Co-Dependency Isn’t What You Think, with Rawly Glass, LCSW

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Rawly Glass grew up in a home full of violence. At 16, he made a pact that he would figure out how to do things differently. He earned a master's in social work, built a career in private therapy, and by all appearances was doing the work. But something from his history kept surfacing, quiet and persistent. When someone handed him the word codependent, he turned it over and put it back down. It did not fit. And he needed to understand why.

What Rawly found was that codependency, as commonly taught, is a behavioral label for something much deeper. It has pathologized one of the most beautiful things about people: the capacity to be gentle and caring. Underneath the behavior there is almost always a more fundamental disruption. Trauma, even the quiet kind, interferes with the development of what he calls a relationship with self. When that gets interrupted, we stop orienting inward and start orienting entirely outward, trying to control what we can see because we cannot access what we feel. He calls it external dependency.

Rawly is a therapist and parent educator who has done this work on himself over decades. He brings research, clinical observation, and a deeply personal story to a question most of us have been handed without enough context: what is driving the behavior, and what does real recovery look like?

If you have ever felt like the codependent label did not quite fit but had no other words for it, Rawly Glass has words for it.

You'll learn:

• What Rawly means by external dependency, and why it fits better than codependency
• The rotten potato story, and what it revealed about looking for the source
• The 15 aspects of a relationship with self, and why most of us are missing some
• Why self-care often fails, and what has to come first
• What co-regulation actually looks like when your child is escalating

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• Rawly Glass website
• Rawly Glass on YouTube
• Brainstorm - book by Dan Siegel
• Broken Toys, Broken Dreams - book by Terry Kellogg

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Transcript

Rawry Glass - Episode 324

[00:00:00] Hey Rawly. Thank you so much for joining me. It's, yeah, we've just had a few technical difficulties, which is minor glitches. Minor glitches, which is a really good reminder that we are so not in control of anything. Yeah, absolutely. A hard lesson. I keep learning it. I know, I know. Well, I got to meet you in person. Oh gosh a couple months ago maybe it was and mm-hmm we started having this awesome conversation and then we had to shift to a different conversation for the event that we were at but I wanted to snag you for this, because I was so intrigued by what you were saying about, well, a lot of things, but especially about codependency. Mm-hmm. You have deep experience working with families and young people, and so here we are to have that conversation. Yeah. So thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Of course my privilege. Really. Why don't you give us just a quick background so 

[00:01:00] people can sort of get to know who you are and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing today, and then we'll dive in. Okay. Well, as for everybody, it's always personal at first, at least and I grew up in a pretty, unhealthy, dysfunctional home with a lot of violence and at 16, I made a pact with myself that I was gonna grow up and have a healthy, happy family and when my wife and I started chatting about marriage, we made that same pact and that we were gonna parent different, but we didn't know what that meant or even where to find all that. Fast forward. We have a couple of kids and we actually had a pretty good family and marriage, but I still had stuff from my history that was haunting, shall we say, and I couldn't figure it out. What was going on? What do I do by this time, I'm, you know, bachelor's in social work and then a master's in social work and I'm doing 

[00:02:00] private therapy work and a lot of different things have come and gone and I'm still not showing up the way I want to and along comes the discussion of codependency and it just didn't fit for me. I don't typically do a lot of enabling and rescuing caretaking kind of stuff, and so I was just really puzzled, you know what that was all about and I began, well, first of all, I went to a residential program for codependency because it was seemed like the only place I could, you know, move. This was the late nineties, the only place I could go that I thought might be useful. I got introduced to 12 Step program and the idea of recovery and realized that recovery's not just about alcohol or drug addiction. It's about many other dynamics and I just became in love with addiction recovery and even though I'm 

[00:03:00] trained in the mental health model, I realize there's this thing that we call recovery that actually offers a different way to live. And I was trying to figure it out. So by the late nineties. I'm looking at codependency, it doesn't quite fit, and I start trying to figure out what else you know is out there, how does this work? So I ran across some material that started me thinking a little differently about codependency, and that's the beginning then of what I ultimately began to call external dependency. So that's kind of the Yeah, and that's what snagged me. I was like, yeah, wait a minute. What are you talking about? Because that, it really piqued my interest, especially because I work with a lot of moms, obviously, right? And parents in general whose kids are struggling and they get this label. It's almost like somebody comes up with this label machine and just like. Yep, you're codependent. Absolutely and then 

[00:04:00] it feels bad. It feels kind of mm-hmm shameful. It feels like we've done something wrong. Right and so that's why I really wanted to dive into that today because when you were talking about it, it just started to make so much more sense and I think the people that are doing the labeling aren't meaning bad, I think right they mean well. Right and they're trying to give you a framework or something to work with. Mm-hmm. But when you hear codependency, like what was not working for you about the traditional kind of codependent label? Mm-hmm. Well. You know the rescuing and caretaking. My wife is just an amazingly nurturing, loving, gentle person, and I'm very kind and understanding and compassionate, but it doesn't drive me to do too much for people typically and the codependency label. When we look at the history of where it came from 

