Family Systems Theory: The Invisible Force That Runs Your Relationships | Being Well

0:00 Hello and welcome to Being Well.

0:01 I'm Forest Hansen.

0:02 If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today.

0:04 And if you've listened before, welcome back.

0:07 Today we're talking about something that I honestly cannot

0:10 believe that we have never done a full episode on.

0:12 Family systems theory.

0:14 Family systems theory is a group of related approaches to therapy that emerged

0:18 in the 1950s and 1960s that fundamentally changed how we think about behavior.

0:23 At the time, the focus in psychology was mostly intracychic.

0:27 That means that it was focused on what

0:29 was going on in an individual person's mind.

0:31 But clinicians noticed that a person's symptoms and their related

0:34 behaviors seemed to change based on relationship context.

0:38 In other words, what was going on around them.

0:40 This was particularly noticeable in families that were under stress.

0:45 These days, most people take it as a given that behavior is situational.

0:49 But at the time, the idea that you should bring the whole family

0:52 into the room and focus on the relationships between them was genuinely radical.

0:58 And it wasn't just that context mattered.

1:00 It's that the relationships themselves had predictable patterns.

1:04 And these patterns had a kind of life of their own.

1:08 And once you start seeing the stuff that FST talks about,

1:12 this is I know I'm like getting chills reading the intro right now.

1:15 It is so cool.

1:16 You cannot unsee it.

1:18 You start to see these patterns everywhere.

1:20 And it is an incredibly powerful lens to view

1:23 ourselves and the systems we're a part of through.

1:26 And it also might lead you to re-evaluate

1:29 some significant uh stretches of your personal history here.

1:32 So to help us learn more about

1:34 this, I'm joined by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen.

1:36 So, Dad, how are you doing today?

1:38 I'm good.

1:39 And this topic is particularly close to my clinical training and also practice.

1:45 So, I'm especially psyched about it.

1:48 Same.

1:48 I just think that this is the absolute coolest stuff.

1:50 Like, it's it's an incredible unlock for understanding behavior,

1:55 for understanding your own behavior, like why you act the way that you do,

1:58 why you why you feel a little different

2:01 when you're uh returning to your parents house.

2:03 Not that I can speak from personal experience here.

2:05 and you walk in the front door and you're like, "Wait a second.

2:07 I feel like I've I've reddownloaded this old old version of my software

2:11 and now I'm acting a little differently than I did previously.

2:14 What's all that about?" It's just such cool stuff.

2:16 Uh so, Dad, let's start at the beginning here.

2:19 What's family systems theory?

2:20 It's a therapeutic orientation.

2:22 So, it's embedded in frames of practice and addressing

2:27 different kinds of suffering and distress and dysfunction.

2:30 And in that frame uh it is grounded in the recognition

2:35 that every individual is part of a larger system.

2:39 Now that recognition was indeed present in psychonamic theory particularly

2:43 around object relations in which there's a sense of self

2:46 and others but the point of intervention the target

2:49 of intervention was intracychic was the individual themselves in isolation.

2:54 Um, family systems theory really broadened the awareness of the ways in which

3:00 we are parts of much larger holes and then it treated the whole itself.

3:05 So the unit of of treatment became

3:07 the family for example increasingly thus family systems.

3:11 Uh it was also grounded in some intellectual developments

3:14 around the time related to systems theory in general.

3:18 Gregory Bates and stuff and, you know,

3:21 kind of moving through it all was, I think,

3:24 a a very welcome disruption of a certain privileging of usually quite

3:32 wealthy people who could afford very

3:35 long uh treatments of individually centered psychoanalysis.

3:40 and family systems theory really came up with a grounded

3:45 recognition of the ways in which things like

3:48 poverty or racism or historical intergenerational trauma uh could

3:55 wear on systems in which individuals then were suffering.

3:59 Could you give a couple of examples here, Dad?

4:02 Whether it's from your own history of working with people or just kind

4:05 of more generic examples of like what this actually looks like in practice.

4:09 I once worked with I'm going to disguise some of the details here.

4:13 I once worked with a a 10-year-old girl who was referred to me

4:18 for being very aggressive and physically violent with other kids in school.

4:23 And uh the stories were also that when she was at home,

4:27 she would threaten to do all kinds of things

4:29 or would even do them like destroying property,

4:33 television sets, things like that.

4:34 And so I started seeing her individually,

4:37 but then along at the same time I began trying to get

4:40 a sense from the two parents what's actually going on here.

4:44 And then it became increasingly revealed that the two

4:46 parents were also extremely aggressive with each other and were

4:52 fighting physically in front of this girl routinely and um

4:57 she was part of a larger complicated system of discord.

5:01 So that would be one example where what was happening for her was based in part

5:06 by modeling what other people were doing

5:08 her parents and also being really affected by them.

5:11 And then another example uh would be a teenager who was um really into drugs,

5:19 really acting out, really problematic.

5:22 Um, the dad was quite authoritarian, quite strict, quite disciplined, you know,

5:28 wanted to send the kid off to some

5:30 extreme boarding school in Utah to straighten him out.

5:34 The mom, very kind of caring, tenderhearted, wanted to really protect the boy.

5:40 and she and the teenage boy were basically aligned with each other in opposition

5:47 to the doineering and you know

5:50 excessively authoritarian and kind of scary father.

5:53 And so you could see the ways in which um they

5:58 formed there was kind of a overall dynamic in which you have

6:01 classically the permissive parent the more permissive parent and then the more

6:05 authoritarian parent and then that starts creating a vicious cycle in which

6:10 uh you know the more authoritarian one parent becomes the more permissive

6:13 the other parent seems like they feels like they need to be

6:16 and vice versa and the kid is kind of bouncing between

6:19 them and tends to you know understandably take advantage of that situation.

6:25 So, if we're going to address the issues of the child, you know,

6:29 let's say a teenager who's flunking out of school and, you know,

6:33 smoking dog every morning in the parking lot before walking in the door there.

6:37 Um, if we're going to address that, we have to address the overall structure,

6:41 the system in which they're apart.

6:43 If you have a really healthy strain of bacteria

6:46 that you're growing in a particular petri dish

6:49 and then you move that bacteria over

6:51 to a different petri dish and it doesn't thrive there,

6:54 you don't blame the bacteria.

6:56 You look at the culture medium.

6:59 You look at the context in which that person is in.

7:02 And so, uh, in wonderful ways,

7:04 family system theory expanded our frame of analysis

7:08 and our frame of reference and also our frame of intervention.

7:11 And for me, just to kind of make it quite personal,

7:14 when I reflect on my own family of origin, as I've done a new curse forest,

7:21 when you send me the notes for this conversation,

7:25 uh it's both haunting and vulnerable to realize

7:29 the ways that the ripples including generationally

7:33 of these larger systems are moving through us and making us on the one hand.

7:39 So it we realize that in the Zen saying we live exposed to the golden wind.

7:44 I mean we are exposed.

7:46 On the other hand alongside that sort of haunting

7:49 vulnerability is a release of a fair amount of self-lame.

7:54 We start to realize okay you know I got written

7:58 into a script that was ordained long before I was even born.

8:04 And uh I have been of course affected by all those larger dynamics.

8:10 And I'm not to blame for you know most of them.

8:15 Uh and still it's my responsibility at whatever age I

8:20 find myself to do what I can with regard to them.

8:24 And so that's a lot of what we're going to be exploring here too.

8:26 Right on.

8:27 And there was already so much in those examples

8:29 that you gave that we're going to be talking about today.

8:32 triangulation, a little bit of identified patient,

8:35 uh the the flow of anxiety in a system, how does a system manage anxiety?

8:40 So, I think those are great examples already.

8:41 Dad, to give a little bit of extra context here.

8:44 So, where did this stuff come from?

8:46 Lot of people worked on FST.

8:48 This is we're not talking about like a singular thing here.

8:51 The um most well-known person is probably Murray Bowen.

8:56 He developed Bowen family systems theory.

8:58 This is sometimes called just Bowen theory.

9:01 And a lot of the time when people uh refer to FST,

9:05 they're typically talking about Bowenian kind of approaches

9:08 and the ones that descended uh from Bowen's work.

9:11 But there were a lot of people involved here.

9:13 Another big one was Salvador Minutuchin who developed structural family therapy.

9:18 Minutuchin was I I think it's fair to say pretty culturally located uh

9:22 in terms of those factors that you were you were talking about, Dad.

9:25 He really wanted to understand families and the broader

9:27 social context that they landed in because

9:30 the family also just as members of the family

9:32 have to adapt to the family's roles of power.

9:35 The family itself has to adapt to the rules

9:37 of power of broader social contexts and systems like school, work,

9:41 big broader social culture, what neighborhood are they in, poverty,

9:45 all of those factors that you were talking about before.

9:47 I want to say really quickly, uh, in part because we just did two big

9:51 episodes on evidence and therapy and like where

9:54 does evidence come from and all of that, family

9:56 systems theory is mostly observational in its nature.

9:59 It's mostly about looking at families

10:01 and the dynamics that tend to emerge between them.

10:05 Because of this, it it's not so much something that we have

10:08 a lot of like double blinded studies on or something like that.

10:11 Those those are out there and a lot of these approaches

10:14 have been clinically validated as being

10:16 effective for different kinds of problems,

10:18 but the frameworks are are more designed to help therapists think and act

10:22 and interpret the behavior of the system

10:25 that's walking into the actual counseling office.

10:28 Do you want to comment on any of that, Dad, as an actual clinician?

10:30 Well, I'm temperamentally a little biased toward making

10:37 room for that which doesn't yet have evidence

10:44 so-called from a double blind big complicated study

10:47 or could never have that kind of evidence.

