Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of The Virtual Couch and or Waking
Up to Narcissim. I think this is going to, this will run on both podcasts.
I'm your host, Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
I would absolutely love it if you would go to TonyOverbay.com slash magnetic
and get on the wait list for my updated, new and improved magnetic marriage
course coming soon to the internet near you.
And that is going to talk about my four pillars of a connected conversation,
the principles of differentiation, the anxious and the avoidant,
and why it is so difficult to talk to our partner at times.
We're going to talk about losing strategies and winning strategies.
It is something that has been, I would say, years in the making,
this reboot of the Magnetic Marriage course.
You will not want to miss it. And then follow me on any of the social media
platforms on Instagram at virtual.couch and on TikTok at virtualcouchsubstack,
substack.com slash the virtual couch.
There's a lot of content there, but let's get right into it.
Today, I'm going to start with a listener's email. I love getting your emails
and please send me questions.
Send me questions about your relationships, your faith deconstructions,
your emotional immaturity, parenting questions, whatever that looks like,
because I love having a question as a muse.
And you will see today, I've got an outline of where it's going to go.
And I'm not even sure if it will go in that direction, which I think is the
way life works a lot of times. Here's the listener's email.
Okay. The person said, hi, Tony, I think I can speak fluent,
Tony, maybe even better than you can, which right out of the gate,
they had me there, a little flattering, maybe a little bit unsettling.
Then he told me that his wife had sent him a video from a guy who goes by the people displeaser.
His name's Nick Pollard. I'm familiar with the people displeaser.
Spoiler alert, I like his work. So that's what made this even more fun.
But he said, my wife and I have a bet. I said, I'm not going to tell you what
I think yet because I don't want to lead the witness.
Which is actually one of my favorite sayings. So I really do think this guy
speaks pretty fluent me.
He said, I want you to go first. I think you and I are going to be on the same
page. She thinks that you are going to break this down into a million pieces.
And I think that's so that she can wiggle her way out of whether or not we agree.
So whether or not he wins the bet, I guess, depending on how many tangents I
go on. So naturally, I'm invested.
Now, before I read you the transcript he sent, I'll talk a little bit more about
Nick Pollard. Again, I like his content. Here's the funny thing.
I get a lot of people who want to be on the podcast, and I'm grateful for that.
And I reach out and try to get guests on occasion. They will respond.
And that's where I'll get, I don't know, you'll call it a big guest.
And I like Nick's content. So I did reach out to him, I think,
through TikTok a while back about coming on the podcast.
And can you believe it? He said yes.
And then I actually was the one who didn't follow through. So this is even more maybe karma.
What the listener shared in this particular video, it's going to come across
as a little bit bold and it's kind of direct.
And I can understand why the listener sent it my way.
And I even played it to get some comments in a men's group that I was facilitating
a couple of nights ago. And it was funny.
The very first thing out of the mouths of the people who were listening said,
oh, I think I know why his wife sent him this. And everybody laughed.
But here's the transcript that is included in the email. So Nick Pollard says,
A shift that I used to manage my triggers has literally never failed me.
But he said, you're not going to like it. And it's probably going to make you uncomfortable.
He said, when I started digging into my triggers, I noticed that I was never
triggered to do anything good.
Never triggered to go to work earlier or to make a sales call or to count my
calories or to have that piece of nicotine gum.
And he said, and I was certainly never triggered to go to an AA meeting.
But anytime I did something that I believed was right, I called it a choice.
I chose to go to the meeting. I chose to have the gum. I chose to count my calories.
But he said in that realization came a really uncomfortable truth that if I
could choose the right things, then I was also choosing the not right things.
And I don't know Nick personally, but it is funny because I have really been
moving away from the right and wrong.
And so I love that he said the right things and the not right things.
And he said in my triggers and trauma responses were my responsibility.
So he said, so I took the initiative and I changed the word trigger to I choose.
And then he said, I choose to get drunk. I choose to eat 5,000 calories.
I choose to have the cigarette.
I choose to cheat. I choose to lie. And he said, and the darndest thing started
happening when I took responsibility for myself in that way.
I stopped doing those things because I realized that I was operating on a flawed
code and it was my responsibility to solve it.
But I had to stop blaming my past for the actions of today, which means I don't
have any triggers anymore. He said, I either choose to do what's good for me
and what's right, or I don't.
So first of all, let that sit, because I think it will feel different depending
on your experiences throughout your life, because you may hear that and think,
okay, I don't think he really understands betrayal, or I don't think he really
understands what triggers really are, or if only it was that easy.
Here's my honest first reaction. When I listen to the core of what Nick is saying,
at a high level, I agree with the heart of it. He's challenging the way that
we use the word trigger, and he's pointing out something that's uncomfortable.
But it's important as well to be able to have nuance here.
He noticed that he was never triggered to do something healthy.
He wasn't triggered to go to a meeting. He wasn't triggered to count calories.
He wasn't triggered to make a sales call.
But when those things did happen, he called them choices.
I like that thought because I have not thought of it that way.
Because yes, I'm choosing, at least this is the story my brain tells me,
I'm choosing to work out when I get home,
Or again, that's the story that I want to tell myself. And I have always just
went with that story until after watching this video, reading this transcript,
because I'm choosing the good thing.
Now, when I eventually found myself eating the third Gear Deli dark chocolate
and sea salt caramel without even pausing to take a breath between consuming
one and unwrapping the other, I will be doggone it if such a true confession.
When I was just writing out the outline of what I wanted to talk about on this
podcast, I reached in my bag and I ate another.
But that was not a choice. Au contraire, I was triggered.
I was triggered because I was talking or writing about those dark chocolate sea salt caramels.
