Speaker 2 I don't know exactly who I was talking to, maybe the whole world, maybe myself, maybe my parents, maybe who, I will not pretend to be sick.

Speaker 2 There was a moment where I

Speaker 2 said all the things.

Speaker 2 to my family of origin, said, this is how I see it now.

Speaker 2 This is what I need apologies for. and

Speaker 2 pointing out that elephant in the family system pointing out actually i don't think it's all me anymore

Speaker 2 i don't want to be the scapegoat i'm actually pointing at making the elephant in the room visible

Speaker 2 the holiday after that

Speaker 2 was the most unbearable week of my life

Speaker 2 because when the person points out

Speaker 2 what they were trying to keep hidden forever, what everybody's been trying to keep hidden forever, the system goes haywire.

Speaker 2 We didn't know how to talk to each other. We didn't know the whole, everybody's script seemed to be taken like the tension.

Speaker 2 And as the person who's identified patient, one of your personality traits either was or became hypersensitivity to everybody's feelings, vigilance. It was untenable to me.

Speaker 2 I did not see all of this in the moment, but what I did was I relapsed.

Speaker 2 I couldn't take it. I just went to the bathroom, started throwing up again.
I hadn't thrown up for nine months. Before that, I was, but when I re-entered into back onto the stage again,

Speaker 2 what I had done, the transgression that I had made by saying, I don't think it's me, I think it's all of us, was so untenable

Speaker 2 that it was easier for me to say, never mind, give me my script back.

Speaker 2 When I,

Speaker 2 a month later, then I was, of course, just fucked again. And then I came back and said, I'm fucked again.
And now I need to go back to, now I'm, I, I relapsed.

Speaker 2 It felt comfortable again.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's the road we know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Everybody felt like they were back in their roles.
Like

Speaker 2 everybody was sympathetic again.

Speaker 2 Everybody got their power back. I think that it has to do with power too.
I think it has to do with worthiness. I think when I came out and said, wait, I think I'm all right and I'm healthy.

Speaker 2 Like if you're the hero,

Speaker 2 if I become full of agency,

Speaker 2 if I become fully human, if I say, actually, I've got this in our relationship,

Speaker 3 what do you do?

Speaker 2 Like if you are depending on one thing

Speaker 3 or...

Speaker 3 Or it gives me an option to not be perfect, right? Because the thing about families is there's systems within systems. There's the family system.
There's the marriage system.

Speaker 3 There's the sibling system, right? There is the threat that it can go either way because it's opposition, integration, or, you know, like it's you could,

Speaker 3 as you become human,

Speaker 3 the other person can sometimes become more human too. Yes.
Like if I don't have to, if you're not totally fucked up, I don't have to be totally perfect.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So let me ask you

Speaker 2 in terms of what I'm presenting to you and what that looks like on the ground. Okay.

Speaker 3 But that's within our system. Like, yes.
Like, when you're talking about Glennon, about everyone's very comfortable with the idea that, oh no, you're sick, and we really hope you get better.

Speaker 3 And it's not a threat to us.

Speaker 3 It's not a threat to the unit that you are sick.

Speaker 3 It's a threat to the unit if you say, I'm not, we are.

Speaker 2 That was what was intolerable

Speaker 2 or felt intolerable. What I saw, how I saw people acting and nobody knew how to relate to each other anymore.
And that holiday, particular holiday was just,

Speaker 2 it became clear to me that that was not acceptable. Whatever, I would rather just be back in my role.
And now,

Speaker 2 a year or two after that, now that I've had time to see that for what I believe it it is, who knows what it actually is, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I'd rather just have a discord or

Speaker 2 I would say major disconnect or whatever, thing I haven't been able to heal yet, thing I don't know if I'll ever be able to heal. Like

Speaker 2 still, I won't pretend to be sick anymore or I won't pretend to be sicker than anybody else, I guess. I'm not saying like, I'm healthier or like what,

Speaker 2 but I did wonder.

Speaker 2 So when i am i'm working on all of this stuff i'm not gonna be the identified patient anymore i'm not gonna pretend that i'm helpless or whatever so i feel like this

Speaker 2 moment of you grieving about your being perfect role and me

Speaker 2 stepping out of the identified patient role has been like a long time coming. I don't think this is something we just figured out this week.
I think that you have been,

Speaker 2 you've been talking about this in a million different ways, very honestly, for a long time. And, you know, sometimes it sounds like I can't do all of this.
Like, I can't keep everything perfect.

