Speaker A [00:00:00]: Every time I think about someone who’s going through something difficult or someone who’s working through addiction, or someone who’s struggling in some way that just can’t get out of their own way, I constantly think to myself of them in an infant state, literally in the operating room just being born. And I think, that child did not ask for any of this right now. And so how did we get from that birth into where we are right now? And I want to peel back every single one of those layers to figure out the core of why that person is the way that they are. Because without that, we have such hurt people that are walking around hurting other people, and it’s drastically changing the way that our world engages with one another. Hey, it’s me. Hey, Erin. Thanks for joining us on the More Love podcast. Do not tell Rebecca, but this podcast is about empathy. She likes people to think she’s dead inside, but the truth is, she’s a big time feeler who has truly helped me uncover that empathy is my superpower. Here she comes.
Speaker B [00:01:19]: Hey, bestie.
Speaker A [00:01:21]: Hi, love.
Speaker B [00:01:21]: What are you doing?
Speaker A [00:01:22]: Oh, just getting ready to host a podcast.
Speaker B [00:01:25]: A podcast about what?
Speaker A [00:01:27]: Life. Our life as best friends who are more like sisters.
Speaker C [00:01:31]: Ah, yay.
Speaker B [00:01:33]: I love us. And I can’t wait to share our.
Speaker A [00:01:34]: Stories with the world, especially the ones that involve us pushing each other right. To be our most authentic selves.
Speaker B [00:01:41]: Oh, man. Okay.
Speaker A [00:01:46]: So I was just talking to Rebecca before this, and I said, did anything traumatic happen to you that was kind of funny when you were growing up?
Speaker B [00:01:52]: I mean, yes, but I can’t think of something off the top of my head.
Speaker A [00:01:57]: So to start today, I’m going to tell you about a traumatic experience that is only now funny. But it wasn’t funny at the time. My mom has likes to tell this story. So my brother is seven years older than I am. His name is Brian, and I could never say Brian, so I always called him Bubba. Okay. I would always call him Baba. Baba. Baba. Every single time. So we went to the Renaissance festival one year. I must have been four or five. Five. Four or five years old. Okay, so what would he he be?
Speaker B [00:02:29]: That’s math.
Speaker A [00:02:30]: 12.
Speaker B [00:02:31]: Yeah, 12.
Speaker C [00:02:33]: That’s mad.
Speaker A [00:02:34]: He was 11. 12 or 13 of those.
Speaker C [00:02:37]: Is this a story or a quiz? Come on.
Speaker B [00:02:39]: Well, the other day. The other day I called her and I’m like, the tickets are 150 plus 150. What is that? She goes, 300. I go, now divide it by two.
Speaker A [00:02:49]: And I go, that’d be a 150. Stupid.
Speaker C [00:02:55]: I can do the easy math.
Speaker B [00:02:58]: Now, if that isn’t really.
Speaker A [00:03:00]: Because you were like, 150 plus 150 is 300. You’re like, great. Now, how much do we individually owe? That’d be 150.
Speaker C [00:03:07]: You should have said. You should have said. Well, you owe 275.
Speaker A [00:03:14]: That’s exactly. See, that’s exactly.
Speaker B [00:03:16]: It is what it is.
Speaker A [00:03:16]: Yeah. So let’s say I’m five. Brian’s, like, 12. We go to the Renaissance Festival, and the only thing he wants to do is to be put into the stocks.
Speaker B [00:03:26]: What’s that?
Speaker A [00:03:26]: It’s the thing where you put your arms and your head in. Oh. And then they, like, put you in there, and you have to stay in there, and then they throw tomatoes at you.
Speaker B [00:03:35]: Oh, I’ve never been to the Renaissance.
Speaker A [00:03:37]: They don’t really throw tomatoes at you, but, like, that’s what they used to do back in the Renaissance. It was a shaming technique. Right.
Speaker B [00:03:43]: I think we should bring that back.
Speaker A [00:03:44]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:03:46]: I mean, there’s a lot of people. I’d stick in there.
Speaker A [00:03:48]: So I, at the time, didn’t know what the stocks were, and he couldn’t wait to be put in there to get his picture taken. And so we walk over, and they take him up on stage, and they put his head in there, and they put his arms in there, and then they close the thing on top of him. And of course, they’re all actors, so they’re talking about how now he’s in the stocks and we’re going to throw tomatoes at him, and I lose my effing mind.
Speaker B [00:04:19]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:04:20]: My mom says, as I’m screaming, get.
Speaker B [00:04:23]: My bubba out of there. Get my bubba out of there now.
Speaker A [00:04:28]: I was losing my absolute mind going up to people telling them, you don’t throw any tomatoes. Just this staunch, whatever. And so that was a period of trauma for me that I thought that they were gonna leave him in there. It was so much. They had to take him out.
Speaker B [00:04:46]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:04:47]: All he wanted was to get his picture taken.
Speaker B [00:04:48]: You ruined it for him.
Speaker A [00:04:49]: I ruined it because you were so concerned. Take out of there.
Speaker C [00:04:53]: Oh, that’s so sweet.
Speaker A [00:04:54]: Because I thought he was gonna get. So I’m just gonna throw a tomato at him. Lost my ever loving mind I now just thought of another one.
Speaker B [00:05:02]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:05:03]: I was in swim lessons now I don’t like water. To this day, do not like water unless I am floating in a pool and you’re handing me Mac salad. That’s it. That’s. That’s all I want.
Speaker B [00:05:15]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:15]: So I. I do it’s very specific. Well, that’s what happened in a pink floaty.
Speaker B [00:05:20]: Yeah. We were at a hotel and she’s like, I’m hungry. And I said, I made some salad back in the room. Would you like some? And I brought it to her. I’m pretty sure I fed it to you too.
Speaker A [00:05:28]: Yeah, she just floated around in my pink thing.
Speaker C [00:05:31]: Who the hell makes Mac salad in a hotel room?
Speaker B [00:05:34]: Oh. But because we had to save money and I refuse to go out to eat when we’re, when we’re on vacation. So I always get a condo with a full kitchen.
Speaker A [00:05:40]: Condo with a kitchen.
Speaker B [00:05:41]: And I, I meal prep. That’s all her favorite foods.
Speaker C [00:05:44]: You know what? If that’s your thing, that’s awesome.
Speaker A [00:05:47]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker C [00:05:47]: I’d be all over that. Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:49]: Yeah. As long as she’s cooking.
Speaker B [00:05:50]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:50]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:05:51]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker C [00:05:51]: Not me. I’m on vacation. I ain’t doing like that.
Speaker B [00:05:54]: Oh. And I, I am doing it because I don’t want to go because she.
Speaker A [00:05:57]: Must have saved money.
Speaker B [00:05:57]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:58]: Yeah. So other than that pool experience, that’s. That’s it. I don’t want anything to do with water. So my mom was trying to get me into swimming lessons, and I must have been five again. But five, apparently, was a very traumatic time for me. It’s one hell of a year. The stocks and the, and the swimming lessons. And it got to the point where it was time to jump in the deep end.
Speaker B [00:06:21]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:06:22]: And I walked over to the deep end and I looked over the little edge. And as much as a five year old can, I thought, hell, no.
Speaker B [00:06:32]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:06:33]: There’s not a chance. It was so dark. It was as dark as this rock. It was this dark. And I was like, I don’t know where the bottom is. I’m going to die. I do not know where what is in there. There’s probably sharks in there. I’m thinking it’s the high school pool.
Speaker B [00:06:48]: Yep, Yep.
Speaker A [00:06:49]: There’s a whole lot of stuff in there. And the woman is trying to get me to go. And I flat out, just as much as I did with the stock, start screaming bloody murder.
Speaker B [00:06:59]: Oh, okay.
Speaker A [00:07:00]: I said, I’m not going. And I sat down on, like, the, you know, like the little mini tiles that they have. I sat my butt in my bathing suit down there, Refused to go in there talking to me. Multiple people are coming over. Oh, if you do this, you do that. I’m like trying to bribe you. There’s not a chance in how I had made up my mom. My, my mom had to Come from the stands. Come over and say, okay, Aaron, you don’t have to do it. And walk me right off the. The edge of the pool to this.
Speaker B [00:07:29]: What would I have done?
Speaker A [00:07:30]: Pushed her in.
Speaker B [00:07:31]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:07:32]: To this. Get.
Speaker B [00:07:33]: Get your ass on the edge.
Speaker A [00:07:34]: I still have never jumped in the deep end of a pool. I am 42 years old.
Speaker B [00:07:40]: Well, now I know what our next excursion is.
Speaker C [00:07:43]: Plus, there’s a big ass shark waiting.
Speaker B [00:07:44]: For you right in the. In the pool.
Speaker A [00:07:46]: Yeah, you wouldn’t know because it was this dark. Do you see this? This is how dark it was. It was like the great beyond down there.
Speaker C [00:07:54]: Was it. Was it a black Marsite pool? Is that what it was?
Speaker A [00:07:57]: Pretty much the high school pool. It must have been, because I once.
Speaker B [00:08:00]: You can see the bottom up. She’s just.
Speaker A [00:08:02]: I went dark.
Speaker B [00:08:03]: She went.
Speaker A [00:08:03]: She went dark.
Speaker B [00:08:04]: She went crazy.
Speaker A [00:08:05]: I wasn’t doing that.
Speaker B [00:08:06]: Hilarious.
Speaker A [00:08:06]: So why do I tell all these stories? You still don’t have one. You still don’t have any good stories.
Speaker B [00:08:10]: I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure I traumatized my brother.
Speaker A [00:08:13]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:14]: This is what I was thinking, okay. When you sprung it on me real quick.
Speaker A [00:08:17]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:18]: So my mom, growing up, we would go on family vacations every year, but her idea of a family vacation was like Amish country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Okay. Because that’s a good time.
Speaker A [00:08:29]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:30]: What? Yeah. So I mean, granted, we went to Disney World and we did. We did other things, but like every other year, it was education. Turn.
Speaker A [00:08:37]: The butter.
Speaker C [00:08:38]: Turn.
Speaker A [00:08:38]: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:39]: So this one time we went to. I don’t even know how old we were, but we went to Williamsburg. Virgin. Now.
Speaker C [00:08:45]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:08:46]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:47]: Where it’s not Amish, it’s colonial.
Speaker C [00:08:50]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:08:50]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:50]: Like we’re going to.
Speaker A [00:08:52]: You’re really turning the butter.
Speaker B [00:08:53]: The colonial. And I. There’s these pictures. Me and my brother are like this. And here’s the best part. She picked a hotel directly across the street from a water park.
Speaker A [00:09:02]: Oh, no.
Speaker B [00:09:03]: And we were like, mom. She’s like, we’re not going there. Oh, what?
Speaker A [00:09:08]: You finally were like, my mom? Yeah. Nailed it.