Or at least, again, that's a story I want to tell myself. Because if I go back
to this example, well, I chose to do the workout when I got home,
but then I was triggered by my workout to be famished.
And when famished and opening the refrigerator door, what am I supposed to do
with the very combination of events?
The choice to work out then led to the trigger of famine. Then I chose to open
the refrigerator door to find something healthy to eat.
And lo and behold, I was triggered by this open bag of caramels in the fridge door.
I will now be waiting by my inbox for the emails where you tell me that you
can't even begin to imagine how difficult that all must have been for me and
how brave I was to be able to express that.
But alas, this podcast isn't going to record itself yet. that insert AI joke
there, the show needs to go on.
It is funny, though, if I step back and just take all that in without judgment,
that I absolutely pick and choose which things of mine I want to say are triggers
or which things are choices.
And heaven forbid we start talking about an impulse.
And please, please know that I am going to do everything in my power not to victim blame or shame.
That's not what this episode is about because I want you to stick with me because
we're going to get into some really deep water here that I think is going to
be really helpful and beneficial.
Because we're going to get to how our reactions happen so quickly, how triggers are real.
And I'll do my best to make sense of that distinction. Back to Nick's video,
though, he had the realization that if the good behaviors were choices,
then maybe the unhealthy ones were also choices as well.
Now, when he started saying, I choose to drink, I choose to lie,
I choose to cheat, something shifted.
He stopped blaming his past. He stopped outsourcing responsibility and his behaviors
changed. Easy peasy, right? Right.
And maybe it is for him. I really don't know. And if so, that's amazing.
However, if I had to guess, and it would not be guessing if I had followed through
on booking him, so I think I will definitely need to make that happen.
But I would guess that process that he's talking about took a fair amount of time.
In my experience, that type of change can take years.
I will quote the book, The Buddha's Brain by Rick Hansen, Every Chance I Get,
where the implicit memory, what it feels like to be me or you,
is based on the slow residue of lived experience. So we have this default to
continue to do the things that we've done, that we've always done.
And then we will then start to make change, but then we'll still default back
to this home base of behavior, these deeply rutted neuropathways.
And over time, we can essentially change that home base.
Before I go any further, I want to pause on the word trigger itself,
because that word, I think, has started to carry a lot more weight than maybe we realize.
It's really fascinating to have been working as a therapist for years and watch
certain words come into the lexicon and then take off and get used a lot.
I think when I very first started in the business, it was bipolar.
Bipolar was talked about a lot.
Borderline, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, narcissism, gaslighting.
And you watch them have this arc where you start noticing these are getting talked about a lot more.
I'm talking about them in sessions. I'm starting to generate more content around
them. And then they hit a peak and then at some point people tend to think the word is overused.
Over the past couple of years, I've noticed something pretty interesting in
therapy with the word trigger. I've had clients come in and tell me that they
are essentially triggered.
By the word trigger, and they want a different word. And I'm not even saying
that jokingly, because for some people who are dealing with real trauma,
their history, their backstory, the word itself begins to feel heavy.
It starts to feel permanent or almost like it is part of their identity.
Am I always going to feel triggered?
Almost if you admit that you have triggers, then you're signing up for a lifetime
of being hijacked by them, which is not the case, but it can feel that way at times.
And even that in and of itself is your body trying to communicate something
to you. So, the word can quietly carry this undertone of hopelessness.
Like, well, I guess this is just who I am now. I'm someone who gets triggered.
And that can start to feel defeating before you have really even done the work.
But the triggers are so big and so heavy. So, that concept of being triggered, I understand, is heavy.
And then the part that I don't think people are going to talk about is seeing
that word land differently on the other side of the room.
When I'm working with somebody who has been the betrayer in a relationship,
whether that's through infidelity, deception, addiction, or some other form
of breaking trust, they will often then tell me privately, maybe in the one-on-one sessions,
that even when they are accepting and they know that they've done the things
that they're not proud of that have caused real damage to their partner, the relationship,
and they'll own it. This is talking about somebody that really will sit and own that.
They feel the weight of it, but they struggle because at times what I hear is
every difficult moment in the relationship is framed as, you're triggering me.
Your behavior triggers me. That word triggers me. Because over time,
that language can start to feel like an identity assignment to the betrayer
rather than a description of the impact.
It can feel like no matter what I do, I am the trigger.
And that is not me minimizing impact at all.
It's just trying to gently notice how language shapes experience.
And that can be on both sides of the relationship.
I am a betrayal trauma certified therapist. I even have a certification with
my last name spelled incorrectly to prove it.
But in our current climate, March, 2026, there is more victim blaming and victim
shaming happening right now.
I really want to assure you that the direction of today's episode is going to
land more around the time it takes for change and how much of the content that's
shared online, while it can be so incredibly helpful,
It's important to note that it's coming typically from one person's human experience.
And I think so many interesting factors are at play. That person may be putting
out content in an effort to sell you something, to get likes and clicks and shares.
Maybe it's even for their own validation, or it might even be coming from a
place of healthy ego, something that person believes because of their lived
experience, and they want to offer it up to the universe in hopes that it might
be received and change lives for good.
But with that comes the acceptance that there will be people who take one's
words, their content, and see what that shows them.
They're looking into their own mirror. If they don't like what they see,
then they will attack the person putting out the content.
So when I hear Nick's take, I don't just hear this hot take on accountability,
but I also hear a reaction to how the word trigger has evolved culturally.
And here's why I will own my projection, because I don't think anybody just
wakes up one night and flips the word triggered to I choose,
and then everything changes instantly.
I would imagine there was a pretty decent runway that led up to that,
where it just started to shift internally for him.