Speaker 2 I can't, or like too much depends on me, or nobody else can do it as best as I can, or what a growing tension, right?

Speaker 2 My

Speaker 2 role has been disappear, just

Speaker 2 whether it's just emotional or like go inside and just not.

Speaker 2 When you got sick, I've been trying to figure out like, how do I

Speaker 2 switch things around

Speaker 2 so that I don't feel the way I do, so that you don't have to feel the way that you do in this ecosystem, right?

Speaker 2 When you got sick, I was like, all right, this is the fucking time.

Speaker 2 She's been asking a million different ways, please.

Speaker 2 Please, world, stop

Speaker 2 rotating around me. I can't do everything.
I don't want to do everything. That's how I've heard it anyway.
Who knows?

Speaker 2 Somebody else step up is sort of

Speaker 2 what I was hearing. So I felt like perfect timing.
I know I'm not fucked anymore. I know I'm not sick.
I know I can handle things.

Speaker 3 You were never fucked.

Speaker 2 Right, but like I thought I did. And when you think you are, that's as good as being.

Speaker 2 And so I

Speaker 3 took over.

Speaker 2 Like I did with my new healing self, I came in and just

Speaker 2 did all the things, rearranged a lot of stuff, did the whole shebang. And I, here's what I wondered.
I wondered if

Speaker 2 when you came back in,

Speaker 2 if that would feel like

Speaker 2 a wash of relief, or

Speaker 2 or and

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 if it would feel a bit threatening.

Speaker 2 Because if your worthiness is tied up in this thing won't run without me,

Speaker 2 but I'm saying with every cell in my body, help me,

Speaker 2 even though you won't ever say those words, but that's what I was

Speaker 2 translating as,

Speaker 2 I wondered if you would have a crisis of worthiness.

Speaker 2 Like, okay, great.

Speaker 2 Because what I want for us is to not need each other.

Speaker 2 I would desperately want, so that I want us to choose as two whole people

Speaker 2 to come together and work and do whatever, but not because we are desperately

Speaker 2 needing each other's brokenness

Speaker 2 to be one

Speaker 2 ecosystem.

Speaker 2 So I wondered if when you came back, you would say, well, If they don't need me to keep the world spinning, what do they need me for? Because that's how I felt in our family

Speaker 2 okay well if you don't need me if i'm not going to be broken anymore what's my role here

Speaker 3 i think that's fascinating i think had it been five years ago i probably would have been threatened by it for sure and i wasn't i was relieved

Speaker 3 and happy

Speaker 3 so i think

Speaker 3 It also, interestingly, and I want to get to yours, Abby, shortly. I think it's also interesting that what we're talking about is that these roles come in when it's a situation of stress,

Speaker 3 dysfunction, stress,

Speaker 3 all of that, right?

Speaker 3 And as I was doing this research, I was thinking, okay, this started in like addicted families. Where's the addict?

Speaker 3 Why doesn't the addict have a role? This starts in highly dysfunctional families where there's a narcissist. Why isn't isn't the narcissist named here?

Speaker 3 They're not.

Speaker 3 These are the people around those people.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 you've got a rageaholic. They're not on this list.

Speaker 3 What it is doing

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 all of these roles are coming around,

Speaker 3 assuming that that behavior, that addiction, that dysfunction is not changing.

Speaker 3 These are the roles that come around to make sure that we can survive notwithstanding the existence of that dysfunction. Got it.

Speaker 2 Because the dysfunction is just the water we're swimming in.

Speaker 3 Exactly. If you remove the dysfunction or the high, high stress or the whatever it is,

Speaker 3 you don't need these roles.

Speaker 3 And also,

Speaker 3 if you're asking as part of that role, I don't want to do this role anymore. So, can you remove that dysfunction?

Speaker 3 That's not going to work because the very

Speaker 3 existence of this entire structure presupposes that we aren't fucking with the dysfunction. That's right.
We are adapting to and surviving the dysfunction.

Speaker 3 That's why you're the identified patient. So, when you say,

Speaker 3 hey, y'all, not not interested in this anymore. So, I'd like to tell you that I'd like you to remove the dysfunction so I don't have to be the identified patient.
That's not what we're doing here.

Speaker 2 And then that leaves you with no hope. It's like everybody's doing it in this fucked up way, but it's holding on to hope.
We know that thing's not going to change.

