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Speaker 1: about the control dramas and have a great day. All right,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna touch on the nervous system for those
Speaker 1: of you who are unfamiliar with what we're about to
Speaker 1: get into. This is the control dramas. Four of them
Speaker 1: are the control dramas from The Celestine Prophecy. The Celstine
Speaker 1: Prophecy is a fictional book written by James Redfield about
Speaker 1: documents that are found in Peru that starts to elevate
Speaker 1: people from the life that they're currently living into the
Speaker 1: next evolution of life. It talks about energy exchanges, it
Speaker 1: talks about our food, It talks about synchronicity. It is
Speaker 1: a fiction book. It is really good. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. But the control dramas them Stelves themselves stem
Speaker 1: from YOUNGI and psychology. They're just put in with a
Speaker 1: twist to make it more relatable to people. So before
Speaker 1: I get into this, I do want to talk about
Speaker 1: the nervous system first. The nervous system does most of
Speaker 1: its foundational wiring in the first seven years of your life.
Speaker 1: Within that window, the first three years carry the heaviest weight.
Speaker 1: That's not an estimate, it's backed by decades of attachment
Speaker 1: research in neuroscience. A child's brain triples in size in
Speaker 1: the first two years of its life, and the wiring
Speaker 1: that happens during that stretch becomes the default operating system
Speaker 1: for stress responses, emotional regulation, and what a person believes
Speaker 1: about safety and connection for the rest of their life.
Speaker 1: When you guys, think about that, the first two years,
Speaker 1: we are unconscious of everything that goes on. When you
Speaker 1: think about your life, you don't remember what it is
Speaker 1: to be under five years old. We might have a memory,
Speaker 1: but it's a fraction of a memory. It's not a
Speaker 1: complete experience. And that's just all there is to that.
Speaker 1: And to think about our life being that controlled by
Speaker 1: an adult who thinks they're not going to remember this anyways,
Speaker 1: all of your emotional outbursts, all of the fucked up
Speaker 1: things that happen, like you're really fucking up a child
Speaker 1: in the first two years of their life because you
Speaker 1: can't emotionally regulate. Right birth to eighteen months is where
Speaker 1: the foundation gets laid for whether the world feels safe
Speaker 1: or unpredictable. This is the attachment window in its truest sense.
Speaker 1: A baby who gets picked up when they cry, soothes
Speaker 1: when they're distressed, and responded to with consistency builds a
Speaker 1: nervous system that expects the world to be reliable. A
Speaker 1: baby who gets inconsistent response, is sometimes soothed, sometimes ignored,
Speaker 1: sometimes met with frustration, builds a nervous system that stays
Speaker 1: on alert, always scanning for whether help is coming. And
Speaker 1: this is where the roots of anxious attachment or avoidant
Speaker 1: attachment actually take hold, long before the kid has had
Speaker 1: a single conscious memory. This is within the first eighteen
Speaker 1: months of life. Guys, eighteen months to three years is
Speaker 1: where a child starts learning about their own autonomy, how
Speaker 1: the world responds to their emerging self. This is the
Speaker 1: stage where tantrums begin happening, where a kid says no
Speaker 1: for the first time and actually means it. Where they're
Speaker 1: testing whether they're allowed to have their own will and
Speaker 1: how a parent responds. Here, whether with patients or the intimidator,
Speaker 1: control drama shapes whether the kid grows up believing their
Speaker 1: own needs are boundaries, believes that their own needs and
Speaker 1: boundaries are valid or dangerous to express. Three to seven
Speaker 1: is where the control dramas we will be talking about
Speaker 1: really start imprinting hard, because this is when a kid's
Speaker 1: brain shifts into heavy pattern recognition mode. They're not just
Speaker 1: reacting anymore. They're building a working model of how a
Speaker 1: relationship functions based on what they watch every day. This
Speaker 1: is the age range where a kid concludes love equals
Speaker 1: walking on eggshells or love equals earning approval whether it
Speaker 1: means managing someone else's emotions or whether it means managing
Speaker 1: someone else's emotions, these conclusions get stored below conscious Those
Speaker 1: conclusions get stored below conscious thought and then run on
Speaker 1: autopilot for the next several decades unless someone deliberately goes
Speaker 1: back and re examines them. After seven, the nervous system
Speaker 1: doesn't stop developing, but it becomes much more like much
Speaker 1: less like wet clay, and much more like clay that
Speaker 1: has already been fired. The brain starts pruning connections that
Speaker 1: it does does not use, and starts reinforcing the ones
Speaker 1: that it does. So whatever patterns got the most repetition
Speaker 1: in those first seven years becomes the new neural pathways
Speaker 1: of least resistance. That's not a life sentence, that's the brain.
Speaker 1: That's the brain's plasticity and change is absolutely possible. But
Speaker 1: it also explains why habits and reactions rooted in early
Speaker 1: childhood feels so automatic and why they take real, sustained
Speaker 1: work to retire rewire in adulthood. And what this means
Speaker 1: for the parent is that the small, repeated moments in
Speaker 1: those first seven years carry far more weight than any
Speaker 1: single big talk or grand gesture later on. It's not
Speaker 1: one blow up that does the damage. It's a thousand
Speaker 1: small interactions that quietly taught a kid what to expect
Speaker 1: from people who are supposed to be safe. Do you
Speaker 1: have anything that you want to add about the the
Speaker 1: nervous system, all right, So the first one is the intimidator.
Speaker 1: The intimidator parent runs on one currency, and that is
Speaker 1: control through fear. It's the raised voices before reasoning even starts.
Speaker 1: It's the silence that feels louder than yelling because everyone
Speaker 1: in the house knows what's coming next. It's the look
Speaker 1: across the dinner table that shuts a kid up faster
Speaker 1: than any lecture ever would, and it works. That's the
Speaker 1: whole problem. It works so well and so fast that
Speaker 1: the parent never has a reason to question their behavior.
Speaker 1: Think about what this is actually happening in the house.
Speaker 1: A five year old spills milk. The parent doesn't see
Speaker 1: a mistake. They see a threat to their control, or
Speaker 1: see a child that should have known better, So the escalate.
Speaker 1: They escalate. The kid freezes, apologizes, probably cries, cleans it
Speaker 1: up in record time. From the outside, it looks like discipline.
Speaker 1: From the inside, for that kid, it's a five second
Speaker 1: event that gets stored for decades. The nervous system doesn't
Speaker 1: file that under spilled milk. It files it under unpredictable
Speaker 1: danger lives in this house, And once that filing system
Speaker 1: gets built, it runs quietly in the background for the
Speaker 1: rest of that's person's life, long before they've moved out
Speaker 1: and long after the parent has softened or died. The
Speaker 1: intimidator parent usually isn't a monster. Most of the time.