I imagine there were stages. And this is where I cannot help but think of Rick
Hansen's work in The Buddha's Brain.
In another section that I really love, he talks about this path of awakening
or path of enlightenment that just resonates with me.
Before we get to that, he first borrows from the Buddha's idea of the first and second darts.
And if you haven't heard this, I think this is also a powerful way to frame
the things that we're going through in our day-to-day lives.
The first dart is the unavoidable discomfort of essentially existing, being alive.
If you live, if you love, and you do it long enough, you're going to experience a lot of emotions.
Essentially, you're going to stub your toe when you're walking through the room in the dark.
You're going to be misunderstood. You're going to feel disappointed,
rejected, overlooked. That's the first dart.
It's part of the human experience. It hurts, but it's natural. It's going to happen.
The second dart is the reaction that we add to it. It's the dart that you throw at yourself.
So you stub your toe and then right after the pain comes the anger. Who left the chair out?
Or your partner seems kind of distant one evening. And then along with that
already kind of a little bit of a natural drop in your stomach comes the old story.
They don't care about me. I'm unwanted.
That's the second dart. Most of our suffering doesn't come from the first dart.
That's inevitable. Part of the human experience. Most of it comes from the second
one, the one that we throw at ourselves.
Then it gets even more layered because second darts often trigger more second
darts. You feel angry, and then you feel guilty about being angry.
So you feel hurt, and then you feel ashamed that you feel hurt.
In relationships, these second darts are the things that start to create these
vicious cycles in the relationship.
My reaction triggers your reaction, which then triggers mine again.
And before we know it, we're no longer dealing with whatever the problem was,
the milk that didn't get bought or brought home.
We're dealing with childhood wounds, attachment fears, threats to our identity
and to our ego. And what I love about the way he frames it is that he describes
these stages of growth along this path.
Stage one is unconscious incompetence.
Unconscious. You're not even aware of it, but you're pretty incompetent.
And that's in a bless your heart kind of way.
You're caught in these second dart reactions, but you don't even know it.
Your partner forgets to bring milk home. You're just angry about the milk and
you think that your anger makes perfect sense. Actually, you're not even thinking
about it. You're just angry.
Then he talks about stage two on this path of awakening. Stage two is called
conscious incompetence.
I'm aware now that I'm kind of being a jerk. I am conscious of my incompetence.
Now you realize that your amygdala is hijacked, but you just can't stop yourself.
You've already been pulled into the tractor beam and you're squirming.
You know the reaction is probably bigger than the situation.
Oh, actually, you know it is. but you cannot stop it. You're still grumbling.
And what is so enlightening about framing things in these stages is that's the
stage that is the hardest.
It's the one where people want to quit. They want to give up because awareness
is here. I'm conscious, but I am incompetent.
That awareness does not mean that the job is done.
It's now on your road to mastering whatever this situation is.
Then there's stage three, conscious competence. I'm now aware and I kind of know what to do.
The reaction is arising, and I'm aware of it, but I don't necessarily act on it.
I built in the pause. I feel the irritation, but I can remind myself, you know what?
They forgot the milk, but they do a lot.
And you start recognizing nobody's perfect. I forget things.
And then finally, there is the stage of enlightenment, awakening.
He calls this one stage four or unconscious competence.
I'm just doing and being. This is the way that I show up.
This is my reaction. My reaction isn't anywhere near that unhealthy or emotionally immature way.
They forget the milk and there isn't a pause in my body.
I just say, hey, we can make something without it. I'm probably calming the
person who now feels bad about forgetting the milk.
Calm from a place with perspective, grounded. So when I hear Nick say he shifted
from I was triggered to I choose, I can imagine that shift maybe happening somewhere along those stages.
I imagine, and this is, again, my projection,
a long stretch of not even knowing what he didn't know, then starting to realize
he was hijacked, then realizing it over and over again and slowly starting to
interrupt the pattern more often than not, and eventually becoming somebody
whose default has changed.
So that feels less like this single moment of revelation and more like a path,
because I think so often people hear of stories like this and they make so much sense.
But then when they can't just immediately flip a
switch now they go back to the they're doing something wrong and i
think that distinction is significant because if
somebody listening hears this and says okay tonight starting
tonight i choose differently i will never have triggers again i would imagine
they're most likely setting themselves up for frustration and then eventually
beating themselves up and then shame will creep in and then it almost has a
net negative effect growth is.
I think tends to look more like stumbling through that stage two for quite a
while before you get to stage three and you start to realize,
I'm starting to do this more often than I'm not.
And then you start to feel more steady, grounded.
So there isn't any failure there. It just is. It's part of the work.
And there's something really powerful about that shift.
I have sat with so many clients who feel captive to their reactions. They are just reacting.
And that's where I want to go back to the concept of being triggered.
They say I was triggered and it almost carries this tone of inevitability.
Like once the button was pushed, the outcome was pretty much predetermined.
And there's a case to be made for that. When somebody says, no,
I chose, that does interrupt helplessness.
So that can feel like you are more empowered.
It restores your agency, it brings you back into the driver's seat.
So from a differentiation standpoint, the lens of David Schnarch and his work
on differentiation, that is solid ground.
I mean, differentiation is about self-confrontation. It's about saying,
actually, everything's a me thing.
Even my reactions are a me thing, because then if I go down the path of what
was I supposed to do, well, that's actually a good question. Now the work begins.
It's time to go to therapy. Maybe I need to look at some of the trauma-based
therapies, some EMDR or brain spotting or brain mapping, or I need to really
be serious about guided meditation. I need to learn to lower my overall resting
heart rate so I have a longer runway until I hit my startle response.