Speaker 2 So, if we just keep rearranging chairs in the Titanic,

Speaker 3 but if you stop doing your role,

Speaker 3 then it creates imbalance. Yes, if you stop doing your role, we are not

Speaker 3 creating.

Speaker 3 It's like these roles are everybody is below the surface,

Speaker 3 swimming their legs as fast as humanly possible. So above the surface, we look like we are a family that is working together.
Okay.

Speaker 3 If you stop

Speaker 3 doing

Speaker 3 that,

Speaker 3 then like, you drop out of that, right?

Speaker 3 Or to think of it a different way, if all of this is to create balance and to create any semblance of order to make this thing keep running, notwithstanding the dysfunction, when people start doing the roles, it starts to feel dysfunctional.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 right.

Speaker 2 Exactly, because it was functioning. It might have been a fucked up function, but it was functioning for a very long time.

Speaker 3 And so, when people start to feel that, when it becomes unavoidable, that's when there is pain enough to maybe induce some change.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 But you can't sit in your role and say, I need you to stop doing that dysfunction because we don't feel any of that pain.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 This is working for us.

Speaker 2 Right. Right.

Speaker 2 Except that it's like secretly not working for anyone. Totally.

Speaker 3 It's just works. But it's like you have to let people feel the consequences.
of their actions in order for there to be any consequences felt by them of their actions.

Speaker 2 So, is a necessary part of this

Speaker 2 dance, this play?

Speaker 2 It feels to me like I don't know the way out of it, but as leaders of a family, the adults in the room, at least putting ourself on stage with everybody else and saying,

Speaker 2 I don't know, but I'm here too, and I'm a player, and my lines and my scripts that I've received and whatever, are contributing to all of this.

Speaker 2 I'm open for discussion as part of this ecosystem in unhealthy and healthy ways.

Speaker 2 Feels like the beginning because my experience of everyone who has these sort of family roles is that we all have parents who are just directors, who don't put themselves in part of the human, messy experience, who are just these like untouchable,

Speaker 2 unmess withable,

Speaker 2 distant

Speaker 2 controllers of the play. They aren't like saying, I too am human.
I am open to hearing your full humanity and open to discussing how my role I've played as a parent might contribute to this mess.

Speaker 2 It's a distance. And then it makes you feel like there's something wrong with you because that's just a God presence.

Speaker 2 Like, for example, I think as parents, I've spent a lot of time wondering why apologies have not landed for me. Like, what's wrong with me? My parents have apologized.
Like, what's,

Speaker 2 okay,

Speaker 2 here's why.

Speaker 2 It is of utmost importance

Speaker 2 how and for what we apologize for as parents.

Speaker 2 The apologies to me have always been,

Speaker 2 we are so sorry that we didn't know how sick you were.

Speaker 2 We are so sorry that you were so sick and we didn't do what needed to be done. This is what has been the major chorus.

Speaker 2 And then I always am, I, I'm in the moment and I'm like feeling it, but then I feel empty afterwards.

Speaker 2 And I'm not throwing my parents under the bus. All parents, all parents, me, I'm thinking about it right now with my growing kids.

Speaker 2 That is like a parent who smokes in the house the whole time their kids are little. Okay.
Just cigarettes everywhere.

Speaker 2 The kid gets lung cancer.

Speaker 2 20 years later, the parents sit down with the kids and say, we are so sorry that we didn't know how to treat your lung cancer better.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 2 absolutely not. The apology is, we are so sorry we smoked in that house for so long.

Speaker 2 What needs to be taken accountability for is the toxins you let into the air.

Speaker 2 Not that you didn't necessarily know how to deal with the effects of those toxins and how they went into somebody's body, right?

Speaker 2 And the incredible importance that I'm just offering this up as a prototype for any of these roles

Speaker 2 is that

Speaker 2 because the apology was always, or the family narrative was always,

Speaker 2 we're so sorry that you were such a sick person and we didn't know what to do with you.

Speaker 2 The only logical conclusion that I could make, the only narrative I had in my brain was:

Speaker 2 well, everybody feels bad and loves me, but everybody agrees that I was born broken.

Speaker 2 I had no other mission in life possible than to figure out what was wrong with me. The gift we can give our children, I think, is not perfection.
It's not being fully healthy people.

Speaker 2 It's not being regulated.

Speaker 2 But the gift we can give is the looking closely at how we contributed, what we still contribute, and owning that so that our kids can see that they are not necessarily broken or messy individually, but just that they are part of this system.