[00:05:00] and the dynamics around who were those people that were called codependents, we've really pathologized that nurturing dynamic in a way that's not helpful to anybody and not only that, we've also misunderstood that the unhealthy version of doing too much, is really as hard to stop doing as not drinking and so it really is a compulsive pattern and to say to somebody, stop rescuing, stop enabling. Is just incredibly unkind and lacks any value really. And so I mean, I had my struggle with it because it didn't fit for me, and I also saw the way that it was being used in a way that was hurtful and not celebrating the amazing power of that gentle, kind, 

[00:06:00] nurturing, you know, way that people show up. So I just had to find a different, something else that was really getting to the core of it. And that's what really started me. I was like, okay, so if this codependency thing is real, that's a behavioral manifestation. Mm I tell the story of coming home with my family one Sunday afternoon from camping and we walk in the door and there's this horrendous smell that just slams us in the face. We're like, oh my goodness, what happened while we were gone? Right? So we run around, we open all the doors and windows, and we get the spray out of the bathroom, and we're spraying away, you know? And of course the spray reduced, right? And so if you're gonna think about it from a codependency standpoint, that's the solution. Deal with the symptom and I wanted to know when we walked in that door, where is this smell coming from? Because 

[00:07:00] I wanna get rid of it and of course, we eventually found a rotten potato in the pantry and if anybody's ever smelled a rotten potato, you know exactly what I mean. Yes. It's horrendous stuff. That's the way, that's very interesting that you, yeah. Okay. I get it. Yeah, that's the way I began to think about it. It's like, okay, what is at the core? Because it might be driving other unhealthy patterns that I could relate to, right? Mm-hmm. So that's, yeah, I think you said this, or maybe I just wrote it down 'cause this is what my brain interpreted was this compulsive helping, and I don't know if you said that or if I just put that in my own brain, but this compulsive desire to help, I think is what a lot of, and I'm just gonna say moms, 'cause I don't work with too many dads, so I don't know that I'm qualified to say this about them. But so many moms, we just have this compulsive need to help. Right. 

[00:08:00] And so I know we're gonna get to why that is, because you've looked for the reason you've looked for the rotten potato. Yes and it's interesting when you said that this is a behavioral manifestation, that really struck me because I think we are always thinking, it's in our brain, right? It's like, right, right. Oh, I have this mental defect or something. Right, right. But when you say it's a behavioral manifestation, that to me is helpful because it's like, well, I can change a behavior. Right. Which feels good 'cause then I think, okay, I can do something about this. Sure and the other part about is changing behavior is if we know what's driving it. Yes. Then we can do something about it and this is why I think people have failed so miserably in their efforts to not be codependent, is because there's too much focus on the behavior. I tell parents, you don't change behavior by changing behavior. That's 

[00:09:00] where everybody wants to go in a way. But that's not how you change behavior. You've gotta know what's underneath it, what's driving it and that's what I began looking for. Okay. Trying to figure that whole equation out. So what is the rotten potato behind this compulsive helping tend to do? So I found two things behind it that lead up to what I would call maladaptive compulsive behavior patterns and I know that's a little jargony and I'm sorry about that, we all have heard of malware today, right? Yes. Unhealthy software, right. So to speak. Yeah. Well, maladaptive, when I think about my ways of adapting to my children's misbehavior, my way of adapting to things I didn't like, right? It was unhealthy, but it was compulsive and of course compulsive is another word for addictive. Mm-hmm. Right. We do it even though we didn't intend 

[00:10:00] to and so when we look at that and we begin to explore underneath those patterns, we find a couple of two specific very fascinating things and I'm just gonna reference a couple of books for people Sure. Because they can read a little bit about this. The first book that I found actually was from Terry Kellogg, who was one of the early writers about codependency back in the eighties, and he wrote this book called Broken Toys, Broken Dreams, and I don't know that it's still in publication, I don't think it is, but it's still available out there and used copies. It's a very, very heavy read, but he understood things about codependency that I don't think too many other people did and on page seven, he makes a really fascinating statement talking about enabling behavior. He says, it appears as if the problem 

[00:11:00] of enabling codependency, et cetera, is about the relationship with a dependent and then he uses a really interesting word that we're all familiar with, and that's the word, but well but negates everything before, right? Yep. And then he goes on to say, it's actually the absence of a relationship with self and when I first read that, I'm like, what in the world? That doesn't even make any sense to me at all. How in the world can you not have a relationship with yourself? Right? Yeah. We live in our skin. We get up with ourselves in the morning, we brush our teeth, we go through all the things. How can you not have a relationship with self? Right? So, I don't know, it just really caught my attention and I have to tell you, it took me a couple of years, quite frankly, to really begin to think. I was starting to understand a little bit of what he was saying that, but that was the first