But that's mine. The work is mine. Not, well, if you wouldn't have done that,
or you made me do it. And this is where I think it gets tricky.
Not even, well, what I was supposed to do is my past. That's my childhood.
Not my trauma forced me, but it is, I did do that thing,
And that kind of ownership is deeply aligned with emotional maturity.
But if even the way that I just framed
that last paragraph felt a little triggering, I hear you. I really do.
Because our childhood, the things that we bring into the relationship,
into who we are right now, it did come from somewhere.
That's why I love origin stories so much. I mean, I want to be really clear with that.
I do say that we are responsible for our behavior.
Trauma can explain why we developed certain patterns, but it really doesn't
excuse the harm that we cause.
And I'm talking about first to ourselves and then also to others.
In that sense, I am really on board with what Nick's saying,
especially for people who have used the word triggered as a shield or as a way
to avoid accountability.
That kind of reframe, it can be life-changing, game-changing for sure,
because there's something sobering about looking at your life and saying, okay,
I did choose this, but I also understand why, why I got to this point where
that is what I did. It just is.
And now I can work with it. I can move away from it. I can understand it more. Now the work begins.
It strips away this illusion that your behavior for the rest of your life is inevitable.
But then I literally want to slow my roll a bit.
This is probably where the listener's wife, the guy who wrote in,
thinks I'm going to start breaking this into pieces because I kind of am.
The line that gives me pause is when he says that this means he doesn't have any triggers anymore.
That's where I just gently want to lean back and think, okay,
maybe we need to talk a little bit more about the nervous system science because
triggers in the sense of a conditioned nervous system response are real.
Your emotional reaction, some believe your emotions travel up to two and a half
times faster than your logical response.
And that's a survival mechanism. And some believe that it even travels faster
when you've been betrayed because you're hypersensitive and wired for vigilance.
And now taking that, if you grew up in chaos, oh, your body learned to scan
for threats constantly.
If you experienced betrayal, your system learned to anticipate abandonment.
If you wired your brain through addiction, certain cues are going to light up
those pathways of your brain.
So then the initial surge of emotion, the adrenaline spike, the tightening in
your chest, the rush of shame or anger, that isn't something you consciously choose.
That's your neurobiological response doing what it was trained to do.
Where choice comes in is what happens next. And I think that that distinction matters a lot.
I may not choose the first flicker of anger when I feel dismissed.
And I don't choose the immediate jolt of fear if something touches an old wound.
I can learn to choose whether I raise my voice or whether I withdraw or I choose
whether then to control, lie, drink or lash out.
There are times where I'm even going to choose to do that. And I'm going to
be honest with myself that that's what I'm doing. And that is a place of growth.
So if somebody says I was triggered, so I yelled, that's a place to begin.
But now the work begins because that still is a bit of an emotionally immature response.
Where the more adult decision response might be speaking up for myself,
or it might be a boundary.
If I'm noticing that I want to yell, then I'm going to leave.
Not an ultimatum. You need to not say that thing because I might yell,
but hey, if I'm noticing that you're saying the thing, I'm probably going to take off.
That's starting to become a little bit more in the emotional maturity camp.
But if somebody says I was triggered and slight reframe here,
I was triggered And you know what? Yeah, I was like, oh, I'm yelling.
At least we're starting to move into the territory of accountability.
The trigger explains the internal activation, and then the choice is defined by that behavior.
And the other reason I want to really be careful here is because of the people
who already over-own everything.
Part of the reason why I want this to go not just to the virtual couch audience,
but also my wonderful waking up the narcissism audience, is that a lot of the
people who listen to that podcast in particular are navigating some really emotionally
immature, even narcissistic relationships.
And I call them the pathologically kind.
They are kind to their detriment, the pathological piece to that kindness.
And I do not want somebody to eventually move away from this desire to be kind.
But when it is to your detriment, then it's important to really understand how
you show up in a situation.
Back to the boundary concept. Because if I'm starting to notice,
fill in the blank, then I need to do something.
The pathologically kind people, they're the ones who already assume everything
is their fault. So if they hear you choose every trauma response and there is
no nuance there, I worry it will quietly morph into shame.
And shame does not produce sustainable growth.
Shame produces rigidity. It produces suppression. It produces white knuckling through things.
What I try to help people do instead is hold more than one truth at once.
My past shaped my nervous system and I'm responsible for my behavior.
And I might not even know what to do next.
And I'm going to figure it out. My trauma is context.
And I still even hesitate even saying the next line of it's not my excuse.
My trauma is real. And now I can accept that I've had traumatic experiences.
And now what can I do? to help myself.
So that's where I would suspect that most people listening, and I probably agree
far more than we disagree, that I'm not interested in creating wiggle room for irresponsibility.
I'm more interested in people being able to get to the bottom of reclaiming their own agency.
And that's really scary, especially when you don't know what to do with it.
I don't want to flatten out the complexity of how the nervous system works in the process.
There's a big difference between saying triggers don't exist and then saying
triggers aren't going to run my life. They're still going to show up at times, but,
That's to be expected. They're not going to completely go away.
Because that first concept dismisses biology, then the second one,
I think, is more of it's going to build character or who I am.
So if the bet is whether I agree with the heart of the message, I do.
Adults eventually choose their behavior. Where I'll always add nuance is in
protecting the space, though, between activation and then action,
because that's where the growth lives.
That's where the differentiation happens. That's where we learn that we can
feel something intensely without being owned by it.
And we're not doing anything wrong if it still comes up in our body or even in our thoughts.
I want to stay right here for a second because this is the part that I was looking forward to.