10:49 Yeah.

10:50 And you you can't really uh morally effectively take a kid out of one family,

10:54 drop them in another and be like, how does their symptomology change?

10:57 You know what I mean?

10:57 So that's exactly right.

10:58 It's a complicated thing.

10:59 I'm really glad you brought up that point for us.

11:02 The other thing I just wanted to do was to call

11:03 out three more bigs as it were in family system space.

11:07 Uh Virginia Satir who you know she's up there in my pantheon.

11:12 You know you and I have talked about oh okay if you could do

11:15 one or five or 10 sessions of therapy who'd you want to do that with?

11:18 Yes.

11:19 Satir is arguably the progenitor of this whole thing.

11:21 So yeah that's just fantastic.

11:23 She and Carl Rogers and you know uh Irving Elom I think

11:27 are our top three probably maybe you know on any given day.

11:31 Okay.

11:31 Khloe Madonna's uh really great stuff there and Jay Haley wonderful stuff there

11:36 including with Ericsonian Milton Ericson forms

11:39 of um you know intervening with people.

11:42 So just naming them and then beyond that I

11:46 wonder Forest if you could give us one

11:48 of your classic summaries of um Bowen's thinking about families

11:55 as emotional units and you know anxiety socalled rippling through.

12:01 Yeah.

12:01 I wanted to do this toward the beginning of this episode

12:03 to just put some signposts in to these different uh big concepts

12:07 or big ideas so that people have something to kind of refer

12:10 back to as they're listening to everything that we're talking about today.

12:13 I learned stuff for us.

12:14 I got to admit it.

12:15 And I learned a lot uh you know reading your notes uh before this episode.

12:20 Oh well, thanks Dad.

12:20 I I appreciate that.

12:22 And I learned an enormous amount doing all of this prep.

12:25 These were mostly terms that have come up once or twice in previous episodes.

12:29 I think we had an episode for example where

12:31 we talked a little bit about triangulation uh because

12:34 I learned it during prep for something else and I

12:35 was just I just thought it was so cool.

12:37 Uh but this was like a real education for me.

12:40 So okay anyways some of the big ideas here.

12:42 Uh big idea one and these are mostly Bowen ideas but again it's it's all

12:48 a big fuzz in terms of who's ultimately responsible for a lot of this stuff.

12:52 First the family is an intensely connected emotional unit.

12:56 This is the big principle of the whole thing.

12:59 This unit functions as a single

13:02 emotional system and each person's individual functioning

13:06 is like a cog in the machine or a piece in a puzzle

13:11 and you can't really understand the behavior of any one cog or any one

13:15 piece without seeing the pressures that are on that piece by the broader system.

13:21 Uh this means that somebody's individual symptoms, anxiety, high conflict,

13:25 like in the example you were talking about with the young girl,

13:28 uh somebody who's acting out in that kind of a way,

13:30 you you can't understand that symptomology just by looking at the person.

13:34 You need a little bit more context.

13:36 Second big idea, and I really can't emphasize this enough,

13:42 family patterns are both relatively stable and extremely powerful.

13:48 They are highly resistant to change.

13:50 To use a word you might be familiar with, they are homeostatic in their nature.

13:54 This is a fancy way of saying that systems in general don't like to change.

13:58 We have to make them change and they can transmit across generations.

14:03 Also part of what you were saying uh in your your examples there, Dad,

14:07 where we can perceive these patterns as being

14:09 kind of handed down in different sorts of ways.

14:12 A really important insight from this that again was huge for me.

14:16 Stable systems can both look and be dysfunctional and chaotic.

14:23 It's hard to see that system that you were describing, Dad,

14:26 between uh the two parents who who were fighting a lot

14:29 and the kid who was acting out or the the two

14:32 parents who were kind of battling it out over whether

14:34 or not their kid should be sent off to a boarding school.

14:36 it it's tough from the outside to look at that much

14:38 intensity or chaos or however you want to describe it and say,

14:42 "Oh, that's a stable stable system." But it is.

14:45 And what we mean by stable is

14:46 that the patterns inside of it are predictable and self-reinforcing.

14:51 Those patterns tend to lead to more of those patterns.

14:54 Uh third big takeaway, and this is a big Bowen thing,

14:58 he really focused on something called differentiation.

15:01 And this is the idea that a person

15:02 is themselves while also being part of a system.

15:06 And this was kind of his way of talking about uh the balance

15:09 of intimacy and autonomy that we talk about on the podcast sometimes,

15:12 you know, me versus we.

15:14 And also these days we use a lot from the language

15:16 of boundaries to talk about this kind of thing.

15:18 And his view is that healthy systems

15:20 were ones where the individuals were fairly differentiated.

15:24 This means that when there was more tension

15:26 or pressure or anxiety inside of the system,

15:29 sure they felt it because you can't not feel it.

15:31 Nobody is perfectly differentiated.

15:33 I I think you could argue we don't really want to be perfectly differentiated.

15:37 Like we are tied to our families.

15:38 We are tied to other systems.

15:40 It's okay.

15:41 Uh but you don't want to feel totally at sea because

15:46 that anxiety is building the system or because there's other stuff going on.

15:50 You want to still feel like you're kind of yourself.

15:53 Anything you want to comment on from those first three, Dad,

15:56 or do you want me to just keep on rolling here?

15:58 I know you know this.

16:00 I'm taking the word family pretty loosely to include extended family caregivers

16:05 and this also applies to ways in which um people can form family systems.

16:11 You know, their own family of origin is pretty broken and they start forming

16:16 a different kind of family with very

16:17 similar dynamics with sometimes with their peers.

16:20 So, we're just kind of broadening the notion here.

16:22 totally as you know.

16:24 Yeah, for sure.

16:25 Uh, one final thing that I would want to mention before

16:28 we get more into the details of some of this stuff,

16:30 there's a major focus in FST on family roles.

16:35 These roles are positions that people place themselves into a little bit,

16:42 but are kind of mostly placed into by the broader functioning of the system.

16:47 And the big takeaway here for people is

16:49 that these rules are driven by patterns of behavior.

16:53 And those patterns of behavior are driven

16:56 at least in part by patterns of thought.

16:58 The way that you think about yourself,

16:59 the way that you think about other people.

17:02 The upshot of this, as we're going to talk about a lot during the episode,

17:05 I think, is that your patterns, the ones that feel like you,

17:10 may have their origins not in how you are deep down inside,

17:14 but instead in the role that you were assigned by the family system as a whole.

17:20 The big big big point from this is that most of the things

17:25 that people think of as me or my nature aren't actually really their nature.

17:31 They're their adaptation.

17:34 And this means that they can change.

17:37 This means that we can do a process of exploration and go, "Wait a second.

17:42 What of these aspects that I think of as me are really

17:46 this big broader social script that I was kind of placed into and which

17:51 of them are actually true to who I am as a person." And I

17:55 I think that if there's like one takeaway from this episode for people,

17:58 I would I would emphasize that one.

17:59 Where this is landing for me forest as I reflect on my own

18:03 childhood is tracking the difference between how

18:10 let's say I developed defenses and coping

18:16 strategies given the family I was in distinct from the ways in which I

18:23 was cast into certain roles that I

18:26 acquired including being because they were rewarding.

18:31 Let's say the as long as I was in that role,

18:35 you know, the homeostasis of the system was maintained.

18:39 Everything was fine.

18:40 But when I stepped out of that role to do um there were

18:46 uh there were issues and I think that's really worth people looking at.

18:50 Yeah.

18:51 Maybe to kind of skip ahead a little bit here, Dad,

18:53 could you give um a couple of examples

18:56 of what what do we mean when we say roles?

18:58 Yeah, going into a bit of a deep dive here.

19:01 Uh, for myself, uh, and credit to, um,

19:06 a central teacher for me, Steven Snyder, who talks about the primal wound,

19:10 the inescapable inherent wounding of being born

19:16 essentially into a human as a human body in which infants necessarily have

19:21 experiences of helplessness and not mattering enough.

19:25 even with fantastic caregiving.

19:29 And so then there's a tendency to compensate for a belief

19:33 in your own innate lack of agency and your innate worthlessness,

19:39 not mattering enough to compensate for it.

19:42 And then we acquire those compensations

19:44 and now we're living out those compensations today.

19:47 So those are like compensatory strategies and that's really worth looking at.

19:51 So I can speak about ways that I've compensated for feelings

19:55 of helplessness with a real strong quality as you know me of sort

19:59 of agency and goal directedness and kind of a feral scruffiness when

20:04 all you know when the chips are down if need be me.

20:06 And then in terms of not feeling mattering enough or you know my my mom to come

20:11 to me and feed me because she was

20:13 believing that she should feed me on a schedule.

20:15 Um you know I would do things to try

20:17 to you know build up social supplies from others.

20:20 Those are compensatory.

20:22 Those are not really role identities.

20:24 Then again in my case, uh oldest of three, uh you know,

20:30 reasonably bright fairly rapidly get cast into this role of the bright,

20:36 well- behaved oldest son, not a troublemaker,

20:40 needs to be someone who does well and doesn't create any problems.

20:46 Well, that's kind of a role, right?

20:48 And that's different from the compensatory strategy for uh out of feeling you

20:56 know helpless and not mattering if that makes any kind of sense at all.

21:00 Now these obviously overlap they intertwine and like so

21:03 much in psychology it's almost like a fortune cookie.

21:07 What's useful is it's not that it's right or wrong.

21:10 is that it's an inquiry and is the inquiry fruitful for you and thinking

21:15 about the system in which you grew up and your own role in it.