[00:12:00] glimpse that something else is behind this for me. Okay. I like that and I'm sure you're gonna dig into that a little bit for those of us who are still scratching our heads saying, but wait, I have a relationship. Yeah. Right. So the next big piece came from Parenting From The Inside Out by Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzel. One of the two best books on parenting, in my opinion and I think that it's really striking to realize that there's a huge scientific dynamic around parenting that's not surprising. Yeah. But at the same time, we don't think of it that way. Right. We just kind of do parent what we do in our parenting. Where does that come from? Well, it all comes originally from our own experience. Right? But what if that experience interfered with the development of 

[00:13:00] the very things we need in order to parent well in order to have healthy relationships. And that's what Dan Siegel talks about in the scientific section of the book on adult attachment and this is page 1 69, paragraph one, and it's the first sentence, actually, it's the first three sentences of that paragraph when I'll just work with the first one. What he says is, if the development of the neural machinery necessary for self understanding is limited, then our capacity for a rich inner life. And to relate to the inner lives of others is also gonna be quite limited and he talks about the reason why it gets limited, and then he goes on to say that when this happens, it can actually leave us without skills that we 

[00:14:00] need in order to function well in relationships. So that when I read that, that one made sense to me. First of all, because I had already been studying the impact of trauma on development and the impact is very, very clear. In fact, if anybody ever does any AI searches on the impact of trauma on development, it literally says it's unambiguous. In other words, it is so crystal clear. The research is without question, and that is that it disrupts healthy development. Right. Well, I know for sure people like me who grew up with a very violent dad trauma was every single day. Yeah. Even if nobody was being knocked around, you're still in that high anxious state. Right? Yeah, of course and that means that our brains are focused on 

[00:15:00] where's it coming from, when will it come? And all of our energy and childhood is supposed to be all about growth and development. When some of it gets focused on where's the next blow coming from, we're missing out on some of that developmental process and so what I began to read about was how profound that disruption was and that the limited neural machinery and he's, Dan Siegel says specifically the neural machinery that's involved in our relationship with ourself and now I'm thinking about Terry Kellogg, the absence of relationship with self and I'm going, holy smokes. This is amazing. Truly scientifically based. Explanation of why so many of us focus on things around us instead of being connected within us. Makes so 

[00:16:00] much sense. When you say it that way, it's mind blowing, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So I began to realize, the thing about codependency is that I'm uncomfortable inside of me. Call it whatever, right? Call it shame, call it anxious, call it sad or depressed. Call it scared. I don't, you know, it doesn't matter. It's a whole variety of different potential things, right? But I don't know what to do with that because managing and processing emotions and relational dynamics is the most complex human activity and when your neural systems are not adequately developed, you don't have, literally do not have what it takes to process emotions and relational dynamics and situations. And so what do we do? We get focused on things around us in order to distract and the other 

[00:17:00] part of it is I can't control inside, but maybe I can control outside and if I can just get my kids to do the things they're supposed to do, act properly, dress right, present properly, finish high school, go on to college and put a big, you know, star on the window of my home that says I'm a good mom, I'm a good dad. The whole draw is external. Right. Totally. It blew my mind. Yeah. I was just reprocessing all of that and what that makes me think about is for people like you who grew up in a violent home, let's say, but what about people who say, well, I didn't grow up in a violent home. Right, right. I grew up in a perfectly happy home. Exactly. And yet they exhibit these tendencies of the right chronic, unhealthy. They have the unhealthy software, basically. What's going on there?  Well, it's actually the same thing because 

[00:18:00] we now know enough about trauma. That it's not just what we used to call it Big T, little T, but it's a whole spectrum. Mm-hmm. It's on a, you know, my, my favorite definition of trauma comes from Dr. Robert Scare in his book The Trauma Spectrum, where he talks about a continuum of variably negative life events and we've all heard about death by a thousand paper cuts, right? Yeah. And what happens in some homes is that there's not the violence that I had, but there is very, very busy moms and dads and children aren't necessarily getting the relational needs met. They have food, they have a place to sleep. They have parents that love them and care about them. See, I always say the Beatles were wrong. It's not all about love. Love is not all you need. Right. Yeah. We needed other things. But it's hard to focus on the needs of children.

[00:19:00] So this takes me to another observation, I suppose is the best way to say it. We live in a world that gives a lot of lip service to the value of our children and our families. Oh yes, we do, but we give very little actual focus to the needs of a child and so there's a lot of needs that we miss and for good parents, which most parents are good parents. For good parents, it's not as much about. I am not meeting their needs as it is. I'm trying to survive in a world that no longer takes two people to survive in. It really takes three people to survive. It's no longer a two income world we live in. You know, and in the past we could say, some of the norms about parenting were really abusive. You know, 'cause they were in historical perspective on parenting. But we're getting 

[00:20:00] to a place where people are so preoccupied just to survive that the needs of children are often missed and it's in the context of love. It's in the context of intention. It's in the context of parents that are really trying their very best. But think about a single parent. I mean, the unbelievable pressure in that system, right? And they're often isolated too, and they don't have a support system. So we could go a lot of different places. Now, one other place I wanted to go in response, I wanna say upfront, I'm not anti-religion or anti spirituality, but there is a really serious problem in a lot of the religion of today in the way that people are expected to behave in certain perfect ways. And there is a real dynamic 