Speaker 2 It is a very unselfish thing to do because

Speaker 2 in the commitment of maintaining this idea of perfect parent,

Speaker 2 if that's your focus,

Speaker 2 then you your kid has to believe that they are broken. That might feel great to know that you are untouchable.
But then the only other logical consequence for the child in the family is,

Speaker 2 well, I guess they're perfect. So it's just me.

Speaker 2 We can share responsibility.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because it's a system. Like any institution, like every system has broken parts to it.

Speaker 3 And it's because we're dealing with complicated human beings who We all really struggle to sit in our discomfort with shit, right?

Speaker 3 And so so trying to bring any kind of homeostasis or some sort of like easy breeziness to a system is usually what the main goal is. I think about it with playing on soccer teams.

Speaker 3 I think about it with my own family of origin. I think about it in our family now.
Like

Speaker 3 everybody is in some ways always trying to create some level of peace.

Speaker 3 And every system has

Speaker 3 difficult parts to it, cracks. I don't want to say broken, but parts to it that are contributing and also making it more difficult for that homeostasis to actually be applicable.

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Speaker 2 what do you think that your role was or is

Speaker 3 you found yourself in a couple different ones right yeah and i'm sure that there's a lot of listeners because you guys have very specific like you came from a family of two kids you know two parents i came from a family of seven children two parents Then we had two cousins come live with us at some point in my life.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of people,

Speaker 3 like a lot of energy happening.

Speaker 3 And it's interesting because when I took this quiz, I only took it as a young person

Speaker 3 because a lot of the questions were directed towards the big people in your life.

Speaker 3 And I think that if I were to go and take it now or even like in my 20s, I would have definitely been rebel. But I was, what was I? Lost? No.
No? You were the easy one. I was the easy one.

Speaker 3 The easy one is also the lost. Also lost, yeah.
So they're the same thing. So that's the one, the wheel that never squeaks.
You're trying to reduce stress by having no needs.

Speaker 3 And yeah, when I was younger, and I would be interested to know how my brothers and sisters would categorize all of us and how different each one of us's categories would be.

Speaker 3 That's been the thing that I've found most fascinating about this is thinking about My sister Beth, who's the oldest. She for sure was the perfect one.

Speaker 3 You know, she went to Harvard and then became a surgeon and all the the things.

Speaker 3 And I remember when I was a child, though, though the, I think these roles are kind of like in the air and like you pick up them subconsciously, I think that I, being the youngest of seven, was in such observation of the other people in my family that I kind of cherry-picked a little.

Speaker 3 Like I think the first couple of years of my life, I was just going with the flow. So that's where I think that this role kind of really set in.

Speaker 3 And I do think that it is a predominant part of my personality. But as I got older, my sister Beth and Laura, they moved out of the house to go to college.

Speaker 3 And then Peter, and then people would just like leave every year or two. They would leave the house.
And so the whole dynamic inside the family kind of changed.

Speaker 3 How long were you just you in the house? Because it's so interesting that you were

Speaker 3 the youngest of seven, which I can't even, and two cousins living with you. Like, that's an insane amount of, yeah, it's a lot of things, not a lot of attention to go around.
Like, how the hell?

Speaker 3 Not a lot. But how long were you in

Speaker 3 the house as like a only child when they left? One year. Oh, one year.
So that wasn't. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't a big time, but there was like when the girls left, when Beth and Laura, the two oldest, left the house, I was eight and ten.

Speaker 3 And so that was kind of a very forming part of my life where they were kind of my parents in a way.

Speaker 3 They raised me because they were the girls and they could change the diapers, you know, like that whole thing.

Speaker 3 And then when my brothers started to leave,

Speaker 3 my roles kind of shifted because this is when athleticism started to take a lot of emphasis in my life. And I started to become, in some ways, I went from like,

Speaker 3 you know, the lost one to the perfect one. Exactly.
That's what I was wondering because a lot of this is like ironic because you're just trying to be unnoticed. You don't want to be visible.

Speaker 3 And then you go into

Speaker 3 the most visible member of your entire family and the one who is arguably,

Speaker 3 you know, with Beth being the Harvard surgeon. proving that wombbachs are doing all right.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Lost to hero, in which case you become a a lost hero. Go ahead.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Lost to hero.
Then I despised the hero part of myself. So I became the rebel because you're still not known.
The hero isn't known. The lost one isn't known.