Speaker B [00:09:11]: Nailed them, definitely. No, so my brother and I, two years apart. I mean, I had to have been. He was probably four or five, so I was probably. What’s math? Two. Two years older than that. And. Yeah, 15. Yeah. And we. We grew up going swimming all the time. Like we were. There was a. We liked it. So we went. She finally caved and she let us go to the water park. At least this is my memories of it. And we go to this water park, and we went up on one of those water slides that had a tube. It wasn’t like you sit on your butt and you go down, so it’s in a tube. Have you ever been to a water park? Do you know anything?
Speaker A [00:09:48]: Maybe one time.
Speaker B [00:09:49]: Okay, so you sit on a tube.
Speaker A [00:09:51]: Going on that ride, though, you sit.
Speaker B [00:09:52]: In a tube and it’s, like, closed in.
Speaker A [00:09:55]: The whole tube part is closed in.
Speaker B [00:09:57]: No, the water slide down. Oh, the water slide.
Speaker A [00:09:59]: So it’s like a dark.
Speaker B [00:10:00]: It’s like the black hole. Yeah.
Speaker C [00:10:02]: So are you seriously explaining a water slide to Aaron?
Speaker B [00:10:08]: So we.
Speaker C [00:10:09]: Holy sheltered life, Batman.
Speaker A [00:10:10]: We go up because it’s just, like, water, Right?
Speaker C [00:10:13]: That’s fine.
Speaker B [00:10:13]: So it’s just me and my brother, my mom. My mom and my grandparents are not going on these water slides. So I’m in charge.
Speaker A [00:10:18]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:10:19]: Yeah, I’m in charge. And so I take it up there, and I’m like, you listen to me. You sit on this tube and you’re going down the water slide. And I’m pretty sure he said, I don’t want to. And I said, yes, you do. And not only did I sit him in that tube, but then I pushed him down backwards.
Speaker A [00:10:33]: Oh, my God.
Speaker B [00:10:34]: I flipped him around. And I’m like, bye. And he went for a ride. Not sure he went on any more that day.
Speaker A [00:10:41]: No, he’s probably all done.
Speaker B [00:10:42]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:10:43]: Traumatized, probably.
Speaker B [00:10:44]: That’s what I mean. I was the traumatizer.
Speaker A [00:10:46]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:10:46]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:10:46]: Okay.
Speaker C [00:10:47]: I know you didn’t ask me, but I have a child.
Speaker B [00:10:48]: Oh, good. Oh, good.
Speaker A [00:10:49]: Okay, good. Tell us about your trauma, Scott.
Speaker C [00:10:54]: We had just recently moved to Florida from Long island, and my parents had taken me to the mall. This was the Broward Mall back in the day.
Speaker B [00:11:03]: Okay, okay.
Speaker C [00:11:03]: And we were walking around, and suddenly I couldn’t find my parents, didn’t know where they were. So I started crying. And I’m like. And I remembered in school they said, if you get lost, find a policeman. So I walked up to two policemen. I believe they were policemen. I could be remembering it wrong. They could have been, like, fricking mall security guards for all I know.
Speaker B [00:11:23]: Even. So, somebody with a name tag, you went up to.
Speaker C [00:11:26]: They had uniforms.
Speaker B [00:11:27]: Yeah.
Speaker C [00:11:28]: In my memory, they had guns and the whole thing. So I think they were cops.
Speaker B [00:11:31]: Okay, all right. Guns in the mall.
Speaker C [00:11:33]: I walked up, I’m crying, I’m bawling. I’m like, excuse me, sirs, I’m lost. And the one guy goes, you’re not lost.
Speaker B [00:11:40]: You’re right.
Speaker C [00:11:40]: In front of Radio Shack. Thanks, pal.
Speaker B [00:11:43]: Stop it.
Speaker C [00:11:44]: Thanks, pal. You piece of shit.
Speaker A [00:11:45]: How old were you?
Speaker C [00:11:46]: I was five.
Speaker A [00:11:47]: I hate everybody.
Speaker C [00:11:48]: Six.
Speaker A [00:11:48]: I can’t. Did he.
Speaker B [00:11:50]: Did he eventually help you?
Speaker C [00:11:51]: I can’t remember. I know I did find my parents, like, shortly after that. They might have just been, like, around.
Speaker B [00:11:57]: The corner, right around the court. Yeah. You know, but still.
Speaker C [00:11:59]: But, yeah. But he was. And they were chuckling. You’re like.
Speaker A [00:12:03]: Like, you fuck about. Ree in the room. This poor kid scared out of his mind, thinking, you know what I’m gonna do? Joke about it. Stupid dink. I can’t with people.
Speaker B [00:12:16]: Oh, speaking of. I think I traumatized Sawyer this past time. After she called you 37 times on our trip to have her have you do the meditation. We get to a point where she’s okay, and she called 17 times in the morning. And I. And she goes, just please tell dad to pick me up from school today, because it’s chorus. I said, okay. So I called dad. Dad confirms he’s gonna pick her up. And I say, well, today might be the day he forgets you, so it’s fine, like, joking around.
Speaker A [00:12:44]: Guess what happened?
Speaker B [00:12:45]: He forgot her at school that same day.
Speaker A [00:12:47]: I know it was not okay.
Speaker B [00:12:49]: He called me, and at this point, I’m like, what are you doing? He’s like, can you call the school? Because I’m definitely late picking up Sawyer. I’m like, what?
Speaker A [00:12:58]: Just so we’re clear. So I again, have walked Sawyer through 16,000 meditations at this point, because she gets stomach. She get. Her stomach gets sick, and then she throws up because she works herself into a tizzy. So I was doing a meditation around that. And then. So we went through that so many times. And then the next day, as she calls 17 times, I hear. I’m in the bathroom and I hear Rebecca goes, well, today might be the day dad doesn’t pick you up from school. I come bebopping my head out of that bathroom, and I say, what the fuck is wrong with you? And she starts laughing.
Speaker B [00:13:29]: And I said, I only said that.
Speaker A [00:13:30]: So serious.
Speaker B [00:13:31]: I know.
Speaker A [00:13:32]: What is wrong with you?
Speaker B [00:13:33]: I only said that.
Speaker A [00:13:34]: Why don’t you pick her top three worst fears and then just hit her with them? I know, Right after another.
Speaker B [00:13:41]: And I only said that because he is the one that picks her up every Thursday from Chorus. Because I always have meetings at that time, and I can’t do it. And if. If I can’t do. Or if. If for some reason he can’t do it, he always calls me, but I live 30 seconds from the house. I could almost walk to the school from my house. That’s how close it is. And he’s done it for two years. This is the second year. I mean, this is like a standard thing. And of course, the one day, the one day I’m messing around and she’s like, haha, I know. Dad always gets me. Hahaha. The one day. Now, granted, it worked out okay because there were a bunch of other kids whose parents didn’t show up. So she wasn’t the only one. And then the school called me because I happen to know the woman who, who stands with her. And she’s like, hey, just checking in. Are you on your way? I’m like, I’m really sorry, my husband’s on the way. You just called me. And she’s like, no problem. Like it wasn’t a big deal, but ironically. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So she’s probably 100% trauma.
Speaker A [00:14:38]: So why are we talking about trauma today? Because I’m reading a book. I’m reading a new book.
Speaker B [00:14:43]: You’re not reading it. It’s reading it.
Speaker A [00:14:44]: It’s reading it to you. Yeah, because I don’t, I don’t read the books. Yeah, I don’t read books.
Speaker B [00:14:48]: You’re listening to.
Speaker A [00:14:49]: I listen to books. And I like to tell everyone about Hoopla. If you are not currently using Hoopla.
Speaker B [00:14:54]: I’ve heard of that.
Speaker A [00:14:55]: Hoopla is an app that you download and you get five free audiobooks every month.
Speaker B [00:15:01]: Nice.
Speaker A [00:15:02]: And you just attach your library card to it. But the nice part about it, compared to Libby, which is the other app that I have used for audiobooks, is that you don’t have to wait for someone else to be done reading it before you can read it.
Speaker B [00:15:16]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:15:16]: So whereas with the Libby app, you. If you’re reading it right now, I get put in a queue. You have to. When you’re done. I get it. With the Hoopla app, so far I believe this to be true.
Speaker B [00:15:27]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:15:27]: I haven’t had to wait for any of the books. It’s just like you attach your library card to it and then you can get it. So love that. So the first book I read was called Good Boundaries and Goodbyes. And that was a really phenomenal book. It was very, very religious in some spaces. Like a whole lot of Christianity talk, which was a little much for me at times. But the concepts and I Very many times during that book, I thought, she’s talking to me. She’s absolutely talking to me. So I really, really rec that book. Good Boundaries and Goodbyes.
Speaker B [00:16:01]: You know what we should do? I don’t think you’ve done this. You should add a resource tab with the books that you’ve read that you really enjoy, related to this kind of stuff, and then link them.
Speaker A [00:16:11]: Okay, I’ll put that on the website right next to the title 9.
Speaker B [00:16:14]: Notice how I say, you know what you should do?
Speaker A [00:16:16]: You know what you should do? Yeah, but this new book that I’m reading is called what Happened to youo? And it’s by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. Bruce Perry is an MD, PhD who focuses on brain and neurology and has done a tremendous amount, 30 years worth of work on trauma and the impacts that trauma has on your brain. And Oprah has been herself through a ridiculous amount of trauma. Many, many, many years of trauma. And this book I’m on, chapter five, I think right now is a little nuts and is forever changing my thoughts on trauma in not good ways.
Speaker B [00:17:02]: Oh, what do you mean, nuts?
Speaker A [00:17:05]: The first main concept of the book is instead of saying what is wrong with you? That we need to say what happened to you? And when you change the conversation to what happened to you, we start to understand human beings at such a deeper level. It then goes on to talk about the neurobiology associated with why we are the way we are and how incredibly early, specifically between birth, until 2 years old, how incredibly important it is that you have experiences where your caretakers are responsive to you, hold you, do not allow you to cry for long periods of time. Basically, you’re creating these ridiculous numbers of neuro pathways that are leading you to believe what is safe, what is unsafe, what you can count on, what you can’t count on. In this whole time, I’m thinking about the cry it out method and how the verdict is out on how people have felt about the cry it out method. I’m telling you, if I had read this book before I had Carter, there’s not a chance in hell that kid would have cried for more than two seconds before I was right there tending to it. Which is the part of this book that I’m like. It’s forever changing the way I think about things in ways that someone like me doesn’t need to be taken down those rabbit holes because we already feel bad enough and empathic enough and caring enough and whatever. So the first concept is that we ask what happened to you? Instead of what is your problem? What is wrong with you? And then the second is that our brain has created all of these neuro pathways. And one of the things that they’ve talked about so far in this group. They give a lot of examples of poor kiddos that have been through trauma that you could not possibly imagine. So a robber breaking into their house and killing a parent right in front of them. Type of trauma, like really horrendous trauma. They’ve talked about just all different types of trauma. One of the ones that I found most effing fascinating was that this kid was placed in a room with a male teacher. And the male teacher did not look or act or sound at all like a prior parent that he had had. But he. This is a kid that came from a ridiculous amount of trauma history. An unreal amount of trauma history. And from the minute this kid was first placed in this classroom, he started to act out. He started to have these types of behavior toward this teacher very long.