[00:21:00] called religious addiction. I grew up in a religious addicted home. Mm. And I know the impact and I have other members of my family who grew up in that environment. No drugs, no alcohol, no substance addiction per se, but the experience in church. Or in the religious environment was so demanding that there was no room to be human. Mm-hmm. And that's abusive and so many loving people that are very heavily involved in those kind of environments of serving others and being available to help others in whatever ways that might look like. Again, external dependency. It's got a lot of different faces. Right. A lot of different faces and boy, I'm doing all this good work externally, but what am I doing to take care of my own heart and my 

[00:22:00] children? I don't know if that helps answer your question, but that's the way I'm seeing it. Well, the phrase that really got me when we were talking in person was this external dependency because it really made me think about. Oh yeah. If I don't know how to do the work inside me right and I don't know how to have a relationship inside me, then I'm always like, I think of it as like pinging everything outside of me. Like I'm pinging, pinging Ping. Oh, I can do that. Mm-hmm. Oh, I can do that. Oh, I can do that. Mm-hmm. And like you said, if I can just get all of the ducks in a row and check all of the boxes in my family. Yep. Then I can be like pat on the back, like, yes. Mm-hmm. I did it. Yep and then, and I would be so curious to hear your thoughts on this. There's a lot of marriages that fall apart and a lot of women in particular who fall apart when their kids go to college mm-hmm. When the kids graduate from college. Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:00] Mm-hmm because their entire identity has been wrapped around the kids and the perfect kids and doing all of that. Mm-hmm and then when the kids are kind of launched. Yeah either parents still are so involved, right? Like overly involved. I mean, I know people whose kids have graduated from college and they are still tracking their location, like, yeah. Oh, why is she there at this time of day? Right. Is that another example of this, like external dependency? Absolutely. I mean, I understand that there are times when GPS tracking has great value, but. I think for the most part it's a real curse, quite frankly. I really do, and it is a hyperfocus on others in a way that keeps me distracted from myself. I eventually came up with what I call the sentence. Trauma disrupts development, leaving us unfinished, disconnected, and 

[00:24:00] externally oriented. Wow. And that is the underlying problem that I think drives all dysfunctions and I know that's a broad claim. Okay? I haven't tried to prove, I'm not a researcher, I'm not gonna try to prove it. But that's my observational statement, is that this is what I see happening is a world that doesn't meet the needs of children. And so they have varying degrees of trauma that keeps them disconnected from themselves and focused on the world around them and then they learn how to live that way and parent from that perspective of hyperfocus on making them be okay and the cycle just continues to repeat. Mm-hmm. In those systems. So I know you've worked with a lot of young people and I'm wondering what the trauma is that you are seeing that these kids have been raised in, I think the inattention that you mentioned about 

[00:25:00] parents mm-hmm. The distraction and busyness and the anxiety mm-hmm of parents is mm-hmm kind of an obvious one. 'cause we're all glued to our phones. Like, yeah. Thank goodness that wasn't the case when I was parenting. 'cause I would've been even more absent. We just weren't, I understand at that point yet when my kids were young. Thank goodness, I'm so glad but when you see young people who are struggling today mm-hmm. What are the things that have impacted them significantly mm-hmm from a kind of a trauma standpoint. So this is a really interesting one to me again, another observation that I made. I've been studying parenting since before we had kids, so that's over 45 years trying to figure out how to do it right and do it well. And unfortunately my kids were growing too fast but anyway, bottom line is that an observation that I made about the basic dynamics of parenting. I call it the classic parenting model, and it's got gentle versions and harsher versions, but they are all rooted in 

[00:26:00] three things, control, correction, and consequences. And that system doesn't work and most people have never realized that because it's promoted across the board around the world as the right way to parent your kids and this literally goes back to the second developmental stage, which is this stage of autonomy and the stage of autonomy is where a person begins to discover, hey, i'm different. I'm not you and you're not me and in child development terms, we call it differentiation. I can begin to tell the difference between I'm over here and you're over there, but this is literally what we have begun to label or not begun, but for years of labeled as the terrible twos. Hmm. Because it's the time where they're discovering themselves 

[00:27:00] and their desire to do things their own way and what do we do with that? We are historically taught that you have to win those battles over those two year olds to show them you're in charge and that you are not going to give up control, right that they've got to comply. They have to do what they're told and again, this is not about bad parents and in the gentlest version of the classic parenting model, we see a kind of almost gentle emotional manipulation of, oh, don't make mommy sad. Right? Or Don't make daddy mad. Right? I mean it, some of that stuff shows up in different places, right? So what I see happening is that this control, correction and consequences model starts with a 