I've got a little bullet point that I just now want to riff a little bit because
here's something that's been rattling around in my head as I've been working through all of this.
And I think it connects more than I initially realized. We're talking about
the word trigger and how it lands differently depending on who's hearing it
and how it can feel like a prison sentence for one person.
And it can also seem almost like a shield for another.
And then one of the important pieces here is how the language itself shapes the experience.
And I keep coming back to this idea that the words that we use aren't neutral.
And it's not from a you must get every word correct.
The semantics do matter because words can carry weight.
Words can carry history. They carry assumptions about who we are and what we
deserve. I'm currently mulling over a concept that has to do with consequence.
And I don't really like the word consequence. And I've been toying with the word outcome.
I like that one better because if we're going to talk about the power of language,
I think that's really what...
This episode has as a through line, then I need to take us somewhere that might
feel like a very, very sharp left turn.
But I promise you it's not. Because there's another word that I think does even
more damage than trigger.
And I think it's one that a lot of you carry, whether you're aware of it or
not. And that word is sin.
Sin and shame are ones that they're essentially best friends.
I think they hang out a lot together. They go to sleepovers.
I think they did some summer camps together, but stay with me because I know
that for some of you, that word is deeply meaningful in your faith tradition.
And I absolutely respect that.
For others, you may have already moved far away from it entirely.
And you're wondering, what are you trying to say, old man? Why are you bringing this up? Here's why.
Because even if you've intellectually moved past the concepts of sin,
I would bet that the feeling it installed in your programming is still running in the background.
You don't even know how to force quit it.
And this came up just a couple of days ago. I came across a quote from a guy
named Father Richard Rohr.
If you aren't familiar with him, Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest.
He's not somebody that's poking at faith from the outside.
He's speaking from deep inside the tradition. And this is what he said,
and I just loved it. And I'm going to paraphrase parts of it,
but I really want to get to the heart of it.
He said that we got obsessed with the notion of sin as a moral category,
which then immediately puts you in this lane of judgment, reward, and punishment.
And that he said, if we had remained in what he calls the Jesus lane,
then we would have said that the issue is not sin, but it's brokenness.
And yes, I know that I say you're not broken, you're human, but in the context
of what we're going to talk about right now, I'm on board.
Again, he said that the issue is not sin, but brokenness and the need for healing.
And Richard Rohr is a big 12-step guy, so he connected that to 12-step work
saying that the, he says the spirit, that it's clearest, most simple work through
the 12-step program, which recognize that addiction is not a sin to be confessed,
but it's a healing to be requested.
And then he said something I think is so profound for anybody who has had the
opportunity to sit with another human being and try to help them untangle their
story, whether you're a therapist,
whether you're in a position of ecclesiastical authority, or just a friend, or a kid, or a coworker.
He said that if you've ever directed somebody, meaning walked with them spiritually,
or I would say therapeutically, or just in life, he said, you know that this
stuff is intergenerational.
It's not one person's sin.
Richard Rohr said, it's the sin of my culture. It's a sin of my nationality,
my family, my inheritance.
And he said that it is passed from parent to child, parent to child, parent to child.
And this is the part that landed so well for me that he said,
with that in mind, it doesn't deserve judgment.
It deserves sympathy and healing. Maybe you can see how that connects to everything
that we're talking about today.
When we started with Nick Pollard's reframe of Triggered to I Choose,
which is about reclaiming your agency. And then I said, yes,
also let's protect the space between activation and action because that's where the growth happens.
But now I want to zoom back even further, because what Rohr is pointing at is
the framework underneath the framework.
He's asking, what if the whole system that we've been using to evaluate our
behavior, this sin-based, confession-based, judgment-based model,
what if that system itself has a big role to play in the problem?
What if the very structure that's supposed to help us get better is one of the
things that is keeping us stuck? And I'll tell you why this matters to me clinically,
because in my office, I see this play out probably every day that I have people
sitting across from me who are doing the work.
They're showing up. They're trying to be better partners, better parents, better humans.
But then somewhere deep in their operating system, deep in their psyche,
there's this belief that says, but you're bad though.
You're still bad. Don't get too far away from that.
You still did the thing. You're still a sinner. And I'm convinced that belief
doesn't produce change.
It does produce shame.
And shame doesn't motivate lasting growth. Shame produces rigid,
black and white, all or nothing thinking.
Shame produces hiding. It produces white knuckling through addiction.
It produces people performing recovery instead of actually healing.
So where does shame get installed? Where does the shame come from?
And I think this is where it gets really fascinating and honestly, also heartbreaking.
Because I don't think it started necessarily in a church. I think it started
in a kitchen or a living room or a car ride home from school.
You're four years old. You're doing what four-year-olds do. You're moving through
the world impulsively, curiously, clumsily.
Let's just say you knock something over or you say something that you were told
not to say or it's taken as very rude.
Or you do something that your parent literally told you not to do,
even though you honestly don't fully understand why you were told not to do it.
Again, because you're four, but now your parent's upset.
And they, whether they recognize this or not, need something from you.
They need to see that you understand that what you did was wrong.
So they need the apology. They need the face. They need you to look sad or sorry
or scared because, and I say this with compassion for the parent too,
because they're running their own inherited programming.
Because if you don't look like you feel bad enough, then you obviously don't
understand how bad the thing that you did is. And if you don't understand that,
then what does that say about them as a parent?
If my kid hasn't even shown remorse, are they even doing their job as a parent?
Eventually the kid performs. The kid learns to read the room.
The kid figures out what expression will make the scary moment stop.
What expression will allow me to come out of my room sooner?
What expression will then allow me to stay home because I'm showing that I am sick?
And here's where the challenge is, I'll say the damage can start to happen.