Speaker B [00:19:47]: He’s a school age child at this point.
Speaker A [00:19:49]: Yes, Very long story short, it was the smell of this man’s Old Spice deodorant. It was triggering, that was triggering to this kid. And the only reason that Dr. Perry found that out was that when I think the father was in jail and the kid was taken to jail to meet with the father, the father was late. The father didn’t make any qualms about being late. It was just like, yeah, I’ll get here when I get here, right? That Dr. Perry sitting with this child and the minute that the dad sits down, he gets this overwhelming smell of this Old Spice deodorant. And then he goes back into the classroom a couple days later, gets an overwhelming smell of Old Spice deodorant. And he says to the teacher, just do this small thing for me. Switch from this deodorant to this other type of deodorant and just let’s experiment, let’s just see. And the kid stops having the same types of massive outburst reactions that he had been having. And they do a reset on their relationship. Can we start over? Right. And they literally do like a sit down conversation. What do you expect of me? What do I expect of you? How can we good partners? And their whole entire relationship changed. And it’s little things like that that you hear throughout this story that has led me to believe that people are not just the way that they are due to DNA and due to just occasional upbringing related factors, but that what happens to people from the moment that they are birthed until, you know, whatever years of age has the most profound impact in ways that you will never have any effing clue about. Because who would have ever thought that Old Spice deodorant, right? This kid didn’t know that Old Spice deodorant was the trick.
Speaker B [00:21:51]: They can’t articulate it.
Speaker A [00:21:52]: He had no clue. It was just a scent recognition. Then they talked about how Oprahs. Oprah has like, this group where they. They take these girls from another country and they give them a different life or different opportunities than they would have had otherwise. And they talk about how the girls constantly act out in the very beginning. And Oprah was so surprised about that. And Dr. Perry is like, meaning they.
Speaker B [00:22:20]: Weren’T like, grateful and just happy to be there because they would create chaos.
Speaker A [00:22:23]: They would create chaos. They would throw things, they would hit things. They would sleep together in the same bed, like all of these types of things. And she would be like, I don’t understand why this is happening. And he’s like, they’re going back to what’s comfortable for them, even if it wasn’t healthy. And they sometimes are living in families of eight people, five of whom are sharing one bed. And so when you get used to that type of connection or that’s what feels comfortable for you, even if that’s not the healthiest, even if you have the opportunity to live in your own bed or to sleep in your own bed, that’s not.
Speaker B [00:22:56]: That’s unsafe.
Speaker A [00:22:57]: What feels comfortable to you.
Speaker B [00:22:59]: Scary. Yeah.
Speaker A [00:23:00]: And then the chaos comes about. In some of the reading I’ve been doing of adult children of alcoholics, that they create conflict and chaos in their own families because they cannot stand when things are normal or okay or comfortable. Because that feels so incredibly foreign to them that they. If they create the chaos or they create some type of environment where there’s an upheaval in some way, shape or form, it releases hormones in their bottoms, in their bottoms, in their bodies that make them feel safe.
Speaker B [00:23:31]: Yeah. I mean, that all makes so much sense in hindsight. Total sense or why you repeat patterns that you’re, you know, like your parents relationship. You seek out that type of relationship because that is all.
Speaker A [00:23:48]: You know, it talked about that too. It said, how many times have you said, oh, I’m not gonna be like my mom or I’m not gonna be like my dad. And all of a sudden you say something and you’re like, oh, my God, that was my mother. Because it comes out of you, because it’s so neurally connected to you that it is what your early experiences have brought into your life.
Speaker C [00:24:09]: Have you heard of the term strict father morality?
Speaker A [00:24:15]: No, what’s that?
Speaker C [00:24:16]: So that’s a phenomenon that I’ve just learned about that, they’re saying was a huge factor in why Trump won the election this past election. Because the country, a lot of the people are especially like Christians or other cultures that are used to a, that are patriarchal, that have a strong male figure at the head of the household. They call it a strict father morality. So people go for that even if it doesn’t make sense or if it doesn’t, if it not necessarily the best for them. They kind of identify with that type of a leader. Makes so much sense, and they choose that over the alternative just because it’s kind of what they know.
Speaker B [00:25:05]: Yeah, that makes so much sense.
Speaker A [00:25:07]: And it’s associated with safety and it’s associated with direction, and it’s associated with steadfast leadership. And we are chaotic right now. And so who has the whatever strong arm to bring us where it is that we need to go? But how subliminal is all of that?
Speaker B [00:25:27]: Sure, I’m sure it’s not intentional. I mean, that would be even more interesting if that was an intentional tactic.
Speaker A [00:25:33]: Fascinating.
Speaker B [00:25:34]: But that makes so much sense.
Speaker A [00:25:36]: That’s so fascinating. One of my biggest takeaways from this book, and what’s really got me on my ass about this, is I don’t know how you look at, at anyone in this world at all and dismiss anything about them, their poor behavior, their reactions, their anything. If you’re asking the question, what happened to you? And that’s not great for someone like me who already thinks like that and already hangs on too long and already doesn’t have good boundaries around why people are the way they are. And I think a lot of that has been coming from me asking the question constantly, what happened to you? Or why are you the way that you are? Every time I think about someone who’s going through something difficult or someone who’s working through addiction, or someone who’s struggling in some way that just can’t get out of their own way. I constantly think to myself of them in an infant state, literally in the operating room, just being born. And I think that child did not ask for any of this right now. And so how did we get from that birth into where we are right now? And I want to peel back every single one of those layers to figure out the core of why that person is the way that they are. Because without that, we have such hurt people that are walking around hurting other people. And it’s drastically changing the way that our world engages with one another. And so here I am, someone who wants to have better boundaries on not wanting to engage or not wanting to have to go deeper into what happened in everyone’s life story. And yet it’s so important for me that people are seen and understood in all of their wretchedness that I then read this book and I’m like, oh, it’s even deeper than you thought it was. It’s down to people’s olfactory systems with their scents, and what they’re smelling could be triggering someone. Then I started thinking about kids in classrooms. Then I started thinking about people on death row. Then I just don’t stop.
Speaker B [00:27:59]: As you’re saying all of this, I’m going back to. I mean, hate me if you want, but feminism plays a role on track. How in the hell are babies and infants supposed to get what you’re saying they’re supposed to get when women need to work and they need to be placed in daycare Systems where there’s one person per 10 kids who can’t get the same type of care and love and this, that and the other. And, you know, moms need to go back to work when kids are 6 weeks old because they don’t get paid leave.
Speaker C [00:28:38]: I think calling that feminism is perhaps a bit wrong.
Speaker B [00:28:42]: Okay, well, take it with. Take it with a grain of salt. I’m just saying that you’re back to.
Speaker A [00:28:47]: Your roles is what you’re saying. You’re back to your roles.
Speaker B [00:28:49]: Not necessarily roles, just how are you supposed to do it all? And I don’t mean women, I mean people. How do you do it all when that kind of either expectation or people have desires to do it all, like, all of that. How do you possibly do it all?
Speaker A [00:29:13]: Related to that, I do think that we’re seeing a shift. Someone was telling me about a research article that they read recently that said millennial dads are spending 50 to 60% more time with their children than their own fathers.
Speaker B [00:29:26]: Millennial dads? Yeah, our age group.
Speaker A [00:29:28]: So children. Children being raised now and then what. What is after millennials, Whatever, whoever. We’re on some.
Speaker B [00:29:38]: I’m not sure, but letters of the.
Speaker A [00:29:39]: Alphabet at this point.
Speaker B [00:29:40]: The next generation.
Speaker A [00:29:41]: Yes.
Speaker B [00:29:42]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:29:42]: That more and more, men particularly, are spending more and more time with their children physically. Time. It talks in this book as well, about how. Or maybe it was something I was watching. I can’t remember if this was in the book, but that it is biologically natural for a child to be going to their mother when they become injured or hurt because those hormones are released to let them know she is your caring, safe haven. And when they want to play or engage or try things out, they’re going to dad. And that those are not just gender stereotypes, those are biologically ingrained in the baby to be going toward these particular parents for those things. And so to your point, if we’ve shaken that up a little bit, not necessarily for bad or wrong reasons, no, but this need to come back to some type of homeostasis where both can’t be play parents, one has to be a nurturing parent. And honestly, both can’t be overly nurturing parents, one has to be a play parent. I’m simplifying that massively.
Speaker B [00:30:46]: And there’s always exceptions. And this isn’t the, the standard, the.
Speaker A [00:30:49]: Rule, the whatever be based in gender per se. That might be hormonally what comes out. But if the father is a really caring, nurturing, loving person, and that tends to be where that child is going and mom tends to be the play person, great, you know, as long as.
Speaker B [00:31:07]: We have a little bit of a balance.
Speaker A [00:31:09]: All of these things intermixed. And so what I’m hearing you say is how are we supposed to be doing all of this stuff? And then how do we. When it gets taken away or when.
Speaker B [00:31:19]: I’m thinking just back from the beginning, like when that child is brought into this world, how do you do it all? How is that possible based in the society that you and I live in in America?
Speaker C [00:31:37]: Don’t get credit cards. That’s a first freaking way. I’m serious. I’m serious. Don’t get into debt when you’re young. If you get into debt when you’re young, then you ensure the fact that you can, can never be a stay at home mom unless you come for money.
Speaker B [00:31:52]: That would require foresight. Well, that would require people not to have to keep up the Joneses. That would require people to have to admit that maybe they don’t need all the things that our society is telling you that you need.
Speaker C [00:32:07]: Or if they had actual financial, fiscal education when it mattered, which we never get.
Speaker A [00:32:12]: Well, that would require institutions of higher education to drastically change the system in which they charge 18 year olds 65 to $95,000 a year to be going to for more schooling.
Speaker B [00:32:28]: It would require our business industry to change hours and times and expectations of both men and women. It would require our society to value children’s lives and allow parents, I don’t care, man, women, whatever, to stay home and actually raise their children while having a career.
Speaker A [00:32:53]: Because let’s be clear, it’s not just keeping up with the Joneses. There are families right now who work two jobs that can’t afford to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table.
Speaker B [00:33:04]: Correct.
Speaker A [00:33:05]: Because a family of four requires $130,000 a year to. For the poverty levels just be right now.
Speaker B [00:33:14]: Which means Those kids at 6 weeks old are being plucked and they have to cry it out because they’re gonna be kicked out of the daycare center if they can’t get their shit together as a six week old. Because nobody has time to sit there and caretake individually to everybody. It’s a broken system. It is a broken system that we continue to churn and churn and churn and churn. And it’s frankly scary. Scary.