[00:28:00] lie. That it's our job to control our kids and it perpetuates and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And we literally are dealing with challenges in adolescence. That started with the way we were dealing with them at two years old, and we didn't realize it. We don't realize it. So, I mean, there's a lot of more things that could be said there. I don't know that we wanna get into consequences today, but that's part of the equation here, you know? Yeah. So these kids that are struggling have sort of been raised in an environment where their parents are doing these three things. The control mm-hmm. The correction and the consequences. Yep and I hear that a lot from different therapists that I talk to, which is the kids need to be their own person and we are desperately trying to make them either like mini versions of us or many versions of a sibling or whatever it is that we think what looks good. Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm and that's a difficult place for a young person to be and then we wonder why they lash out or 

[00:29:00] why they rebel, or why they dye their hair purple or why they pierce their belly button. Yeah, exactly and again, it's not about bad parents. We're doing what we're taught. We're doing what we're told is good parenting. We're doing it in the best way we can. But I remember a talk I was giving to a group of parents with, of children that had addictions, adolescents, and it was live and we were in this room and there were parents, you know, that were taking notes and I said, consequences don't work. I made that comment in the, you know, the bigger context. One mom. In the back of the room, her head just jerked up like it was gonna fly off, right? And she literally threw her pin on the floor. She was like, why hasn't anybody ever told me that? I have been trying to figure out the right consequence and it's the control piece about helping them learn, helping them get what they're supposed to get. And she was really 

[00:30:00] conscientious, trying her hardest and was in that moment, it was just all that tension released with the realization. It's true. I have been trying and it has never worked. Yeah, so control is where it starts and I love Adam Price was his book. He's Not Lazy. He talks about the paradoxical response. The more you try to control your teenager, the more they will resist, and the more they resist, the more we will try to control them and it sets up this battle for control that just perpetuates and deepens the trauma and disrupts the developmental process ongoing for years and just continues the disaster, right? Yeah. So there's a million questions. We might have to do a part two of the podcast on the three Cs because I think I can hear everybody leaning in like, okay, then tell me what to do instead. Right. But what I would love 

[00:31:00] to do is go back to the external dependency and if we, yeah. If we start to recognize that in ourselves and we say, Ooh. Mm-hmm. You know what? That kind of sounds like me. Mm-hmm. Like, I don't have a lot of relationship with myself. Mm-hmm. Actually, can I ask a really basic question? Sure. What would one recognize in themselves if they don't have a great relationship with themselves? Yeah. So. I mentioned that I had gotten a little clarity when I read that material from Dan Siegel about, you know, the neural development being disrupted and trying to fit these pieces together. I ran across another fascinating piece that actually helped me understand this absence of relationship by understanding what a real relationship with self might look like. This is actually from a book on the Adolescent Brain by Dan Siegel. Brainstorm. A lot of people are probably familiar with that book. Mm-hmm. This is 

[00:32:00] page 44, paragraph four. He identifies 15 aspects of the relationship with self and it's a really interesting list. I'm gonna read it. I happen to have it here. I have these little papers that I have a bunch of them in my desk here. I love this. And every one of my clients gets this list. Okay. It's like I love, 'cause this is real page numbers. It's so brilliant. This is real recovery, see, recovering and we'll go back to that in a second 'cause that's another key part to externally dependency. But, oh, here we go. Sensations, impulses, perceptions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, memories, images, intentions, attitudes, hopes, dreams, desires, motivations, and longings.

[00:33:00] That's the list. It's not in list form. It's in sentence form. Yeah. But if you extract them out, that's what you get and then he concludes by saying, and there's probably more things, and I added three more things that are pretty common. One is fantasies. We all have fantasies about what we'd like. Right and then of course, the big old discussions of our needs and our wants. Yeah. Right. A relationship with self is, that is healthy is the person who is able to tap into any or all of those at will and to tune into what's going on inside and what is it telling me? See our bodies, our emotions, all of these that are different ways that we communicate with ourself and we have been taught not to listen. And that, I wanna go back to that now for a second. If you think about an infant, an 

[00:34:00] infant is so profoundly connected with themselves. They don't even care if they're in the middle of someplace, like an orchestra, like which everybody should be really quiet. Yes. Right. If they're gonna scream, they don't care. No, they're gonna scream. It's like, this is not okay that you have been here 45 minutes and that's long enough. Let's go. Right? Yes. And so they're profoundly connected physiologically. Emotionally, even though they don't call it an emotion, right? Mm-hmm. Right and even mentally, to the degree that a infant has mental functioning, which of course they have a lot of, but it just isn't articulated in words, right? When they get old enough and they start getting cognitive processing going on, we get real excited. We love it when they can put a whole sentence together and then we start teaching them, use your words. Which is not a bad idea, but how about, can you use your 

[00:35:00] words to talk about how you're feeling, right. Physically, emotionally, what your perception of What I just did is, and I have a lesson in one of my parent classes that I call the three questions and these are three questions that we can ask ourselves to begin to understand our children and where they're coming from. Because when we understand them now we know how they interpret what I just did, and that tells me why they're doing what they're doing. It's not random stuff, it's not oppositional, even though it looks oppositional in many cases. It's really. There's a reason behind it, right? Yeah. So anyway, you can see there's a lot of ramifications to this connection with self, right? Oh, absolutely. I love the list. Thank you for running through those. I had a question. I was kind of expecting to hear self-compassion in that list. Would that be considered 

