Big a 08 17 2001 – Part 3 – John

official journal so that we can begin to diagnose it and treat it but he says you know one of the characters are you stay in a relationship with an active substance abuser for two years without seeking help you stay enough physically or emotionally abusing relationship without seeking health you change your routine you change the structure of your life you become violence you become suicidal and then one of most common things that happens in the late stages of codependency. You know, the old TA people used to talk about games, first-degree games, second-degree gains, third-degree gain. Third-degree game are tissue issues. That is, your body tissue gets into it and you develop ulcers. These are common diseases that go with codependence. You develop heart disease. You developed cancer, arthritis, hypertension. Those are common complications physically. A woman I worked with, severely codependent. They just took two feet of her colon out. She just developed cancer. Thank God she's really gotten on an imaging routine and she's into a vitamin therapy and she got the cancer in remission because she really started dealing with some of this stuff. But late stages of codependency can be cancer And again, we're not saying that's the only cause of it. But let's say you have a genetic history of it and you add the codependency to it. It's going to be very hard. Then the next characteristic, the E, so powerless, primary, progressive, and pervasive was the P, emotional constraint, with or without dramatic outbursts. I got that line from Tim and Chermak. Experienced as being numb, having outburst of feelings, or distorting feelings. See, a lot of us, you say, well, you're psychically numbed out and the person flies off the handle or goes into hysteria. And we say, Well, that person's in touch with their feelings. Wrong. It's almost like you have the dramatic outburst to get it over with and you're not really in touch mit your feelings. Anger rackets, feeling rackets. Like the most common feeling racket for women is to cry when you're angry. The most common feeling racket for men is to get angry when you're scared. Men are taught that real men shouldn't fear you're a wimp and a weenie, and so they see their dad stomping around. And fear feels powerful. I mean, anger feels powerful So I tell this thing that happened. You know, this happened one time with Nancy. She met me at the door and said, the air conditioning is out. And I have this tape that says real men are supposed to know how to fix mechanical things. and of course at that time 10 years ago I was not in touch with feelings like I am now and instead of saying honey I'm real scared when you tell me the air conditioning's out see mother's voice just went on that says real men are supposed to know how to fix mechanical things and I don't even know where our conditioner is so I say instead of saying honey, I'm really scared when tell me that let's go to a motel call air temperature which would be a healthy way to handle it. I said, what did you do to it now? And stomp around the house because see that feels powerful. That's a racket. Rage is often a racket or anger is often a racket It's a feeling used to cover up another feeling and so a lot of times if women are angry they cry. So here's some of the unmanageability behaviors. Your feelings come out in sharp bombastic bursts and frighten those around you and you manipulate with that you don't know what you feel or you feel nothing your fear of anger determines what you say or do boy right think about that think about how you've been controlled by anger in relationships you somatize your feelings you're sick a lot you get sick so you can feel as bad as you feel you feel shame when you feel anything you feel only acceptable feelings See, whatever that is. That means whatever was acceptable in your family. Like the most acceptable feeling in my family was guilt. Anger was not acceptable. Sadness was not accessible. Fear not acceptable。 Joy was not unacceptable for very long, about 37 seconds. And then, that's enough. Don't get too rambunctious. And there are starving children in Latin America. You never talk or share your feelings. Okay, look at the next one. Noetic disorders. Codependency is characterized by thinking disorders. God, did I hate this one. See, obsessive worrying is a thinking disorder. Good moms are taught like old natives that if you beat the drums, you can keep the evil spirits away. So the mother, worry, worry. And then the kid will come home safe. that's the biggest crop no and that never helped any kid get home safe but it's like if I worry then I'll keep the evil spirits away it's open it's flexible all feelings are okay you can express your feelings there's forgiveness mistakes are learning tools there's discipline but the parents are disciplined disciplinarians In dysfunctional families, there's plenty of discipline. You get punished, you get grounded, but the parents are undisciplined disciplinarians. The parents don't do what they say. And so the kids learn exactly. See, remember last night, J.C. Benjamin, the rules for him and the rules for me are not the same. And kids learn what we do, not what we say we do. the family system exists for the individuals and everybody can leave the family in a healthy family. In an unhealthy family, go to the other side of the page, the individuals exist for the family. So when I talk to you about your roles