Speaker 1: They're exhausted, overwhelmed, and running the only playbook that they
Speaker 1: were ever handed Somewhere in the back of their childhood
Speaker 1: someone bigger than them controlled the room through force, and
Speaker 1: it worked on them too. So when their kid pushes back,
Speaker 1: mouths off, or just moves too slow getting ready for school,
Speaker 1: the old wiring fires before the adult brain even gets
Speaker 1: to say. It's reactive, not calculated. Not calculated. That doesn't
Speaker 1: excuse the damage, but it explains why so many people
Speaker 1: who swore they would never become their father or mother
Speaker 1: catch themselves mid sentence sounding exactly like them. Intimidation might
Speaker 1: get compliance, but it kills closeness. You can have a
Speaker 1: house where the kid never talks back and the parent
Speaker 1: still feels completely alone because what they built wasn't respect.
Speaker 1: It was distanced through obedience. A lot of the parents
Speaker 1: get to their fifties and sixties wondering why adult kids
Speaker 1: now only call on holidays or went no contact, why
Speaker 1: nobody wants to bring the grandkids over as much as
Speaker 1: they had hoped, and why there is a wall there
Speaker 1: that they can't quite name. The wall is the fear
Speaker 1: that they instilled thirty years ago and never went away.
Speaker 1: It's just there for the kid. The fallout usually goes
Speaker 1: one of two directions. Some kids absorb the pattern and
Speaker 1: become intimidators theirselves because on some level, forced look like power,
Speaker 1: and power look like safety. They grow up believing that
Speaker 1: the only way to get respect is by making other
Speaker 1: people afraid of you at work and relationships, even with
Speaker 1: their own future kids. Other kids go the opposite way entirely.
Speaker 1: They become the peace keeper, the people pleaser, the one
Speaker 1: who reads the room for tension before they've even said hello.
Speaker 1: They'll avoid conflict at almost any cost, because conflict, as
Speaker 1: a kid means danger, not disagreement. Neither path is a
Speaker 1: personality flaw. It's an adaptation. It made sense to them
Speaker 1: at the time. It just stops being useful the moment
Speaker 1: that the person tries to build an adult relationship where
Speaker 1: honesty and vulnerability actually matter. So if you're the parent
Speaker 1: and something in your chest tightened a little bit, the
Speaker 1: reaction is worth sitting with here. As we always say,
Speaker 1: if you're feeling triggered, you should ask yourself why you
Speaker 1: are bound to lose your temper again. Saying that you
Speaker 1: want is not realistic, and promising that it will probably
Speaker 1: make you feel and promising it will probably make you
Speaker 1: feel worse the next time you slip up. The actual
Speaker 1: work is catching it in the moment before the explosion
Speaker 1: and asking yourself what you're really afraid of. Most of
Speaker 1: the time, it's not the spilled milk. It's the fear
Speaker 1: of losing control, of being disrespected, of somehow failing as
Speaker 1: a parent. If your kid doesn't fall in line immediately,
Speaker 1: that fear is yours, not theirs, and it deserves to
Speaker 1: get examined instead of dumped onto a seven year old.
Speaker 1: If you're the adult who grew up with this, the
Speaker 1: work looks different. It's noticing when you shrink in a
Speaker 1: conversation with someone who raises their voice, even if it's
Speaker 1: a stranger or someone with zero actual power over you.
Speaker 1: It's noticing if you either avoid all conflict or swing
Speaker 1: hard the other way to become the intimidating one yourself
Speaker 1: the second that you feel threatened. Neither reaction is who
Speaker 1: you are. It's who you've learned to be, and the
Speaker 1: nervous system can be retrained, but only once you can
Speaker 1: actually see the pattern clearly enough to stop making the
Speaker 1: mistake and stop making stop mistaking it for your identity.
Speaker 1: Do you have anything on the intimidator? Okay, the next
Speaker 1: one is the interrogator. The interrogator doesn't raise their voice.
Speaker 1: That's what makes this one sneaky. I have seen grown
Speaker 1: men who had zero physical fear of their father growing
Speaker 1: up and still flinch every time someone asks why did
Speaker 1: you do that? In a certain tone. That's their tell.
Speaker 1: This drama runs on questions, not fists. So picture this.
Speaker 1: A kid comes home fifteen minutes late. The intimidator parent
Speaker 1: would yell. The interrogator parent doesn't yell. Instead, they ask
Speaker 1: where were you, who were you with, why didn't you call?
Speaker 1: What were you thinking? And each question on its own
Speaker 1: is reasonable. Stack together, it's an interrogation room with a
Speaker 1: bright ass light in a kid's face. The kid isn't
Speaker 1: being asked to explain what happened. They're being asked to
Speaker 1: defend themselves against an outcome that the parent has already decided.
Speaker 1: People have said, I felt guilty before I even said
Speaker 1: a word. That's the interrogator working to a tee. The
Speaker 1: interrogator parent also almost always believes that they're just being
Speaker 1: thorough careful. A good parent ask questions right, So this
Speaker 1: one hides in plain sight, behind the mask of concern.
Speaker 1: I've watched adult children defend their parents' behaviors. She just
Speaker 1: wanted to know I was safe, and then in the
Speaker 1: same breath described feeling that they were on trial every
Speaker 1: single day of their childhood. Both things are true. Was
Speaker 1: what makes this one harder to name than intimidation. There's
Speaker 1: no obvious villain in the moment to point to. The
Speaker 1: nervous system is destroyed a thousand small cross examinations at
Speaker 1: a time. What I've noticed is that kids raised under
Speaker 1: the interrogator develop a running internal monologue that never shuts off.
Speaker 1: They start narrating their own choices before they make them,
Speaker 1: building a defense and advance for a trial that hasn't
Speaker 1: even happened yet. If you've ever written an email over
Speaker 1: explaining anything to your boss or to a lover like
Speaker 1: you are preparing for trial, that's not a personality quirk.
Speaker 1: That is a kid still bracing for the dinner table
Speaker 1: thirty years later in a different building. The parent doesn't
Speaker 1: come out of this unscathed either, even though it looks
Speaker 1: like they're the one in control. What you see over
Speaker 1: and over again is a parent who genuinely can't relax
Speaker 1: around their own kid. Every conversation becomes an audit, and
Speaker 1: audits don't build closeness, they build distance with a really
Speaker 1: good documentation. These parents often end up shocked later in
Speaker 1: life that their kid doesn't call to talk only cause
Speaker 1: when there's a problem to report, and that's the relationship
Speaker 1: they built. If every phone call growing up was a
Speaker 1: deep brief, why would the adult kid call for anything else?