21:23 the way in which that role became a so-called basin of attraction terms

21:27 of complex systems theory um and how you then acquired it and developed

21:32 it and and it was reinforced and movement away from it was punished

21:37 in various ways not even deliberately but just systemically you know that is

21:42 a really powerful inquiry and then it becomes increasingly free you know freeing

21:47 right you can find a way to live in this life in which

21:52 You're increasingly unburdened by the compensatory

21:56 strategies you developed around the primal wound

21:59 and increasingly unbburdened by the scripts and roles that you were cast into.

22:05 That was great, Dad.

22:06 Uh to talk a little bit more about specific roles

22:09 that people might be able to see an echo of themselves in.

22:13 And before I get to this in too much detail,

22:16 I want to say pretty quickly here that uh Bowen

22:18 himself did not do a lot of labeling of specific roles.

22:23 As time went on, other people,

22:25 particularly people who were doing uh work inside of families

22:29 that had more of a of a substance use issue,

22:32 came up with specific titles for different roles so

22:36 that people could kind of better identify themselves in that story.

22:40 But this is not really so much original Bowen stuff.

22:43 He was more interested in something we might talk about a little bit later,

22:46 which is called the family projection process.

22:48 That's probably all more technical that 98% of people

22:51 listening to this episode need to know about,

22:53 but I just wanted to get it in there kind of for our due diligence here.

22:56 So the big idea here is that people typically move

22:59 into or placed into a kind of role in the system.

23:03 Uh this role helps the system function

23:05 in a predictable and relatively stable way.

23:08 Again, even if that stability looks kind of chaotic and you know,

23:12 wild from the outside, but roles are by their nature limited.

23:16 When you're functioning based on a role,

23:18 based on a mask in the play of the family that is going on around you,

23:23 you can't be totally free in your behavior.

23:27 You are inherently constrained.

23:29 So, an example of this might be like you were saying, Dad,

23:32 like an an oldest sibling who is projected

23:35 on by the family in different kinds of ways.

23:38 this is the person who's going to be the high achiever.

23:40 This is the person that the family is investing

23:43 a sort of sense of it as a successful unit in.

23:46 Uh you could use phrases like golden child or whatever.

23:49 I don't know if that was your experience

23:50 but that's an experience a person might have.

23:53 Um the point is that these roles are exist to serve

23:58 the function of the system not the self-actualization of the individual.

24:04 Think about it from the other side.

24:06 uh the child who learns how to kind of disappear by staying quiet or not

24:10 causing a problem because the family system

24:12 doesn't have any room for their needs.

24:15 A specific other words that people might

24:17 be familiar with are ones like peacemaker,

24:19 being the peacemaker inside of the family.

24:21 Uh one of these systems uses the one of role was called like the mascot.

24:25 Somebody who uses more humor or charm to kind

24:27 of deflect from problems that are happening inside of the system.

24:31 Uh, a big role that we're going to talk about in a little bit that has

24:34 a lot of complexity associated with it

24:36 is the identified patient or the problem child.

24:39 This is the person whose symptoms tend to be the most visible.

24:42 They're kind of manifesting the internal

24:45 problems that the family is experiencing.

24:49 And just that just like going back through and going,

24:52 "Huh, what roles was I playing?

24:54 Huh?

24:55 Why was I playing those roles?

24:57 Wow, how much of that is me?

24:59 Huh?

25:00 How much of that is is a kind of broader force that is moving

25:06 through me in that moment or something that I felt like I had to do

25:10 in order to receive love and affection and support from those who who were

25:15 around me that itself can just be a really useful inquiry for a person.

25:19 Forest, how do you think that you know Bowen talked about anxiety?

25:24 He used that term really broadly.

25:26 You could say it's synonymous with stress or pain moving through a system.

25:32 Um, how does that affect people in family systems theory?

25:36 I mean, one of the things that we would look

25:39 at in our clinical training is the ways in which uh parental issues,

25:45 marital issues between the parents, let's say they're married,

25:48 u would be displaced onto the kid in effect.

25:53 So that the kid then becomes the carrier of the pain in the family system.

25:58 And then that starts showing up with maybe a the child,

26:03 teenager perhaps being self-destructive, cutting other forms of acting out.

26:08 You know, they're and and and it kind of helps

26:10 you think about that if you think about it as, huh,

26:14 they are carrying they are in effect like the safety

26:17 valve for the pain and pressure in this system.

26:21 And if the system can then also fixate on the so-called identified patient,

26:26 this child who's selfharming, let's say,

26:28 then other members of the system such as the mom

26:30 and the dad don't need to look at their issues.

26:34 So the symptomatology of the child starts

26:38 serving functions that are systemic and that way

26:41 of thinking about this in terms of the function uh you serve the larger system.

26:45 So you might want to think about if you're listening

26:47 here to when you were you know a kid growing

26:49 up um how did your way of being whatever that was

26:54 you know your role your strategies your patterns as they

26:57 say in Hoffen for example how did that uh what

27:02 function did that serve in the system in terms of maybe

27:04 maintaining an equilibrium between your parents even a problematic equilibrium

27:09 between your parents you know what function did it serve

27:12 yeah I found the anxiety idea really

27:14 interesting Because at least for in in Bowen's

27:17 version of this, anxiety is kind of the fuel

27:20 that the whole system is running on.

27:22 It it's got a little echo.

27:24 I don't know if this is a good tell me

27:25 if this is a good analogy or not here, Dad.

27:27 It's a little bit like Freud's idea of libidal

27:29 energy or like how the system responds to the That's a great way to look at it.

27:33 Yeah.

27:33 So, the the whole system is built around kind of constraining the id, you know,

27:37 or or like tamping it down and dealing with its with its intense energy.

27:41 In much the same way,

27:43 family systems theory is kind of built around what do we do with this anxiety?

27:46 And like you were saying, anxiety is interpreted really broadly.

27:49 It's tension.

27:50 It's stress.

27:51 It's the normal uh friction that emerges between people.

27:56 And the whole idea is that we don't really want to face our anxiety directly.

28:03 That can cause rifts between people.

28:05 It can blow up the whole system.

28:07 And remember, systems want to keep on going.

28:11 So, we need to find all of these complicated ways

28:15 to manage anxiety when it appears inside of the system.

28:19 And we've already given a few examples of that.

28:20 You just gave a great one, Dad.

28:22 You've got friction between the parents.

28:24 And how do they displace that friction?

28:27 Well, they say, "Okay, kiddo.

28:29 Whoop.

28:29 We're going to enlist you as a third member in our little

28:33 system here." And this is something that's often called triangulation.

28:36 So Bowen's idea is that uh systems are most stable when there are at least three

28:42 people involved in them because when there are

28:45 just two people involved in a system, guess what?

28:48 If they're mad at each other, they got to actually deal with it.

28:50 And the dealing with it could destroy that diad.

28:54 The system breaks down.

28:55 Systems don't want to break down.

28:56 So what do we have to do?

28:57 We have to displace that anxiety somewhere.

29:00 Suddenly the parents become very interested in what's going on with the kid.

29:05 Now hopefully even very healthy parents are

29:07 very interested in their children in healthy ways.

29:10 There are always uh more functional and less functional versions

29:14 of all the stuff that we're going to be talking about today.

29:16 But you can imagine a version of this where

29:18 the kid becomes a kind of battleground for the parents in the way that you

29:22 were describing in some of your examples there,

29:23 Dad, where they don't want to talk about their arguments with each other.

29:28 So they become very focused on Johnny's schooling, right?

29:31 where they become very focused on different views about how much permissiveness

29:36 or how much authoritarianness we should have inside of our parental dynamic.

29:41 So does that make sense as an explanation here?

29:43 Dad, do you want to do this with maybe more more polish than I am right now?

29:48 Well, in our dynamic, you say stuff like that and

29:52 you are so polished, Forest, you are so on the money.

29:56 Um, for me, I learned so much listening to you.

30:00 So, let's let's just uh very touch

30:02 let's just blow up the script there a little bit.

30:06 So, you were watching me be disruptive and actually that's a bit of a preview

30:10 of where a lot of this um some of the therapeutic uh uh takeaways are,

30:15 which has to do with deliberately disrupting systems.

30:19 And they would do little things that uh the therapists would

30:23 that were not um designed in particular to change a particular thing.

30:28 They were just trying to change anything.

30:30 So they would start having meetings in different places

30:34 with the families or they would rearrange the furniture.

30:37 They would put the parents on low chairs and they would put

30:41 the kids on bar stools so that they were literally above the parents.

30:46 They would disrupt things.

30:47 And so I think there was just a place sometimes for being disruptive,

30:50 just deliberately disrupting systems.

30:52 I mean it was seemingly innocuous stuff

30:54 that would actually destabilize the system and then

30:59 help it land in a you know better a happier more you know adaptive equilibrium.

31:04 So anyway so that's an exa that's a way

31:07 of commenting on what just sort of happened between us there.

31:10 I wanted to um make a key point here related to what you

31:15 brought up which is that so much

31:19 of the unfolding systemically is not deliberate.

31:24 It's not malicious for sure.

31:27 Yeah.

31:27 It's not based on a master plan.

31:30 The parents are not thinking, you know, to with each other or covertly.

31:34 Yeah.

31:35 Oh, let's get the kid to start selfharming

31:38 and because that'll be a way to, you know, not avoid our marital issues.

31:41 No, no, no.

31:42 And one of the ways I like to think about it

31:45 is this whole idea of strange attractors and where to system settle.

31:51 Imagine a sphere, a ball, and imagine cutting it in half.

31:54 So now you have a half sphere.