Speaker A [00:33:40]: But I do think that the generations that are coming after us feel that. See that I would agree.
Speaker B [00:33:46]: There are things changing.
Speaker A [00:33:48]: That’s why you’re seeing people who are like, I’m not doing it. No, I’m not doing this. I’m gonna live in a van and I’m gonna travel and I’m not gonna buy property or I’m not going to. Right. Like they’re saying, I’m going to be virtual and I’m going to go get a job in California making three times what I can make here. But I’m going to still live here in New York or I’m not going to live in New York because the taxes are too high. I’m going to go live over here. You know, so there’s a lot of dis. Decisions that are being made around flexibility, work, life, balance, you know, life being prioritized over work that I think we’re starting to see a shift.
Speaker B [00:34:19]: I hope so.
Speaker A [00:34:20]: And we’re starting to see that the people who have ownership over these organizations are valuing some of those things as well, which doesn’t surprise me. Right. We typically go real far left, then we go real far right. And then we decide somewhere closer to the middle is where we ultimately need to end up. We just happen to be living raised by a generation that was really far right. And now living in a society that’s pretty far left as people who are experiencing both trying to figure out.
Speaker B [00:34:50]: But that’s also privilege too. Right. I feel very privileged to be able to experience and participate in things that are very obscure and not normal. You know, I.
Speaker A [00:35:07]: Well, because you’re a hustler, you’re gonna figure out what you need to do to make yourself the money that you need to make by pulling 18 jobs together. But that’s not normal.
Speaker B [00:35:16]: I don’t think that’s normal. And I don’t think that that is comfortable. And I don’t think that that’s something that’s talked about a lot. I forget that I’m in these microcosms of environments, that this is very, totally normal. And that’s not most people’s experience. And I’m very, very grateful for that because I’m teaching my children very different things. And not to say that my mom didn’t do any of that, just it’s different generations.
Speaker A [00:35:45]: You don’t know what you don’t know.
Speaker B [00:35:46]: Right.
Speaker A [00:35:47]: It wasn’t a thing.
Speaker B [00:35:48]: Right. And you know, I just, I look at some of the, you know, expectations, standards, or even people put worth their own self worth around that. People put self worth, their identity as a, as their career. And many people, when you do that.
Speaker A [00:36:08]: Many people stay at jobs that they absolutely hate, might be physically because of.
Speaker B [00:36:12]: Money or because they, whatever, they get.
Speaker A [00:36:15]: A good pension, that or their title.
Speaker B [00:36:17]: Is really important or, you know, whatever.
Speaker A [00:36:19]: And I’m not knocking that, because I’m not either. I do believe that that is a choice for some people. That absolutely works for them. Absolutely. A lot of people will say to me, you’re living the life that I want to live. You’re running your own business. You dabble in some things on the side that you enjoy. You get to say no to things, even though I don’t, that you ultimately don’t want to do. Like, I would love to have that life. And I think to myself, it’s not a unicorn. This is just something that I had to. Mentally, physically, financially, emotionally work myself into. I had to do some real effing hard work, real hard work to get into for seven years, if not longer, to get into this place to determine that this is what I’m gonna do and how I’m gonna schedule my days and when I’m gonna take my days off, you know, because you were so.
Speaker B [00:37:07]: Ingrained, for whatever reason, not necessarily any particular person’s fault, and maybe you’ll discover that through your journey. But what was it in your life that told you this is the way.
Speaker A [00:37:20]: It is and why play it safe and why.
Speaker B [00:37:24]: And I am raising. And I, you know, even my. I remember back when I was trying to figure out a career, you know, like, what am I gonna go to school for? There was no question about whether I was going to college. That wasn’t an option. Nobody said that to me. But it was a very clear message in the school I went to. Very clear. And so then I’m like, yeah, but what am I gonna do? Because I don’t like any of this. I don’t like what it feels like. I don’t like being told what to do. I was very clear about that from the beginning. And so then I had to figure out. And I remember once I finally had the light bulb go off and I got beyond excited to pursue recreation and leisure as a degree. And I remember calling my mom and I said that to her and she was like, what the hell are you, what job are you going to get? Because that was the end goal, Right? The end goal was a job. And I’m like, like rattling all these things off. And she’s like, I don’t. I don’t think so. And I was like, watch me watch it.
Speaker A [00:38:24]: Yep. And now you do it in. In a unique way. It’s still very much connected to what you do.
Speaker B [00:38:29]: Very much.
Speaker A [00:38:30]: Right. You’re still planning events, you’re still creating rec and leisure activities.
Speaker B [00:38:33]: But I can, as my parent, even my grandmother was probably, like, mortified. She’s like, what do you mean? Women. Women are teachers. Women are this blah, blah, blah.
Speaker A [00:38:41]: I will never forget the day that I said to my parents, I’m going to leave my nicely paying, retirement focused job in higher education to follow my dream of building my own business.
Speaker C [00:39:01]: So true.
Speaker A [00:39:02]: I will never forget. And it wasn’t out of like, oh, God, Aaron, we don’t think you can do it. It was out of fear. We are fearful that you’re not going to be in a good place, in an okay place. And we don’t wanna leave this earth with you struggling in any way, shape or form. But I remember saying to them, I have a choice in my life that I can stay this course and I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be. Or I could spend the rest of my life wondering, what if?
Speaker B [00:39:30]: Yeah, I know what if. I know. When that heartbeat is too strong, you gotta punch.
Speaker A [00:39:35]: I can’t. I cannot. I just can’t live my life wondering.
Speaker C [00:39:39]: I have a friend who. Whose father said she wanted to go to school for theater and acting and all that kind of stuff. That was her passion. And her father said, I’m not paying for you to go to college to be a waitress.
Speaker A [00:39:53]: Yes. Wow.
Speaker B [00:39:54]: Yes.
Speaker A [00:39:54]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:39:55]: Yes. When reality is, you get a good waitress job, you can make a bokeh amount of money go. They’re gonna make way more than I’ll ever see.
Speaker A [00:40:05]: There’s a mom across the street from me who’s a good friend of mine who just does bartending and serving on Friday and Saturday nights. And otherwise she’s the most beautiful stay at home mom.
Speaker B [00:40:16]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:40:16]: She watches another little girl during the day, happy as can be, because it’s so important for her that she’s there for her. One daughter just went off to kindergarten, but their littlest one is not yet there. Right?
Speaker B [00:40:27]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:40:27]: And she’s like, I get out of the house a couple days a week and I do this and I do that. And I just think we’re starting to see some shifts. And that. God, that. That’s our retreat right there is. Where are you at right now? What’s your life pulse right now? Are you happy with where you’re at? And if you’re not, where do you want to be different in whatever amount of time? And then how do we lead you on some steps to get there? You and I have both done it.
Speaker B [00:40:54]: Oh yeah. But then this is the generational quote unquote trauma that you’re breaking. What are you doing different? And what messages are you sending to your children that nope, we don’t need. We don’t need to have the best house on the planet. We don’t need to be scraping by with these credit cards like you talked about, Scott. We don’t. Those are all choices. And here’s where it’s going to lead you. Let’s talk about this option and what that means.
Speaker A [00:41:18]: Right back to the one thing. What is the one thing you want?
Speaker B [00:41:21]: What is the one thing?
Speaker A [00:41:21]: What is it? What are you doing that is directly aligned with what that one thing is? And if it’s not it, if it’s out buying $4,000 worth of Christmas gifts. But that means that you’re further away from your ultimate goal, leaving your job, then that ain’t.
Speaker B [00:41:35]: You gotta say no or that isn’t your one thing. Your one thing really is.
Speaker A [00:41:40]: Right.
Speaker B [00:41:40]: I want to be the Jones.
Speaker A [00:41:42]: That’s right.
Speaker B [00:41:43]: And. And the. I’m saying these things that matter, but they really don’t.
Speaker A [00:41:47]: That’s right.
Speaker B [00:41:47]: You got to get clear with yourself. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Whatever. Whatever.
Speaker A [00:41:50]: Your answers are fine. Absolutely are completely fine.
Speaker B [00:41:54]: But it’s got to be.
Speaker A [00:41:54]: You just have to be happy with you.
Speaker B [00:41:57]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:41:57]: At the end of the day. And if you’re not, change it.
Speaker B [00:42:00]: That right. Right. And don’t be scared.
Speaker A [00:42:01]: Don’t be scared than done. But that’s why coming at you hot is the retreat.
Speaker B [00:42:05]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:42:05]: The more love retreat.
Speaker B [00:42:07]: You need answers.
Speaker A [00:42:08]: 2025, you need answers.
Speaker B [00:42:09]: We got them.
Speaker A [00:42:10]: We’re Going to be down at the library with their. With their free rooms because we don’t have any money.
Speaker B [00:42:16]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:42:17]: To pay for anything else.
Speaker B [00:42:18]: In fact, we might be on the lawn. It’s fine.
Speaker A [00:42:20]: Yeah, right. No one can come on over. Backyard. Backyard rodeo.
Speaker C [00:42:23]: Here is one term I wish my wife had never heard of.
Speaker B [00:42:26]: What?
Speaker C [00:42:27]: Retail therapy.
Speaker B [00:42:28]: Oh, I know.
Speaker A [00:42:29]: We’re going to have a guest. I don’t know if they canceled or not, but we do have a guest that is going to be coming on at some point who’s talking about retail therapy and how retail therapy is actually a trauma respons and as a response to stress and triggers and it’s not at all about what you’re buying.
Speaker B [00:42:44]: So rewind.
Speaker C [00:42:46]: That sounds awesome. If they actually show up. But anyway, go ahead.
Speaker A [00:42:48]: I know.
Speaker B [00:42:49]: Rewind back to when we had the mystic autistic and I had the checklist and I was like, erin. Aaron. Aaron, this guest that you’re talking about, Rebecca. Rebecca.
Speaker A [00:42:56]: Rebecca. Rebecca. Yeah. Returns to Amazon. You all know that Amazon changed its damn return policy because of Rebecca.
Speaker B [00:43:04]: Yeah, right.
Speaker A [00:43:05]: Just so we’re clear, it’s like, have you worn this? Did you wear this on a cruise ship? Did you put this fake mustache on? On Take it off and then put it back? Did you use this period cup, not wash it and then send it back? That’s how specific all these freaking questions are. And then the final question is, are you Rebecca Herzog? And if you click yes on that, they’re like, we’re not taking this back. We’re not taking it back. I know, I know. Well, here’s our affirmation card to close us out. Oh, this is perfect.
Speaker B [00:43:32]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:43:32]: I know that it is important to work hard and play even harder. I am supposed to have fun.
Speaker B [00:43:39]: Yes.
Speaker A [00:43:39]: See you at the library retreat in 2025.
Speaker B [00:43:43]: I loved that.
Speaker A [00:43:45]: Me too. Isn’t empathy amazing?
Speaker B [00:43:47]: Well, we’re amazing. I don’t know about all this empathy stuff.