And it's so subtle that nobody even notices.
A four-year-old doesn't have
the cognitive architecture to separate I did a bad thing from I am bad.
So those two concepts are fused. They're one thing. And in that moment,
shame gets installed. Not guilt.
Guilt, which I could still poke holes in, says, I did something that I want to repair.
Notice I don't even want to say I did something wrong or bad,
but I need to repair that. not my finest moment.
Shame says, I am bad. I am fundamentally broken. And that shame becomes the operating system.
So then what happens? The kid grows up and maybe they do walk into a church
and somebody tells them, you're a sinner.
And it actually doesn't feel that new. It actually feels familiar.
It confirms what they believed about themselves ever since they were small.
Of course, I'm a sinner. Yeah, I need to confess.
There are plenty of things wrong with me. And I need somebody to tell me that I'm okay.
I need somebody to tell me that that feeling or that emotion is the right one.
I need to perform well. I need to hang my head. I need to be very performative
and transactional so that then I can get what I want, which what I want might
just be the attaboy champ.
You look like you really are repentant. You look like you're really taking this seriously.
So, I learned to perform. And I also learned at the same time,
I'm broken and something's wrong with me.
And that whole system then reinforces the wound instead of healing it.
And I don't think that's what the concepts around religion were there for, to make you feel worse.
I think that's what Richard Rohr is getting at when he says,
this is intergenerational. It's not one person's sin. It's a pattern. It's inherited.
The parent who needed you to perform remorse, well, they learned that from their parent.
Who learned it from theirs? And somewhere along the way, we built entire institutions
around the idea that this cycle of shame and confession and judgment was the path to healing.
And here's Richard Rohr from the inside, inside of one of those institutions
saying, I don't think that's it.
I think the path is recognizing brokenness and requesting healing,
not performing penance, not trying to prove you're sorry enough. It's healing.
I've worked with so many people who have done things that they're not very proud
of, things that they never anticipated they would do.
And when that is brought from the shadows out into the light,
which I think needs to be a time of healing.
It takes a tremendous amount of courage for a person to do that.
Some of my favorite work is when somebody really trusts me and opens up and says, here it all is.
And then I get to respond and say, man, thank you. I can't imagine how heavy
that was to carry all of that.
But now they need to go show someone else, hey, I did this thing.
And that person now is in charge of their, in essence, their outward looking salvation.
Now I'm handing this important emotional thing over to somebody who doesn't
know what it feels like to be me. And I'm saying, do you think I'm okay?
But you are okay. What if that is the programming that the goal was to know
that you're going to go through life and do things?
And let's go full acceptance and commitment therapy here. This is why I stress
that you're the only version of you walking the face of the earth,
going through life for the very first time, and you did the things you did because you did them.
And over time, you were telling yourself all kinds of stories of why you did them.
But at some point, it's important to accept that those are the things I did,
because now I can start to heal.
Because what is shame? When I look at it clinically, shame is cognitive fusion
at its most destructive.
It's fusing to a.
It's so destructive to fuse to shame. It's not, I'm having the thought that
I messed up. It's, oh, I messed up.
And if I step back from that, when somebody says, I'm mad, honestly, though, I'm me.
And I'm noticing I'm mad because now I can really look at what am I mad about?
What's the story my brain's telling me?
The thought and the self become one thing.
And what does the traditional sin framework ask you to do? It asks you to walk
into a room and declare that you are a sinner.
It asks you to fuse with the most painful story that you can tell about yourself.
And then it tells you that doing so is the path to freedom, but I got to do
it in the right way so that somebody else will tell me that I'm okay.
But from where I sit, that's not freedom.
Freedom is defusing. Freedom is being able to notice the thought.
I'm telling myself the unbroken thought or the I did bad or I did the thing
and hold it with some space.
View it in the context of this moment. to say, I'm having the thought that something is wrong with me.
And I noticed that that thought has been with me since I was very small.
And it was given to me by people who were carrying their own version of it. Bless their heart.
That's not avoiding responsibility. That's actually deeper responsibility because
now you're not just owning the behavior, you're owning the pattern.
And that's where you can begin to stop the pattern and have an impact that will
be generational moving forward. You're saying, you're not.
I am going to be the courageous one, the brave one, to see where this came from.
And now I'm going to choose to do something different with it.
And that brings us full circle, doesn't it? Nick Pollard said at the beginning, I choose.
And I said, yeah, let's also take a look at the nervous system that fires before the choice arrives.
Now, Roar is adding another layer. What if the framework you've been using to
evaluate your choice is good or bad, righteous or sinful?
What if that framework itself needs the healing?
What if the most important choice you make isn't I choose to do the right thing,
but I choose to stop believing that I'm fundamentally wrong,
that I'm broken, or that something's wrong with me.
Because I think that's where real change lives, not in performing better,
not in confessing more or harder, not in white-knuckling your way through one
more day of choosing right over wrong.
But in slowly, imperfectly, stumblingly updating your operating system.
Moving from I am bad to I'm actually a human being who is going through life
for the very first time, who is doing my best with the programming that I was given.
And I can actually look for the upgrades. I'm allowed to request healing instead of judgment.
And if you're listening to this and something in you just exhaled a little bit,
that is not letting you off the hook. It's not weakness.
That's your nervous system recognizing something resonated, something felt a
little more true. What if you never were the problem?
What if you were always the person carrying the problem? And the difference
between those two things, what if that's everything?
Now, I need to give you a little bit of a warning here. I didn't know if this would actually fit.
I had all these pieces that I thought might be interchangeable,
but I need you to grab a yoga mat,
maybe a clip-on ponytail for those who don't have one, maybe light some incense
because I'm about to go a little zen on you, but stay with me here because I
promise this is going to land, I hope.