today, I want to try to help you get in touch Well, what was your role in that family? Like one of my roles was hero, star. But my being a hero never did one thing to help my family. So in dysfunctional families, these roles that we get in to try to keep the family together, they don't work. They don't really heal the family. Being my mother's surrogate spouse and her confidant, I didn't help my mother. Those roles don't work. So in dysfunctional families, the roles become rigid. Dad's an alcoholic, so the family needs a husband. So somebody becomes a surrogate spouse. Dad's totally irresponsible, so two of the kids become super responsible to balance the mobile and then play those roles rigidly to try to keep the family together. Mother and Daddy have a marriage, and they pretend a lot, but they're really angry at each other, and their little Farquhar goes to school every day and starts fights and sets fires in the classroom, and when the parents are called in, they can't believe this is their child. This child's perfect at home. What he does is he takes their rage and loneliness, which is unexpressed the secret, and he goes and acts it out at school. So basically he acts it Out. And he may be doing that ultimately to try to keep their marriage together. So do you begin to see that you get set up in the roles out of the family dysfunction? So you don't choose the roles. The system chooses the roles, the roles are rigid they're not chosen they're inflexible and you exist to keep the family together that's why it's so hard to get out of dysfunctional families because there's something bigger here than any of us the whole is greater than the sum of the parts this is a law of social systems and so in a dysfunctional family the roles are assigned by the system There's unhealthy competition. It's punishing or permissive. It's shaming. The feelings are frozen. It's always in terms of right and wrong, perfectionism. It's closed, inflexible, lots of secrets, compulsive. Approval must be earned. You're shamed for mistakes. It's destructive. It's intergenerational. The frozenness will be passed on to the next generation. delusion, it's a system in delusion and denial. Now, what I want you to look at here is if you look at the mom and the dad, the circle that represents mom, the cycle that represents dad, then I've drawn a line down from each one and a line across, and then here are the children. What I put on this paper, or this is something we hand out in our new family life, are all the roles that have been discovered. And you may not identify with any of these, but what I want you to think about as I go through this is what role were you in in your family? Who was the hero in your community? Who was your hero in the family? Your family. Who was their heroine if your family was dysfunctional? And you may have had a hero and a heroine, but often you'll have a star. There can only be one star And boy, the star is just everything. Who was the lost child in the family? The lost child may be the first kid that comes along that mother and daddy have because they got pregnant. And basically what a lost child is, the message is get lost child. It's like we don't really want a kid. Or a lost childhood could be the fifth child who's an accidental pregnancy. Or you could be the darling in the family and have a little sister that's cuter than you, and you become a lost child. At about three, you lost your role. So there'll always be a part of you until you do some work on this that's a lost childhood. Now, lost kids tend to be perfect. It's like get lost child So what the child will do is go play in their room. They'll be quiet. It won't cause any trouble. And often what you'll get is you'll hear mom or dad talking. They'll say, well, here's my perfect one. She never gives us any trouble Sometimes lost kids are almost invisible in a group. You just almost don't even see them. They just almost know how to make themselves invisible because really their message is, please let me stay on the planet. I promise you I won't give you any trouble. Somebody said that they're the ones in the system most prone to suicide. Most prone to... because they never get to be bad. They never getと have any bad feelings. They never gets to do anything bad. They always have to be perfect. Um, so look at some of those different roles. Hero, little parent, lots of you were taking care of your little brothers and sisters at a very early age. I used to give my brother's allowance. I was 13 years old. I would give him his allowance every week because there wasn't a daddy there and the system needs a daddy. See, my mother didn't call me in and say, let's see, shall I choose John or Richard to be my emotional spouse? The system did it. We're talking about the laws of social systems, and these systems are more powerful than individuals. They're also more immature and primitive than individuals." Any therapist in the group that would be willing to stand up so that the rest of you could see that there are people here who do counseling, do therapy, and they're here. And to me, that's one of the best things I could say about somebody is that they're helping other people but they're also working on themselves. So would any therapists care to stand up? Or counselors? Just raise your hand. Okay, stand up. Look around. Go ahead. Come on, Mary. And the rest of you can notice these people And if you want to talk to one of them at the end, I