Speaker A [00:43:51]: That’s fine. I accept you wherever you are. Oh, God, I love you.
Speaker B [00:43:57]: I love you too.
Speaker A [00:43:59]: And if you love us, please like and subscribe to more Love the Power of Empathy podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker B [00:44:07]: See you next time.
Speaker B [00:01:19]: Hey, bestie.
Speaker A [00:01:21]: Hi, love.
Speaker B [00:01:21]: What are you doing?
Speaker A [00:01:22]: Oh, just getting ready to host a podcast.
Speaker B [00:01:25]: A podcast about what?
Speaker A [00:01:27]: Life. Our life as best friends who are more like sisters.
Speaker C [00:01:31]: Ah, yay.
Speaker B [00:01:33]: I love us. And I can’t wait to share our.
Speaker A [00:01:34]: Stories with the world, especially the ones that involve us pushing each other right. To be our most authentic selves.
Speaker B [00:01:41]: Oh, man. Okay.
Speaker A [00:01:46]: So I was just talking to Rebecca before this, and I said, did anything traumatic happen to you that was kind of funny when you were growing up?
Speaker B [00:01:52]: I mean, yes, but I can’t think of something off the top of my head.
Speaker A [00:01:57]: So to start today, I’m going to tell you about a traumatic experience that is only now funny. But it wasn’t funny at the time. My mom has likes to tell this story. So my brother is seven years older than I am. His name is Brian, and I could never say Brian, so I always called him Bubba. Okay. I would always call him Baba. Baba. Baba. Every single time. So we went to the Renaissance festival one year. I must have been four or five. Five. Four or five years old. Okay, so what would he he be?
Speaker B [00:02:29]: That’s math.
Speaker A [00:02:30]: 12.
Speaker B [00:02:31]: Yeah, 12.
Speaker C [00:02:33]: That’s mad.
Speaker A [00:02:34]: He was 11. 12 or 13 of those.
Speaker C [00:02:37]: Is this a story or a quiz? Come on.
Speaker B [00:02:39]: Well, the other day. The other day I called her and I’m like, the tickets are 150 plus 150. What is that? She goes, 300. I go, now divide it by two.
Speaker A [00:02:49]: And I go, that’d be a 150. Stupid.
Speaker C [00:02:55]: I can do the easy math.
Speaker B [00:02:58]: Now, if that isn’t really.
Speaker A [00:03:00]: Because you were like, 150 plus 150 is 300. You’re like, great. Now, how much do we individually owe? That’d be 150.
Speaker C [00:03:07]: You should have said. You should have said. Well, you owe 275.
Speaker A [00:03:14]: That’s exactly. See, that’s exactly.
Speaker B [00:03:16]: It is what it is.
Speaker A [00:03:16]: Yeah. So let’s say I’m five. Brian’s, like, 12. We go to the Renaissance Festival, and the only thing he wants to do is to be put into the stocks.
Speaker B [00:03:26]: What’s that?
Speaker A [00:03:26]: It’s the thing where you put your arms and your head in. Oh. And then they, like, put you in there, and you have to stay in there, and then they throw tomatoes at you.
Speaker B [00:03:35]: Oh, I’ve never been to the Renaissance.
Speaker A [00:03:37]: They don’t really throw tomatoes at you, but, like, that’s what they used to do back in the Renaissance. It was a shaming technique. Right.
Speaker B [00:03:43]: I think we should bring that back.
Speaker A [00:03:44]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:03:46]: I mean, there’s a lot of people. I’d stick in there.
Speaker A [00:03:48]: So I, at the time, didn’t know what the stocks were, and he couldn’t wait to be put in there to get his picture taken. And so we walk over, and they take him up on stage, and they put his head in there, and they put his arms in there, and then they close the thing on top of him. And of course, they’re all actors, so they’re talking about how now he’s in the stocks and we’re going to throw tomatoes at him, and I lose my effing mind.
Speaker B [00:04:19]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:04:20]: My mom says, as I’m screaming, get.
Speaker B [00:04:23]: My bubba out of there. Get my bubba out of there now.
Speaker A [00:04:28]: I was losing my absolute mind going up to people telling them, you don’t throw any tomatoes. Just this staunch, whatever. And so that was a period of trauma for me that I thought that they were gonna leave him in there. It was so much. They had to take him out.
Speaker B [00:04:46]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:04:47]: All he wanted was to get his picture taken.
Speaker B [00:04:48]: You ruined it for him.
Speaker A [00:04:49]: I ruined it because you were so concerned. Take out of there.
Speaker C [00:04:53]: Oh, that’s so sweet.
Speaker A [00:04:54]: Because I thought he was gonna get. So I’m just gonna throw a tomato at him. Lost my ever loving mind I now just thought of another one.
Speaker B [00:05:02]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:05:03]: I was in swim lessons now I don’t like water. To this day, do not like water unless I am floating in a pool and you’re handing me Mac salad. That’s it. That’s. That’s all I want.
Speaker B [00:05:15]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:15]: So I. I do it’s very specific. Well, that’s what happened in a pink floaty.
Speaker B [00:05:20]: Yeah. We were at a hotel and she’s like, I’m hungry. And I said, I made some salad back in the room. Would you like some? And I brought it to her. I’m pretty sure I fed it to you too.
Speaker A [00:05:28]: Yeah, she just floated around in my pink thing.
Speaker C [00:05:31]: Who the hell makes Mac salad in a hotel room?
Speaker B [00:05:34]: Oh. But because we had to save money and I refuse to go out to eat when we’re, when we’re on vacation. So I always get a condo with a full kitchen.
Speaker A [00:05:40]: Condo with a kitchen.
Speaker B [00:05:41]: And I, I meal prep. That’s all her favorite foods.
Speaker C [00:05:44]: You know what? If that’s your thing, that’s awesome.
Speaker A [00:05:47]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker C [00:05:47]: I’d be all over that. Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:49]: Yeah. As long as she’s cooking.
Speaker B [00:05:50]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:50]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:05:51]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker C [00:05:51]: Not me. I’m on vacation. I ain’t doing like that.
Speaker B [00:05:54]: Oh. And I, I am doing it because I don’t want to go because she.
Speaker A [00:05:57]: Must have saved money.
Speaker B [00:05:57]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:58]: Yeah. So other than that pool experience, that’s. That’s it. I don’t want anything to do with water. So my mom was trying to get me into swimming lessons, and I must have been five again. But five, apparently, was a very traumatic time for me. It’s one hell of a year. The stocks and the, and the swimming lessons. And it got to the point where it was time to jump in the deep end.
Speaker B [00:06:21]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:06:22]: And I walked over to the deep end and I looked over the little edge. And as much as a five year old can, I thought, hell, no.
Speaker B [00:06:32]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:06:33]: There’s not a chance. It was so dark. It was as dark as this rock. It was this dark. And I was like, I don’t know where the bottom is. I’m going to die. I do not know where what is in there. There’s probably sharks in there. I’m thinking it’s the high school pool.
Speaker B [00:06:48]: Yep, Yep.
Speaker A [00:06:49]: There’s a whole lot of stuff in there. And the woman is trying to get me to go. And I flat out, just as much as I did with the stock, start screaming bloody murder.
Speaker B [00:06:59]: Oh, okay.
Speaker A [00:07:00]: I said, I’m not going. And I sat down on, like, the, you know, like the little mini tiles that they have. I sat my butt in my bathing suit down there, Refused to go in there talking to me. Multiple people are coming over. Oh, if you do this, you do that. I’m like trying to bribe you. There’s not a chance in how I had made up my mom. My, my mom had to Come from the stands. Come over and say, okay, Aaron, you don’t have to do it. And walk me right off the. The edge of the pool to this.
Speaker B [00:07:29]: What would I have done?
Speaker A [00:07:30]: Pushed her in.
Speaker B [00:07:31]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:07:32]: To this. Get.
Speaker B [00:07:33]: Get your ass on the edge.
Speaker A [00:07:34]: I still have never jumped in the deep end of a pool. I am 42 years old.
Speaker B [00:07:40]: Well, now I know what our next excursion is.
Speaker C [00:07:43]: Plus, there’s a big ass shark waiting.
Speaker B [00:07:44]: For you right in the. In the pool.
Speaker A [00:07:46]: Yeah, you wouldn’t know because it was this dark. Do you see this? This is how dark it was. It was like the great beyond down there.
Speaker C [00:07:54]: Was it. Was it a black Marsite pool? Is that what it was?
Speaker A [00:07:57]: Pretty much the high school pool. It must have been, because I once.
Speaker B [00:08:00]: You can see the bottom up. She’s just.
Speaker A [00:08:02]: I went dark.
Speaker B [00:08:03]: She went.
Speaker A [00:08:03]: She went dark.
Speaker B [00:08:04]: She went crazy.
Speaker A [00:08:05]: I wasn’t doing that.
Speaker B [00:08:06]: Hilarious.
Speaker A [00:08:06]: So why do I tell all these stories? You still don’t have one. You still don’t have any good stories.
Speaker B [00:08:10]: I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure I traumatized my brother.
Speaker A [00:08:13]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:14]: This is what I was thinking, okay. When you sprung it on me real quick.
Speaker A [00:08:17]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:18]: So my mom, growing up, we would go on family vacations every year, but her idea of a family vacation was like Amish country in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Okay. Because that’s a good time.
Speaker A [00:08:29]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:30]: What? Yeah. So I mean, granted, we went to Disney World and we did. We did other things, but like every other year, it was education. Turn.
Speaker A [00:08:37]: The butter.
Speaker C [00:08:38]: Turn.
Speaker A [00:08:38]: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B [00:08:39]: So this one time we went to. I don’t even know how old we were, but we went to Williamsburg. Virgin. Now.
Speaker C [00:08:45]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:08:46]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:47]: Where it’s not Amish, it’s colonial.
Speaker C [00:08:50]: Oh, yeah.
Speaker A [00:08:50]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:08:50]: Like we’re going to.
Speaker A [00:08:52]: You’re really turning the butter.
Speaker B [00:08:53]: The colonial. And I. There’s these pictures. Me and my brother are like this. And here’s the best part. She picked a hotel directly across the street from a water park.
Speaker A [00:09:02]: Oh, no.
Speaker B [00:09:03]: And we were like, mom. She’s like, we’re not going there. Oh, what?
Speaker A [00:09:08]: You finally were like, my mom? Yeah. Nailed it.
Speaker B [00:09:11]: Nailed them, definitely. No, so my brother and I, two years apart. I mean, I had to have been. He was probably four or five, so I was probably. What’s math? Two. Two years older than that. And. Yeah, 15. Yeah. And we. We grew up going swimming all the time. Like we were. There was a. We liked it. So we went. She finally caved and she let us go to the water park. At least this is my memories of it. And we go to this water park, and we went up on one of those water slides that had a tube. It wasn’t like you sit on your butt and you go down, so it’s in a tube. Have you ever been to a water park? Do you know anything?