Speaker 1: Almost every interrogator parent was raised by someone who used
Speaker 1: doubt as control themselves, or grew up in a household
Speaker 1: where mistakes were treated as character flaws instead of just mistakes.
Speaker 1: So the question isn't really about the kid's behavior. It's
Speaker 1: the parent's own, unprocessed fear of things going wrong, aimed
Speaker 1: outward and dressed as diligence. I don't think that it's
Speaker 1: an excuse. I think that that's just an honest starting
Speaker 1: point if you actually want to change it. If you're
Speaker 1: this type of parent, there's a real difference between curiosity
Speaker 1: and cross examination. Your kid can feel which one they're getting,
Speaker 1: even if they can't name it. What happened is curiosity?
Speaker 1: Why would you do that? It's a verdict wearing a
Speaker 1: question mark. The words can be almost identical. The tone
Speaker 1: and the intent behind them are not. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to read this again because what happened. If your kid
Speaker 1: is crying and you walk in and you go, what happened?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what happened? You're concerned. If you walk
Speaker 1: in and you see that somebody fell and the TV
Speaker 1: broke and you go, why did you do that? That's
Speaker 1: a very different fucking nervous system response to a child
Speaker 1: already freaking out because something just happened. And again, you
Speaker 1: have to remember that a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: happen with children under seven years old is subconscious. Their
Speaker 1: young brain can't understand and process in real time what's happening.
Speaker 1: You guys have to be aware of these things. This
Speaker 1: is how you fuck your kids up long term. So
Speaker 1: if you grew up with this, the work is noticing
Speaker 1: where you still perform for approval that isn't even in
Speaker 1: the room anymore. Over, explaining a decision that nobody asked
Speaker 1: you to defend, feeling guilty before you've done anything wrong,
Speaker 1: picking a partner who questions you the exact same way,
Speaker 1: because on some messed up level, familiar feels like love
Speaker 1: even when it isn't. You will recognize this pattern, and
Speaker 1: that's when you can start working on it. Anything on
Speaker 1: that one nope, all right. The aloof the aloof parent
Speaker 1: is the one that is the hardest, the spot no yelling,
Speaker 1: no interrogation, no obvious moment where something bad happened, just absence.
Speaker 1: You can describe your childhood home as quiet in a
Speaker 1: way that felt like this might be your situation. So
Speaker 1: here's what it actually looks like day to day. The
Speaker 1: kid comes home excited about something, a drawing, a grade,
Speaker 1: a touchdown in a game, and the parent gives a
Speaker 1: flat that's nice without looking up from their phone or
Speaker 1: from the sink or whatever it is that they're doing.
Speaker 1: Not cruel, not mean, just not there. This is there
Speaker 1: but not present, the silent treatment after disengagement, instead of
Speaker 1: a conversation, emotional topics get deflected with a joke or
Speaker 1: a change of subject. Physically, they are there, but they
Speaker 1: are not present. For sure, the parent is in the house,
Speaker 1: but there is a wall between the kid and them,
Speaker 1: and they can feel it long before there's a language
Speaker 1: for it. This is the one control through Withdrawal doesn't
Speaker 1: look like control because it looks like nothing at all,
Speaker 1: But that's exactly the mechanism. When the parent goes quiet
Speaker 1: and checks out, the kid starts working over time so
Speaker 1: that they can close the gap. They get quieter to
Speaker 1: match the mood, or louder trying to earn attention, or
Speaker 1: they start performing achievements just to see if they can
Speaker 1: finally get a reaction. I've watched grown adults still do
Speaker 1: this in their forties, still chasing approval from bosses, partners, audiences,
Speaker 1: or anyone else who reminds them of that unavailable parent,
Speaker 1: because the nervous system never got the message that connection
Speaker 1: could just be given freely. A kid raised by an
Speaker 1: aloof parent usually learns one less and faster than any
Speaker 1: other kid and any other dynamic, and it's pretty fucking brutal.
Speaker 1: Needing someone doesn't work, so they stop asking when they
Speaker 1: see this, and I see this a lot when in
Speaker 1: our coaching. There are men out there who pride themselves
Speaker 1: on being low maintenance, easy going, no big emotional needs,
Speaker 1: and when we dig into it, that's not actually their personality.
Speaker 1: It's an old survival strategy that has been embedded. It
Speaker 1: has embedded itself into their identity, and they've learned somewhere
Speaker 1: before the age of seven that reaching out got them nothing,
Speaker 1: so they quit reaching and independence became the identity because
Speaker 1: dependence never paid off. I don't think that most aloof
Speaker 1: parents are called people. Most of them are actually overwhelmed, avoidant,
Speaker 1: or carrying their own processed unprocessed grief or depression, and
Speaker 1: withdrawal is just one more coping mechanism that they've got.
Speaker 1: So some of them grew up in homes where emotion
Speaker 1: itself was treated as a problem. They never learned how
Speaker 1: to sit with the kid's feelings without wanting to escape
Speaker 1: the room. The tragedy is often love. They often love
Speaker 1: their kids deeply and have no idea how far away
Speaker 1: they seem from the outside. Where this repeats becomes predictable
Speaker 1: once you've seen it enough times. A kid who grew
Speaker 1: up starved for engagement either becomes an aloof parent themselves
Speaker 1: because emotional distance is the only template they were given,
Speaker 1: or they swing in the opposite direction and become enmeshed,
Speaker 1: unable to give their own kids any space because space
Speaker 1: equals abandonment in their nervous system. Neither extreme is healthy,
Speaker 1: and people can spend years bouncing between the two without
Speaker 1: ever realizing that both reactions trace back to the same wound.
Speaker 1: If you're a parent and you recognize yourself in this
Speaker 1: The fix isn't forcing constant conversation that you don't actually feel.
Speaker 1: Kids can smell performance like a fart in the car.
Speaker 1: Bonus points to anybody who remembers that if you can
Speaker 1: tell me in the chat what movie that came from,
Speaker 1: that would be great. Remember, kids, I can smell a
Speaker 1: lie like a fart in a car. I will tell
Speaker 1: you that it was Christian Slater who said it. Love
Speaker 1: that movie anyways. Um, the real work is smaller than that.
Speaker 1: It's looking up from the phone for ten seconds when
Speaker 1: your kid is trying to show you something. It's naming
Speaker 1: your own exhaustion out loud instead of just appearing disappearing
Speaker 1: into it. So if your kid learns that your silence
Speaker 1: is about your day and not about them, that one
Speaker 1: distinction alone can undo a lot of damage over time.