31:56 Make that half sphere like a sink.

31:59 Now you have a sink that's a half sphere.

32:02 And above the sink, drop a ping-pong ball.

32:06 Wherever you drop that pingpong ball,

32:09 wherever it starts after five or 10 or 50 little bounces,

32:14 where's it going to end up?

32:16 The bottom of the basin.

32:18 That's the strange attractor.

32:20 And in much the same way, um, systems end up in these basins of attraction.

32:26 uh not particularly like I'm saying intentionally but the forces

32:32 you know draw them there and then the other

32:34 related point is to really appreciate the degree to which

32:39 families in most cases are under a lot of pressure.

32:44 My family was under a lot of pressure growing up.

32:47 You know my dad was struggling to get

32:49 through after World War II his delayed training.

32:53 He eventually got a PhD in zoolology.

32:55 My mom was home alone, you know,

32:57 while my dad was very engaged in that and, you know,

33:00 a certain amount of psychological pressure on him

33:02 to succeed in his deferred career, become a provider.

33:07 You know, my mom helped out financially a little bit,

33:09 but it was a traditional structure.

33:10 My family was under a lot of pressure.

33:12 And when I look back and I kind of look

33:16 through some of my own critiques of my parents

33:19 and I start having a deeper understanding

33:22 of the stress stressors and pressures that they were under,

33:26 you know, it's helped me have a bigger perspective,

33:30 a wider perspective because you start realizing, wow, this is so overdetermined.

33:35 So many forces brought were brought to bear that landed on, you know,

33:42 my mom snapping at me some Tuesday afternoon, let's say.

33:46 And some of that is the intergenerational aspect of it.

33:50 Yeah.

33:49 Which you're kind of making a reference to here, Dad,

33:52 that your parents themselves came from systems

33:54 that came from systems that came from systems.

33:58 And one of the one of the insights from Bowen is

34:00 that these family patterns tend to intensify over time until somebody,

34:05 you know, cracks the egg on the whole thing.

34:07 There are healthier and less healthy ways to crack the egg on the whole thing.

34:11 But in general, those kinds of of processes

34:14 that are associated with differentiation when we

34:16 get more space between ourselves and and the um

34:19 the classic patterns of that system, that's really hard to do.

34:24 Systems are powerful.

34:25 Differentiation is hard.

34:26 It's easy for this stuff to just reinforce itself over time

34:31 and it gives me a lot of appreciation for people who

34:33 come from uh far less functional environments than I did who

34:37 are able to step into that role and change some real patterns.

34:40 I love to cook and I wish I lived in a world where I always had the time,

34:45 the energy, and the brain space to cook

34:47 three delicious and nutritious meals a day.

34:51 But these days, that's just not always the case.

34:53 And when I'm moving through my day or I'm tired at the end of it,

34:56 that's when it's easy to make less than ideal choices about what I'm eating.

35:00 That's why I was really curious when Hule reached out to sponsor the show.

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35:07 And they're also thoughtful about minimizing

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36:24 I find it just haunting and you know,

36:26 it makes me think about so much of um like Shakespeare or so many major stories,

36:33 biblical stories, Cain and Abel uh are about family dynamics.

36:37 Well, I fear I may have overcomplexified this stuff

36:41 and I wonder for us if you could bring us home uh and talk about

36:47 the the construct of the identified patient as it were.

36:50 Okay.

36:51 That's a really concrete way into this material and one

36:54 I think that will have a lot of meaning for people.

36:57 Yeah.

36:57 So the identified patient, the IP is, as we've sort of said to this point,

37:03 but just to go into a little bit more detail about it,

37:05 it's the family member whose symptoms are the most

37:07 visible and who is often presented for treatment.

37:11 And this is a key idea because the where where Bowen and other people

37:15 were bumping into this is that is who's being sent to work with them, right?

37:19 Like that's the context that they're working

37:20 and somebody needs to first walk in the door.

37:22 So then the question becomes why is that person walking in the door?

37:26 which is sort of a subtly important question in the process of therapy.

37:30 What actually brings somebody into the room

37:33 and these were often people who were presented by others.

37:39 You know, our child is the problem.

37:41 Here, solve the child's problem.

37:44 And in systems terms, as you were talking about a little bit earlier, Dad,

37:48 this person can function as kind of this the anxiety

37:51 bearer for the system as a whole, the the symptom bearer for them.

37:55 And what I want people to take from this is that there is

37:58 a difference between having the loudest symptoms

38:02 and being the genuine source of the problem.

38:05 And you could really see this in that first example

38:07 that you gave way back at the beginning of the episode, Dad.

38:10 There was this young girl who was acting

38:12 out in school being physically violent with other kids.

38:17 But then you kind of trace that behavior back

38:19 to the source and you go, "Wait a second.

38:20 These parents are constantly fighting with her or fighting in front of her.

38:23 They're being physically aggressive with each other.

38:25 Where is she learning these behaviors from?

38:28 Is the kid the problem or is there something else going on here?

38:31 So Bowen really emphasized how anxiety could concentrate in one person,

38:35 typically a child, but not always, through predictable processes.

38:39 And he called these the family projection process,

38:42 which is a little tricky to understand,

38:44 but when I dug into it and kind of got to the bottom of it,

38:47 I thought it was just so cool.

38:49 I'm not sure if cool is quite the right word, but I hope you take my meaning.

38:52 The idea here is that one member becomes

38:55 the the focus of worry or control and then

38:59 develops symptoms because they are the focus in that way

39:03 and this becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

39:06 Uh the parent treats the child as if something is wrong with them

39:11 and looks for and interprets their behavior as if something is wrong with them.

39:17 So something starts to become wrong with them because

39:20 they have been kind of treated in this way.

39:22 Uh so the core idea here is

39:23 that the parents fears and perceptions shape the child's

39:26 development in such a way that the child

39:29 grows to embody their fears and perceptions.

39:33 And this projection process follows three steps

39:36 and then a fourth I'll kind of add

39:37 to the end here that that's not a formal part of it but was helpful for me.

39:41 First, the parent focuses on the child out

39:44 of fear that something is wrong with the child.

39:47 And then second, the parent interprets

39:49 the child's behavior as confirming that fear.

39:52 And then third, the parent treats the child

39:54 as if something is really wrong with the child.

39:57 I would add a forest fourth step because the child

40:01 is being treated as if something is wrong with them.

40:04 They come to believe that thing really is wrong with them.

40:10 There's actually an example of this that's

40:12 given on the Bowen website that I'm going

40:15 to paraphrase a little bit here because

40:17 I thought it was such an interesting example.

40:19 Martha feared that she would transfer inadequacies she had

40:23 felt as a child and still felt to her child.

40:26 To solve this, she became hyperinvolved and responsive

40:30 to any seeming desire her child Amy had for attention.

40:35 Martha loved Amy deeply and they seemed like one person.

40:39 In other words, they were in kind of an imshed relationship.

40:42 Amy becomes just as sensitive to Martha as Martha is to Amy.

40:48 Martha, that's the mom.

40:49 Her excessive involvement programmed Amy to want much of her mother's

40:54 attention and to be highly sensitive to her mother's emotional state.

40:59 This led to more behaviors that look to Martha, the mom, like neediness.

41:05 Martha comes to resent Amy, that's her child,

41:08 neediness, while also feeling like she is failing Amy.

41:12 She's distressed if Amy seems unhappy with her.

41:15 Martha lectures Amy about her sensitivity and neediness,

41:20 but she is herself a sensitive, needy person.

41:23 When Amy tries to be less dependent, Martha pulls her back in.

41:29 What a typical and haunting example of this kind of thing happening.

41:35 Is there anything you'd like to add here, Dad?

41:37 So, that's fantastic.

41:40 And frankly, as a parent myself, I'm squirming here.

41:46 And if you're listening and you're a parent,

41:49 you might be thinking, "Oh my goodness.

41:52 Oh my goodness." about um you know ways you were

41:58 and I think it's so helpful to appreciate that these messes

42:04 are not entirely our fault and very often they're hardly

42:08 our fault at all and still they are to some extent

42:12 our respons they they are our responsibility to do what we

42:15 can about them including retrospectively and retroactively much as I think

42:20 there's a place for um adult kids to process and repair

42:26 and communicate as much as possible with their own aging parents.

42:30 There's a place for aging parents themselves uh based on their own

42:33 reflections to take responsibility uh for being there when it

42:38 happened at a minimum and you know for being one

42:42 of the actors on the stage in which the family drama was unfolding.

42:47 Point one.

42:47 Point two, Amy the child doesn't have the kind

42:50 of moral culpability that Martha the adult does,

42:54 but Amy to some extent is doing things deliberately.

42:59 Amy is aware of certain dynamics.

43:02 Amy could look around and Amy real could

43:05 realize that she could act differently in some ways,

43:07 particularly, you know, Amy is a 10year-old and then a 17year-old.

43:11 This is something that we talk about sometimes, Dad.

43:14 And I think that maybe this is one of those things that we

43:16 just feel a little differently about or think a little differently about.

43:19 So for me, yeah, you know,

43:20 maybe Amy could have made some different choices here, but man,

43:25 there were a lot of forces acting on Amy

43:27 that made it real hard to make other choices.

43:30 100,000%.

43:31 You know, if um and and sometimes the external forces

43:36 are really quite extraordinary and the child has zero agency.

43:40 Imagine a highly abusive setting.

43:43 And the example here is not that extreme to your point, kind of mid-range.

43:47 Uh, you know, I'll just speak to myself.

43:49 Uh, I was, you know, really kind of aware of the role I was in as a kid,

43:53 but, you know, I'm very I had a very

43:56 strong sense of agency by the time I was six.