think it's a very neat thing to see how many counselors and therapists are working on their own lives. And for all of us who do this work, if we're not working on ourselves, it's pretty hard to help others, especially if you're codependent, because you're just going to be enhancing your codependency. Now, the thing that I wanted you to experience is that you probably have been set up in some kind of role and that the feeling of that role goes with you all your life. You can be exactly in it 30 years later. The role is one way to help you get to your feelings. By breaking out of the role, you break out of a system Because remember, the function of the role is to keep the system going. Why do we do the role? Why do you get in the role because the system needs this homeostasis it needs this balance but the fact is that the dysfunctional roles don't work my being a hero hasn't saved my brother sister my dad or my mother my being a caretaker has not worked with any of them. And so the roles don't work. They're dysfunctional roles. And one of the ways to give them up is to begin to realize what feelings did the role demand that you have? What that means is somebody just walked up to you and gave you a script and said, here, play this part in the play. And so when you play this part in the play, you have to have feelings that go with that part, right? And so after 40 years of playing the role or 20 years of playing The Role or 15 years of Playing the Role, you don't even know you're playing a role anymore. You think that's what you really feel. And so one of the things about getting in touch with the family system roles is that they are a way to help you get to your feelings, your feelings about the role and the feelings that you had to give up. To have the role. Now, one of the ways out of the role is to express the feelings that you had to give up. To start expressing them. For me to be vulnerable and sad and hurt and need help is a way to stop being a hero all the time. To be willing in a context of my life not to be on stage, stage, not to be the hero. That's a way to start giving up the role. The feeling of the role will stay with you, but you can give up the roll and you can change the role into a healthier way of being. I don't mind, you know, being a leader as I deal with my shame. I can handle that more and more, that some of us are called to verbalize things as part of this movement. I know that in AA for years people would say, well you can say it, you know, you can Say those things. That's what I felt, but I've never been able to say it. And I had to grapple with that. But I'm happy. That's paying my dues. As long as I don't start thinking I'm exceptional in some way and that I don't have the problem anymore. That's the danger of getting in the leadership role or the guru role or whatever that is. That is the danger and I've got to fight not to let that happen because there is a part of me that likes the ego fanfare and all of that. I don't want to be the hero in my family. I want to be a daddy. I want to love my kids. I don't expect them to, you know, my son's not at all impressed with a lot of my stuff. And I get it that that's okay. I miss dad. I'm not the leader or blah blah for the lecture. I'm his dad. And it's real important. I am not a caretaker anymore. I' m a caregiver and there context in my life where I'm perfectly willing to give care, but I don't have to. And there are times when I will refuse. Uh, I've got 150 people on a waiting list and I don' t worry about it anymore. I used to just grapple with that all the time. Uh I'm moving out of counseling now. It's hard, hard, work. And uh I feel like my energy is better used like this. And you know and people want me to continue to counsel, and there's my codependency wants them to like me. But I can give better care like this, and I can give care and not be a caretaker or not be super responsible, not try to be responsible for everybody. Building boundaries, knowing where I end and you begin, not taking on other people's problems when I really need to take care of my own. Those are all the ways that I can work out of this system and the more I work out those roles, the more leave that family. Do you all see that? That the more you give up the role, the more your life is going to be different. The more you leave the dysfunction. You get back in touch with your own feelings. You start getting connected with yourself. And then the more you give up those roles and leave that system, the more your giving up the codependency. And see, that's basically what we've been working on today. How do you treat codependancy? Well, if I can break out of the system wherein I became codependent, then I am dealing with my codependence. And if codependency is not knowing what I feel, not knowing what I need, not knowing what I want, then stopping taking care of everybody else and starting getting in touch with what I feel, what I need, what I want, that's a way to work out of the codependence. So this is part of the process. Now it's not all of the process and there are other ways to do this. There are other ways to do family of origin work. Some of you have done it in therapy. There's other therapeutic approaches to it. I just wanted to give you a sample of a way to do it, and it's a good way. We do this in our family, our Center for Recovering Families. We have a four-and-a-half-day workshop where people work on, in five hours a day in groups, you