Speaker 3 Like none of these are known, but like you're

Speaker 3 loved for having no needs

Speaker 3 as the lost one. Yes.
And then you're loved for

Speaker 3 what the like honor and accomplishments you can bring to the family, neither of which are satisfying.

Speaker 3 I mean, and I think my biggest thing, one of my deepest wounds is, and needs is to fear of not being known and the desire of being loved.

Speaker 3 And it's all of these roles that I kind of took on throughout my life that

Speaker 3 enables or enlivens these needs and these desires that I've longed for, these longings.

Speaker 3 And I just think, you know, it's kind of like a case study, my family specifically, where I can see specifically. I know who the jester is, I know who the mascot is, I know who the peacekeeper is.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I think is really interesting now, since my brother Peter has passed away, is

Speaker 3 he was the one that brought levity, jokes, and also he was the big peacekeeper. I don't think that that's the same one.
I think those are two separate ones, right, sister?

Speaker 3 You said the peacekeeper and the what? The jokes, sir.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, they're different. Yeah, yeah.
The comedian is different than the. I think Peter was a combination of both.

Speaker 3 And I'm curious to see how

Speaker 3 our family dynamic now is without him.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 3 the role that he played, and I'm not trying to like make his role bigger, I think that that role is maybe one of the most obvious missing. pieces when it goes missing.

Speaker 3 You know, I think that the

Speaker 3 one who brings up all the family shit, and that's also probably a really conscious one.

Speaker 3 But all the other ones can be a little bit, they're a little bit less knowable, you know, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes, the peacekeeping.

Speaker 2 It will.

Speaker 3 It'll be interesting to see if someone steps into that, you know, if someone notices, because these, these seem like very intuitive, like,

Speaker 3 oh, that this role is needed right now. Yeah.
I will step in it. You know, I wonder if someone will take that over.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, he was the one that would go to my parents' house and weed the garden, clean the pool, all the stuff.

Speaker 3 So he's being noticeably missed for so many things, so many functions, and in the roles that he played. But I'm curious to see how the dynamic shifts with the death, right?

Speaker 3 Like, and also, I have a couple of questions around the kind of totality of this

Speaker 3 idea. One,

Speaker 3 I'm curious if there's any research that you found if certain roles allow for longer lives or shorter lives.

Speaker 3 I bet. I do know that the hero often is very susceptible to stress-based illnesses and diseases.
Oh, interesting. But that's the only thing I saw about that.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm sure that the ones that are more prone to like substance, like the comedian developing substance dependencies is probably also not great for longevity.

Speaker 3 But those two are the only ones that I saw that have associated.

Speaker 2 identified patient probably does great because we're always in the doctor's office

Speaker 2 i mean i feel like i've had more testing than anyone our family put together i'm like i'll probably be all right

Speaker 3 identified patient lasts 100 years but 50 of them are in the hospital yeah

Speaker 3 and then i guess the last thing that i think we should maybe talk about just a little bit before we get off is now that all of us are in our 40s And I think at the beginning of the first episode, you're like, you know, when things start slowing down in your 40s, I don't think that our lives slow down in our 40s.

Speaker 3 I think that they're the most complicated and intense.

Speaker 2 Slowdown isn't the right word.

Speaker 3 I think crash and burn. No,

Speaker 2 no, I slow down like a plane into a mountain.

Speaker 3 Honestly, I think our 40s is the time that we start to question our mortality because we are closer to death. And I think that that's why we start thinking about the stuff more.

Speaker 3 20s and 30s were like, fuck it. I'm not dying for a while.
I don't have to think about this shit. I think we're trying to get right with it.

Speaker 3 My question is, do we,

Speaker 3 as adults, I have found that my marriage has allowed me to

Speaker 3 uncover the different parts of myself that I wasn't able to kind of

Speaker 3 employ or like bring into my, like, do relationships

Speaker 3 help us heal? Do we ever get healed or the way that our family is functioning as we get older? Does this apply?

Speaker 3 Or are we just thinking about this in our own nuclear like family with our own children now? Like, does it change as you get older? Differentiation is how you discover this, right?

Speaker 3 So if you, it's recognizing when your whole existence is around your nuclear family, your family of origin, you don't know another existence or another sense of self outside of that.

Speaker 3 As you

Speaker 3 have more life under your belt and more dynamics and relationships with your new family and your new partner and your whatever, you are starting to see a sense of self that isn't confined to your family of origin.