43:59 You know, I was making choices.

44:00 I actually think this is a great way in here,

44:02 Dad, to something that I wanted to ask you about.

44:04 Uh, how do you think the the term identified patient

44:09 gets misunderstood by people or misused or kind of used

44:13 as a blanket statement in situations where where maybe it

44:16 shouldn't be in some of the ways that you're describing.

44:18 It can be reductionistic if for one,

44:20 you know, it uh can reduce the complexities.

44:23 It's ironic that coming out of complex system theory uh comes

44:27 this terminology that can be reductionistic in terms of actual complexities.

44:32 And then second, it can be a way to avoid uh really recognizing uh the agency,

44:40 frankly, the choice making especially of an older child like an older teenager.

44:45 Uh and also a way to avoid really

44:48 recognizing um factors that are not really systemic factors.

44:54 They're not really family system factors.

44:56 There could be biology inside the child.

44:58 There could be learning issues in the child that are

45:01 really embedded in their own hardware for example or temperamental tendencies.

45:06 Uh there could be also a way to using

45:10 the IP terminology sort of not face the pain.

45:14 Right?

45:15 I think so much of um the opportunity here

45:18 with family systems theory is to acknowledge pain is

45:22 to as Tara Brock recently used this term with me

45:26 to become proximal to pain to become close to it.

45:31 And you could argue that the um problematic

45:35 uh evolutions of of family systems are ways often

45:40 to avoid pain and avoid dealing with pain

45:43 and really addressing pain uh including in in key members.

45:48 And it's the avoidance of the pain

45:50 and the you know the strategies to avoid the pain

45:54 uh or adapt to the pain that then you know drive the difficulty in the family.

45:58 I think in part looking back on my mom and my dad bless their memory

46:03 and I won't get too detailed here but I think uh you know one thing

46:08 that would happen is that in their traditional roles my mom missed my dad and he

46:14 was gone a lot and that was pain for her and she also had high standards

46:19 for herself and no family support all

46:22 alone with two young kids initially and some

46:26 of that pain you know unfolded in various ways and was kind of fuel for some

46:31 of um you know what was happening with her that then spilled out you know onto

46:38 her kids and so um you know paying attention to pain I think is important and

46:45 and not getting too trapped in our terminology like identified patient.

46:50 Yeah, totally.

46:51 And another thing that that term can sometimes do is ironically turn

46:57 some other individual into the uh the IP during the process of therapy,

47:02 the the source of all the problems.

47:04 You know, it was it was my mom all along.

47:06 It was my dad all along.

47:07 And then all of the things they were talking about get shifted onto that person.

47:13 Yeah.

47:12 And there are real situations where they

47:14 should all get shifted onto that person.

47:16 that person really was messing up in very obvious and consequential ways.

47:21 But as we've all been talking about,

47:23 this stuff is complicated and a lot of the time

47:26 there's just a lot of stuff in the mix and it can be very reductive to make it

47:31 all one person's fault at the end of the day.

47:34 Uh to me the big value of this is

47:39 that balance of um non-pathizing and relaxation

47:49 of responsibility with this big claiming of responsibility

47:54 and agency counterintuitively at the same time.

47:57 So there really are things we can do as an adult to go back

48:02 through and think about this and re-evaluate and make changes in our life today.

48:07 And also there's an appreciation for all of the ways that these factors

48:11 were a million winds and they were blowing on us in different ways.

48:16 And there really was a lot that when you are when you're seized by a system,

48:21 it's like a snowball rolling down a hill.

48:24 And could you really in that moment in time

48:26 truly authentically could you have done something differently?

48:30 And the answer for a lot of people is going to be no.

48:33 They just they just weren't there yet.

48:35 They didn't have the resources.

48:36 They didn't have the internal skills.

48:38 They didn't have the situational support.

48:40 Whatever it was, it it just it was what it was.

48:42 You did the best you could.

48:44 And okay, now what are we doing?

48:47 Kind of as we constantly come back to on the podcast.

48:50 And that sort of non-pathologizing element to all of it,

48:52 I think is such an such a great part

48:54 of this sort of systems thinking because I I

48:58 think that it removes the shame that can sometimes

49:00 get in the way of authentic change for people.

49:04 I think that's a key point you're making there and it reminds me of a comment

49:07 from Paul Gilbert uh once I was talking with him and he said sorrow not shame.

49:15 I think one example of that is another very common

49:18 dynamic along the lines of what you were talking about here.

49:21 This um what's the acronym for it?

49:24 FSS or whatever family projection process.

49:28 FPPP.

49:28 FP.

49:29 Yeah.

49:30 Another example classic is where you have a child,

49:34 let's say edging into 12, 13, 14,

49:36 starts becoming increasingly oppositional and defiant and disruptive

49:41 in the family and maybe misbehaving at school.

49:44 And so then what do you do as parents?

49:46 So not not atypically.

49:48 A parent for example might start discip

49:51 trying to discipline the child or correcting them

49:54 or calling them out for their misbehaviors which

49:58 in many cases just leads the kid to dig

50:00 in deeper and in ways you're describing in circular

50:04 ways they become even more oppositional because then

50:07 they start you know creating an identity as being

50:10 oppositional to this parental power coming at them.

50:14 and that that can then lead to escalations which then increase the polarizations

50:19 and on and on it goes along with a kind

50:22 of an internalization on you know the part

50:25 of the kid of well I I guess you think I'm a you know bad

50:29 you know it's a short step from my behavior is bad to I am bad

50:33 and how does somebody act when they internalize that sense of badness

50:36 you know does it become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy

50:39 exactly right that's to me a very common example and one that often shows

50:42 up in the clinical literatur And it often gets involved in the triangle I

50:46 referred to earlier where you have

50:48 a more permissive parent and a more authoritarian

50:50 parent and it becomes really difficult

50:52 to come together and all that's totally true.

50:56 Hey there, thanks for watching and sorry for the brief interruption.

50:59 But it turns out that over 60% of the people

51:01 watching this right now are not subscribed to the channel.

51:04 So if you could just take a moment to hit the subscribe button,

51:07 it would really help me out.

51:08 I'd appreciate it a lot.

51:09 All right, back to the show.

51:11 So, in this last third of the episode

51:14 or however much time we have left here, uh,

51:16 before I have to get you out of here, Dad,

51:18 I want to talk a bit about what are we going to do about all this?

51:21 Like, this is a lot of cool information.

51:23 Just knowing this will help you perceive systems in a new and different way.

51:28 When I learned about this stuff, it was like Neo in the matrix, you know?

51:31 I suddenly started seeing the code that was

51:34 running underneath people's interactions with each other.

51:36 And and you want to be a little careful about that.

51:38 I think it's really easy to learn a new term or learn

51:41 a new idea and and suddenly you start seeing it everywhere.

51:44 You know, you don't want to get like wrapped up in it in that way.

51:46 But man, it can be a really insightful set of tools for a person.

51:51 But there's also stuff that we can do whether you're

51:53 thinking about your relationship with your literal family system these days

51:57 or if you're interpreting that term much more broadly in terms

52:00 of just like how do you want to act in the world?

52:03 And going back to something that I said toward the beginning of the podcast,

52:06 Bone's big target here was differentiation.

52:08 In other words, you are not the systems you belong to.

52:12 You are yourself, your own unique, independent, strong individual.

52:17 And the way that he described differentiation was the ability to stay

52:21 emotionally connected while maintaining your own

52:25 thinking values and personal sense of direction,

52:29 especially when important other people put different kinds of pressure on you.

52:35 You are being your own person inside of the relationship.

52:41 And he thought that people's basic level of differentiation

52:45 was essentially established by the family of origin,

52:48 where they came from, and that it

52:50 remained relatively stable unless a person did active,

52:54 often difficult work to change it.

52:57 To give some examples here,

52:59 a well differentiated person looks something like this.

53:03 They've got strong and boundaried connections with other people.

53:06 They enjoy relationships.

53:08 They recognize dependence.

53:10 I just had a great conversation with Nedra Glover Tab

53:13 about dependence and how we are all dependent on other people,

53:15 but they also don't need others in that way.

53:19 They're not acting overly responsible for other

53:22 people or um overly conflict driven with them.

53:26 They can express their needs to others in different kinds of ways,

53:29 particularly safe others.

53:31 They've got a kind of strong and autonomous sense of self.

53:33 They're secure in their identity, their beliefs, their values.

53:37 uh they're not so easily affected by criticism or praise.

53:42 They're not constantly approval seeking and they can

53:45 hold on to some amount of independent thinking.

53:47 Uh they can have a a flexibility to the way that they approach situations,

53:52 a little bit more on the lower end of differentiation.

53:55 I somebody who is really pursuing a kind of ideal

53:58 distance from other people either very very close or more far.

54:03 Uh they maybe feel like they can't hold their boundaries.

54:05 And so being intimate with others is is very emotionally scary

54:09 for them because they recognize that they're a low differentiation person.

54:14 They tend to be more emotionally reactive and they tend to have more

54:18 of what Bowen called in a a slightly judgmental way a pseudo self.

54:23 Uh the sense of self is malleable

54:26 and will kind of change to please other people.

54:30 And over time, our goal here is to kind

54:32 of move toward more differentiation if we can.

54:35 Uh, now there's a bit of a good news, bad news in all of this.

54:40 The the good news is that you still have agency and the path

54:45 to influencing the system that you're a part of is maybe a little ironically.

54:49 There's been a lot of like counterintuitiveness in this conversation,

54:52 which I think is interesting.