Speaker A [00:09:48]: Maybe one time.
Speaker B [00:09:49]: Okay, so you sit on a tube.
Speaker A [00:09:51]: Going on that ride, though, you sit.
Speaker B [00:09:52]: In a tube and it’s, like, closed in.
Speaker A [00:09:55]: The whole tube part is closed in.
Speaker B [00:09:57]: No, the water slide down. Oh, the water slide.
Speaker A [00:09:59]: So it’s like a dark.
Speaker B [00:10:00]: It’s like the black hole. Yeah.
Speaker C [00:10:02]: So are you seriously explaining a water slide to Aaron?
Speaker B [00:10:08]: So we.
Speaker C [00:10:09]: Holy sheltered life, Batman.
Speaker A [00:10:10]: We go up because it’s just, like, water, Right?
Speaker C [00:10:13]: That’s fine.
Speaker B [00:10:13]: So it’s just me and my brother, my mom. My mom and my grandparents are not going on these water slides. So I’m in charge.
Speaker A [00:10:18]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:10:19]: Yeah, I’m in charge. And so I take it up there, and I’m like, you listen to me. You sit on this tube and you’re going down the water slide. And I’m pretty sure he said, I don’t want to. And I said, yes, you do. And not only did I sit him in that tube, but then I pushed him down backwards.
Speaker A [00:10:33]: Oh, my God.
Speaker B [00:10:34]: I flipped him around. And I’m like, bye. And he went for a ride. Not sure he went on any more that day.
Speaker A [00:10:41]: No, he’s probably all done.
Speaker B [00:10:42]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:10:43]: Traumatized, probably.
Speaker B [00:10:44]: That’s what I mean. I was the traumatizer.
Speaker A [00:10:46]: Okay.
Speaker B [00:10:46]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:10:46]: Okay.
Speaker C [00:10:47]: I know you didn’t ask me, but I have a child.
Speaker B [00:10:48]: Oh, good. Oh, good.
Speaker A [00:10:49]: Okay, good. Tell us about your trauma, Scott.
Speaker C [00:10:54]: We had just recently moved to Florida from Long island, and my parents had taken me to the mall. This was the Broward Mall back in the day.
Speaker B [00:11:03]: Okay, okay.
Speaker C [00:11:03]: And we were walking around, and suddenly I couldn’t find my parents, didn’t know where they were. So I started crying. And I’m like. And I remembered in school they said, if you get lost, find a policeman. So I walked up to two policemen. I believe they were policemen. I could be remembering it wrong. They could have been, like, fricking mall security guards for all I know.
Speaker B [00:11:23]: Even. So, somebody with a name tag, you went up to.
Speaker C [00:11:26]: They had uniforms.
Speaker B [00:11:27]: Yeah.
Speaker C [00:11:28]: In my memory, they had guns and the whole thing. So I think they were cops.
Speaker B [00:11:31]: Okay, all right. Guns in the mall.
Speaker C [00:11:33]: I walked up, I’m crying, I’m bawling. I’m like, excuse me, sirs, I’m lost. And the one guy goes, you’re not lost.
Speaker B [00:11:40]: You’re right.
Speaker C [00:11:40]: In front of Radio Shack. Thanks, pal.
Speaker B [00:11:43]: Stop it.
Speaker C [00:11:44]: Thanks, pal. You piece of shit.
Speaker A [00:11:45]: How old were you?
Speaker C [00:11:46]: I was five.
Speaker A [00:11:47]: I hate everybody.
Speaker C [00:11:48]: Six.
Speaker A [00:11:48]: I can’t. Did he.
Speaker B [00:11:50]: Did he eventually help you?
Speaker C [00:11:51]: I can’t remember. I know I did find my parents, like, shortly after that. They might have just been, like, around.
Speaker B [00:11:57]: The corner, right around the court. Yeah. You know, but still.
Speaker C [00:11:59]: But, yeah. But he was. And they were chuckling. You’re like.
Speaker A [00:12:03]: Like, you fuck about. Ree in the room. This poor kid scared out of his mind, thinking, you know what I’m gonna do? Joke about it. Stupid dink. I can’t with people.
Speaker B [00:12:16]: Oh, speaking of. I think I traumatized Sawyer this past time. After she called you 37 times on our trip to have her have you do the meditation. We get to a point where she’s okay, and she called 17 times in the morning. And I. And she goes, just please tell dad to pick me up from school today, because it’s chorus. I said, okay. So I called dad. Dad confirms he’s gonna pick her up. And I say, well, today might be the day he forgets you, so it’s fine, like, joking around.
Speaker A [00:12:44]: Guess what happened?
Speaker B [00:12:45]: He forgot her at school that same day.
Speaker A [00:12:47]: I know it was not okay.
Speaker B [00:12:49]: He called me, and at this point, I’m like, what are you doing? He’s like, can you call the school? Because I’m definitely late picking up Sawyer. I’m like, what?
Speaker A [00:12:58]: Just so we’re clear. So I again, have walked Sawyer through 16,000 meditations at this point, because she gets stomach. She get. Her stomach gets sick, and then she throws up because she works herself into a tizzy. So I was doing a meditation around that. And then. So we went through that so many times. And then the next day, as she calls 17 times, I hear. I’m in the bathroom and I hear Rebecca goes, well, today might be the day dad doesn’t pick you up from school. I come bebopping my head out of that bathroom, and I say, what the fuck is wrong with you? And she starts laughing.
Speaker B [00:13:29]: And I said, I only said that.
Speaker A [00:13:30]: So serious.
Speaker B [00:13:31]: I know.
Speaker A [00:13:32]: What is wrong with you?
Speaker B [00:13:33]: I only said that.
Speaker A [00:13:34]: Why don’t you pick her top three worst fears and then just hit her with them? I know, Right after another.
Speaker B [00:13:41]: And I only said that because he is the one that picks her up every Thursday from Chorus. Because I always have meetings at that time, and I can’t do it. And if. If I can’t do. Or if. If for some reason he can’t do it, he always calls me, but I live 30 seconds from the house. I could almost walk to the school from my house. That’s how close it is. And he’s done it for two years. This is the second year. I mean, this is like a standard thing. And of course, the one day, the one day I’m messing around and she’s like, haha, I know. Dad always gets me. Hahaha. The one day. Now, granted, it worked out okay because there were a bunch of other kids whose parents didn’t show up. So she wasn’t the only one. And then the school called me because I happen to know the woman who, who stands with her. And she’s like, hey, just checking in. Are you on your way? I’m like, I’m really sorry, my husband’s on the way. You just called me. And she’s like, no problem. Like it wasn’t a big deal, but ironically. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So she’s probably 100% trauma.
Speaker A [00:14:38]: So why are we talking about trauma today? Because I’m reading a book. I’m reading a new book.
Speaker B [00:14:43]: You’re not reading it. It’s reading it.
Speaker A [00:14:44]: It’s reading it to you. Yeah, because I don’t, I don’t read the books. Yeah, I don’t read books.
Speaker B [00:14:48]: You’re listening to.
Speaker A [00:14:49]: I listen to books. And I like to tell everyone about Hoopla. If you are not currently using Hoopla.
Speaker B [00:14:54]: I’ve heard of that.
Speaker A [00:14:55]: Hoopla is an app that you download and you get five free audiobooks every month.
Speaker B [00:15:01]: Nice.
Speaker A [00:15:02]: And you just attach your library card to it. But the nice part about it, compared to Libby, which is the other app that I have used for audiobooks, is that you don’t have to wait for someone else to be done reading it before you can read it.
Speaker B [00:15:16]: Oh.
Speaker A [00:15:16]: So whereas with the Libby app, you. If you’re reading it right now, I get put in a queue. You have to. When you’re done. I get it. With the Hoopla app, so far I believe this to be true.
Speaker B [00:15:27]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:15:27]: I haven’t had to wait for any of the books. It’s just like you attach your library card to it and then you can get it. So love that. So the first book I read was called Good Boundaries and Goodbyes. And that was a really phenomenal book. It was very, very religious in some spaces. Like a whole lot of Christianity talk, which was a little much for me at times. But the concepts and I Very many times during that book, I thought, she’s talking to me. She’s absolutely talking to me. So I really, really rec that book. Good Boundaries and Goodbyes.
Speaker B [00:16:01]: You know what we should do? I don’t think you’ve done this. You should add a resource tab with the books that you’ve read that you really enjoy, related to this kind of stuff, and then link them.
Speaker A [00:16:11]: Okay, I’ll put that on the website right next to the title 9.
Speaker B [00:16:14]: Notice how I say, you know what you should do?
Speaker A [00:16:16]: You know what you should do? Yeah, but this new book that I’m reading is called what Happened to youo? And it’s by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. Bruce Perry is an MD, PhD who focuses on brain and neurology and has done a tremendous amount, 30 years worth of work on trauma and the impacts that trauma has on your brain. And Oprah has been herself through a ridiculous amount of trauma. Many, many, many years of trauma. And this book I’m on, chapter five, I think right now is a little nuts and is forever changing my thoughts on trauma in not good ways.
Speaker B [00:17:02]: Oh, what do you mean, nuts?
Speaker A [00:17:05]: The first main concept of the book is instead of saying what is wrong with you? That we need to say what happened to you? And when you change the conversation to what happened to you, we start to understand human beings at such a deeper level. It then goes on to talk about the neurobiology associated with why we are the way we are and how incredibly early, specifically between birth, until 2 years old, how incredibly important it is that you have experiences where your caretakers are responsive to you, hold you, do not allow you to cry for long periods of time. Basically, you’re creating these ridiculous numbers of neuro pathways that are leading you to believe what is safe, what is unsafe, what you can count on, what you can’t count on. In this whole time, I’m thinking about the cry it out method and how the verdict is out on how people have felt about the cry it out method. I’m telling you, if I had read this book before I had Carter, there’s not a chance in hell that kid would have cried for more than two seconds before I was right there tending to it. Which is the part of this book that I’m like. It’s forever changing the way I think about things in ways that someone like me doesn’t need to be taken down those rabbit holes because we already feel bad enough and empathic enough and caring enough and whatever. So the first concept is that we ask what happened to you? Instead of what is your problem? What is wrong with you? And then the second is that our brain has created all of these neuro pathways. And one of the things that they’ve talked about so far in this group. They give a lot of examples of poor kiddos that have been through trauma that you could not possibly imagine. So a robber breaking into their house and killing a parent right in front of them. Type of trauma, like really horrendous trauma. They’ve talked about just all different types of trauma. One of the ones that I found most effing fascinating was that this kid was placed in a room with a male teacher. And the male teacher did not look or act or sound at all like a prior parent that he had had. But he. This is a kid that came from a ridiculous amount of trauma history. An unreal amount of trauma history. And from the minute this kid was first placed in this classroom, he started to act out. He started to have these types of behavior toward this teacher very long.
Speaker B [00:19:47]: He’s a school age child at this point.