Tara Brock is a psychologist, a teacher, and she wrote a book called Radical
Acceptance that I've gone back to a couple of times, and lo and behold,
it's a different book each time. I don't know how people do that.
That's a joke, but it changes when I am in a different headspace.
There's a quote that she gives that I shared a couple of hundred episodes ago
that it's interesting because it even feels different now.
She draws this contrast that I think puts a nice bow on everything that we've been talking about.
She talks about the concept of the Buddha's teaching that this human birth,
just being here, just being alive is a gift.
And it's not because you have earned it. not because you've proved yourself
worthy of it, but because it is, because you were born.
And it gives you now the opportunity to recognize something that was already there from the start.
And I started, because this is Tara's quote from a place of Buddhism,
but there's a Christian version of this too, so hang on.
But that love and that awareness are your true nature.
And spiritual awakening in that tradition isn't about fixing what's broken,
It's about recognizing what was never actually broken in the first place.
It's recognizing your essential goodness, your natural wisdom,
your natural compassion that are in there and you need to experience life to unlock those things.
Here's why I think this matters. And here's where I think Tara Brock's quote
is something I can read over and over again, because she contrasts that view
with what she calls the guiding myth of Western culture.
It's just deeply baked into our psyche. And that's the story of Adam and Eve.
And she says, we might forget how powerful it is because it's so familiar. It's so worn.
The message of original sin, she says, is unequivocal because of our basically
flawed nature, we don't deserve to be happy. We don't deserve to be loved.
We don't deserve to be at ease with life because we're outcasts.
And if we want to get back to the garden, now we have to redeem ourselves.
We have to overcome our flaws by controlling, controlling our bodies,
our emotions, our surroundings, other people.
And we have to work and strive tirelessly, acquiring, consuming,
achieving, overcommitting, rushing in this never-ending quest to prove ourselves
once and for all that we are worthy.
And I would love for you to sit with that for a second.
Because what does it sound like that she just described? I think she describes
the internal world of most every single person that I've sat across from in
therapy, that they feel like they're just running on this treadmill or in a hamster wheel,
that constant low-grade hum of, okay, I still don't feel good.
Maybe it'll be after I do this thing or this thing or this thing.
I'm a human doing, not a human being. The feeling that if I just work harder,
if I just achieve a little bit more, if I can control myself a little better,
then maybe, maybe I'll deserve to feel okay.
And it's also what keeps us comparing ourselves to others.
Because if I need to earn my way back somewhere, then I need to certainly make
sure that I'm doing it better than somebody else, because probably the last
person in line is not going to make it to the buffet.
But what Brock is saying is that's not a personal failing. That's a cultural operating system.
It's a myth that got installed so early and deeply that most of us don't even
recognize it as a story. It just is. It's our baseline. It's.
We think that's just what life is, this endless project of earning your way
back from some original deficit.
Now, I want to connect that back to everything that we've talked about today.
Because we started with Nick Pollard's reframe I chose, which is about agency.
Then we talked about the nervous system and honoring the space between activation and action.
And we throw some Richard Rohr in there and he says, what if the whole sin framework
might actually be the problem? and that what looks like personal moral failure
is actually intergenerational trauma or brokenness and that deserves healing, not judgment.
And now, Tara Brach is pulling the lens all the way back and saying,
what if the deepest wound isn't even the specific thing that you did or the
specific thing that was done to you?
What if the very deepest wound is this belief baked into the very foundation
of our culture that you are fundamentally not okay?
That you arrived here already in debt, already exiled, already needing to earn
your way back. Because if that's the water that you've been swimming in your
entire life, and I think for most of us it is, then of course you feel like
you're never doing enough.
Of course, you feel shame when you fall short.
Of course, you perform remorse for things that may not even require it.
You've been running the original sin operating system since before you could even walk or think.
And every time that somebody told you to try harder, to be better,
to do more, to confess more, and to do it more sincerely, own it more fully,
they didn't know it, but they weren't helping you heal. They were reinforcing the code.
And what both Roar and Brock are saying from completely different traditions,
one from inside Christianity, one from Buddhism, is that the code itself is actually wrong.
You didn't arrive broken, you arrived whole. You had everything you need.
The power of God is within you, or you were born with your Buddha nature.
And the work isn't to fix yourself. The work is to slowly, gently,
imperfectly stop believing the story that says you were never okay to begin
with, and then you have to earn it.
And I can already hear some of you thinking, okay, apparently though,
does that mean that nothing is my responsibilities?
I mean, I just declare myself good and I go do whatever I want.
What I'm saying though is that sustainable change, real growth,
genuine accountability, the kind that actually lasts and doesn't just produce
these white knuckling and performance type of reactions,
that kind of growth happens best when it starts from a foundation of worth,
not from a foundation of deficit.
You cannot hate yourself into becoming a better person. You may be able to scare
yourself into real short-term compliance.
You may be able to shame yourself into performing recovery for a little bit,
but lasting transformation, that is going to require believing,
even just a little, that you're worth the effort.
And I don't need somebody else to tell me that I am.
It's not because you have to earn it, but it's because you're here right now.
And I want to double down for my Christian listeners, because I'm there a lot.
I worry that you may be thinking what I'm describing is somehow outside of the
faith, but I think it's actually at the very center of it.
I did a little bit of digging. You can find this in Jesus' own words.
One example, good old Luke 17.
You got these Pharisees, they come to Jesus and they say, hey,
when is the kingdom of God coming? Can you remind us again about this?
They're expecting him to describe some grand external event with an army and
a government and a pageantry, everyone will be aware.