54:54 By actually focusing on yourself,

54:55 your own behavior, your responses, your choices.

54:58 I'm me over here.

55:01 The bad news is that systems are really powerful and when we move into a system,

55:06 it exerts a lot of force on us whether we wanted to or not.

55:10 And it's difficult for any one individual person

55:12 to change a system all on their own.

55:16 But the way we do this is by actually changing ourselves.

55:19 When we shift our little puzzle piece,

55:20 puts pressure on all of the puzzle pieces around us.

55:23 And so one of the things that you talk about over and over again,

55:25 Dad, I've heard you talk about this so many times,

55:27 is that an essential part of change is recognizing

55:32 the pressure you will be under to not change.

55:35 That when you start changing,

55:37 you are going to get blowback from other people about those changes.

55:41 And so in order for the process to be successful,

55:44 you need to be able to deal with that inside of yourself.

55:47 A different kind of version of it is you have let's say a mother who is

55:52 a caregiver in her family system and as the kids get older and and also as she

55:59 starts communicating increasingly with her partner more and more

56:03 she wants to step out of the role of being the solution to everybody's problems

56:09 and she just steps out of that role increasingly.

56:12 She refuses let's say to do other people's dishes.

56:16 It's not her job to figure out the family schedule.

56:19 If other people can't figure out where they're supposed to be

56:21 at a certain time when it's plainly on the calendar on the refrigerator,

56:26 it's not her job to go pick them up and solve that problem for them.

56:30 Stuff like that.

56:31 You know, normal range things done reasonably skillfully without much anger.

56:37 Just clean, straightforward.

56:39 Whoa.

56:40 There's a lot of push back.

56:41 Often, you know, people want to wait, what?

56:44 What?

56:44 you're not the gonna be the solution to all my problems.

56:46 What?

56:46 What if I forget my lunch?

56:48 You're not going to drive to school to bring me in my lunch?

56:51 You know what?

56:51 What?

56:52 And there's the attempt to rewrite her back into that script.

56:56 And I find um you know, I've really enjoyed the metaphor from Tom

57:01 Wolf and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test having

57:04 to do with the early hippies and Ken

57:06 Keezy and the Merry Pranksters where to summarize it,

57:09 there can be a really great question for you.

57:12 Whose movie am I in?

57:15 Am I being written into some role that maintains your equilibrium?

57:20 So you want to solve your inner problems by having me be a certain way.

57:26 Right?

57:27 And that's me being written into your movie.

57:29 Or on the other hand, am I in my movie, right?

57:33 and even to some extent am I relating to you from my movie rather

57:38 than um maintaining and uh reinforcing the script

57:44 that you're trying to write me into.

57:46 I have found that metaphor really helpful.

57:48 So, I think you already gave one answer to this question,

57:52 but because you are a clinician and you've

57:55 worked with a lot of people around this stuff

57:57 and I'm not sure how many people listening

57:59 know this, but your predominant clinical work was

58:02 with kids and families and couples uh where

58:05 there was a lot of this family system stuff that was in the mix like you

58:09 were talking about in the examples that you gave.

58:11 So, I want to kind of clear out a little bit at the end.

58:14 I've been talking a lot during this episode

58:16 and just ask you a uh a deceptively simple question.

58:20 What do you think helps people differentiate?

58:23 What can people actually do if they want

58:25 to develop more of that sense of differentiation as adults?

58:30 Yeah, ideally as adults.

58:31 I don't know how many 17year-olds or 16 year

58:33 olds are listening to this, but maybe some are.

58:36 I think that's a profound question for us.

58:39 Well, one thing is to uh really acknowledge

58:44 the gravitational power of social approval and social scripting.

58:52 It really affects us.

58:53 Think about, you know, gender role socialization, expectations of other people,

59:00 who they want you to be, you know, it's powerful.

59:04 So, that's kind of step one, right?

59:06 Uh in other words, what are the forces that uh don't differentiate you that kind

59:11 of merge you into a role and and limit

59:14 your capacity to express yourself really really freely.

59:19 Second, this goes to the work you and I have done

59:22 a lot around um recognizing your fears of risking a dreaded experience.

59:27 In other words, what are the dreaded experiences

59:30 that you anticipate if you become one step more individuated?

59:35 That's another related term to differentiation as you know from Jung and others.

59:39 Um what might happen if you started listening

59:44 more to the beat of your own drummer?

59:46 If you started pursuing your own interests, if you stopped agreeing so much,

59:50 if you stopped giving agreement so much uh to other

59:54 people that you didn't actually agree with deep down inside yourself,

59:58 oh what might happen?

59:59 So mindful awareness of the forces that tend to force push you into conformity.

1:00:06 That's what we're talking about here.

1:00:07 You know, maintaining a kind of conformity

1:00:10 and also being aware of your own inner fears.

1:00:13 And then uh it can really help to do

1:00:16 little things that break you out of the script

1:00:19 that are um within your power to do

1:00:22 and they differentiate you a little bit from other people.

1:00:26 like move your chair at dinner, you know, sit differently.

1:00:30 Uh eat something different, make a different kind of meal, you know,

1:00:34 don't just nod in agreement when Uncle Bob starts,

1:00:38 you know, ranting about immigrants or something.

1:00:41 Just maybe just look at Uncle Bob, you know,

1:00:43 you don't need to argue with him necessarily, but you don't give him agreement.

1:00:46 Little things like that, and you're then expanding

1:00:49 your window of tolerance for your own uniqueness.

1:00:54 Th those are really good things to do.

1:00:56 I think another thing uh which has been really helpful for me in a funny

1:01:01 kind of way is to uh start becoming more mindful of identification per se.

1:01:10 What do you identify with?

1:01:12 who what what kind of way of being, nationality, perspective, type,

1:01:19 you know, smart, not so smart, you know, what do you identify with?

1:01:25 And you start becoming more aware

1:01:27 that identifying and identification is constructed.

1:01:32 It's just constructed.

1:01:34 And you start experiencing yourself more, as Walt Whitman put it,

1:01:38 as multitudes, as you know, IFS, I think, is very helpful here.

1:01:42 Parts theory is really helpful here that you are a complexity.

1:01:46 And as you start to air out your own identity

1:01:51 and what you identify with and start having a sense of yourself

1:01:56 more increasingly is made of many parts that are connected and are

1:02:01 changing dynamically in relationship with the wider world and wider system.

1:02:07 So you see yourself more and more as sort

1:02:09 of like an eddying in the streaming of reality.

1:02:12 Uh that experience not just that idea but that actual

1:02:17 experience increasingly starts loosening you up right you don't feel

1:02:21 so bound or fixed or fixated and then you have

1:02:25 more and more inner freedom and outer freedom as well.

1:02:29 I think those are great.

1:02:30 Dad, another one that I would toss in here is to appreciate

1:02:33 how so much of the functions of these systems are driven by patterns.

1:02:40 Mhm.

1:02:40 And therefore, the way that we disrupt the system,

1:02:42 just as you were saying, is by disrupting the pattern.

1:02:46 But the point of the pattern is to essentially avoid it's

1:02:50 to avoid confronting the actual real

1:02:55 underlying material that is driving this pattern.

1:02:58 The parents don't want to talk about

1:03:00 their problems with each other and they certainly don't

1:03:02 want to do it in a way that is grounded and empathic but also driven by change.

1:03:12 They're not just having the same old argument

1:03:14 they've had with each other a dozen times.

1:03:17 They're interacting with the problem in a different kind

1:03:20 of way where one of them says to the other, "Hey,

1:03:23 this just has to change in the future or the nature

1:03:27 of our relationship is going to change." Or, "Wow,

1:03:31 this is a way that we are acting with our kid

1:03:34 and we just can't act that way with them anymore." Like, we just can't do that.

1:03:38 Maybe you do it with a therapist.

1:03:40 Maybe you do it with a moderator of some kind.

1:03:43 Who knows?

1:03:43 Do what you got to do.

1:03:44 But you're stepping out of the typical

1:03:47 script and you are having the bravery, frankly,

1:03:52 to confront these issues in a more clear and direct way

1:03:58 because so much of these systems is built around not doing that.

1:04:02 It's built around triangulation and diffusing anxiety by talking

1:04:06 to your buddies about your problems with your spouse.

1:04:08 Look, there's a place for that.

1:04:10 Everybody does that.

1:04:11 It's okay to some degree.

1:04:13 But if that is your way of constantly diffusing anxiety

1:04:16 so that you never actually confront the underlying issue with hello,

1:04:20 the person who can really do something about it,

1:04:23 that's something to really think about and ask yourself like,

1:04:25 is that the way that I want this to go

1:04:27 or am I ready to do something a little bit different?

1:04:30 Well, as we wrap up here, I wonder if I could offer three hopefully hypers

1:04:36 succinct bullet points to see what you think about them.

1:04:40 First is to really broadly recognize on the one hand the ways

1:04:46 that we are really affected by others

1:04:49 and typically underestimate how affected we are.

1:04:53 And it's important to have the humility

1:04:55 to recognize how affected we are by other people.

1:05:00 And on the other side of it to realize how much we

1:05:03 are affecting others in ways that we routinely do not take into account.

1:05:09 Uh this is certainly true if we hold any position

1:05:12 of advantage or privilege in relationship to another person in which

1:05:16 we're not often taking into account what it's like

1:05:19 for them to be with us in various kinds of ways.

1:05:22 So that's that's one huge takeaway.

1:05:25 Have the humility to recognize how affected you are by others

1:05:29 and to have the decency to recognize how much you affect them as well.

1:05:33 Second is to think about the ways that sometimes you get drawn in by other

1:05:40 people in ways to perpetuate their scripts or to serve functions for them.