Speaker A [00:19:49]: Yes, Very long story short, it was the smell of this man’s Old Spice deodorant. It was triggering, that was triggering to this kid. And the only reason that Dr. Perry found that out was that when I think the father was in jail and the kid was taken to jail to meet with the father, the father was late. The father didn’t make any qualms about being late. It was just like, yeah, I’ll get here when I get here, right? That Dr. Perry sitting with this child and the minute that the dad sits down, he gets this overwhelming smell of this Old Spice deodorant. And then he goes back into the classroom a couple days later, gets an overwhelming smell of Old Spice deodorant. And he says to the teacher, just do this small thing for me. Switch from this deodorant to this other type of deodorant and just let’s experiment, let’s just see. And the kid stops having the same types of massive outburst reactions that he had been having. And they do a reset on their relationship. Can we start over? Right. And they literally do like a sit down conversation. What do you expect of me? What do I expect of you? How can we good partners? And their whole entire relationship changed. And it’s little things like that that you hear throughout this story that has led me to believe that people are not just the way that they are due to DNA and due to just occasional upbringing related factors, but that what happens to people from the moment that they are birthed until, you know, whatever years of age has the most profound impact in ways that you will never have any effing clue about. Because who would have ever thought that Old Spice deodorant, right? This kid didn’t know that Old Spice deodorant was the trick.
Speaker B [00:21:51]: They can’t articulate it.
Speaker A [00:21:52]: He had no clue. It was just a scent recognition. Then they talked about how Oprahs. Oprah has like, this group where they. They take these girls from another country and they give them a different life or different opportunities than they would have had otherwise. And they talk about how the girls constantly act out in the very beginning. And Oprah was so surprised about that. And Dr. Perry is like, meaning they.
Speaker B [00:22:20]: Weren’T like, grateful and just happy to be there because they would create chaos.
Speaker A [00:22:23]: They would create chaos. They would throw things, they would hit things. They would sleep together in the same bed, like all of these types of things. And she would be like, I don’t understand why this is happening. And he’s like, they’re going back to what’s comfortable for them, even if it wasn’t healthy. And they sometimes are living in families of eight people, five of whom are sharing one bed. And so when you get used to that type of connection or that’s what feels comfortable for you, even if that’s not the healthiest, even if you have the opportunity to live in your own bed or to sleep in your own bed, that’s not.
Speaker B [00:22:56]: That’s unsafe.
Speaker A [00:22:57]: What feels comfortable to you.
Speaker B [00:22:59]: Scary. Yeah.
Speaker A [00:23:00]: And then the chaos comes about. In some of the reading I’ve been doing of adult children of alcoholics, that they create conflict and chaos in their own families because they cannot stand when things are normal or okay or comfortable. Because that feels so incredibly foreign to them that they. If they create the chaos or they create some type of environment where there’s an upheaval in some way, shape or form, it releases hormones in their bottoms, in their bottoms, in their bodies that make them feel safe.
Speaker B [00:23:31]: Yeah. I mean, that all makes so much sense in hindsight. Total sense or why you repeat patterns that you’re, you know, like your parents relationship. You seek out that type of relationship because that is all.
Speaker A [00:23:48]: You know, it talked about that too. It said, how many times have you said, oh, I’m not gonna be like my mom or I’m not gonna be like my dad. And all of a sudden you say something and you’re like, oh, my God, that was my mother. Because it comes out of you, because it’s so neurally connected to you that it is what your early experiences have brought into your life.
Speaker C [00:24:09]: Have you heard of the term strict father morality?
Speaker A [00:24:15]: No, what’s that?
Speaker C [00:24:16]: So that’s a phenomenon that I’ve just learned about that, they’re saying was a huge factor in why Trump won the election this past election. Because the country, a lot of the people are especially like Christians or other cultures that are used to a, that are patriarchal, that have a strong male figure at the head of the household. They call it a strict father morality. So people go for that even if it doesn’t make sense or if it doesn’t, if it not necessarily the best for them. They kind of identify with that type of a leader. Makes so much sense, and they choose that over the alternative just because it’s kind of what they know.
Speaker B [00:25:05]: Yeah, that makes so much sense.
Speaker A [00:25:07]: And it’s associated with safety and it’s associated with direction, and it’s associated with steadfast leadership. And we are chaotic right now. And so who has the whatever strong arm to bring us where it is that we need to go? But how subliminal is all of that?
Speaker B [00:25:27]: Sure, I’m sure it’s not intentional. I mean, that would be even more interesting if that was an intentional tactic.
Speaker A [00:25:33]: Fascinating.
Speaker B [00:25:34]: But that makes so much sense.
Speaker A [00:25:36]: That’s so fascinating. One of my biggest takeaways from this book, and what’s really got me on my ass about this, is I don’t know how you look at, at anyone in this world at all and dismiss anything about them, their poor behavior, their reactions, their anything. If you’re asking the question, what happened to you? And that’s not great for someone like me who already thinks like that and already hangs on too long and already doesn’t have good boundaries around why people are the way they are. And I think a lot of that has been coming from me asking the question constantly, what happened to you? Or why are you the way that you are? Every time I think about someone who’s going through something difficult or someone who’s working through addiction, or someone who’s struggling in some way that just can’t get out of their own way. I constantly think to myself of them in an infant state, literally in the operating room, just being born. And I think that child did not ask for any of this right now. And so how did we get from that birth into where we are right now? And I want to peel back every single one of those layers to figure out the core of why that person is the way that they are. Because without that, we have such hurt people that are walking around hurting other people. And it’s drastically changing the way that our world engages with one another. And so here I am, someone who wants to have better boundaries on not wanting to engage or not wanting to have to go deeper into what happened in everyone’s life story. And yet it’s so important for me that people are seen and understood in all of their wretchedness that I then read this book and I’m like, oh, it’s even deeper than you thought it was. It’s down to people’s olfactory systems with their scents, and what they’re smelling could be triggering someone. Then I started thinking about kids in classrooms. Then I started thinking about people on death row. Then I just don’t stop.
Speaker B [00:27:59]: As you’re saying all of this, I’m going back to. I mean, hate me if you want, but feminism plays a role on track. How in the hell are babies and infants supposed to get what you’re saying they’re supposed to get when women need to work and they need to be placed in daycare Systems where there’s one person per 10 kids who can’t get the same type of care and love and this, that and the other. And, you know, moms need to go back to work when kids are 6 weeks old because they don’t get paid leave.
Speaker C [00:28:38]: I think calling that feminism is perhaps a bit wrong.
Speaker B [00:28:42]: Okay, well, take it with. Take it with a grain of salt. I’m just saying that you’re back to.
Speaker A [00:28:47]: Your roles is what you’re saying. You’re back to your roles.
Speaker B [00:28:49]: Not necessarily roles, just how are you supposed to do it all? And I don’t mean women, I mean people. How do you do it all when that kind of either expectation or people have desires to do it all, like, all of that. How do you possibly do it all?
Speaker A [00:29:13]: Related to that, I do think that we’re seeing a shift. Someone was telling me about a research article that they read recently that said millennial dads are spending 50 to 60% more time with their children than their own fathers.
Speaker B [00:29:26]: Millennial dads? Yeah, our age group.
Speaker A [00:29:28]: So children. Children being raised now and then what. What is after millennials, Whatever, whoever. We’re on some.
Speaker B [00:29:38]: I’m not sure, but letters of the.
Speaker A [00:29:39]: Alphabet at this point.
Speaker B [00:29:40]: The next generation.
Speaker A [00:29:41]: Yes.
Speaker B [00:29:42]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:29:42]: That more and more, men particularly, are spending more and more time with their children physically. Time. It talks in this book as well, about how. Or maybe it was something I was watching. I can’t remember if this was in the book, but that it is biologically natural for a child to be going to their mother when they become injured or hurt because those hormones are released to let them know she is your caring, safe haven. And when they want to play or engage or try things out, they’re going to dad. And that those are not just gender stereotypes, those are biologically ingrained in the baby to be going toward these particular parents for those things. And so to your point, if we’ve shaken that up a little bit, not necessarily for bad or wrong reasons, no, but this need to come back to some type of homeostasis where both can’t be play parents, one has to be a nurturing parent. And honestly, both can’t be overly nurturing parents, one has to be a play parent. I’m simplifying that massively.
Speaker B [00:30:46]: And there’s always exceptions. And this isn’t the, the standard, the.
Speaker A [00:30:49]: Rule, the whatever be based in gender per se. That might be hormonally what comes out. But if the father is a really caring, nurturing, loving person, and that tends to be where that child is going and mom tends to be the play person, great, you know, as long as.
Speaker B [00:31:07]: We have a little bit of a balance.
Speaker A [00:31:09]: All of these things intermixed. And so what I’m hearing you say is how are we supposed to be doing all of this stuff? And then how do we. When it gets taken away or when.
Speaker B [00:31:19]: I’m thinking just back from the beginning, like when that child is brought into this world, how do you do it all? How is that possible based in the society that you and I live in in America?
Speaker C [00:31:37]: Don’t get credit cards. That’s a first freaking way. I’m serious. I’m serious. Don’t get into debt when you’re young. If you get into debt when you’re young, then you ensure the fact that you can, can never be a stay at home mom unless you come for money.
Speaker B [00:31:52]: That would require foresight. Well, that would require people not to have to keep up the Joneses. That would require people to have to admit that maybe they don’t need all the things that our society is telling you that you need.
Speaker C [00:32:07]: Or if they had actual financial, fiscal education when it mattered, which we never get.
Speaker A [00:32:12]: Well, that would require institutions of higher education to drastically change the system in which they charge 18 year olds 65 to $95,000 a year to be going to for more schooling.
Speaker B [00:32:28]: It would require our business industry to change hours and times and expectations of both men and women. It would require our society to value children’s lives and allow parents, I don’t care, man, women, whatever, to stay home and actually raise their children while having a career.
Speaker A [00:32:53]: Because let’s be clear, it’s not just keeping up with the Joneses. There are families right now who work two jobs that can’t afford to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table.
Speaker B [00:33:04]: Correct.
Speaker A [00:33:05]: Because a family of four requires $130,000 a year to. For the poverty levels just be right now.
Speaker B [00:33:14]: Which means Those kids at 6 weeks old are being plucked and they have to cry it out because they’re gonna be kicked out of the daycare center if they can’t get their shit together as a six week old. Because nobody has time to sit there and caretake individually to everybody. It’s a broken system. It is a broken system that we continue to churn and churn and churn and churn. And it’s frankly scary. Scary.
Speaker A [00:33:40]: But I do think that the generations that are coming after us feel that. See that I would agree.
Speaker B [00:33:46]: There are things changing.
Speaker A [00:33:48]: That’s why you’re seeing people who are like, I’m not doing it. No, I’m not doing this. I’m gonna live in a van and I’m gonna travel and I’m not gonna buy property or I’m not going to. Right. Like they’re saying, I’m going to be virtual and I’m going to go get a job in California making three times what I can make here. But I’m going to still live here in New York or I’m not going to live in New York because the taxes are too high. I’m going to go live over here. You know, so there’s a lot of dis. Decisions that are being made around flexibility, work, life, balance, you know, life being prioritized over work that I think we’re starting to see a shift.