Speaker 1: If you grew up like this, the work is noticing
Speaker 1: where you built a life around not needing anyone and
Speaker 1: asking yourself honestly, whether that's peace or armor. Not needing
Speaker 1: anyone isn't the same as healed. Sometimes it just means
Speaker 1: that you learned really early that asking didn't work, so
Speaker 1: you stopped. You learn to do it all yourself, and
Speaker 1: you called that strength because the alternative was too painful
Speaker 1: to sit with. Right. And then the last one from
Speaker 1: the Celestine profit see is the poor me, And then
Speaker 1: I have five that I created for you guys. The
Speaker 1: poor me is the parent h is the one that
Speaker 1: fools almost everyone, including the kid who lived there. There's
Speaker 1: no yelling, no integrity, no interrogation, no cold shoulder. What
Speaker 1: there is instead is a sigh, a look of exhaustion
Speaker 1: that shows up right on cue whenever a kid needs something.
Speaker 1: I guess I'll figure it out like always. That sentence
Speaker 1: alone can run a household for twenty years, and most
Speaker 1: people will never clock it as control because it looks
Speaker 1: so much like suffering. People spend years defending this parent
Speaker 1: before they ever see the pattern. She sacrificed everything for us, sure,
Speaker 1: and she made everyone in the house know it every
Speaker 1: single day, and one hundred small comments that turned love
Speaker 1: into a debt that nobody asked to. Oh that's the
Speaker 1: mechanism guilt instead of force. The kid doesn't get told
Speaker 1: what to do, they get shown how much it costs
Speaker 1: the parents when they do it. So here's a scene.
Speaker 1: Kid wants to go to a friend's birthday party instead
Speaker 1: of the families for dinner. The intimidator parent would say no,
Speaker 1: and that would be the end of it. The poor
Speaker 1: me parent says, fine, go don't worry about me. I'll
Speaker 1: just sit here alone. No rule was broken, no boundary
Speaker 1: was even stated. But the kid stays home anyways, because
Speaker 1: the alternative is carrying the image of that parent sitting
Speaker 1: alone at the table, and no kid wants to be
Speaker 1: the reason for their parents' pain and suffering. What actually
Speaker 1: happens developmentally is that the kid becomes the emotional caretaker
Speaker 1: of the parent, usually before they are old enough to
Speaker 1: spell the word responsibility. That's parentification. Parentification. That's a hard
Speaker 1: word to say, parentification, and it's one of the quieter
Speaker 1: forms of role reversal and a family because from the outside,
Speaker 1: it just looks like a really considerate, mature kid. Teachers
Speaker 1: love these kids, everyone comments on how thoughtful they are.
Speaker 1: What's actually happened in a seven year old, though, is
Speaker 1: that they are learning to read a grown adult's emotional
Speaker 1: cues and adjusts their own needs accordingly, and this becomes
Speaker 1: their fucking life. A lot of poor me parents aren't
Speaker 1: manipulating on purpose. Many of them are uly struggling they're
Speaker 1: overwhelmed and this is the only way that they know
Speaker 1: to cope. Somewhere in their own history, direct requests didn't
Speaker 1: work or weren't allowed, and martyrdom became the only socially
Speaker 1: acceptable way to ask anyone for anything. I don't think
Speaker 1: that it excuses the impact on the kid. I just
Speaker 1: think it's an honest starting point if the goal is
Speaker 1: actually breaking the cycle instead of just blame. The kid
Speaker 1: who grows up under this pattern usually ends up in
Speaker 1: one of two places as an adult. Some become chronic overgivers,
Speaker 1: the ones who feel physically uncomfortable receiving anything, who apologize
Speaker 1: for taking up space, who end up in relationships where
Speaker 1: they're doing all of the emotional labor and calling it
Speaker 1: love because that's the only version of love they were
Speaker 1: ever shown. The others swing the other way, obviously, and
Speaker 1: they go numb. They become numb to guilt entirely, sometimes
Speaker 1: to the point of struggling with real empathy, because they
Speaker 1: spent so many years absorbing manufactured guilt that they built
Speaker 1: a wall against all of it, including the guilt that
Speaker 1: would actually be useful to feel. The parent doesn't come
Speaker 1: out ahead in this either, even though they get comple
Speaker 1: alliance for years. What eventually happens is adult children who
Speaker 1: only help out of obligation and resentment instead of love,
Speaker 1: who show up because they feel that they have to,
Speaker 1: not because they want to. Some of these parents can
Speaker 1: get into their later years wondering why their kids seem
Speaker 1: to be performing care instead of feeling it. That performance
Speaker 1: is the outcome of the relationship built on debt instead
Speaker 1: of connection. If you're this parent, the shift is not
Speaker 1: pretending that you're fine. It's it's not pretending it's fine
Speaker 1: when you're not. That's its own kind of dishonesty. The
Speaker 1: shift is learning to state a need plainly instead of
Speaker 1: performing suffering until someone notices I could really use some
Speaker 1: help today. Land's completely different in a kid's nervous system
Speaker 1: than a heavy sigh a martyred tone, even if the
Speaker 1: outcome you're hoping for is the same. One teaches a
Speaker 1: kid that needs are normal and can be spoken or
Speaker 1: talked about. The other teaches them that needs have to
Speaker 1: be extracted through guilt, which is a harder thing to
Speaker 1: unlearn if you grew up with this. The work starts
Speaker 1: with noticing where you still feel response for other people's
Speaker 1: emotional states that you were never actually yours to manage.
Speaker 1: Notice where resting feels like you're doing something wrong. Notice
Speaker 1: if you feel drawn to relationships where you are always
Speaker 1: the strong one, always the giver, because on some level
Speaker 1: that role feels familiar, and familiar gets mistaken for love
Speaker 1: more often than people realize. It isn't love. It's an
Speaker 1: old job that you got a sign too early, and
Speaker 1: now you're not allowed to quit. That's how it feels.
Speaker 1: You are allowed to quit, guys, You're allowed to walk
Speaker 1: away and save your fucking nervous system. All right. So
Speaker 1: now I made some up. I have five that I
Speaker 1: made up, and I think that from what we do
Speaker 1: on the podcast and what we've seen in parents and coaching,
Speaker 1: all of these are very prevalent. The first one I
Speaker 1: call the rescuer. This parent doesn't look like a control
Speaker 1: drama at all. That's what makes this one so hard
Speaker 1: to catch, even for people who've done a lot of
Speaker 1: shadow work already. This parent shows up early, fixes everything,
Speaker 1: never lets the kids struggle long enough to solve their
Speaker 1: own problems. So the picture is the kid is struggling
Speaker 1: with a math problem, gets frustrated, and before frustration even
Speaker 1: has a chance to turn into a breakthrough. The parent
Speaker 1: is sitting down doing half the problem for them. The
Speaker 1: kid gets an argument with a friend, and instead of
Speaker 1: letting them work through the discomfort or conflict, the parent
Speaker 1: calls the other kids mothers to smooth it over. Every
Speaker 1: obstacle gets removed before the kid even has a chance
Speaker 1: to feel the weight of it. This looks like love
Speaker 1: a lot of the time. It's actually fear, though, the
Speaker 1: fear that if the kid struggles and the parent doesn't
Speaker 1: step in, something will go wrong and the parents will
Speaker 1: not be able to forgive themselves for it. And this
Speaker 1: is the epitome of helicopter parenting. What gets missed constantly
Speaker 1: is what this does to a kid's sense of their
Speaker 1: own capability. If every hard thing gets handled for you
Speaker 1: before you get the chance to handle it yourself, you
Speaker 1: never build an internal evidence that you can I've seen
Speaker 1: people in their thirties who are objectively competent people, good jobs,
Speaker 1: good relationships on paper, and they still freeze the second
Speaker 1: something goes wrong, because nobody ever let them sit in
Speaker 1: the discomfort of solving their own problems. As a kid,
Speaker 1: their nervous system never got the reps in confidence isn't
Speaker 1: something that you can hand someone. It's built and solved
Speaker 1: one problem at a time, and the rescuer parent without
Speaker 1: meaning to keep stealing those reps from their children. Almost
Speaker 1: every rescuer parent grew up with an inability or instability
Speaker 1: of some kind, an unpredictable parent, financial chaos, a household
Speaker 1: where something always felt like it was one step closer
Speaker 1: from falling apart, so they became hypervigilant to the problems
Speaker 1: as kids, and that hypervigilance never turned off, it just
Speaker 1: got redirected onto their own children. Rescuing really isn't about
Speaker 1: the kid in front of them. Most of the time.
Speaker 1: It's an old alarm system still running, trying to prevent
Speaker 1: the version of chaos that has already happened decades ago.
Speaker 1: The parent pays a price for this too. It's a
Speaker 1: steep one that most people don't see coming because rescuing
Speaker 1: is fucking exhausting. You cannot be everyone's emergency contact for
Speaker 1: every small crisis and have everything left over for your
Speaker 1: own life. I've seen parents in their fifties who are
Speaker 1: still fielding daily calls from their adult children, who can't
Speaker 1: make basic decisions without checking in first. When the parent
Speaker 1: is resentful and burnt out, but they built the exact
Speaker 1: dynamic with their own hands. One rescued crisis as at
Speaker 1: a time, starting back when their kid was seven and
Speaker 1: couldn't tie their own shoes. Kid who grows up with
Speaker 1: this pattern usually goes one of two directions. Some become
Speaker 1: chronically dependent, unable to trust their own judgment, always needing
Speaker 1: someone else to weigh in before they can commit to
Speaker 1: a decision because deep down they never got proof of
Speaker 1: their own judgment being any good. Others rebel really hard
Speaker 1: against it and become fiercely, almost aggressively self reliant, refusing
Speaker 1: help from anyone even when they're drowning, because being rescued
Speaker 1: as a kid felt like being told that they weren't capable,
Speaker 1: and they would rather struggle alone than feel that way again.
Speaker 1: I've seen both types, and neither one is actually free.
Speaker 1: One is stuck depending on the other, while the other
Speaker 1: is stuck refusing to depend, and both are still reacting
Speaker 1: to the same childhood. If you're a parent and you
Speaker 1: see yourself in this, the shift isn't becoming colder hands off.
Speaker 1: That's an overcorrection, and kids can feel the difference between
Speaker 1: neglect and trust. The real shift is learning to sit
Speaker 1: next to your kids struggle instead of jumping in to
Speaker 1: remove it. Let them feel frustrated with the math problem
Speaker 1: for five minutes before you help. Let them have an
Speaker 1: awkward conversation with their friend instead of trying to make
Speaker 1: the call for them. Struggling with them. Struggling with them
Speaker 1: as a witness is completely different than struggling alone, and
Speaker 1: that distinction is the whole game. You are not abandoning
Speaker 1: them by letting them struggle. You're teaching in them that
Speaker 1: they can handle hard things, which is a gift that
Speaker 1: I'll last almost everything else that you can give them
Speaker 1: if you grew up with a rescuer. The work starts
Speaker 1: noticing where you either wait for someone to save you
Speaker 1: or refuse to help when you need it so bad.
Speaker 1: Ask yourself honestly whether your independence is actual strength or
Speaker 1: old defenses. There's a real difference between someone who is
Speaker 1: capable and at peace with asking for help when it
Speaker 1: makes sense and someone who white knuckles everything because letting
Speaker 1: someone in feels like handing over control that they never
Speaker 1: trusted anyone else with in the first place. All Right,
Speaker 1: the next one is the charmer. The charmer parent is
Speaker 1: the hardest one to explain to somebody who didn't grow
Speaker 1: up with it, because on paper, nothing bad ever happened,
Speaker 1: no yelling, no cold children, no guilt trip, just a
Speaker 1: parent who was fun, quick with a joke, good in
Speaker 1: a room, and the other parents just genuinely liked being around.
Speaker 1: I've heard people say everyone loved my dad, and almost
Speaker 1: the same breath, then they say, I don't think I
Speaker 1: actually ever knew him. I'm sorry, and not to see
Speaker 1: the contradiction sitting there, and so it's pointed out. Charm
Speaker 1: is a deflection tool. Kids bring up something real or hurt, feeling,
Speaker 1: a broken promise, a moment that actually mattered, and instead
Speaker 1: of engaging with it, parents redirect with humor. They make
Speaker 1: it a skit turns the tension into a laugh before
Speaker 1: it becomes a conversation. It works almost every time, because
Speaker 1: who wants to be the buzzkill who keeps pushing after
Speaker 1: everyone's already laughing. If a kid brings up something genuinely painful,
Speaker 1: dad cracks a joke, the whole room exhales and moves on.
Speaker 1: The kid just quietly learns that their pain isn't going
Speaker 1: to get taken seriously. And that how because not everyone
Speaker 1: said so, not because anyone said so, but because it
Speaker 1: kept getting laughed at and passed over. What I think
Speaker 1: gets missed is that charm isn't the opposite of control,
Speaker 1: it's just the smoother version of it. The intimidator controls
Speaker 1: the room through fear. The charmer controls the room through likability,
Speaker 1: and likability is nearly impossible to argue with. Try telling
Speaker 1: someone my dad's warmth was actually a wall, and watch
Speaker 1: how many people look at you like you're the problem.
Speaker 1: That's the trap. The kid grows up doubting their own
Speaker 1: ability to read the situation because everyone else in the
Speaker 1: room only saw the good version. Something to notice with
Speaker 1: the charmer parent. They're often incredibly good in social settings themselves, funny,
Speaker 1: easy to talk to the guy that everyone wants at
Speaker 1: the party, and then in a one on one conversation
Speaker 1: with their wife or a close friend, something just shuts off.
Speaker 1: They can't stay in a hard conversation. The second it
Speaker 1: gets emotionally heavily emotionally heavy, outcomes a joke, a subject change,
Speaker 1: a way to lighten it before where it gets uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: And that's not a personality quirk that they picked up randomly.
Speaker 1: It is the exact tool that their parents used running
Speaker 1: on autopilots decades later in a completely different relationship. Where
Speaker 1: I think this one actually comes from is a parent
Speaker 1: who learned early that being liked was safer than being known.
Speaker 1: Maybe in their own house. Growing up, they were punished
Speaker 1: for vulnerability, or rewarded for performance, or just never made
Speaker 1: room for anything hard to be said out loud, So
Speaker 1: they built an identity around being the fun one, the
Speaker 1: easy one, the one that nobody worries about, because being
Speaker 1: worried about felt more dangerous than being enjoyed. I don't
Speaker 1: think most charmer parents are hiding something sinister. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of them genuinely just don't know how to
Speaker 1: sit still in hard moments because nobody ever showed them
Speaker 1: that it was survivable. The cost to the parent here
Speaker 1: is loneliness, and it's hard for them to even spot
Speaker 1: because from the outside their life looks full lots of friends,
Speaker 1: lots of laughs, phones that never stop ringing, But almost
Speaker 1: none of those relationships have any depth to them because
Speaker 1: depth was never something that was an offer. Usually it
Speaker 1: takes something like a divorce or an adult kid quietly
Speaker 1: stepping back before they end up in a seat, end
Speaker 1: up in that seat, and when what comes out of
Speaker 1: them nearly every time is some version of the same sentence,
Speaker 1: nobody actually knows me. That's the invoice of thirty years
Speaker 1: of being liked instead of known. The kid usually goes
Speaker 1: one of two ways. They become charmers themselves because it worked.
Speaker 1: It got them liked, it kept the room comfortable, and
Speaker 1: comfortable felt like a whole goal growing up. Others go
Speaker 1: the opposite direction and become almost allergic to charm, and
Speaker 1: other people suspicious of anyone too smooth, too quick to joke,
Speaker 1: because their nervous system learned that charm is where people
Speaker 1: hide the real stuff. You see this in women specifically,
Speaker 1: who avoid genuinely warm funny men entirely, not because there's
Speaker 1: anything wrong with warmth, but because warmth was the exact
Speaker 1: costume their unavailable parent was wearing. If you're a parent
Speaker 1: and you see this in yourself, the fix isn't becoming
Speaker 1: heavy or serious at the time. That would just trade
Speaker 1: one imbalance for another. The actual work is staying in
Speaker 1: the room for a few more seconds after the joke
Speaker 1: would have normally landed. Your kid brings something up hard.
Speaker 1: Let the humor weight, ask them another question. Let it
Speaker 1: be a little uncomfortable, take the extra time. And that's
Speaker 1: the whole difference between a kid who learns that their
Speaker 1: feelings get skipped over versus a kid who learns that
Speaker 1: their feelings actually get heard. If you grew up with this,
Speaker 1: the work is learning to notice when you're using humor
Speaker 1: as an exit to a conversation, especially one that's starting
Speaker 1: to make you feel uncomfortable. Watch for it. The next
Speaker 1: time something real comes up with someone you love. Do
Speaker 1: you lean in or do you make a joke? Neither
Speaker 1: answer makes you broken. It just shows you where the
Speaker 1: old pattern is still driving the car, all right. The
Speaker 1: next one is the gas lighter. The gaslighter parent is
Speaker 1: the one that leaves the deepest damage with the least
Speaker 1: visible evidence. Imagine someone trying to describe what happened to
Speaker 1: them and watching them struggle to even trust their own description.
Speaker 1: This isn't about fear of guilt or absence. This is
Speaker 1: about reality itself getting rewritten in real time, and a
Speaker 1: kid have no defense against that. Because the kid's whole
Speaker 1: understanding of what's true comes from the adults around them.
Speaker 1: You don't get to make decisions when you're seven years old.
Speaker 1: Six years old, your entire existence is built on the
Speaker 1: foundation of what your parents tell you you can and
Speaker 1: can't do. So here's what it actually sounds like. In
Speaker 1: a house. Kid says, you promised we'd go to the game.
Speaker 1: Parents says, I never said that. Kid remembers a slam
Speaker 1: door and a raised voice the night before, and the
Speaker 1: parent says nobody was even upset or being dramatic. Kid
Speaker 1: brings up something that clearly happened and gets met with
Speaker 1: a flat denial, delivered with total confidence, no hesitation, no
Speaker 1: flicker of doubt on the parent's face. The confidence is
Speaker 1: the weapon kid can say I'm sorry. A kid can
Speaker 1: survive a parent saying you're wrong. A kid has a
Speaker 1: much harder time surviving a parent saying that didn't happen,
Speaker 1: with the exact same clarity that they would use to
Speaker 1: state their own name. What people miss about this control
Speaker 1: drama specifically, is that it doesn't just control behavior, It
Speaker 1: controls the kid's relationship with their own mind. An intimidator
Speaker 1: teaches a kid to fear the parent's reaction. A poor
Speaker 1: me teaches a kid to manage the parent's emotions. A
Speaker 1: gaslighter teaches a kid that their own perception cannot be
Speaker 1: trusted at all, and that's a different category of damage.
Speaker 1: I've seen people in their forties who still pause mid
Speaker 1: sentence describing a memory from childhood and say, I think
Speaker 1: that happened, but I'm not totally sure anymore. That hesitation,
Speaker 1: that little crack in their own certainty is the fingerprint
Speaker 1: of this specific drama. Where this comes from is almost
Speaker 1: always a parent who cannot tolerate being wrong or being
Speaker 1: seen honestly. Being confronted with an accurate account of their
Speaker 1: own behavior feels like an attack on their identity, not
Speaker 1: just a disagreement about facts. So the mind does something
Speaker 1: dramatic to protect itself. It doesn't just defend the behavior,
Speaker 1: it erases the event. I don't think most of the
Speaker 1: parents are consciously lying most of the time. Either. A
Speaker 1: lot of them, I believe, actually have can convinced themselves
Speaker 1: that the denial is true. That's not manipulation in the
Speaker 1: classic sense. That's a nervous system so committed to avoiding
Speaker 1: shame that it rewrote the file before the parent even
Speaker 1: opened their mouth. This actually shows up in your ego,
Speaker 1: and you guys can if you've watched any of our
Speaker 1: ego content, this is the ego doing everything that it
Speaker 1: can to prevent itself from having to deal with any
Speaker 1: type of bruising or catastrophe. There's a lot that goes
Speaker 1: into this. So the kid who grows up with this
Speaker 1: usually becomes chronic self doubters, running every decision, every moment,
Speaker 1: every gut instinct through an internal committee before they'll trust
Speaker 1: it because trusting their own perception got punished so consistently
Speaker 1: as a kid. Other swinghart the other direction and become
Speaker 1: almost rigid about being right, holding onto their version events
Speaker 1: with white knuckles in every argument because being told that's
Speaker 1: not what happened one more time feels unbearable. Neither one
Speaker 1: is a character flaw. Both kids are still trying to
Speaker 1: win an argument about a reality that they lost decades ago.
Speaker 1: The cost here as well, even if it's not obvious
Speaker 1: at first. These relationships tend to go shallow fast and
Speaker 1: stay shallow because they cannot build real closeness with someone
Speaker 1: whose account of a shared history you can't trust. Adult
Speaker 1: kids of gaslighting parents often distance not out of anger,
Speaker 1: not out of anger, but out of self protection being
Speaker 1: around that parent means being around a version of the
Speaker 1: past that doesn't match what actually happened to them, and
Speaker 1: most people can only tolerate so much of that before
Speaker 1: they simply stop showing up. If you're this parents, the
Speaker 1: shift isn't pretending you remember everything perfectly nobody does. The
Speaker 1: shift is being willing to say, I don't remember it
Speaker 1: that way, but I believe that's what it felt like
Speaker 1: to you. Instead of flatly erasing your kid's experience. The
Speaker 1: one sentence tells their kid perception is allowed to exist
Speaker 1: even if it doesn't match yours, and that's the opposite
Speaker 1: of what this control drama teaches. If you are a
Speaker 1: kid who grew up with this, the work is. It's
Speaker 1: learning to trust your own memory again, even without anyone
Speaker 1: else confirming it. It's noticing whether you still ask other
Speaker 1: people to validate things that you already know to be
Speaker 1: true because some old part of you doesn't believe how
Speaker 1: to read reality enough on your own. It is enough,
Speaker 1: it always was. You just have to trust yourself again.
Speaker 1: The next one is the competitor. The competitor parent turns
Speaker 1: love into a scoreboard. Most of the time, nobody in
Speaker 1: a family would ever actually call it that out loud.
Speaker 1: It just feels like normal conversation. You guys, remember the
Speaker 1: one upper commercials like, oh, that's the one upper. Oh
Speaker 1: I'm not the one upper. I know somebody that's way
Speaker 1: worse than that than I am. You know, the one
Speaker 1: upper thing the competitor could be like the one upper.
Speaker 1: You get a promotion, they mention it, So you called
Speaker 1: your parents, Hey, I got a promotion. They mentioned the
Speaker 1: guy at their old job who made partner by thirty.
Speaker 1: You finish a ten k. They bring up a marathon
Speaker 1: that they ran in their twenties like that, somehow relevant,
Speaker 1: Every accomplishment gets measured against theirs, and somehow there's always win,
Speaker 1: even when the facts don't actually support that. Maybe your
Speaker 1: dad just happens to have a bigger version of whatever
Speaker 1: you brought to the table. You caught a fish, He
Speaker 1: caught one twice the size once. You had a rough
Speaker 1: day at work. He had a rougher one. For a
Speaker 1: decade straight on paper. That's just conversation and practice. A
Speaker 1: kid stops bringing things to the table at all, because
Speaker 1: why share a win if it's just going to quietly
Speaker 1: get overshadowed thirty seconds later. What I think is easy
Speaker 1: to miss here is that this isn't really about the kid.
Speaker 1: The competitor parent is still fighting an old battle that
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with the person sitting across from them.
Speaker 1: Usually it's a sibling rivalry that never resolved, or a
Speaker 1: parent on their own who never once said good job,
Speaker 1: a parent of their own who never said good job,
Speaker 1: and now there's a hole that never got filled. The
Speaker 1: kid becomes unintended, an unintended stand in for whoever they
Speaker 1: were actually trying to outdo thirty years ago. Sometimes their
Speaker 1: father wasn't actually compete with them at all. He was
Speaker 1: still competing with his own brother, and they just happened
Speaker 1: to be splashed by it. The kid raised this way
Speaker 1: usually ends up in one of two places. They become
Speaker 1: relentless achievers, chasing wins their entire life, trying to finally
Speaker 1: land the one that gets the actual reaction, and it
Speaker 1: never quite lands the way they need it to. Because
Speaker 1: the goalpost was never about achievement, it was always about them.
Speaker 1: Others go numb. They go numb to their own success entirely.
Speaker 1: They downplay wins before anyone else can. They say it's
Speaker 1: not a big deal before someone else gets the chance
Speaker 1: to one up them first, because that's easier than sitting
Speaker 1: through let down. Once again, there's a specific type of
Speaker 1: loneliness that comes with being this parent. Even though from
Speaker 1: the outside it might look like confidence, you cannot actually
Speaker 1: connect with someone you're constantly measuring yourself against. These parents
Speaker 1: get to their sixties confused about why their adult kids
Speaker 1: share less and less with them over time. The kid
Speaker 1: isn't being cold. The kid just got tired of every
Speaker 1: good thing in their life becoming a setup for parison.
Speaker 1: If you are the parent and any of this sounds familiar,
Speaker 1: the fix isn't staying quiet about your own life. That's
Speaker 1: not realistic. It's not even about the actual issue. The
Speaker 1: issue is timing. Let your kids have a win, breathe
Speaker 1: before you bring up yours. Let it sit in the
Speaker 1: room uncontested for a minute. That's it. That single pause
Speaker 1: is the difference between a kid who learns their accomplishments
Speaker 1: accomplishments matter, and one who learns everything else gets measured
Speaker 1: the second it leaves your mouth. If you grew up
Speaker 1: with this, it's worth noticing where you still can't enjoy
Speaker 1: something immediately without bracing for comparison, even when the body
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, even when nobody else is in the room
Speaker 1: to make it that. Bracing isn't paranoia. It's trained response
Speaker 1: to a pattern that ran for years and it took root.
Speaker 1: You got one more. This is the last one. This
Speaker 1: one's the perfectionist. The perfectionist parent is an easy is
Speaker 1: easy to mistake for a good parent because on the surface,
Speaker 1: it looks like high standards, discipline, wanting the best for
Speaker 1: your kid. Nobody throws apart already celebrating mediocrity. But there's
Speaker 1: a specific difference between a parent who wants their kid
Speaker 1: to try hard and a parent who's made love conditional
Speaker 1: on outcomes. So here's what it looks like. Kid brings
Speaker 1: home a report card with five a's and one B.
Speaker 1: The perfectionist parents go straight to the B, not because
Speaker 1: they hate their kid, but because the four a's already
Speaker 1: met the bar, so they don't register as anything worth mentioning.
Speaker 1: Only the mis gets discussed. Adults can replay this exact
Speaker 1: scene from thirty years ago in perfect detail, the specific grade,
Speaker 1: the specific tone, because that's the moment they learned good
Speaker 1: isn't good enough in this house. What separates this from
Speaker 1: the interrogator is that the interrogator makes you defend your
Speaker 1: choice after it happens. The perfectionist sets the bar before
Speaker 1: you've even started, and sets it so high that it's
Speaker 1: that missing. It's almost guaranteed. You're not being punished for failing.
Speaker 1: You're being set up to fail so that correction can
Speaker 1: keep coming. If you've ever felt like I don't think
Speaker 1: my mom or dad ever actually wanted me to hit
Speaker 1: the target. I think they wanted the ongoing project of
Speaker 1: fixing me. That's a hard thing to admit about your parents,
Speaker 1: but it might have been your reality. The kid raised
Speaker 1: under this learns that their worth becomes tied to output
Speaker 1: instead of existence. You see this in adults who cannot
Speaker 1: resist rest without guilt. You see this and people who
Speaker 1: physically feel uncomfortable doing nothing because nothing as a kid
Speaker 1: meant that they weren't earning anything and nothing, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: and not earning meant not mattering. It's not a productivity habit.
Speaker 1: It is a nervous system that is still trying to
Speaker 1: prove it deserves the right to exist. Where this comes
Speaker 1: in on the parent is usually one of two places.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's a parent who was raised the exact same
Speaker 1: way and genuinely believes pushing hard is how you show love,
Speaker 1: because nobody ever demonstrated another way to do it. Other times,
Speaker 1: it's a parent using the kid's achievement as proof of
Speaker 1: their own worth as a parent, so the kid's grades
Speaker 1: or performance isn't actually about the kid at all. It's
Speaker 1: evidence being collected for the case that the parent is
Speaker 1: quietly building about themselves. Either way, the kid is the
Speaker 1: one carrying the weight that was never really theirs to carry.
Speaker 1: Perfectionist parents often end up with kids who stop trying
Speaker 1: entirely by their teenage years, not because they're lazy, but
Speaker 1: because if the bar can never be hit, some kids
Speaker 1: quit playing the game. We've all seen the bright kid
Speaker 1: who suddenly stops doing homework around fourteen. Everyone calls it
Speaker 1: a phase. They say it's laziness, or they say the
Speaker 1: child is just bored, when really it's a kid protecting
Speaker 1: themselves for one more round of falling short of a
Speaker 1: target they knew they never could hit. The two directions
Speaker 1: of adult kids of perfectionists usually take are becoming high
Speaker 1: achievers who cannot enjoy the single accomplishment, always already looking
Speaker 1: at the next target before the current one is even settled,
Speaker 1: chasing a finish line that keeps moving because it was
Speaker 1: never really about the achievement in the first place. Or
Speaker 1: they give up on an ambition almost entirely because trying
Speaker 1: and falling short so many times hurts, so not try
Speaker 1: and feel safer than getting close and missing again. If
Speaker 1: you're a parent and this sounds familiar, the shift is
Speaker 1: learning to notice the four a's out loud before you
Speaker 1: mentioned the bee, not to avoid feedback. Feedback matters, but
Speaker 1: to make sure your kid knows that they got the
Speaker 1: win and it's seen first. That order matters. A kid
Speaker 1: who hears their effort acknowledged before correction learns something completely
Speaker 1: different than a kid who only hears about the miss.
Speaker 1: If you grew up with this, the work is learning
Speaker 1: to sit and rest without treating it like a crime.
Speaker 1: It's noticing whether you can actually enjoy a win or
Speaker 1: whether you're already scanning for what's next before the new
Speaker 1: moment is even over. You're allowed to just be good
Speaker 1: at something and let that be enough for one afternoon.
Speaker 1: So that's the four original control dramas. Interrogator, I'm sorry, intimidator, interrogator, aloof,
Speaker 1: and poor me. Then the five that are not in
Speaker 1: a Celestine prophecy that I believe exists, which are the rescuer, Charmer, Gaslighter, competitor,
Speaker 1: and perfectionist. The list continues to grow as you get
Speaker 1: closer and actually look because people who vie for power
Speaker 1: want to steal your energy or control or control you
Speaker 1: in a way that they can never run out of
Speaker 1: ways to do it, and they will always find new
Speaker 1: ways when one old way stops working. And here's what
Speaker 1: I want you guys, to walk away with. None of
Speaker 1: these are about identifying your parents so that you can
Speaker 1: build a case against them. The real work is always
Speaker 1: is way less comfortable than that. It's asking which one
Speaker 1: of these you're running from right now, and to look
Speaker 1: at the people who trust and love you the most.
Speaker 1: Because the thing about control dramas. You don't inherit the
Speaker 1: wound and skip the pattern. You inherit both. The wound
Speaker 1: feels like something that happened to you. The pattern feels
Speaker 1: like it's become a personality trait, but it really hasn't.
Speaker 1: It's the same nervous system wiring just showing up thirty
Speaker 1: years later in a different body, running the same playbook
Speaker 1: that you swore you would never use. I think about
Speaker 1: this a lot, believe it or not, because most people
Speaker 1: think that they need better communication skills or a better
Speaker 1: morning routine, and what actually needs to happen is that
Speaker 1: they need to go back and find the six year
Speaker 1: old still bracing at the dinner table that no longer
Speaker 1: exists anymore. You cannot parent, lead, or love from a
Speaker 1: nervous system that is still defending itself against something that
Speaker 1: ended decades ago. It's not a metaphor, that's just how
Speaker 1: this works. So if you listen to this whole episode
Speaker 1: and one of these things hit a little too close,
Speaker 1: it's not a bad sign. That's the whole reason I
Speaker 1: did this. Awareness is the only way you cannot change
Speaker 1: a pattern that you've never actually named. You'll just keep
Speaker 1: calling it your personality and wondering why the same relationship
Speaker 1: keeps repeating with different faces attached to it. So go
Speaker 1: look at your own house this week, not your parents' house, yours,
Speaker 1: the one that you're building right now with your kids,
Speaker 1: your partner, the people who are watching you and how
Speaker 1: you handle pressure, and they that are taking mental notes
Speaker 1: of everything that you do, study in your behavior and
Speaker 1: then course correct where necessary and that's the episode