[00:36:00] something that, you know, if you have a good relationship with yourself, that you're able to have self-compassion or Absolutely would. In fact, that's part of the issue is the lack of compassion, is that resistance, I don't wanna look, I don't wanna feel, I don't wanna deal. Right. In fact, that's part of what we're taught. Don't be selfish. I often talk with parents about that phrase, don't be selfish. That just means stop thinking about yourself. Stop tuning into yourself. When do we say that to kids? Around two to five to six years old. Yeah, which is the exact time period they're supposed to be getting connected with themselves. It's part of the training to be disconnected. That is interwoven across the board in our culture of humanoids. Mm-hmm. So I think you're right about compassion, don't be compassionate towards yourself, it's just simply focus on everybody else which says, you know, don't 

[00:37:00] have enough compassion for yourself. That's the way I would think of it. So I would agree with you a hundred percent. People that are well attuned to themselves are going to have compassion for themselves. You bet. Yeah. So, okay. You mentioned when you were showing the little list that you had there, that that's part of recovery. So what does recovery look like from this disconnection from ourself? And the reason I asked you what it might look like is, I think a lot of people just are not aware. You've been maybe told that you are codependent and all these things, but nobody's telling you like, and you could do this and here's how to start looking at that. So you said that you are in recovery from this condition of not being connected with yourself. What does that look like for you? So there's a couple of very specific tools that I like to use that help me with that connection one of them comes from Dan Siegel, actually from Brainstorm, this is on page 47 and it's called Mine Site Practice A. It's called 

[00:38:00] Sift, SIFT. It's an acronym and it stands for, it's actually four of these 15 Dynamics Sensations. Images, feelings and thoughts, and when you have an experience that doesn't go well or you're in distress for of some kind, and you pause you can learn to do, sift in about two to five minutes, and it's a moment of pausing and connecting internally. What sensations am I feeling in my body? What images did that conjure up for me? What feelings, emotions am I having right now, and what thoughts are in the mix of that whole equation and so it's only tapping into four, but these are probably some of the most important four because of the role they play in our lives. Okay. So that's one practice that I like a lot. 

[00:39:00] Another one is a writing exercise that I learned about years ago probably the common name for it is stream of consciousness writing. Okay. Many people have heard of that. I was trained in what it was called, hot penning. It's called Hot penning because you keep the pen hot on the page and it's a timed writing exercise. And literally, for me, the way I did it, I was taught by a therapist that said, you do 45 minute hot pens and I'm like, my A DH brain could never do 45 minutes. Okay? So I shortened it to 10 minutes and I could do that. Okay, so you set a timer, you turn the timer so you can't see it, and you have your first sentence. I'm doing a hot pin about really feeling angry right now. Okay and you just put the pin on paper and you do not stop writing for any reason. Until the timer rings and you don't watch the clock 

[00:40:00] because the brain needs to go into an altered state. It's a semi hypnotic state of the anger and all the energy around it. Right? And over time I realized that I was missing out on some stuff because I was shortened it down and so I extended it and created what I call a series of hot pins, which is three hot pins with a wok in the middle of it and the wok, the wok is actually bilateral stimulation, similar to what you might find in EMDR or other trauma therapy techniques and so without getting into all the details, those are my two favorites in terms of when I really need to process something and I've had some really profound experiences with just those two. Anything that gets you into the body and into the emotions. Yeah. And this now takes us to good self-care. Many people talk about spa days, 

[00:41:00] vacations, those kinds of things are wonderful, but they really are not self-care unless you have a foundation of emotional and body sensation work woven into it. If you're just taking a break, that's fine. There's value there, but that's not really self care in the sense of helping my body and my systems rejuvenate. So I just had a total light bulb moment when you said that about self-care, because we are at Hope Stream. We are constantly preaching self-care, self-care, self-care, because your kid's struggling and you know all that. Yes, yes. But what I just realized is if you don't have really a relationship with yourself, self care would seem like a very foreign concept. And also it would just feel very sort of mechanical. Like, okay. Mm-hmm. I know I'm supposed to go on a walk, or I know I'm supposed to go, you know? It's a behavior. Yes. And it 

[00:42:00] wouldn't really deliver the desired results. If yes, you aren't saying, wait, I have a self to care for first. Exactly. That's, yeah. Okay. That because we have such a hard time convincing people like, yeah, no, I don't. I don't know. I mean, okay, y'all go on a walk, but now I'm understanding why that might be true for some people. You bet. That just can't connect the dots there. Right? Again, you can't change behavior by changing behavior. No. You gotta know what's underneath it and this takes me to the very first thing that I really learned in my parenting struggle to understand how to be a good dad and that was what I call relationship first and relationship first says that when I have a relationship with myself. I can form a relationship with my child that is different than just a behavior focus. And when I have a relationship with 