And Jesus says something that I think is so profound.
He says, so the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed.
People won't say, look, here it is, or there it is.
And then depending on your translation, both the ones I found are pretty good.
He says, either the kingdom of God is actually within you.
Well, that sounds a little bit similar to our Buddhist friends who say that
you have everything you need. It's already there.
Or another translation says, the kingdom of God is in your midst.
And yes, scholars have debated that translation for centuries within you,
among you, in your midst.
To me, either way, what Jesus is not saying is the kingdom of God is out there
somewhere and you have to earn your way back.
He's saying, oh, it is here. It's in you.
It's not a destination you arrive at after enough confession and penance and
performative events to prove yourself.
It's a reality that's already present if you have the eyes to see it.
And I think that's just one example. I could take you through Paul's letters
or the Psalms or Jesus sitting at the table with tax collectors and sinners
telling the Pharisees that he desires mercy, not even necessarily sacrifice.
There's thread after thread after thread in scripture that points to inherent
worth, to the divine already dwelling within you, to healing over judgment.
And if that's a rabbit hole that you want to go down, oh, I encourage it.
Go down it. Because I think what you'll find might surprise you.
I think you'll find that the person that your faith is named after was far more
interested in compassion than keeping the score.
Far more interested in letting everyone eat at the table than kicking people out of the room.
So, whether you're hearing this from Richard Rohr's perspective inside of the
Christian tradition, or from Brock's Buddhist lens, or even the ACT framework
that I'm bringing to my clinical work, or from the very words of Jesus himself,
I think the thread's the same.
The invitation isn't to try harder, it isn't to confess more,
it isn't to earn your way back from some big deficit, and it's not to say to
someone else, tell me when I am okay.
The invitation is to stop believing the story that says you were never enough to begin with.
Deep breath. Okay. So what did we learn today?
Let's bring this all the way back to where we started because a listener sent
me an email and he told me that his wife had a bet about whether I'd agree with
a video from Nick Pollard about triggers and choice.
And he said he thought we'd be on the same page. And his wife thought that I
would break it into a million pieces so that she could wiggle her way out of
whether or not they agreed.
And I forget now who even had to pay who and what.
And I love that. I love that because that's exactly how this works.
Somebody sends me a question. I sit with it. It becomes my muse.
Best word I can think of. It becomes the thing that I turn over and over in my head.
And then one idea will connect to another. And before you know it,
we've gone from a video about triggers to childhood shame, to a Franciscan priest,
to the Buddha, to Tara Brach, to the words of Jesus at dinner with a bunch of outcasts.
And I did not plan all of that to go down. I didn't sit down and think,
I think today I'll connect Nick Pollard to the book of Matthew.
But that's what happens when you follow a thread honestly and
you're not doing it wrong it takes you somewhere and here's
what I know about right now about this moment some of you are going to walk
away from this episode and it's going to land exactly the way you needed it
to something here is going to give you permission to set down a weight you've
been carrying for a long time and you might not even be able to name that weight
yet but something's gonna feel a little lighter and I really hope that for you I do.
Some of you are going to go in a completely different direction with it.
You're going to hear what I said about sin and think I've gone off the deep end.
You're going to hear the quotes around Tara Brock's section and think,
okay, he's lost his Christian listeners, or you're going to hear the scripture
section and think, oh, he's cherry picking verses to support his agenda.
And some of you are going to make assumptions about what I believe or what I
meant or what my intentions are.
And those assumptions are going to tell you more about your own mirror than they tell you about me.
And that's okay. And I mean that. There's no sarcasm there.
That is genuinely wonderful because that's exactly what's supposed to happen.
That's part of the human experience.
That's the whole point of putting something out into the world.
You don't get to control how it lands.
You can't manage every interpretation. And sometimes that's scary.
And it's the same within your relationship with your partner, with your kids.
You offer it and then people do with it what they're going to do with it.
And some of them will love it and some of them will hate it.
And most of them will take a little piece of it that was meant for them and leave the rest.
And that's the way it works. And I'll be honest, I'm at a place in my career
that I'm very grateful for where I'm okay with that.
I've sat across thousands of people now, and I've heard stories that would break
your heart and ones that would restore your faith in humanity,
sometimes in the same session from the same person.
And one of the things I've learned from all of it is that the things worth saying
are usually the things that make you a little nervous to say,
because I know that talking about sin and shame and scripture and Buddhism and
triggers and betrayal all in the same episode is going to push some buttons.
And I also know that somewhere out there, someone needed to hear exactly this
combination of ideas, maybe even in this order.
And if that's you, then this episode was for you. So to the listener who sent
the email, thank you. I don't know if you won or lost.
Thanks for the question. Thanks for the bet with your wife. And I hope you feel
like you both won something today, even if it wasn't what you expected to win,
because your question didn't just get answered.
It became the seed that grew into something I didn't see coming and that's beautiful.
And everybody else, I am definitely one of those people who wants to put things
out into the universe and hopes that it might do a little good.
That's it. That's the whole mission statement.
Yeah, sure. Click on things and buy things if I'm offering them. That'd be great.
But I definitely don't think I have all the answers and I'm not trying to tell you what to believe.
I'm just a therapist with a microphone and a bag of Ghirardelli caramels who
followed up a thought and then ended up somewhere here.
If any part of this episode gave you even one moment of feeling like maybe just
maybe you aren't as broken as you thought you were, then I think we did the job.
Taking us out per usual. The wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence with her
song. It's wonderful because I genuinely think it is whatever it is, fill in the blank.
I hope you have an amazing week.
We'll see you next time on the virtual couch and waking up next week.