Speaker 3 So you start to experience like, wait, is this working for me here? This is, how do I, do I want to replicate that? Are new things possible for me?

Speaker 3 Is this story that's being told by my family, is that even true of me anymore? Who am I? Who am I allowed to be?

Speaker 3 And you're starting to fuck with the idea of like, is who I've always been working for me? If not, am I allowed to be something else? What would that mean to me?

Speaker 2 I think aging is about being in different contexts. Now I'm in the context of my marriage.
Now I'm in the context of this company. Now when we put ourselves in new contexts,

Speaker 2 the context we came from becomes clear.

Speaker 2 If you're just in a fishbowl the whole time with the same four fish, you never question it.

Speaker 2 But then when you are doing your little thing and you get put into an aquarium with a bunch of other fish and the other fish look at you and they're like, why the fuck are you like this? Yeah.

Speaker 3 You're like, wait a minute, I thought this was just normal. I thought this is what I was supposed to be to get love.
Why am I not getting love?

Speaker 2 Yes. And then you start to see the script and the roles and the.

Speaker 3 But you certainly can replicate if you're leading a family that's full of stress and or dysfunction. You could absolutely replicate this and be in a different role in the new family or the same one.

Speaker 3 So it's not like it transfers directly, but these dynamics still play all the time.

Speaker 3 But I think the key is letting people exist in the fullness of their complexity, is resisting, especially since we all live really stressful lives, it is resisting the temptation a thousand times a day to say,

Speaker 3 this kid, my husband, me, whatever, is always blank, is never blank.

Speaker 3 It's asking yourself, what is the story my family tells about me? What is the story my family tells about my son?

Speaker 3 What is the story my family tells about my daughter, about their father, about their mother?

Speaker 3 What is the real story of them?

Speaker 3 Is there a difference? Who is each person in this family not allowed to be?

Speaker 3 Who are they allowed to be? And like start to really interrogate whether you're inadvertently putting someone in a role or accepting them showing up in a role.

Speaker 3 Because accepting them showing up in a role is just as bad as putting them there. Like you need to lure them out of it.
Yeah. It's good.

Speaker 2 Well, first of all, I know the pod squad well enough by now to know that everyone is going to have ideas about this. Feel free to call us.

Speaker 3 747-200-5307.

Speaker 2 Okay. We will do another episode on this.
We will bring somebody in. We will do whatever we have to do to help us all break out of our contexts.

Speaker 2 But the like teeny little start of this, I really believe is just

Speaker 2 trying like all hell to bring beginner's mind to the people in our lives, to like try to look at everybody in our life like you've never seen them before.

Speaker 2 Because the thing that makes us not appreciate the beauty of a rose is the word rose. It's the label of the thing is between us and the experience of the thing.

Speaker 2 We never see the thing because of the label of the thing.

Speaker 2 And if we can just try to remove the label for a day and look at each person in our family with beginner's mind, like, wow, I've never met you before.

Speaker 2 Who are you today?

Speaker 3 Andrea Gibson said about Megan in episode 245, they said, I think I learned it in college. One of our greatest human desires is to be known.

Speaker 3 But there was something about right when I was diagnosed when I realized that the best way to know somebody is to unknow them.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 To see them as a mystery, to not expect the same patterns.

Speaker 3 And what's really beautiful about that is as soon as you stop expecting the same patterns, that energy almost creates this world in which the person no longer does the thing anymore, who has more of a capacity to not do it.

Speaker 3 But I remember just being overwhelmed with just watching Meg walk through the house and thinking, who is this person? Who is this mystery walking around in here?

Speaker 3 And I had years ago heard a poem by Mary Oliver talking about her partner at the time. And it was called The Whistler.
And I think they had been together for decades.

Speaker 3 And then one day Mary walks downstairs and hears Molly whistling and she had never heard her whistle before. Such a beautiful poem.

Speaker 3 It just talks about how there is so much to uncover in a person, even decades later. We only know a fraction of them.

Speaker 3 And I feel like there was something about that energy of just feeling like you were new.

Speaker 2 We love you, Pod Squad. You are new.

Speaker 2 We don't even think of you as the Pod Squad.

Speaker 3 We don't know who you are.

Speaker 2 You are new to us. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 3 Perhaps if you come.

Speaker 3 Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

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Speaker 2 We appreciate you very much.

Speaker 2 We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Speaker 2 Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and this show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, and Bill Schultz.