[00:43:00] my child, then I can influence them in ways that I can never get to when I'm trying to control their behavior. Hmm. That is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. The control thing just does not work. It's huge work. Yeah. It just doesn't, so externally dependency, I don't know if we have time to get to the affect regulation or the self-management, emotional management piece. Yeah, let's do it. But if we don't have that connection with self, you really can't really manage and route self-regulate reregulate. But here's the bigger issue. Affect regulation is again, one of those incredibly intense neural development based activities, and if you think about where external dependency comes from, which is, it's activated, I call it the catalyst factor, trauma. Trauma activates the disruption in the developmental process. I get to 

[00:44:00] adulthood. I don't have the neurodevelopment I need, and so my capacity to truly self-regulate. Is going to be limited at best and so part of recovery is how do I reengage neurodevelopment so that my nervous system can mature to a level that I can self-regulate. Okay. So that, I mean, those are all pieces that are woven into this discussion and recovery. I call it three different levels. Behavioral level. We don't ignore behavior, but it's not the key. Right? It's where we start, because it's what we can see, right? One of the things that I found myself doing as a dad was criticizing, well, criticizing is incredibly damaging, especially to gentle hearted children, right? And so when I think about, my criticizing and how incredibly 

[00:45:00] damaging that was. Right? So now we look at this business of how do I regulate instead of criticize, right? Hmm. How do I actually show up relationally instead of behaviorally? Anyway, I was gonna go someplace else, but I can't remember where I was going. But anyway, sorry. No. So what would that potentially look like? So instead of you know, criticizing my child, oh, you're always forgetting your backpack, dude. Every day you forget your backpack or whatever. What would a more regulated response look like? Well, the regulated response is gonna start with the relationship that says, sweetie, I can see that your struggling with this. Do you know what that's about? And of course they're gonna say, I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying. Right? It's like, honey, it's okay. Take a nice deep breath. When I say that, by the way, I'm teaching them to self-regulate. Right? And so take a nice deep breath. Let's just kind of pause a moment and if we can figure it out, that's 

[00:46:00] great. If not, we'll just ponder it for a while. One of my favorite therapy tools is the tool of wondering. I write it on a piece of paper, I carry it with me for two weeks, wondering. I read it over and over. I wonder, where did this come from? What is this about? What do I need to do different? Anyway, side note. So, the bottom line is how do I help my child take a deep breath, confirm inside. It's okay. It's not the end of the world, you know? Yeah. We'll figure this out. So when I'm thinking relationship first, I'm not focused on the frustration of the behavior in the same way. Does that mean it's not gonna be frustrating? Of course not. Yeah. This is exasperation is probably, the parent's most common factor. Yes. Because it's really exasperating, right? Yes, yes. Not because of bad kids, but because we don't know how to regulate and put it in the context of a relationship. 

[00:47:00] So I think what it looks like is helping my child tune into the relationship with themself and thinking about what's distracting me, what's interfering, what's causing me to lose focus. Right. Yeah. And I can't help but think about Gabor Maté who talks about where does A DHD stuff come from, right? Yes. I was just gonna ask you about that, if this is really, I was fortunate enough to have him on the podcast when he, I saw that launched, the Myth of Normal, which huh, please everybody read the book. Amazing. And yeah, and he was talking about really the true roots of A DHD and when, so as you've been talking about this, I'm like, that has just been pulsating in my brain. Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. And the world is not as friendly to our children either, you know, it's not just that it's demanding more of us, and so we're having more 

[00:48:00] difficulty in doing our work that is so important to us. The world is demanding and threatening in ways that are just unprecedented and I think that that's part of the equation of the unprecedented numbers of A DHD and other you know, issues going on. Yeah, for sure and we always talk about we as parents have to do our own work, right? And sometimes I think that can feel almost like a punishment and I think what you've given, at least what I've absorbed from what you've said is that us doing our work is truly a gift to ourselves first. That is going to be a bonus, like overflow impact onto our kids. Obviously our spouses or partners or whoever's around us, but that doing our own work is not like this. Oh, I God, you know, like another thing to do. It's really being kind and generous to yourself to say, why am I responding in the ways that I am and [00:49:00] to be able to dig into that is really a generous thing to everybody around you. Absolutely right. Like it feels really, really kind. Human beings are designed to do what Dan Siegel calls mind sight. Are you familiar with that term at all? I've heard of it, but I don't know. I don't know much about it. So he defines it as the ability to look within one's own mind. Mm. Mind sight, to have sight within oneself. Introspection work is not just like you said, a punishment or, oh, I gotta go to therapy. It's not even intended to be a therapy experience. It's intended to be a self-healing, it's intended to be making sense of things. It's intended to be processing emotions, giving my body and my mind the ability to let go, to accept, to relax and we are designed with the capacity to do this 