1:05:47 And related to that, make choices if you do, not to collude with that.

1:05:56 Not to uh reinforce their game or their I mean that sounds porative,

1:06:01 but just their dynamic, their script, their system.

1:06:05 No, I'm not going to perpetuate your system.

1:06:07 I'm not going to reinforce it.

1:06:08 I'm not going to reward it.

1:06:09 I'm not going to try to disrupt it or blow it up.

1:06:12 I'm not going to try to end it, but well,

1:06:15 I'm not going to you're not going to use me.

1:06:17 uh in your quarrel with this other person.

1:06:20 Nope, I'm not going to get drawn into this, right?

1:06:23 Uh so I think that's something to pay attention to.

1:06:26 And then my third bullet point is to just kind of share

1:06:31 what I'm feeling as we're going through all this, the weight of it.

1:06:38 We are all of woman born.

1:06:41 We are all born into some kind of system.

1:06:45 No human infant can live on its own, can survive on its own.

1:06:49 We are all born into systems and we're, you know,

1:06:52 and then those systems might even evolve over time,

1:06:54 but we're part of there's it's inescapable.

1:06:57 And the issues that we bring up here in our common humanity are universal.

1:07:03 And when you, you know,

1:07:06 perhaps feel the weight of things that happened to you growing up or feel

1:07:09 the weight of things that you did

1:07:10 as a parent while your children were growing up,

1:07:13 it's also important to appreciate.

1:07:19 Well, unless there was something really extreme,

1:07:22 most of what happens is kind of in the mid-range

1:07:25 and is part of our common humanity.

1:07:29 And I think that's helpful to appreciate.

1:07:31 This is one of those episodes where we

1:07:32 could have done four episodes on family systems theory.

1:07:36 We could have done a whole episode,

1:07:38 we might do a whole episode in the future on satir just

1:07:40 the more like humanistic approach to family

1:07:43 systems and uh self-esteem and self-actualization

1:07:46 and uh Satir really focused on more communication styles in relationship inside

1:07:51 of the family and how we can work on those communication styles.

1:07:54 We could do a whole episode on that.

1:07:55 We could do a whole episode on minutuchin.

1:07:57 We could do a whole episode on a lot of these ideas.

1:08:00 Uh we could do a whole episode on triangulation given different examples

1:08:04 of it and how these kinds of structures get perpetuated in our relationships.

1:08:08 Uh so we're really only scratching the surface with this one even

1:08:11 though we talked about it for for you know 70 80 minutes here.

1:08:15 I really appreciate people sticking with it.

1:08:16 This kind of episode can be a little

1:08:18 dense in terms of the information that we're sharing.

1:08:20 I hope that people enjoy it and get a lot out of it anyways and they find it,

1:08:24 you know, not just informational,

1:08:26 but like fun to listen to hopefully and engaging as we're going.

1:08:29 I learned a lot.

1:08:30 I hope you learned a lot if you were listening to it.

1:08:32 And again, Dad, as usual, thanks so much for doing this with me.

1:08:35 Oh, thank you, Forest.

1:08:36 And I I don't even know if to include this.

1:08:39 It's just here we are talking about family and we are family.

1:08:43 Oh, I almost mentioned it in the beginning,

1:08:45 but I thought it was just like an obvious subtext to the whole thing.

1:08:48 Yeah, it's very funny.

1:08:49 Yeah.

1:08:49 And maybe another time we could talk about or maybe

1:08:52 this is part of it just asymmetries of influence.

1:08:59 Sure.

1:08:58 And mattering.

1:08:58 In other words, what I see is that when obviously

1:09:02 kids are subject to much more influence from their parents,

1:09:06 whatever agency particularly a growing and older child has,

1:09:12 their parents have so much more power on the one hand.

1:09:15 On the other hand, as kids become adults and age over time,

1:09:20 there's an asymmetry that starts moving in the other direction.

1:09:23 Totally.

1:09:23 Yeah.

1:09:24 At some point, that dynamic flips.

1:09:25 Yeah.

1:09:26 Yeah.

1:09:26 And uh in which their their parents need them

1:09:32 more than the kids need the parents over time.

1:09:36 And totally just kind of naming and facing those inherent asymmetries.

1:09:40 And so I it's in that context I feel a particular appreciation for you.

1:09:44 Oh, well thanks, Dad.

1:09:45 Yeah, that's very sweet for uh being engaged

1:09:48 in this reflective process in a way that's really extraordinarily rare.

1:09:54 I didn't think I did not engage it this fully

1:09:56 with my own parents when I was your age.

1:10:00 Well, some of that is because I was taught these skills

1:10:03 by by you and mom that gave me more access to it.

1:10:06 So, you know, here we are again with is this is this about

1:10:09 an individual's behavior or is it about the system that they emerged from?

1:10:13 So, I can only I can only take so much credit for it,

1:10:15 which is an interesting maybe period to put

1:10:18 on the end of the sentence of this episode,

1:10:20 but to just echo part of what you're saying, um,

1:10:24 you know, the the greatest inheritance that you

1:10:26 guys gave me was that you were good parents.

1:10:29 That's sweet.

1:10:30 Yeah.

1:10:32 And more than anything else and, uh,

1:10:32 that's when I when I refer to myself as being a privileged person,

1:10:36 that is one of the first things that I'm mentioning,

1:10:38 particularly as a process of doing this work.

1:10:40 I think that you you just hear so many stories from people

1:10:43 or have so many interactions with other people where you're like, "Wow,

1:10:46 you just had a rough go of it in your home." And being in the group

1:10:52 of people who sure there was there were

1:10:54 other pressures on me when I was growing up.

1:10:56 We talked about a lot of them on the podcast.

1:10:57 We were not tremendously well to do.

1:11:00 There was a lot of stuff going

1:11:01 on with other kids that was very complicated for me.

1:11:04 We had our own internal dynamics in the family

1:11:06 that were not perfect because no family dynamics are perfect.

1:11:10 Everybody's got their stuff is my point.

1:11:12 And even so, I look back on it and I go, "Wow,

1:11:17 I had a great run of it relative to 99% of the population.

1:11:22 I feel I feel, you know,

1:11:24 so thrilled about that." And I don't even know what quite the right word.

1:11:28 I was just so like grateful that that was the case for me.

1:11:33 I really enjoyed talking with Rick today about family systems theory.

1:11:37 This was a long and pretty dense episode.

1:11:39 I'm going to do my best here at the end

1:11:42 to summarize some of the big takeaways for you guys.

1:11:45 First of all, what is family systems theory?

1:11:47 Well, it is a set of related approaches

1:11:50 that came out of the 50s and 60s that really

1:11:53 changed how clinicians thought about dealing with different kinds

1:11:57 of behavioral issues that were showing up in individual people.

1:12:01 At the time, therapy was very focused mostly on individuals

1:12:04 and what was going on in the minds of individuals.

1:12:07 Family systems approaches changed the game by focusing on the family.

1:12:11 It's right there in the name as the primary unit of analysis.

1:12:15 That's a bit of a fancy way of saying that the family

1:12:18 as a whole was what was being evaluated in the therapeutic process.

1:12:22 For example, Bowen worked at the National

1:12:24 Institute of Mental Health in the late 1950s,

1:12:27 and he was well known because he would have whole families

1:12:31 live on the ward there together where he could observe them.

1:12:34 This was a pretty radical approach at the time.

1:12:37 The big idea from family systems is

1:12:39 that the family is this single emotional unit.

1:12:43 It functions as a single interconnected system

1:12:46 and each person's behavior is interdependent on everybody else's.

1:12:50 Everyone is a cog in the machine and we can't understand any

1:12:54 individual cog without having a sense of the machine as a whole.

1:12:57 The goal inside of family systems theory

1:12:59 is to improve differentiation to allow individuals

1:13:03 to be themselves while still being a functional

1:13:06 part of the system that they're in.

1:13:07 And this was basically how Bowen talked about the balance of intimacy

1:13:11 and autonomy which we talk about on the podcast all the time.

1:13:14 It was also sort of his version of talking about boundaries.

1:13:17 To quickly move through some of the core ideas from family systems theory,

1:13:21 there's a major focus on roles.

1:13:23 And the idea here is that people are typically placed into different roles

1:13:27 in the system that help the system function in predictable and stable ways.

1:13:31 Some phrases you might have heard are golden child,

1:13:34 problem child, peacemaker, uh identified patient.

1:13:37 We talked about a good bit on the podcast.

1:13:39 These are all different examples of roles.

1:13:41 The big takeaway from this is that what we think of as us,

1:13:46 what I think of as forests behavior is sure partially about me,

1:13:52 but it's also at least partially about the role that I learned

1:13:55 to play inside of the systems that I was a part of.

1:13:58 And I had a bit of a hand in that.

1:14:00 I've got my own unique nature and my own unique temperament.

1:14:03 As near as we can tell, temperament is pretty natur.

1:14:05 It's one of the harder things for us to change.

1:14:07 And it's the kind of interfacing between my unique nature as a person

1:14:12 and the systems that I was a part of that landed me in a particular role.

1:14:16 For example, for me, inside of my friend groups,

1:14:18 I'm typically the person who does a lot of planning and I tend

1:14:21 to do a lot of problem solving for the group as a whole.

1:14:24 And this can then lead to predictable problems for me.

1:14:27 I tend to get resentful toward other people when I feel

1:14:30 like I'm doing more than my fair share of the work,

1:14:32 but I have a difficult time expressing myself around this.

1:14:34 I've done some work on that and I've

1:14:36 talked about this on the podcast quite a bit.