Speaker B [00:34:19]: I hope so.
Speaker A [00:34:20]: And we’re starting to see that the people who have ownership over these organizations are valuing some of those things as well, which doesn’t surprise me. Right. We typically go real far left, then we go real far right. And then we decide somewhere closer to the middle is where we ultimately need to end up. We just happen to be living raised by a generation that was really far right. And now living in a society that’s pretty far left as people who are experiencing both trying to figure out.
Speaker B [00:34:50]: But that’s also privilege too. Right. I feel very privileged to be able to experience and participate in things that are very obscure and not normal. You know, I.
Speaker A [00:35:07]: Well, because you’re a hustler, you’re gonna figure out what you need to do to make yourself the money that you need to make by pulling 18 jobs together. But that’s not normal.
Speaker B [00:35:16]: I don’t think that’s normal. And I don’t think that that is comfortable. And I don’t think that that’s something that’s talked about a lot. I forget that I’m in these microcosms of environments, that this is very, totally normal. And that’s not most people’s experience. And I’m very, very grateful for that because I’m teaching my children very different things. And not to say that my mom didn’t do any of that, just it’s different generations.
Speaker A [00:35:45]: You don’t know what you don’t know.
Speaker B [00:35:46]: Right.
Speaker A [00:35:47]: It wasn’t a thing.
Speaker B [00:35:48]: Right. And you know, I just, I look at some of the, you know, expectations, standards, or even people put worth their own self worth around that. People put self worth, their identity as a, as their career. And many people, when you do that.
Speaker A [00:36:08]: Many people stay at jobs that they absolutely hate, might be physically because of.
Speaker B [00:36:12]: Money or because they, whatever, they get.
Speaker A [00:36:15]: A good pension, that or their title.
Speaker B [00:36:17]: Is really important or, you know, whatever.
Speaker A [00:36:19]: And I’m not knocking that, because I’m not either. I do believe that that is a choice for some people. That absolutely works for them. Absolutely. A lot of people will say to me, you’re living the life that I want to live. You’re running your own business. You dabble in some things on the side that you enjoy. You get to say no to things, even though I don’t, that you ultimately don’t want to do. Like, I would love to have that life. And I think to myself, it’s not a unicorn. This is just something that I had to. Mentally, physically, financially, emotionally work myself into. I had to do some real effing hard work, real hard work to get into for seven years, if not longer, to get into this place to determine that this is what I’m gonna do and how I’m gonna schedule my days and when I’m gonna take my days off, you know, because you were so.
Speaker B [00:37:07]: Ingrained, for whatever reason, not necessarily any particular person’s fault, and maybe you’ll discover that through your journey. But what was it in your life that told you this is the way.
Speaker A [00:37:20]: It is and why play it safe and why.
Speaker B [00:37:24]: And I am raising. And I, you know, even my. I remember back when I was trying to figure out a career, you know, like, what am I gonna go to school for? There was no question about whether I was going to college. That wasn’t an option. Nobody said that to me. But it was a very clear message in the school I went to. Very clear. And so then I’m like, yeah, but what am I gonna do? Because I don’t like any of this. I don’t like what it feels like. I don’t like being told what to do. I was very clear about that from the beginning. And so then I had to figure out. And I remember once I finally had the light bulb go off and I got beyond excited to pursue recreation and leisure as a degree. And I remember calling my mom and I said that to her and she was like, what the hell are you, what job are you going to get? Because that was the end goal, Right? The end goal was a job. And I’m like, like rattling all these things off. And she’s like, I don’t. I don’t think so. And I was like, watch me watch it.
Speaker A [00:38:24]: Yep. And now you do it in. In a unique way. It’s still very much connected to what you do.
Speaker B [00:38:29]: Very much.
Speaker A [00:38:30]: Right. You’re still planning events, you’re still creating rec and leisure activities.
Speaker B [00:38:33]: But I can, as my parent, even my grandmother was probably, like, mortified. She’s like, what do you mean? Women. Women are teachers. Women are this blah, blah, blah.
Speaker A [00:38:41]: I will never forget the day that I said to my parents, I’m going to leave my nicely paying, retirement focused job in higher education to follow my dream of building my own business.
Speaker C [00:39:01]: So true.
Speaker A [00:39:02]: I will never forget. And it wasn’t out of like, oh, God, Aaron, we don’t think you can do it. It was out of fear. We are fearful that you’re not going to be in a good place, in an okay place. And we don’t wanna leave this earth with you struggling in any way, shape or form. But I remember saying to them, I have a choice in my life that I can stay this course and I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be. Or I could spend the rest of my life wondering, what if?
Speaker B [00:39:30]: Yeah, I know what if. I know. When that heartbeat is too strong, you gotta punch.
Speaker A [00:39:35]: I can’t. I cannot. I just can’t live my life wondering.
Speaker C [00:39:39]: I have a friend who. Whose father said she wanted to go to school for theater and acting and all that kind of stuff. That was her passion. And her father said, I’m not paying for you to go to college to be a waitress.
Speaker A [00:39:53]: Yes. Wow.
Speaker B [00:39:54]: Yes.
Speaker A [00:39:54]: Yeah.
Speaker B [00:39:55]: Yes. When reality is, you get a good waitress job, you can make a bokeh amount of money go. They’re gonna make way more than I’ll ever see.
Speaker A [00:40:05]: There’s a mom across the street from me who’s a good friend of mine who just does bartending and serving on Friday and Saturday nights. And otherwise she’s the most beautiful stay at home mom.
Speaker B [00:40:16]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:40:16]: She watches another little girl during the day, happy as can be, because it’s so important for her that she’s there for her. One daughter just went off to kindergarten, but their littlest one is not yet there. Right?
Speaker B [00:40:27]: Yeah.
Speaker A [00:40:27]: And she’s like, I get out of the house a couple days a week and I do this and I do that. And I just think we’re starting to see some shifts. And that. God, that. That’s our retreat right there is. Where are you at right now? What’s your life pulse right now? Are you happy with where you’re at? And if you’re not, where do you want to be different in whatever amount of time? And then how do we lead you on some steps to get there? You and I have both done it.
Speaker B [00:40:54]: Oh yeah. But then this is the generational quote unquote trauma that you’re breaking. What are you doing different? And what messages are you sending to your children that nope, we don’t need. We don’t need to have the best house on the planet. We don’t need to be scraping by with these credit cards like you talked about, Scott. We don’t. Those are all choices. And here’s where it’s going to lead you. Let’s talk about this option and what that means.
Speaker A [00:41:18]: Right back to the one thing. What is the one thing you want?
Speaker B [00:41:21]: What is the one thing?
Speaker A [00:41:21]: What is it? What are you doing that is directly aligned with what that one thing is? And if it’s not it, if it’s out buying $4,000 worth of Christmas gifts. But that means that you’re further away from your ultimate goal, leaving your job, then that ain’t.
Speaker B [00:41:35]: You gotta say no or that isn’t your one thing. Your one thing really is.
Speaker A [00:41:40]: Right.
Speaker B [00:41:40]: I want to be the Jones.
Speaker A [00:41:42]: That’s right.
Speaker B [00:41:43]: And. And the. I’m saying these things that matter, but they really don’t.
Speaker A [00:41:47]: That’s right.
Speaker B [00:41:47]: You got to get clear with yourself. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Whatever. Whatever.
Speaker A [00:41:50]: Your answers are fine. Absolutely are completely fine.
Speaker B [00:41:54]: But it’s got to be.
Speaker A [00:41:54]: You just have to be happy with you.
Speaker B [00:41:57]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:41:57]: At the end of the day. And if you’re not, change it.
Speaker B [00:42:00]: That right. Right. And don’t be scared.
Speaker A [00:42:01]: Don’t be scared than done. But that’s why coming at you hot is the retreat.
Speaker B [00:42:05]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:42:05]: The more love retreat.
Speaker B [00:42:07]: You need answers.
Speaker A [00:42:08]: 2025, you need answers.
Speaker B [00:42:09]: We got them.
Speaker A [00:42:10]: We’re Going to be down at the library with their. With their free rooms because we don’t have any money.
Speaker B [00:42:16]: That’s right.
Speaker A [00:42:17]: To pay for anything else.
Speaker B [00:42:18]: In fact, we might be on the lawn. It’s fine.
Speaker A [00:42:20]: Yeah, right. No one can come on over. Backyard. Backyard rodeo.
Speaker C [00:42:23]: Here is one term I wish my wife had never heard of.
Speaker B [00:42:26]: What?
Speaker C [00:42:27]: Retail therapy.
Speaker B [00:42:28]: Oh, I know.
Speaker A [00:42:29]: We’re going to have a guest. I don’t know if they canceled or not, but we do have a guest that is going to be coming on at some point who’s talking about retail therapy and how retail therapy is actually a trauma respons and as a response to stress and triggers and it’s not at all about what you’re buying.
Speaker B [00:42:44]: So rewind.
Speaker C [00:42:46]: That sounds awesome. If they actually show up. But anyway, go ahead.
Speaker A [00:42:48]: I know.
Speaker B [00:42:49]: Rewind back to when we had the mystic autistic and I had the checklist and I was like, erin. Aaron. Aaron, this guest that you’re talking about, Rebecca. Rebecca.
Speaker A [00:42:56]: Rebecca. Rebecca. Yeah. Returns to Amazon. You all know that Amazon changed its damn return policy because of Rebecca.
Speaker B [00:43:04]: Yeah, right.
Speaker A [00:43:05]: Just so we’re clear, it’s like, have you worn this? Did you wear this on a cruise ship? Did you put this fake mustache on? On Take it off and then put it back? Did you use this period cup, not wash it and then send it back? That’s how specific all these freaking questions are. And then the final question is, are you Rebecca Herzog? And if you click yes on that, they’re like, we’re not taking this back. We’re not taking it back. I know, I know. Well, here’s our affirmation card to close us out. Oh, this is perfect.
Speaker B [00:43:32]: Okay.
Speaker A [00:43:32]: I know that it is important to work hard and play even harder. I am supposed to have fun.
Speaker B [00:43:39]: Yes.
Speaker A [00:43:39]: See you at the library retreat in 2025.
Speaker B [00:43:43]: I loved that.
Speaker A [00:43:45]: Me too. Isn’t empathy amazing?
Speaker B [00:43:47]: Well, we’re amazing. I don’t know about all this empathy stuff.
Speaker A [00:43:51]: That’s fine. I accept you wherever you are. Oh, God, I love you.
Speaker B [00:43:57]: I love you too.
Speaker A [00:43:59]: And if you love us, please like and subscribe to more Love the Power of Empathy podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker B [00:44:07]: See you next time.