[00:50:00] work but we lose touch with that when we lose touch with ourselves. Yeah. It's part of our nature of being humans to do that work. Yeah. Ongoing. No, I love that and we'll link to the brainstorm book. I know that that's a very, very popular one. Yeah and that's a good one and if you have any others that you wanna send us, I'll put those in the show notes so that people can tap into those. It's so helpful to have a good recommendation instead of like, you go to Amazon and look at the million parenting books and it's like, oh boy.Yeah. I just wanna rewind for one second on the Sure the exasperation and how we can have more measured responses if our kids are sort of losing it. And I know that a lot of the parents in our community have kids, and I had one of these who seemed to, they are zero to a hundred, right? Like you say one thing, Hey, could you put the milk in the refrigerator? And they just lose it? Yeah. Yeah. And is 

[00:51:00] that part of this, or is that just a dynamic of that kid? I see it so often that I feel like I need to grab a second with you to ask that question. Yeah. Well, as I'm sure you know and could guess, along with all of us, there's many different reasons, depending on temperament, depending on what other kinds of significant traumas, big traumas, not just little traumas. Right? Might have happened along the way. What meaning did they assign to those events or those experiences? Bullying experiences, which are so profound anxieties and fears. I won't get distracted. I'm sorry. I started to get distracted but anyway, the bottom line is that when we look at the relationship between a parent and a child, I believe that the number one job of a parent is that co-regulator, and that means being grounded, being stable, being 

[00:52:00] calm, is what our children need the most from us and that is super hard to do when we have external dependency stuff going on ourselves. Yeah. And so I think that's the biggest factor in the equation. I actually have a lesson that I do with parents in my other job that is the 24 strategies and the 24 strategies are a different way to think about and engage with our children and they include several paradigm shifts, like, what are we gonna replace consequences with? Because we don't wanna ignore misbehavior. That's not right. We're not promoting permissive parenting. Yeah, we're, but what do we do different? Right. That's a big question. It's an important one, but things like ongoing conversation, that's one of them. An ongoing conversation acknowledges that there is no such thing as, we just talked about that last night for crying out loud. What does that mean to a child? See, this is part of the 

[00:53:00] answer, I think, to your question. What does that mean to a child? It means you're stupid. You didn't get it. We already talked about it one time. You should have gotten it right. We all know, especially experts in education. Nobody learns from one time. It is repetition, repetition, repetition, right? Yeah. That's how we learn. So ongoing conversation. When a parent can embrace that one idea, then we can let go of the frustration when we're having the second time or the third time. Yeah. Okay. Because this is part of the process. This is how people learn and so I think that when children feel the anxiety of a parent, when they feel the frustration of a parent, when they feel the shame that a parent might be struggling with, when they feel the exasperation of a parent. All of those things are personalized by the child because they are, 

[00:54:00] by definition, immature. We're supposed to be, by definition, mature, but unfortunately supposed to be. Yeah. It doesn't quite, and it's not an insult, it's just an acknowledgement of, okay, yeah, I got disrupted. Right? So when they experience any of those emotional things, then they're going to get defensive and when they get defensive, then that puts up the wall. It could be volume, could be words, it could be, I'm not listening, I roll my eyes. It could be a lot of different ways that it shows up and then exasperation becomes desperation and frustration to the hilt and yeah. I mean, there's so many places we could go with all of that, but, but that's, well, that's, that's good. The co-regulation part is a really good reminder because. Yeah, we are all so busy and so distracted and moving in so many different directions, and I think there's also a heightened level of just 

[00:55:00] parental anxiety overall. When we're seeing, yeah, in the palm of our hand. As we lay in bed at six o'clock in the morning, the first thing we see is the war that's going on in this country, in the abuse that's going on here. And the horrific things, it can make you feel like that is the only thing going on in the world and so our level of anxiety, like we're walking into the day with our shoulders up here and we're like, ah, If you're not watching on YouTube, you're not seeing my great, antics if you're just listening, you're missing that. But I think there is just this level of anxiety with parents that is rubbing off and is like you can't walk into a room and not feel that everybody is just Ooh, absolutely. At a whole new level. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And children are saying, do I have a future? Yes. You know, what is going to be there for me? Yes. Right. Absolutely. Especially our teens who are looking at AI and they're looking at the state of the world. 

[00:56:00] Like, I don't think I'd wanna be going, okay, I am only like 15 years into this thing. This is what I've got. That could be really scary for a very sensitive Right. And you know, the parents, I would say 98.9% of the parents in our community describe their kids as highly sensitive. Yes. Both emotionally, tactically, somatically, everything. Like we just have these kids who are, their nerve endings are exposed to the world and so you get that sensitivity, you know, combined Yes with what's going on, and it is just super hard for them to cope. Yep and those are connected to trauma and disrupted development too. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, absolutely. We could go on for days and days, but I think we may have to do a part two. Thank you so much. Okay. I look forward to it. Yes. This has been incredibly enlightening my light bulb moment on self-care is. It's gonna be very helpful, I think. 'cause I'm gonna approach it in a different way. Yeah and I just thank you so much for your time. You bet. It's my privilege. Thank you 

[00:57:00] for having me here. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and a weekend. We get a weekend coming up. Yes. And a weekend's. Awesome. All right. Thank you. Thank, thank. Alrighty.