1:14:38 One of the big insights from this is that all roles,

1:14:41 whether they are positive or negative, limit a kid's ability to differentiate.

1:14:45 A uh glorified golden child,

1:14:48 can be just as imshed into the family dynamic as the problem child can.

1:14:52 They might have a heightened need for attention

1:14:55 and approval or higher reactivity to rejection.

1:14:59 They might start feeling responsible for the happiness of others or like

1:15:02 they're letting the family down if they don't perform at a certain level.

1:15:05 These rules are sometimes based on what

1:15:07 Bone called the family projection process,

1:15:09 which we talked about a little bit during the episode.

1:15:11 It can be a little counterintuitive,

1:15:13 but it's also a very cool idea once you understand it.

1:15:16 And it's how parents transmit their emotional problems to their children.

1:15:21 This gets to another big point from Bowen,

1:15:23 which is that these systems are themselves part of larger systems.

1:15:28 And one of the larger systems that they're

1:15:30 a part of is the historical family system.

1:15:33 Uh your parents had parents who had parents.

1:15:36 They all had their own, for lack of better way of putting it,

1:15:39 their own And that then gets kind of siphoned down

1:15:44 the family system until somebody eventually does something about it.

1:15:47 Another big idea from family systems is triangulation.

1:15:50 Bowen thought that triangles were the fundamental building

1:15:53 block of systems because they were emotionally stable.

1:15:56 Two-person systems are unstable because they don't have a natural way to release

1:16:01 tension when tension comes along or at least not a way to release it.

1:16:05 That doesn't lead to the disruption of the system.

1:16:08 A third party provides a lot of relief.

1:16:10 The two original people can unite together around

1:16:14 concern for or conflict with a third party.

1:16:18 Uh one party can vent about the other party to that third party.

1:16:21 There are different ways that it allows the system to release anxiety.

1:16:25 These are all ways that triangulation allows the system to release anxiety.

1:16:30 And larger systems are made up

1:16:32 of this dense web of interlocking triangles of relationships.

1:16:37 So inside of a threeperson nuclear family,

1:16:40 you've got all of these different triangles.

1:16:41 You've already got mom and dad versus the child,

1:16:44 child and mom versus dad, child and dad versus mom.

1:16:48 Now think about how those dynamics might have played out in your family.

1:16:52 And then think about how this gets more

1:16:54 complicated when you include increasing numbers of people.

1:16:58 If you have more siblings involved,

1:17:00 all of a sudden you start to get these very complicated triangles.

1:17:04 Within a triangle, there are two insiders and an outsider.

1:17:08 But the triangles themselves are in constant motion.

1:17:11 It's normal for triangles to kind of flip where so much tension builds

1:17:14 between the insiders that one unites with the outsider to form a new triangle.

1:17:20 And again, you can probably think back over

1:17:21 your personal history and see maybe some examples of this.

1:17:24 Practical examples can be really helpful.

1:17:27 A parent confides in their child about frustrations with the other parent.

1:17:31 Two siblings uh connect with each other by criticizing a third sibling.

1:17:35 A couple whose conflicts consistently get redirected toward debates about how

1:17:41 to handle a problem child could be one example of triangulation.

1:17:44 Uh Rick gave kind of an example of that in the beginning of the episode.

1:17:48 There's a very classic example of triangulation

1:17:50 that we didn't even talk about during the episode.

1:17:52 It's after a baby is born into a relatively stable marriage.

1:17:56 One parent, typically the mom, focuses a lot of their attention on the child.

1:18:01 And this effectively pushes the other parent,

1:18:03 typically the father, into more of an outsider position.

1:18:07 The point is that role assignment isn't totally valitional.

1:18:10 You don't always have a say in it.

1:18:12 And this gets to one of the complicated parts of family systems theory.

1:18:15 We have agency and we don't have agency.

1:18:18 We're influenced by our circumstances and we influence our circumstances.

1:18:22 Rick talked about this a lot during the episode and balancing

1:18:25 those different factors and doing it with this kind of non-pathizing stance,

1:18:29 this non-shaming stance is, I think, one of the big revelatory moments of family

1:18:35 systems where we can look back over it

1:18:38 and appreciate all of it from this this bird's

1:18:41 eye view that maybe recontextualizes our behavior.

1:18:45 the behavior of different individuals inside of that system.

1:18:48 At the end of the conversation, we talked a little bit about what

1:18:50 we can do to increasingly differentiate ourselves.

1:18:54 And I want to add a few other ideas here at the end of the episode.

1:18:58 First, building your independent sense of self.

1:19:01 This means spending time understanding your values

1:19:03 and beliefs without seeking external input or approval.

1:19:07 What do you really care about as a person underneath it all?

1:19:11 Have you always funneled the things that you cared about through

1:19:14 the perceptions of others or these things that are genuinely just for you?

1:19:19 What helps you pursue authentic and individual

1:19:21 goals and interests outside of your primary relationships?

1:19:25 Uh if you're a chronic giver,

1:19:28 what's something that you can do just for yourself?

1:19:30 There's this great line from Bowen.

1:19:32 It is automatic that when the two

1:19:34 parents become more differentiated from the other,

1:19:37 the more relief the child will feel.

1:19:39 This is because the kid isn't receiving all

1:19:42 of that reflected anxiety from the relationship between the parents.

1:19:46 The point here is that it's actually a good thing

1:19:49 for us to not be so wrapped up in each other.

1:19:52 And this has a lot of implications uh for things like the modern world

1:19:55 of parenting and helicopter parenting and the idea

1:19:59 of self-sacrifice as being a parental ideal.

1:20:02 Another line from Bowen is that he mentioned that uh Betty Friedan,

1:20:06 I hope I'm saying that right,

1:20:08 was right when she said mothers should have goals of their own.

1:20:11 And this all reminds me a little bit

1:20:12 of Winnott's idea of the good enough parent.

1:20:15 This then gets to another way that we can become more differentiated.

1:20:18 We can build up what I'll call relational buffers.

1:20:21 There is a little bit of an irony in family systems theory.

1:20:24 the more um to use a phrase that isn't a real phrase,

1:20:29 isolatedly connected, you know,

1:20:31 bear with me here, the bigger the problems are that people are going to find.

1:20:34 In other words, if if a family or a friend group is very inshed

1:20:38 with each other and they don't have

1:20:40 a lot of relationships outside of that system.

1:20:43 In other words, they're very connected with each other,

1:20:45 but they're also isolated from from other other relationships,

1:20:49 other things that could help balance them out effectively.

1:20:52 the more they need to get everything from that system.

1:20:56 And this creates a lot of problems.

1:20:57 You can't expect your partner or your child to meet all of your needs for you.

1:21:02 We have this kind of myth in certainly in America,

1:21:05 I would imagine other western cultures, I I can't speak for other cultures,

1:21:09 the this myth that there's one person out there who

1:21:11 is going to just solve all of your problems and be

1:21:14 the one and you're never going to have to worry about

1:21:16 it because you're just going to be so in it with them.

1:21:18 And I personally think that that's

1:21:19 an incredibly unhealthy model of relationship.

1:21:21 The more isolated a system is,

1:21:24 the more the tension in it needs to be reduced by it.

1:21:27 And this can then take us to some ideas for what we could do.

1:21:30 If you're a parent, how could you invest

1:21:32 in and connect with friends beyond your family?

1:21:35 If you're in a friend group that occasionally feels a little, you know,

1:21:38 chaotic and unstable,

1:21:40 how could you reach out to other people outside of that group?

1:21:42 Another great way to achieve more differentiation is by not

1:21:46 engaging in the typical tactics that govern a system,

1:21:50 not engaging in triangulation, facing anxieties head-on,

1:21:55 being direct and clear with other people.

1:21:57 This could also include things like resisting the impulse to appease

1:22:01 others or the impulse to manage and control other people.

1:22:04 One way to do this is just classically by using I statements.

1:22:08 This is how I feel.

1:22:09 It's not so much about me trying to project how you feel or guess how you feel.

1:22:13 I'm just communicating how I feel about something.

1:22:15 And this then reminds me a bit of the boundaries

1:22:17 framework that I I talked about with Dr.

1:22:19 Becky when she was on the podcast.

1:22:21 A boundary is something that requires the other person to do nothing.

1:22:26 It is about what you will do.

1:22:28 And this is a great example of something that is very high differentiation.

1:22:31 I am in control of my own body and my own behavior.

1:22:35 That is the lever I have to pull.

1:22:37 And by pulling that lever, we really do affect the systems that we're a part of.

1:22:43 That's the best way to create positive change.

1:22:46 It's actually not by trying to change other people.

1:22:48 It's by trying to change ourselves.

1:22:49 I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

1:22:51 I got a lot out of learning for this episode and doing

1:22:54 the prep that I had to do to pull this all together.

1:22:57 I thought it was such cool stuff.

1:22:59 I hope people were into it.

1:23:00 Uh because that means we get to talk about this more in the future,

1:23:03 which I would love to do.

1:23:04 So, please uh shoot us an email,

1:23:06 contact atbeingwwellpodcast.com, leave a comment on YouTube,

1:23:10 leave a a rating, a comment, a positive review on Apple or on Spotify.

1:23:15 These are all ways that you can get in touch with the show.

1:23:17 Let me know what you thought about this episode.

1:23:19 I would love to get some feedback on it.

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1:23:23 It's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast.

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1:23:32 If you would like even more content from me,

1:23:34 you can also find me on YouTube and on Substack.

1:23:37 I do short videos on YouTube and I write somewhat regularly over on Substack.

1:23:43 Until next time, thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon.