Every family has an origin story, and it's not always the one that we tell at
the holidays, but maybe one that's written in these tiny, quiet moments.
Now, sure, you want to know how did grandma and grandpa meet?
Was grandma always so quiet?
And was grandpa always this inappropriate?
And why is it that I see everybody laugh at dad's jokes when we're at a party,
but at home, all I see is mom roll her eyes?
And why can cousin Kevin say something and completely get away with it,
but cousin Keith can say the exact same thing and all of a sudden everybody takes great offense?
Because over time, you learn about the family rules and more importantly, the family roles.
Who eventually found themselves in the role of the helper, or the hero,
or the problem solver, or the mascot, or the peacekeeper, the fixer, or the scapegoat?
And by the time that we even learn what role we
play in the family system it's pretty much already set in stone and those roles
follow us well into adulthood even into our own relationships and our own families
sometimes we're not even aware that we're playing those roles and then let me
add a little twist today we're going to talk about the butterfly effect.
The idea that a tiny action can create massive ripples.
I'm going to make the argument that it doesn't just shape weather patterns or
world events, but it also shapes families.
One unhealthy coping mechanism, one unhealed wound, one survival strategy, or one act of courage.
Any of those things can send shockwaves through generations.
Take a scientist who was studying lizard venom and how he changed the future
of medicine, or a wrong turn that helped ignite a world war or a rounding error
that reshaped chaos theory.
And don't even get me started with your Uncle Ray. Oh, we will be talking about
Uncle Ray today. But all of these have something in common.
There are these small moments that may seem inconsequential at the time,
but they can have massive consequences, especially in a family system.
Family systems can work the same way.
One person's fear or avoidance or emotional immaturity can ripple through an
entire lineage, but so can one person's awareness, one person's healing,
one person's willingness to show up differently.
Today, we're going to dive into a story of a family where one emotionally overwhelmed
parent, bless their heart, set patterns that then echoed for decades and how
those patterns show up long after the original players are gone.
And I think as you listen today, you might start to see your own family in a
new light because you're not just part of a story that started before you were born.
You're also the one who gets to decide how it continues.
All that and so much more coming up on today's episode of The Virtual Couch.
Welcome to The Virtual Couch.
Please take a seat for a pillar.
Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining me today on The Virtual Couch.
And most likely, this one is going to go up on Waking Up to Narcissism as well,
because there is so much to share.
And I am finding more and more. I forget, I guess it's the guy who records both
Waking Up to Narcissism and The Virtual Couch.
The assumption is, oh, well, people are listening to both, but they have very different audiences.
This is a crossover episode because we're going to talk a lot about emotional
immaturity, family systems, and things that I think will apply to anyone who
is part of a family, who can basically spell the word family.
My name is Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
And I would love for you to follow me on all the social media things on Instagram
at virtual.couch, on TikTok at virtualcouch, on Substack. Go learn about Substack.
There is a lot of content and it's short, bite-sized content.
It's at substack.com slash thevirtualcouch. I would love to have you there.
And there is a paid subscription version there as well, where you are getting
a lot more content, some behind the scenes things, and a little bit of a deep
dive more into the world of emotional maturity, narcissistic traits,
behaviors, and a lot more there on Substack.
And reach out to me if you have questions or if you identify with the work that
I do and are looking for some coaching, some therapy.
If you are interested in working with me, tell me a little bit more about your story.
I sometimes have availability, some openings, and I'm finding that I'm a little
more picky, a little more choosy with the people I work with.
But in doing so, I really have felt a connection with the people that I have
the opportunity to work with. But let's get to today's story.
In the early 1960s, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz was running computer
simulations of weather patterns. He was essentially trying to predict the weather.
One day, he wanted to rerun a simulation partway through, so instead of starting
over, he manually entered numbers from a previous printout.
The computer calculated using six decimal places, for example, 0.506127.
The printout only showed three, 0.506.
Lorenz figured the difference was insignificant, because we're just talking a few ten-thousandths.
Entered the rounded number, started the simulation, and he took a little break.
When he came back, the weather patterns had diverged wildly.
What started as nearly identical conditions now produced completely different
weather. And at first, Lawrence thought the computer must have been broken.
He actually stumbled onto something fundamental. In certain kinds of systems,
very small inputs can amplify in unpredictable ways.
He called it sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
Kind of a little bit of a nerdy version of what in 1972 he would later present
with a much better title, does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
Also known as the butterfly effect.
And what's important is that the butterfly effect doesn't mean every small action
causes enormous consequences, but it means that in complex dynamic systems with
a lot of interconnected parts, a lot of variables, small inputs can amplify unpredictability.
That's why weather forecasts are still unreliable beyond a week or two,
or maybe even a day or two, or an hour or two. It's not about the computing power.
It's that the atmosphere is inherently chaotic.
Now, let's talk about one of the most fascinating things I've heard in a long
time, Gila monster saliva. Stay with me here.
In the early 1990s, Dr. John Ng, an endocrinologist at a VA hospital in the
Bronx, became obsessed with something that most people would overlook.
And the therapist in me would really like to find out what his initial motivation
was, why this was so enthralling to him.
He became fascinated with the Gila monster, this slow-moving venomous lizard
from the American Southwest, and how it only eats about five to ten times, dramatic pause, a year.
It can go months between meals, and somehow it keeps perfectly stable blood sugar the whole time.
Dr. Ng wanted to know how, so he did what I think any of us would do.
He ordered some dried venom from a serpentarium in Utah, and yes, that is a real thing.
And he found a peptide that he named Exenden-4. It was almost identical to a
human hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar.
But in humans, GLP-1 breaks down in just a couple of minutes.
The Gila Monsters version stays active for hours.
Dr. Ng sees the potential immediately.
One problem, nobody else cared. So for three years, he pitched pharmaceutical
companies and they all passed.
Lizard venom for diabetes. Sounded a little too weird and even his own hospital
wouldn't help him patent it.
But he did not give up. In 1996, he stood next to a poster at a diabetes conference
pitching anybody who would listen.
And finally, a small biotech company bit.
Pun intended. That moment, one scientist refusing to give up,
waiting for somebody to believe in lizard spit, set off a cascade that nobody predicted.
That compound eventually became Ozempic or Wegovi, and today over 25 million
prescriptions and counting, and it's not just for diabetes anymore.
Research is showing benefits for heart disease, kidney disease,
potentially Alzheimer's, and even reduced addiction, alcohol,
cigarettes, tobacco, and even in early trials with some drug addiction.
So from a scientist studying lizard spit in a VA hospital to a compound that
may transform how we treat addiction, dementia, heart disease,
and obesity, one small discovery, one person who refused to give up.
Ripples still expanding. That's the butterfly effect working in our favor.
Now, let's talk about when it doesn't necessarily work in our favor.
June 28, 1914, Sarajevo. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian
throne, was traveling through the city in an open car with his wife, Sophie.
That morning, Serbian nationalists had positioned themselves along the route
with pistols and bombs and cyanide pills.
The first assassination attempt
failed. A bomb bounced off Ferdinand's car and exploded behind them.
Shaken, he continued on to City Hall, and afterward, he made a fateful decision.
He wanted to visit the wounded. The motorcade was supposed to take a different
route for security's sake, but the driver didn't get the message.
So he turned on to Franz Josef Street, the original route, by mistake.
And when somebody shouted the error, the driver stopped to back up.
And the car came to rest directly in front of a 19-year-old named Gavrillo Princip.
Princip had been part of the plot, but he hadn't acted that morning.
And now, by pure chance, his target sat motionless feet away.
He stepped forward and he fired twice, and both Ferdinand and Sophie were dead.
Within weeks, alliances pulled the continent into war.
Russia mobilized, Germany declared war, France and Britain followed,
and World War I went on to kill some estimates, say, up to 17 million people.
Four empires collapsed, the Russian Revolution happened, and the Treaty of Versailles
planted seeds for World War II that would take the lives of another 60 million.
One wrong turn, one driver who wasn't told about the route change,
one 19-year-old on a specific street corner at a.
The ripples from that wrong turn are still shaping our world today.
So we have three stories. Scientist persistence leading to a compound that may help millions.
A driver's wrong turn contributing to 17 million deaths.
And a rounding error revealing that some systems are fundamentally unpredictable.
So here's what I've been thinking about lately, and this is where your Uncle Ray comes in.
Family systems are complex too.
A family system is the emotional ecosystem that develops between the people
who live together, who grow together and psychologically wire themselves to
one another in a sense, often,
long before they're even aware it's happening, if they ever are aware of the
way that they co-regulate and that it's happening in the system.
It's the web of roles and rules and expectations, alliances,
unspoken agreements, and emotional patterns that form in response to how each
member relates to the others.
And a family system isn't just the sum of the individuals, it's also this invisible
operating system that shapes how everybody inside it learns to communicate and
solve problems and express emotions and react to each other and essentially
try to make sense of relationships.
Sometimes the butterfly in a family system isn't an event.
I think it can be a person and that person can tilt the whole system in either
direction. Sometimes the butterfly in a.
Just as often, and this is the part that I don't think we talk about enough,
the butterfly is the one who quietly decides this pattern ends with me.
One person's courage can be just as contagious as somebody else's dysfunction.
So the system shifts because somebody was willing to step out of the role that
they were handed and do something new, something different, something healthier,
and it can be uncomfortable and feel like you're going against the grain.
I've seen families where the first person who decides to go to therapy becomes
a different kind of catalyst, Not the kind that creates drama,
but the kind that creates space.
Space for honesty, space for healing, space for somebody to finally say,
hey, I don't really want to feel this way anymore.
And sometimes they get mocked by siblings or dismissed by parents who have never
confronted their own guilt or shame or who say, I don't even think therapy works
as the person who's never been to therapy.
This person goes anyway, and before long, somebody else in the family starts
wondering, maybe I could do that too.
That one person's willingness to step into the unfamiliar begins to shift what
the whole system thought was possible.
And I've also worked with people who were discouraged from doing anything that
fell outside of the unwritten rules of their family system.
One client enlisted in the military, even though nobody in their entire family
had ever done it. And in some cases, it openly ridiculed and mocked the idea.
And then, almost quietly, two cousins followed. The moment one person breaks
this invisible barrier, the barrier loses a lot of its power.
That is the butterfly effect in real time. One act of courage creating a path
where no path existed before.
Or I worked with somebody who decided to join a church choir after years of
being teased and mocked for wanting to sing.
And they showed up anyway, shaky voice and all. And then something kind of remarkable happened.
Then their mom, who spent decades silencing her own voice to avoid her husband's
mocking, starts joining them every Sunday, finally choosing courage over conditioning.
So you got one person's willingness to reclaim a small part of themselves opens
a doorway for somebody who thought that doorway had been closed years ago.
And I think I see this most profoundly in people navigating faith transitions,
which is still one of the things I enjoy working with the most.
When someone steps out of a high demand religion that has shaped the family
for generations, they often feel
like they're violating some sacred script because in essence they are.
But when they make that move, and not necessarily out of rebellion,
but out of their own personal integrity,
they often free themselves from layers of inherited shame that they didn't even
know that they were carrying, that they thought was just part of what everybody
goes through and what you deserve.
And what's extraordinary is what happens next. Often, other family members who
never felt permission to explore their own questions suddenly find themselves
wondering if they are allowed to think and feel for themselves as well.
One person's courage to step out of this is just what we do kind of mentality
can loosen the grip of generational expectations that everybody else assumed were immovable.
I've lost count of how many clients I've seen become what I like to call transformational
figures in their families.
They're the ones who finally stand up to these unspoken rules,
who decide that their life is worth living in alignment with their own personal
values rather than the family's fears or the family's absolute expectations.
They become the quiet example that says, hey, you're allowed to grow.
You're allowed to change.
You're allowed to choose differently. And then that example ripples forward.
Giving oftentimes their siblings or their cousins or even their parents,
eventually their own children, permission to believe that they can do something
difficult and meaningful too, even if it goes against the expectations of the
family system that they were born into.
And then we're going to talk a lot today about Uncle Ray, a person whose emotional
immaturity, whose need for drama, whose patterns of behavior create ripples
that spread through an entire family system for generations in the opposite direction.
And to be perfectly clear, the Uncle Ray's and the family systems aren't changing
things through necessarily grand betrayals or even sometimes obvious abuse,
although those things happen too.
Usually it's through something a little more subtle. Constant, low-grade chaos.
Manufactured conflict. The kind of drama that slowly erodes family traditions,
fractures relationships, and teaches children patterns that they will unconsciously
repeat with their own family someday.
I like to think of this as the family butterfly effect. So the family that I'm
about to describe is based on a real family, but of course, I've changed a lot
of things to protect the innocent.
Several years ago, a friend shared a story that is the basis for today's episode.
I changed the identifying details, but the dynamics are real.
So let's meet the players. My friend.
Let's call her Sarah. Sarah comes from a family with the usual cast of people,
parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, holiday gatherings, where at grandma's,
the traditions that families build over decades were played out in her family
system. But there's one person who stands out.
Sarah's mother's brother. And we will call him Uncle Ray.
Uncle Ray is not a bad person. That's important to say up front.
I don't think that he wakes up planning to create chaos, twirling his snidely whiplash mustache.
But here's what Sarah told me almost verbatim. He needs a problem with something.
It is always, always a thing. That's the key.
He needs a problem. He needs drama. Without conflict, without some grievance
to nurse, Uncle Ray doesn't quite know who he is.
For some people, chaos feels like home. It's what they grew up with.
It's the only emotional temperature they know how to regulate.
And here's something fundamental. We don't really know that we exist until we're
interacting with another human at our most basic level.
Our sense of self is relational to others.
We need people to interact with, to reflect back that we're real, that we matter.
And for most of us, hopefully that interaction can be cooperative,
connecting two people, genuinely curious about each other.
But the further down the emotionally immature scale somebody is,
the more they need to find a one-up position when they're talking to somebody.
They don't just need interaction.
They need to win the interaction.
This one-up position is fascinating. It's this psychological stance that emotionally
immature people, and this is where I'm maintaining that we're all emotionally
immature until we're not, but that the emotional immaturity in us, let's just say,
we instinctively reach for when we feel unsure of ourselves.
It's this illusion of superiority, being above the other person,
because staying one-up protects them from the discomfort of vulnerability or accountability.
In a one-up position, they don't have to consider your perspective or acknowledge
their own impact or tolerate any uncertainty.
They simply position themselves as the judge, the knower, the correct one.
And this is significant because the moment somebody shifts into the one up position,
real connection becomes almost impossible.
You can't be curious and defensive at the same time. You can't collaborate with
somebody from a pedestal and you can't build intimacy when the relationship
has turned into a scoreboard.
The one up position isn't always loud or it's not always aggressive.
Sometimes it shows up in a much subtler form. The victim stance,
It sounds counterintuitive because being a victim looks like being one down,
but emotionally immature people often use it to elevate themselves above others
without taking responsibility for anything.
When somebody can go into the poor me, what they're really saying is,
I have the moral high ground here.
I have been wronged more than anybody else. I am the most injured party.
And from that position, they don't have to self-reflect. They don't have to
be accountable. They don't have to consider the other person's perspective.
Victimhood becomes its own version of superiority, and it's untouchable,
it's unquestionable, and it's pretty much insulated from growth when it gets to that point.
So it's still a one-up move because it shifts all the emotional labor onto everybody
else while allowing them to remain blameless.
You'll see this when somebody says things like, well, I guess nothing I ever
do is good enough for you, right after being asked to take responsibility for
something really small.
Or suddenly the conversation isn't about the issue anymore, it's about comforting them.
Or when a person responds to a boundary with, wow, okay, I didn't know you hated
me, forcing the other person to now backpedal and now soothe and reassure rather than stand firm.
When somebody says, no, you're right, I'm just a horrible person,
what they're essentially saying is, hey, I'm going to say these words and then
I need you to make me feel better.
So in all these cases, the victim stance becomes a shield and a weapon at the same time.
It keeps that person protected from accountability and it places them in this
superior emotional position, the one who is wronged, the one who deserves repair,
the one others must know, you now must work to appease me.
It's still this one-up position, but it's disguised in a softer,
more manipulative form.
And then once somebody's operating from that one-up position,
whether through a superiority or victimhood, they're not looking for connection anymore.
They're looking for material. They need something to push up against,
something to react to, something that lets them reinforce their elevated stance.
And that's where the dynamic gets even trickier because the moment you open
your mouth, you've given them something to work with.
They might ask you a question, but I don't often think it's genuine curiosity.
It's like they need you to start moving your mouth and saying words,
saying something, anything, so they can then attack what you say and take that
one-up position. This is what I like to call the attack surface.
So let me give some examples because I see this very regularly.
One spouse says, hey, just tell me what you need me to do. Honestly, I'll do it.
That sounds very helpful, right? The right mouth noises and the right intonations. Right.
And the other spouse says, okay, I could really use help bathing the kids for a spouse.
Yeah, that kind of hurts my knees, right? But anything else,
anything else you tell me, I will do it.
You can kind of see what happened there, right? Tell me what you need wasn't
actually an offer. It was a setup. The moment their partner gave an answer,
it became a bit of an attack surface.
Now they can reject it and look reasonable and say, hey, I said I'd help,
but you picked something that I can't believe you picked, like you know about my knees.
And all of a sudden now they asked you if they could help you.
And now you're apologizing to them. Yeah, sorry, I forgot about your knees because
it sure seems like your knees were fine when you were playing soccer over Thanksgiving, but I digress.
Or here's an old favorite. Hey, where do you want to go to dinner?
I don't care. You choose.
So you pick a restaurant. Oh, wow, really? I thought we had that last week.
Or, oh, I didn't think you'd actually pick that or I would have told you anything but that.
The question wasn't genuine. It felt a little bit more like bait.
The moment you provide an answer, you've given them something to attack.
Now they're in the one-up position without having to be vulnerable.
And don't get me wrong, when somebody is aware of this, if I really don't know,
I don't have any ideas that are in my head.
It's okay to be aware of that and to say, you know what? Throw something out
there at me. I got to be honest. I'm not thinking about anything.
I'm probably going to react to the things that you're going to say.
If you're going to say Thai food, oh, well, there we go. Now I've just formed an opinion.
So we can even get to that point just by being aware.
But this is why conversations with emotionally immature people can feel so exhausting
because you feel like you can't win.
Not that it should even be a game of win or lose, but it's because you can't.
The game's rigged. It's kind of like one of those carnival games where you're
supposed to toss a ring onto a bottle, except the bottles are slightly tilted
and the rings are just a little bit too small.
But you keep trying and you keep adjusting and you keep thinking, maybe this time.
But the setup itself is designed so you never quite make it.
And it's not your skill that's lacking.
This game was engineered to keep you chasing a wind that isn't coming.
Or like a classic whack-a-mole booth.
You think I've finally responded in the perfect way, said the right thing,
stayed calm enough and clearly clarified myself.
And then another mole pops up on the other side of the board with a brand new
complaint or criticism You can't win because the goalposts aren't just moving
The person that you're dealing with is the one that's moving them and kind of
laughing and saying chase me.
This actually gives me a great idea, emotional immaturity whack-a-mole,
because that's exactly what it feels like.
You answer one thing and boom, another contradiction pops up before you can
even put the mallet down.
Okay. Immature person says, hey, where do you want to go to dinner?
You, maybe Thai food. Immature person, Thai? Seriously? Whoa. Okay.
Hey, anyway, what are we doing this weekend? Whack. All right.
New mole. Me. Maybe we could take the kids to the park. Immature person,
the park with my allergies.
Do you even think before you talk? Immature person. Hey, also,
I missed my dentist appointment today.
Why didn't you remind me about my dentist appointment. Whack,
there's a new mole. Me, I assumed it was still in your calendar.
Immature person, oh, so now it's my fault. Nice.
Immature person, hey, so what are we going to do for your mom's birthday, by the way?
Whack, new mole. You can answer every question perfectly and it still won't
matter because the goal wasn't information. It was friction.
They're not collecting answers. They're looking for these attack surfaces.
So back to Uncle Ray, a phrase that you're going to hear several times today.
Uncle Ray is married to Janet and Janet is what I often call pathologically kind.
Now that word pathological can sound harsh or clinical. So I want to clarify
what it means in this context.
When something's pathological, it simply means that it's moved maybe beyond
its healthy purpose or identity. And it's crossed a little bit into territory
where it can cause harm, usually quietly or gradually, and often with the very best of intentions.
It's when a trait that is very beautiful in moderation becomes so overused or
automatic or so tied to survival that it starts working against the person instead of for them.
You can see this in a lot of areas in life. Confidence is wonderful until it
becomes almost a form of pathological overconfidence where somebody can't hear
feedback or acknowledge mistakes.
Or order and neatness can be really grounding, but it can also become pathological
when it starts looking like perfectionism, where nothing ever quite feels good
enough and a person's self-worth rises and falls on these impossible standards.
And even love can become pathological when it turns into pathological caretaking,
where somebody believes their entire worth depends entirely on keeping everybody
else happy and keeping themselves in a kind of a one-down position.
So when I say that Janet is pathologically kind, I'm not saying she's broken.
I'm not saying she's flawed. I'm saying her kindness grew out of its healthy
container and became so tied to her identity, so necessary for her emotional
safety that she no longer has access to the other side of the equation.
Confidence, assertiveness, boundaries, her own needs.
Healthy kindness is more balanced. It breathes. It allows generosity and self-respect to coexist.
Healthy kindness lets you say, hey, I'm happy to help, but also I may not be
able to today, or I've got a hard out at five o'clock.
It recognizes that giving is part of a relationship, but it's not the entire job description.
Pathological kindness is different because it's reflexive. It's fear-driven.
It's the kind of kindness that says, if I take care of everybody else well enough,
maybe, maybe I'll finally feel safe.
It's prioritizing everyone else's needs above your own essential needs and over
and over again because the alternative feels dangerous or selfish or disloyal.
It's about feeling guilty for even thinking about setting a boundary.
It's staying in painful situations because leaving might upset someone else.
And it's absorbing mistreatment and apologizing for not handling it better.
That's the place that Janet lives in. She doesn't push back.
She doesn't set limits. She explains away Ray's behavior.
She smooths conflict before it forms. She sacrifices her own needs to keep Ray calm.
And somewhere along the line, she came to believe that if she could just give
enough, accommodate enough, love enough, then Ray would finally get it.
He would have his aha moment. He would finally soften.
And again, none of this is a moral failure. It's a childhood imprint.
It's the emotional equivalent of learning to walk with one leg slightly shorter
and not realizing decades later that your whole posture has been shaped around it.
Janet learned early that she was safest when she managed other people's emotions.
That was how she stayed connected. That was how she stayed valuable.
That was how she stayed needed.
And this is why my friend Ross Rosenberg, author of The Human Magnet Syndrome,
describes relationships like theirs as breakup resistant.
Because they're built on dynamics, not compatibility.
Ray is somebody who needs friction to feel alive. He needs somebody to push
against, somebody who absorbs his storms so he never has to confront the fear
underneath the bluster.
Drama is Ray's emotional currency. It really is the air he breathes.
And then Janet steps into the picture, somebody whose entire emotional identity
is built on absorbing storms, smoothing chaos, and believing that love means to erase yourself.
She knows how to caretake chaos. She's done it her whole life.
It feels familiar, even if it's painful. For her, it just is.
So for Ray, she's a perfect partner who won't challenge the narrative,
won't require accountability, and won't pull away when he creates emotional turbulence.
For Janet, well, Ray's familiar.
He keeps her in the role that she learned in childhood, managing,
soothing, compensating, fixing.
Ross calls this the human magnet syndrome, two people whose wounds fit together
so snugly that it feels like destiny, even though it's actually unconscious
patterning, pulling them toward each other.
And right in the middle of that dynamic is their son, Tyler,
quietly absorbing all of it, learning not from lectures or rules,
but from the emotional choreography that he's watched his entire life.
And when you see the world through that lens, it's hard to blame him for repeating
what was modeled. Let's get to the wedding, which ended up being a masterclass
in emotional immaturity.
Before I go into those details, let me say something very important.
I believe we are all emotionally immature in certain ways. It's not a negative,
it's human. It's a place to operate from.
If you have not heard any of the Waking Up to Narcissism podcast because you've
been afraid of the word narcissism, which I have received a lot of that feedback...
Since early on, 150 plus episodes ago, I wanted to be very clear that narcissistic
personality disorder is a very, very small percentage of the population.
Some estimates between 3% and 5%. But we throw it around like it's at 50%,
60%, 70%. Everybody's ex, everybody's boss, everybody's bad friend is a narcissist.
But in reality, we're all just emotionally immature until we're not.
Until we do the work to find the tools. And even then, we still have to embrace
a lot of discomfort, admit the things that we don't know that we don't know.
But at least if you can identify the areas in which you are emotionally immature,
you're on a path of healing.
Emotional immaturity is when the survival skills we developed as kids keep running
into adulthood, even when they no longer serve us.
We don't arrive in adulthood with fully developed emotional skills.
We arrive with whatever we learned in childhood, strategies that helped us navigate
our families, our schools, our early relationships. And the problem is that
those childhood strategies don't automatically upgrade when we turn 12 or 16 or 18 or 25 or 40 or 50.
They keep running in the background. It's like old software on a new computer.
There's a line from an Alex Michelaitis novel. He's the author of The Silent
Patient, an amazing book.
In a follow-up book called The Fury, he has a line that captures this so well.
He says, when we are young and afraid, something happens.
Time stops. A version of us is trapped at that age forever.
A frightened child's hiding in your mind. And you were meant to liberate that
child, but instead you ended up becoming their jailer.
The child who learned to please others becomes the adult who can't set boundaries.
The child who shut down emotions becomes the partner who can't be vulnerable.
The child who learned that disagreement meant abandonment then sees every conflict as a threat.
I think part of why that quote is so good is because I believe when we're kids, we feel everything.
Our bodies are wired to send up little flares, fear, excitement,
confusion, shame, sadness.
And our nervous system is doing its best to say, hey, something happened,
pay attention. But the problem is almost none of us were ever taught what to do with those feelings.
Even the kindest, most well-meaning parent would say things like,
hey, don't worry about it, bud.
Or it's not a big deal. because they wanted to soothe us, but we were still
worried. And to us, it was a big deal.
So right there, we learned that our internal world was somehow incorrect.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you had parents who said,
stop crying or you're fine or the classic, I'll give you something to cry about.
And on both sides of that coin, there's the gentle minimizer or the harsh dismisser.
The message lands the same way. Your emotions are too much. And if something
feels overwhelming to you, you're wrong for feeling it.
So what does that child do with that? Their body still registers the experience.
Their nervous system still reacts, but without anybody helping them name it
or regulate it or make sense of it, those big feelings get filed away like the quote describes.
Like these little pockets of unfinished business that the child assumes that
their future self will come back and sort out.
It's almost as if the kid inside of us, the inner child, is saying,
okay, tuck this away into the vault.
And when you grow up and become the big kid, I'm sure you'll help us. You'll heal us.
But then somewhere along the line, we totally missed the memo.
Nobody circles back, teaches us that adulthood isn't the finish line where emotional
maturity magically downloads.
It's not like just you can update the software. You have to do the work.
You have to be your own programmer.
And then those old survival strategies, the pleasing, the shutting down, the fear of conflict.
Now they show up in our adult relationships with the emotional logic of a child.
Not because we're broken, but because that younger version of us is still holding
those old feelings, waiting for us to finally come back and help them make sense of it.
But then they just come out. They're reactive.
So back to the story. Sarah has a brother, Michael.
Michael got engaged and wanted to get married in roughly about eight months
and have a summer wedding.
Uncle Ray's son, Tyler, had also gotten engaged, but booked the venue a year
and a half, two years out.
Long engagement, big production. Now, there is no rule anywhere,
at least that I'm aware of, in any etiquette book or any tradition that says
you cannot get married before your cousin who chose a longer engagement.
It's not as if they called dibs on weddings and until they run its course,
no one else is allowed to marry.
But Uncle Ray sees it a little differently. So let's talk about the patterns
of emotional immaturity.
When you look at Ray's reaction to Michael's wedding, you can see several patterns
that show up again and again in emotionally immature family systems.
And these are random behaviors. their childhood adaptations that are being replayed
in adult form here are these survival strategies they worked once.
Now in adulthood, they create confusion and conflict and in a sense that nothing
you say or do is ever quite right.
We're going to go over a few of these. Pattern one, black and white,
all or nothing thinking.
Children make sense of overwhelming situations by seeing the world in absolutes.
Everything is good or bad.
It's a lot of extra work to sit with the gray because our brain craves certainty.
We want to know and we don't like to be uncomfortable.
We see things as kids and as adults as all good or all bad, with me or against
me. It's developmentally normal, but when that thinking doesn't mature,
it turns into ultimatums, extremes, and emotional rigidity.
So for Ray, Michael's wedding couldn't simply be a joyful moment for someone
else. In his framework, if Michael was getting married first,
it took something from Tyler.
It's a zero-sum game. There's a winner and a loser. Someone had to win, someone had to lose.
There was no room for the mature adult truth that two things can actually be
true at once. that Michael could be excited about his own timeline and Tyler's
wedding could still be wonderful as well.
This is the same mechanism that is behind ending a relationship after one argument.
You never supported me or seeing coworkers as either perfect allies or then
total backstabbers and flip-flopping back and forth.
It's the emotional logic of a child navigating a complicated world with really
simple categories and simple rules.
Let's go to emotional immaturity pattern number two, mind reading and assumed intent.
Children assume others feel and think exactly the way that they do.
Exactly the way they do. We still do this. Adults carry this forward and we
start to create entire narratives about other people's intentions without actually
checking any of the facts.
So Ray never asked why Michael wanted a sooner wedding. He didn't approach it
with curiosity. He decided that he knew the motives and it was selfishness, attention seeking.
And he treated that imagined narrative as absolute truth because if he thought
that, then everybody must think that.
And this is the same pattern that leads adults to think my partner didn't text
me back, they are mad. Or my friend didn't say hi, they are obviously upset
with me without ever checking.
It is not malicious. It's, again, an outdated emotional operating system that
never learned to pause and verify and be genuinely curious.
Emotionally immature pattern number three, difficulty with accountability.
Children absolutely fear being
wrong because being wrong often meant punishment or withdrawal of love.
If you never were able to feel safe making mistakes, then accountability becomes
threatening even in adulthood.
So the nervous system scrambles to avoid it at all costs. I didn't do that. You didn't tell me to.
It's where gaslighting comes in. Later, Ray insisted he didn't say that Michael's
fiance was selfish, even though that is what people heard.
He said, oh, no, no, she was being selfish, as though that's a meaningful distinction.
It's a subtle rewriting of reality to try to avoid responsibility.
And this isn't unique to Ray. Adults do this all the time.
Oh, I didn't yell. You just took it that way. Or I didn't forget. You never told me.
When that habit gets called out, many people immediately shift to defensiveness
or shame because the stakes of simply being wrong just feel as high as they did in childhood.
In family systems work, this is described as a childhood defense mechanism masquerading as adult logic.
This is why gaslighting is a childhood defense mechanism.
I couldn't have done that or else that means that I did something that has disappointed
you and then you will leave me. So I didn't do it. You never told me.
The dog ate my homework. Pattern four, emotional reasoning.
Children treat emotions as facts because feelings were their primary way of
navigating the world. But if this continues into adulthood, I feel it becomes it must be true.
So when Ray tells people that his sister attacked him on the phone,
a sister who, by all accounts, avoids confrontation at all costs,
he wasn't necessarily lying.
To him, disagreement feels like an attack, and when people are attacking you,
they yell at you, and that feeling became the fact.
This is why conversations with emotionally immature people can feel so disorienting.
You can be the most calm, measured, and kind person ever, and they will still
insist that you are harsh or critical or aggressive.
It's when your kids say, stop yelling at me, and you know you're not yelling
because you find yourself wanting to say, I'll show you yelling.
Their emotional experience becomes the objective reality, and they expect everybody
else around them to dance accordingly.
I feel it, so it must be true. I think you're mad at me. So now I need you to
prove that you're not mad at me, even though you're probably not.
And I don't even actually know what it would take for me to feel that way.
But you need to start dancing.
Pattern five, external validation dependence. Because children rely on caregivers
for reassurance and their own sense of self.
A kid gets their sense of self from external validation. That's why they're
continually trying to look and see, what do you think? What do you think about
me? What do you think about this thing I'm doing?
And adults who never internalize that sense of identity look to other people
to stabilize their emotions.
I interact with people in my life on occasion who say, no, I need you to tell me what to do.
And what I hear in that is that so that then if it works, great.
If it doesn't, I can blame you.
Ray needed the entire family to co-sign on his perspective. He told Tyler,
he told other relatives, he built a case.
Because without external validation, without this affirmation,
the grievance didn't feel real enough, solid enough, justified enough.
It didn't feel right for him. But here's the spoiler alert. it won't because
he doesn't know how he feels.
He has this lack of self on the inside.
So, it won't ever feel like the right thing.
But if others don't validate his view, then he can definitely hold it against
them. And this pattern shows up everywhere.
Obsessively checking social media engagement, needing others to agree before
making a decision, feeling deflated when an idea is immediately praised. And it's not vanity.
It's a nervous system still searching for the parents who were supposed to say,
hey, champ, what do you think?
And help it feel more secure. And then a couple more. Pattern six,
magical thinking. One of my favorites.
Children believe their thoughts can control reality. If I close my eyes, you can't see me.
Or if I don't leave my stuffed animals on the bed in a certain way,
then when I get home, they'll be mad at me.
Or I love, I heard a podcast recently where the person said,
hey, I'm in my 30s and I still think I got to wear my lucky socks in order to
be successful in certain situations at work.
Or people with their superstitions and sports.
Adults outgrow this for the most part. But in emotional situations,
magical thinking resurfaces.
And Ray fell into this too. He believed that if he felt wrong,
then surely everybody else must see it in the same way. that if he declared
Michael's timeline selfish, then others would intuitively understand and they
would rally behind him. And when they didn't, it felt like betrayal.
Adult magical thinking also sounds like some of my greatest hits.
If I avoid checking the bank account, the problem isn't real.
Or people who say, if my partner loves me, they should just know what I need.
But even a bigger one, if we don't talk about it, it'll just get better.
If I don't deal with my problems in my marriage, they will just magically work out.
Now, the beliefs aren't silly. They're emotional shortcuts formed long before
logic entered the picture. but it is magical.
Magical thinking. And one more, managing other people's emotions. This is big.
Children learn early which emotions are allowed and which ones get them in trouble
or get ignored. So they become scanners and fixers and they manage others to stay safe.
So for Ray, managing emotions look like controlling the narrative.
If he could get everybody on his side, he wouldn't have to feel the discomfort
of uncertainty or disagreement.
For Sarah's mother, managing emotions looked like smoothing conflict or taking
responsibility for everybody else's feelings and trying to keep the peace.
A lot of managing people's emotions is, I don't want that person to be mad.
I don't want that person to think that I don't care.
I'm managing their emotional experience rather than allowing them to have their
own emotional experience.
And there is a version of this where somebody becomes aware of it and they say, no, I am doing that.
I'll at least acknowledge that because there's a chance that person won't respond
the way that you are worried about them responding. Both Ray and Sarah's mom
learned these things for good reasons.
Both adapted to survive in their childhood home. But then these same adaptations,
when carried into adulthood, unchecked, create dysfunctional dynamics that leave everybody exhausted.
So when you put all these patterns together, black and white thinking,
mind reading, difficulty with accountability, emotional reasoning,
external validation dependence.
You got your magical thinking and the pressure to manage everybody else's emotions.
You can see why a simple wedding announcement sent shockwaves through the whole
family system. It wasn't just about a date on a calendar.
It was about decades of emotional templates that start playing themselves out in real time.
Ray wasn't trying to destroy the family or cause conflict. He was reacting from
the only emotional playbook he'd ever been given.
And that's the heart of emotional immaturity. It's not a lack of intelligence.
It's not even a lack of love, but a lack of updated tools.
And this is where the butterfly effect kicks in.
So Ray tells Tyler, his son, his version of events.
Tyler responds in kind. And Michael, who has been close with Tyler growing up
as cousins, reaches out to smooth things over. Tyler takes a few days to respond.
Then he responds and says, Hey, I think we're just not going to be able to make
it to your wedding. But if that's not a priority for you to come to ours, I guess I understand.
So again, he's being very passive aggressive saying, if that's not a priority for you, I understand.
It's not conflict resolution. That's a passive aggressive missile launched.
We're not coming. And it's your fault.
Tyler learned it somewhere. Before we get there, I want to talk about curiosity.
I think there's this spectrum of curiosity.
Curiosity or the lack of it is one of the clearest windows, I think,
into someone's emotional maturity level.
Some people just aren't curious, not because they're lazy, but because they
didn't see a model, because they can't take in someone else's opinion.
If you're stuck in black and white thinking, hearing a different opinion feels
like an attack. If you think differently than me, you must think I am wrong and you are right.
And if I am wrong, then what am I? Bad? Worthless? Dumb?
So instead of being curious, they tell, they inform, they explain,
they talk at you, they control the narrative.
They even tell you what I think that you are thinking or what you are believing.
And that's not a conversation. That's a monologue with an audience.
Performative curiosity, if we're starting to move up the spectrum,
is curiosity as a checkbox.
There, I asked. They don't lead in. They don't follow up. They asked because
they were supposed to, not because they wanted to know.
There is a question mark on the end of it. Okay, no, yeah, how was your day?
Then you've got weaponized curiosity. And that's where people ask questions,
but they're more designed as traps.
Don't you think it's hypocritical that you're upset about this when you did
that? It's not curiosity. That's an ambush, again, with a question mark.
Genuine curiosity means stepping outside of your ego, being prepared to hear
things that feel like potentially criticism.
And instead of defending, continuing to be curious, to set your ego aside.
It sounds like, hey, help me understand. and then actually trying to understand,
actually actively listening.
Genuine curiosity is wanting to understand someone's inner world,
especially when it doesn't match yours.
And it's difficult. It requires sitting with discomfort instead of reacting to it.
One of the number one responses I see is that when somebody does say,
okay, I do want to be genuinely curious, and then you share something with them
and then they don't respond and they just say, well, I don't know what to say.
And now we get back into the world of emotional immaturity that you're assuming
there's a right thing or a wrong thing to say.
Real intimacy is I want to know you. I want to understand. And you can even say, oh, I have no idea.
I don't even know what to say or to have the courage to be known and to say,
man, that's hard for me because I disagree. And so, I find myself wanting to
defend myself or to attack what you're saying.
That's a place that we can start from. But Uncle Ray is not good at sitting
with discomfort. He is very good at reacting to it.
Now, let's introduce Uncle Dave. Uncle Ray had cut his brother Dave out of his
life years earlier. Total estrangement.
And then one Christmas, seemingly out of nowhere, Ray decided to reach out.
And given their history, that alone took a lot for him. I'm curious of what
that was really all about. What was the angle?
But the way he framed it revealed a lot about how he understood repair.
He said, I'm open to reconnecting, but I want to leave the past in the past.
And on the surface, it sounds reasonable. And I hear that often,
especially when couples come in for therapy.
It's like somebody's trying to move forward and they don't want to drag old
pain behind them. And I do genuinely believe that Ray thought he was offering something generous.
But underneath that hope was also a very human attempt to protect himself from
vulnerability, from discomfort, from the uncertainty that real connection requires.
Because what Ray was really saying from his emotional vantage point was.
Hey, I don't know how to talk to you about what happened. I'm not even really
sure what happened. I just don't like the way it felt.
I don't know how to hold your experience in mind at the same time.
So the only way I know how to feel safe reconnecting is if we don't ever touch old wounds at all.
And that makes sense when you consider the family system you came from.
Avoidance might have felt like the most stable path. But what it also meant
was that the reconciliation he offered didn't allow space for Uncle Dave's feelings
or the years of distance or the very real pain that had accumulated on both sides.
It was an attempt at some type of connection, but it's framed in a way where
Ray could feel secure without having to step into emotional territory that felt overwhelming to him.
And here's the hard truth about being human. Even if we intellectually decide,
let's not talk about the past, remind our bodies or our central nervous systems
because they don't operate on that kind of logic.
Our nervous systems remember things that our minds have been trying to forget.
A smell, a tone of voice, a familiar pattern, any of it can bring old emotions forward.
Not because somebody's trying to sabotage the relationship, but because that's
how wounds surface when they've never been tended to.
That's part of the human experience. So when Dave inevitably had a moment where
something felt off or an old hurt might have bubbled up, Ray would have interpreted
that through the only framework he knew.
To him, oh, so now Dave's breaking the agreement and choosing conflict over connection.
And from that place, Ray would get to conclude, see, I tried. He didn't want this.
So from the outside, it's easy to see that the reconciliation was almost destined
to struggle, not because either person was malicious, but because the conditions
it was built on did not give the relationship room to breathe and to just be real.
Real reconciliation is spacious. It says, hey, I'm here and I want to understand
and we can take as long as we need.
And it assumes that discomfort will come up and it makes room for it.
Ray's version came from a place of emotional self-protection,
offering connection, but only within boundaries that allowed him to stay in
control of the narrative.
And when Dave couldn't meet those conditions, conditions that I would worry
that anyone with a history and a central nervous system could realistically
meet, then Ray interpreted that as proof that the attempt had failed because
of Dave, not because the framework itself didn't allow for healing.
And I work from this place where I assume that nobody wakes up thinking,
how can I sabotage reconnection today? that they wake up trying to do what feels
best or safe for them, what feels possible, what matches, what they were taught.
And sometimes those attempts, as genuine as they are, don't line up with what real repair requires.
And before I go any further, I want to own something here big time because I
am aware of it, even as I'm talking about all of this, I'm projecting.
And projection at its simplest is when we take our own worldview,
our own emotional logic, our own lived experience, and we assume that someone
else must be operating from the same internal map.
And we don't do it maliciously or even really on purpose, it's just the brain
trying to make sense of behavior by filtering it through what we think we would do in that situation.
And I fully acknowledge that I'm doing exactly that right now,
describing Ray's actions through the lens of what I imagine someone might be
feeling or trying to do, even if that person themselves doesn't consciously
understand the deeper reasons for their own reactions.
And the reason I want to highlight this is because it connects directly to one
of the most important concepts in my four pillars of a connected conversation.
Pillar one is to assume good intentions, to give somebody the benefit of the
doubt, that people don't wake up in the morning and think, how can I cause harm?
How can I make life miserable for the people that I love? That assumption comes
from my worldview, absolutely, and probably from my own eternal optimism.
Years of doing couples therapy, while that has been a game changer for a lot
of people to operate from, to begin to try and have connected conversations,
but I've also sat with people who are interacting with others and their behavior
looks anything but well-intentioned.
I've sat with people who would curse out their partners, who would manipulate
or stonewall or weaponize silence in ways that were deeply hurtful.
And pretty quickly, I've got the kind, pathologically responsible partner in
my office saying, I know I'm supposed to assume good intentions when they're
telling me to go jump in a lake, fly a kite, disappear.
And then I say, oh, hold on. No, not that. Let's come up with something different.
So, I added a part B to pillar one. And honestly, it does change things in a
very good way. Part B is this.
Or there's a reason why this person is doing or saying or acting the way that they are.
And that matters because it shifts us out of the moralization of behavior,
good person, bad person, and hopefully into more understanding, more curiosity.
If somebody learned as a child that emotions were dangerous or that vulnerability
was unsafe or that connection only came through conflict or control,
then of course, those patterns show up in adulthood.
And they're going to think that this is the way that you get somebody to listen
to you is you have to be very, very mean or rude about it.
Gaslighting, manipulation, shutting down, overreacting, all those behaviors have roots.
Now that doesn't make them okay. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to tolerate them. You don't.
You still get to decide the kind of relationships that you want in your life.
And that's where boundaries come in.
If this person does this, then I can't continue in this conversation or the relationship.
But understanding where behavior comes from can help us approach it with clarity instead of chaos.
And I can't tell you how many times I've been in a session where someone gets
caught, for lack of a better word, caught in a lie, caught in manipulation,
caught in an inconsistency.
And when we slow the moment down, when we stay in the conversation long enough
that they can't wriggle out of accountability, something profound happens.
You see this flash of shame across their
face, not guilt. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad.
I am broken. And that shame almost always traces back to childhood where the
internal safety mechanism wasn't, hey, let me learn from this.
But if I am bad enough, if I show that I am broken, then maybe someone will
come rescue me. Someone will finally see that I am hurting.
And sometimes, tragically, even that didn't work. The parent didn't come.
The soothing didn't arrive. So the child internalized the belief that they actually are bad.
And that belief didn't evaporate the day they turned 18. It followed them into
adulthood. It shapes so many conflicts, relationships, moments of defensiveness.
This is why I ask clients, especially early on, can you do me a favor and set
aside right and wrong for a bit?
Not because behavior doesn't matter, but because the moral framing keeps people
stuck in shame. And when shame is there, it shuts down curiosity.
When we can step back and simply look at ourselves through the lens of why do
I do that? Why did I say that without declaring ourselves as good or bad?
We start reclaiming our humanity because the truth is we're all just reacting
to life for the very first time in that moment.
That is the thing. Check that out. This is how I reacted.
Then I can look at it with more curiosity, with more grace, with more compassion.
We show up with these emotional tools that we were handed from childhood.
Some of those tools serve us, but a lot of them don't. But our worth doesn't
rise and fall based on whether somebody else approves of how we show up.
So when I ask people to suspend right and wrong and instead follow their own
pattern with gentleness and curiosity, it's because I want them to begin and
separating their worth from their behavior.
You're allowed to look back at your reactions, your triggers,
your habits and say, oh man, that is fascinating. Instead of, what is wrong with me?
Curiosity is where the growth begins. Shame, that's where it ends.
And most of us have spent a lifetime living in the latter when what we truly
needed was permission to explore the former.
So when we talk about Ray's reaction or the way he approached reconnection with
his brother Dave, it's not about judgment, at least the way I'm trying to present it.
It's about understanding the emotional history that shaped him.
Because these things don't come out of nowhere, which leads us right into the heart of it.
Where did Uncle Ray learn this? So Sarah's grandparents divorced when her mom,
her mother, and then also Ray and Dave were teenagers.
And like many divorces, especially in that era, it was painful and it was complicated.
And Dave went with their dad.
Sarah's mom and Ray stayed with their mom. And here's the part that really stands out.
In her hurt and in her overwhelm, Sarah's grandmother cut off Dave,
her son, a teenager, because she felt that he had sided with his dad.
And it's heartbreaking, but it's also very human.
She was responding with the emotional tools that she had, shaped by her own
upbringing, her own fears, and her own sense of what loyalty and family were
supposed to look like. here's where projection is not a great thing.
It's easy to project into that situation and say what I would have done had
I been, and I'm literally talking me, a 56-year-old male human being living
now, what I would have done as a female 40 years ago.
That's kind of silly. Of course, I would have no idea what I would have done
based off of all the things that brought her grandmother to the point where she was.
From her perspective, Dave's choice felt like abandonment. She experienced it
as betrayal, and in the emotional framework that she had learned,
families were either united or divided.
There wasn't much space for nuance or for a young person simply choosing the
parent that they felt safest with or that they felt obligated to or they felt
bad for or the one that they needed most at that moment or even as a way to
break away from the way that they felt about their birth order,
where they were with their siblings.
As an adult, we hope that we can start to see the shades of gray,
but when somebody is hurting, scared, or emotionally flooded,
the world can shrink down to these stark categories that feel protective with us or against us.
Not because they're cruel, but
because that's the only template that they were taught, that they know.
If you imagine the years that followed, it's not hard to see how she might have
tried to make sense of everything by talking to the two children who stayed with her.
She may have shared her pain, her fear, her narrative about what had happened,
not to manipulate them, but because she truly believed her perspective was truth
and that she needed them to be there for her. She needed them to hear her to keep them close.
And so, Ray learned a version of love where loyalty meant agreement,
where disagreement felt dangerous and where choosing differently could mean losing connection.
So for him, it's normal. It's the familiar. This is how family works.
You stick together, you share the same grievances, and you protect each other
by seeing the world the same way.
And when he mirrored his mother's feelings, she most likely felt understood,
which reinforced the pattern.
That's how he got his external validation, I'm guessing.
He wasn't being conditioned maliciously. He was being loved in the way that she knew how to love.
Sarah's mother learned something different, but equally understandable.
Growing up in that emotional environment, most likely she became the one who
watched for tension, who anticipated the reactions, who softened conflict before it erupted.
That role can feel like the safest place in a family where emotional storms
are very unpredictable.
She becomes the peacemaker, not because she wants the burden of it,
but that's just what she does.
That's what her nervous system learned early, that harmony was survival and
that her well-being depended on managing the emotional climate around her.
So if you fast forward 40 years and you put Ray and Sarah's mom in the same
room, of course, those childhood roles show up.
Ray's tendency to see disagreement as threat makes sense given the emotional
history he lived through.
Sarah's mother's instinct to soothe and smooth and stabilize also makes sense
because she was shaped by the same system carrying forward the strategies that
once protected her and kept the peace.
Neither one trying to really be purposely difficult or dramatic.
They're simply doing what their nervous systems learn to do. What is the familiar?
And before we go any further, I want to acknowledge something really important.
I'm sharing all this from the tiny sliver of information Sarah was told,
which she heard through the proverbial family grapevine, and then told me.
I don't have her grandmother's full story. I don't know what her marriage really
looked like or what led her to make the decision she made.
I'm just illustrating this as a way to show how family systems evolve or show up.
Because if we wanted, we could turn this part of the episode into a whole separate
Choose Your Own Adventure podcast and talk about a narrative about her grandpa.
Maybe her grandpa was inattentive. Maybe he struggled with his own wounds.
Maybe he was a lying, cheating, no good son of a gun, or maybe he wasn't any
of those things. But the truth is, we don't know.
Family stories are rarely clean, but for the sake of today's conversation,
we're focusing on the impact of the grandmother's emotional patterns,
not to judge her, but to understand how one person's pain and coping strategies
can ripple outward through generations.
None of this happened in isolation. It's the long shadow of learned roles,
survival strategies, and the stories that felt true at the time.
Again, the family butterfly effect. Now what's the cost? They don't do Christmas together anymore.
And when you say that out loud, it lands with kind of quiet sadness.
Decades of traditions, meeting at a familiar house, navigating schedules,
creating memories across generations, pictures, videos have simply fallen away.
A lifetime of shared holidays, gone. And at one point, unfortunately,
Tyler told family members that, yeah, now the more I think about it,
coming to Sarah's family's home all those years, we were actually doing them
a favor and that we had been putting up with it.
And that's one of the most painful realities of living in the orbit of somebody
who sees the world that Ray does. So emotionally immature.
Even good memories have to get rewritten.
It can't be that things were good until they weren't. Traditions that once felt
warm and consistent get reframed as burdens.
Moments that were shared in joy become evidence of being wronged or inconvenienced.
And then there's Sarah's mother, the peacekeeper, who still doesn't want to
cut Ray out to rock the boat, even after everything.
Part of that comes from a genuine emotional maturity. But part of it is the
old childhood programming still running in the background. If I can keep the
peace, maybe everybody will stay okay.
And what does that cost her? It might mean being accused of attacking simply
for disagreeing gently.
It means watching special moments get overshadowed or pulled into conflict.
It may mean using emotional energy to manage someone who, through no malicious
intent, may never be fully satisfied or soothed.
And these patterns don't just stay contained.
Now, Sarah's future children will grow up hearing stories about Uncle Ray.
They'll learn which relatives are difficult, which holidays come with tension,
which topics are safe or left alone. and those lessons quietly shape how children
start to understand family and connection and belonging.
Tyler's children, closer to Ray's worldview, may absorb a different set of rules,
that disagreement equals attack, that cutting people off is an acceptable way
to resolve conflict, and that loyalty means alignment rather than honesty.
They may not even know that they're learning a template. They just absorb what feels normal.
And then those children will grow up, form relationships, and start families of their own.
And someday one of them might be planning a wedding and a small detail,
a seating chart, a date, a perceived slight, could activate the same patterns
that started years before they were even born.
That's how these dynamics echo through a family system.
Sarah's grandma made some choices decades ago, and they were shaped by her own
pain and her own worldview and her own emotional inheritance.
And then those choices shaped how she raised Ray and Sarah's mom and how those
patterns are echoing into the next generation and the next.
This is how emotional DNA travels, quietly, subtly, through stories and reactions
and expectations and roles.
Your grandparents' parents made decisions, handled conflict in certain ways,
expressed or suppressed emotions in certain ways.
That shaped your grandparents, which shaped your parents, which shaped you.
And unless awareness steps in, those patterns continue forward,
unexamined, unchallenged, and unnamed. And the powerful truth,
the hopeful truth, is that each cycle can be interrupted.
Awareness gives you options. Doing the work gives you tools.
And choosing differently, even when it's hard, can create an entirely new set
of ripples that move forward into every generation that follows.
So what do you do if you have an Uncle Ray? The first hardest truth is this.
You cannot change Uncle Ray.
You can't love him into emotional maturity. You can't explain clearly enough
or accommodate thoroughly enough or give him the aha moment or the epiphany
or be patient long enough to transform him.
But he's also not broken. He's simply running the emotional operating system
he learned in his family, just like everybody else.
Uncle Ray is going to Uncle Ray. It's not cynicism. That's reality.
Now, what you can control, what you do have your own agency over is how you respond.
You can set boundaries, not as punishment, but as protection for your emotional well-being.
Boundaries that sound like if the conversations go in this direction, I will not be engaging.
If someone is wanting me to be in the middle of passing messages,
I will not do that. You can refuse triangulation.
When Ray tries to pull you into the story he's spinning, you don't have to play
the part he's assigning you. You can say, oh, that sounds really difficult.
I hope you can work that out and step out of the emotional crossfire.
And you can grieve because there is grief. People spend years exhausting themselves
trying to create a normal relationship
with somebody who isn't necessarily capable of meeting them there.
You're allowed to grieve the version of the family that you wish you had and
the holidays that didn't happen and the uncle that you hoped he would be.
That grief is real and it deserves to be acknowledged. And if you're the peacekeeper,
this is a moment to examine that role too. Peacekeeping often feels noble.
And yes, refusing to cut people off at the first sign of trouble can be a sign
of maturity. But there's also the shadow side.
Sometimes it's maybe not maturity. it might be this childhood strategy still running the show.
The belief that if you work hard enough, you can calm the emotional waters of
the entire family system.
That if you keep everybody else steady, then you'll finally feel safe.
And sometimes peacekeeping is simply the nervous system repeating what it learned
early on. Real emotional maturity isn't just refusing to cut people off.
Real maturity is being able to disagree, hold a boundary, allowing somebody
else to be uncomfortable and stay grounded in your own worth without abandoning
the relationship or yourself.
That's differentiation. That's the goal. And then there's the deeper work,
looking inward at the patterns that you absorbed.
Because growing up with an Uncle Ray doesn't just affect how you view him.
It shapes how you view yourself and conflict and emotions and intimacy.
Maybe you learn to walk on eggshells. Maybe you learn that conflict must be avoided at all costs.
Maybe you absorb some of Ray's own survival strategies. And so breaking the
cycle isn't just about managing the difficult person.
It's about becoming aware of how their pattern lives, maybe even in you,
and then you get to choose differently.
And this is where I want to gently turn the focus to you, my wonderful listener,
because every family system has its own butterfly effect and that includes yours.
Somewhere in your family line, someone learned to shut down,
somebody learned to explode, somebody learned to please and to disappear and
to take care of everybody else and to perform and to control and to avoid and to rescue.
And those patterns, whether spoken or silent, got handed down.
And eventually they reached you.
So here's the question I would love to have you sit with. If you became the
butterfly in your family system, the catalyst for change, what might that look like?
Not changing for your family, not performing to meet expectations,
but becoming more you, more grounded, more differentiated, more authentic,
more of the person that you would like to be.
And here's the thing that most people don't anticipate, that as you begin to
show up differently, the system around you will often push back.
Not because you're doing something wrong, but because you're disrupting your
familiar role. You're no longer the peacekeeper or the problem solver or the
invisible one or the overachiever or the comedian or the caretaker or the quiet one.
You're stepping into a new version of yourself that creates friction and systems
built on predictability.
But please hear this. Your growth can be the catalyst.
Your change can be the flap of wings that shifts the emotional climate for generations.
Your clarity, your boundaries, your healing can plant seeds that ripple outward
into your children and their children and their children's children.
And long after you're gone, your courage can be the reason somebody else in
your lineage feels emotionally safe, understands themselves better,
or chooses healthier relationships.
We tend to underestimate our impact in a family system, but every meaningful
shift starts with one person saying, you know, I think this pattern ends here.
And that brings us to hope because the butterfly effect works both ways.
One person's dysfunction can ripple through generations, but so can one person's health.
Every time you respond differently, every time you set a boundary instead of appeasing,
tell the truth instead of placating, stay grounded instead of escalating or
process your emotions instead of projecting them onto somebody else,
you create a new ripple and your children notice, maybe not consciously,
maybe not this year, maybe not even in the moment, but they notice that conflict
can be faced without catastrophizing.
Disagreement doesn't mean disconnection and that it's possible to hold onto
yourself without losing others and they'll carry that
forward and then those ripples continue you got
dr johnning standing next to a simple poster continuing to believe in something
nobody else could see good old gila monster saliva the ripples of that courage
are still expanding preventing alzheimer's reducing addiction saving lives addressing
obesity a driver made a wrong turn and it changed the course of history edward
lorenz rounded a number and the world discovered that small inputs can shift entire systems.
So the question isn't whether you'll create ripples. Oh, you will. We all do.
The question is, what kind of ripples do you want to create?
So thanks for listening, everybody.
I know this one went deep. If it stirred something up in you,
memories of your own family, your own patterns, your own internal Uncle Ray's, completely normal.
I would love to hear it. Send me your comments. Send me your questions.
Send this one to somebody if you think it would help them. We're heading into
the holidays and we're going to have a lot of people that are going to be around a lot of families.
So hopefully those will be these opportunities for you to maybe show up a little bit different.
There's the work. We don't explore this because it's easy. We explore it because it matters.
Taking us out per usual, the wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence with her
song, It's Wonderful, because hopefully you get the vibe that you can truly
start to make things feel a little more wonderful for you and your family system.
I'll see you next time on The Virtual Cat.