work on your family system, and you work on what we call the original pain, original pain work. See, in some ways, until you go back and express the feelings, you stay in delusion and denial. And the more I can express the feelings, then I don't have to act them out anymore. The more I can express the feelings. And this is also shame reduction work. Because what you're really saying, it's okay for me to feel angry being set up to be my mother's surrogate spouse or my dad's little princess. And that's caused me, it has had life-damaging consequences. It's cost me a great deal, and I have a right to be angry about that. And I have a right to express anger toward that parent. We take bataka sticks and we put a chair there and we put the parent over here. We don't hit the parent with bataka sticks, even in symbolism. But we hit the chair and say, I'm angry at you, and express the anger. See, you couldn't do that as little kids. Who could you have talked to? who would have listened to you so where did all that energy go it just went in there or those of you who got set up with incest or sexual abuse you've had to carry that secret for years because you were in this terrible paradox that if you expressed what happened to you you lost your family I mean what a terrible paradox what a horrible double bind and incest is all about this. In violent families, you don't dare open your mouth. You're terrified. You get beat up. And then what happens is the victims out of violence often become offenders themselves because what victims will do is they'll identify with their violator because their violater was powerful. So victims will literally become offenders because the offender was powerful. And they just simply, it's the only way they can have a reality is identify with that offender. So this is a journey and we've got to heal that past. Now another part of the work is the inner child work. And I'm going to do a tiny exercise with you as the last exercise of today of sort of going back and touching that little child. Maybe when I come back, what we can do is the inner child workshop, which is a day-and-a-half type workshop where we go through all the developmental stages. We put people in groups, and you sit in the group and you hear the kinds of words that you needed to hear as a child, like your infancy needs. You close your eyes and you have people touch you and say, welcome to the world. I'm glad you're here. Huh? Huh? What'd you say? When are we going to do that? I don't know yet, but we're going to. But you see those infancy needs. You needed to hear somebody that was happy you were here and welcome to the world and you'll have all the time you need to get your needs met and I want to be close to you and I wanna love you and I Wanna Touch You. See, some of you already start feeling sad, don't you? The second you hear those words. If you're a lost child, the first time I did this, I had eight of my own clients who were all lost kids. In two seconds they were abdominally crying because I'm going to tell you if you didn't hear those works, you've got a hole in your soul and you grew up without those needs met and every time you walk in a new situation in your life, those infancy needs come up. See, because those things are recycled. Pam Levin wrote a real powerful book called The Cycles of Power. And she talks about how those needs are recycled through your life. So in my workshop, we go through every developmental stage and have people in groups. I do some of it in hypnotic age regression. And I say the words. We do some OFIT in groups where you hear the words at a certain point. You write a letter to your parents. And then you read it to your group, and boy, you may think you know how to dissociate, but when you get in that exercise, I have seen the toughest people go right into the feelings. And of course, there's a tremendous healing because we're all there together and we're acknowledging that we need help. And it is indeed the most powerful single workshop I've ever been involved in. I've never seen anything like it and the healing that comes out of it. I was in Dallas two days ago. Three people came up to me and said, changed my life. Because you see, once I can touch that energy again and embrace that child, it's as if I said, here's a child, take them home with you now and pay some attention to them. It won't take much. You don't have to feed them or clothe them anymore. But just be aware, there's a part of you that's tiny and vulnerable and scared and that never got to be that way. You had to pretend you weren't. And I keep a picture of a four-year-old on my desk. People say, is that your son? I say, no, it's me. You know, and it's kind of weird sometimes. I keepa picture of my wife as a four year old And when I start getting angry at her, and I know all about her life and her childhood, it's very healing to look at that picture. And I can get it, you know, that little girl that was kind of abandoned was sent off to summer camps at five years old because Mama was bombing around Europe and who was just literally orphaned even though her family had some wealth. You know, I grew up poor thinking, boy, if you have money, you could never suffer and had terrible prejudice against anybody who had money. But that's not true. People have as much pain with money as without money. But anyway, those are two kinds of things. Then in second-level recovery, we do a lot of maintenance work confronting the inner voices. Robert Firestone has these whole techniques where he has people get the inner forces out and exaggerate them, like what are you saying to yourself? And it's just amazing when people get on to this because a lot of it goes on unconsciously, how you shame yourself and how you beat yourself and you put yourself down and you carry those internal tapes. TA people talk about your parent tapes, your critical parent tapes. The interjected voices, and it's not just from mom and dad. It could be from school teachers or it could be form anybody who criticized you. But see, we will tend to shame ourselves the way we were shamed. So we have to learn how to stop those internal cycles. Then another thing I have people do is write affirmations. And this is a very helpful kind of exercise. Like in writing this book recently, I've been trying to write a book for 15 years. I've had advances from publishers and I've never written a book. And so one of the things I did about two years ago is I started writing affirmations. I, John, am perfectly capable of writing an adequate book. And you write that 20 times, same sentence over and over again, ideally twice a day. And then you draw a line down the center column and over here you put reply. See, a lot of people do affirmations but they don't do the reply column. and then what you do is you write the affirmation and wait for the first voice that comes to you and mine will be this is BS this isn't going to work this is too simple how could this possibly change a lifetime of complexity these are my voices and see what they're doing is they're stoppers they're going to stop you from being creative They're going to stop you. Because you see, a lot of times, as tragic as this is, it isn't the conscious part of mom or dad, but it's the unconscious, what the TA people call the child in mama or the child and daddy who doesn't want you to succeed. They're too jealous. Even could want you dead. Firestone found over and over again in the voices of people that there was a part of that mother that wanted to get lost. And so you wonder why you have suicidal feelings or why you, you have a lifestyle that's really a death style. That's no lifestyle at all. It doesn't bring you life. And, and so it's real important to, to boy when you get that column, you do this for three weeks, write these affirmations for three days, three weeks. And man I'm telling you that right hand column, sometimes you won't believe the stuff you're saying to yourself because a lot of it functions unconsciously. So it's another way to deal with the voices in your head that keep you from leaving that system and keep you from getting to your own power. Then I believe in things like assertiveness training and communication training, self-image thinking, all that kind of thing can be really helpful if you've done some of this original pain work. In other words, corrective experiences. But the original pain walk is not a corrective experience. It's experiencing what you never experienced, that you're acting out. Does everybody understand that? It's like you never did express these feelings. You had to repress them to survive. So we're not talking about corrective. we're getting you to go back and do what you never did. See, if you don't work it out, you act it out. That's all you can do with that energy. Or you project it or you act in it. But it's got to go somewhere because it's energy. And energy is about molecules and electrons. Emotion is energy. This is Freudian. This is very Freudian, Freud really discovered that energy is there in our emotional life. Then, third level recovery. Now, to me, third-level recovery is spiritual awakening. And there's a danger in doing the spiritual work too soon. Because believe me, I was into astral traveling. I was into a monastery meditating on Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross before I could hardly blow my nose. And I was doing all this heavy spiritual discipline, fasting, kneeling six hours without moving a muscle when I was studying to be a priest in the monastery. And all of it for me was basically an addiction. it was not because I still hadn't done the original pain work I hadn't been I hadn' t done the family of origin work and what happens with it is you get into very subtle delusion and denial it's like I don't need to do any of this other stuff I'm in higher consciousness now and I see some people in higher conscious that desperately need lower consciousness you know I know it. Well, I tell you the way I think it goes, and that's a good point, that I wouldn't discourage somebody from meditating. I mean, again, if you're rigidly codependent, don't rush out of here and say, Bradshaw said I can't do this. But try meditating. See what happens to the quality of your life, to the quantity of your relationships. I don't think that everybody has to go the same way by any means. And it may sound like it, but I don' t believe that. And I believe there' s grace and I believe that there' S people that are unique and I belive that there are people that have had grace in their childhood. They had a teacher, they had an uncle, they had aunt that broke them out of these systems so that everybody doesn't have to sort of take it. I'm sort of giving you the survey, and that's the problem with it. And there are some spiritual masters who say that you can heal some of this stuff. I don't know about that. I sure tried it that way, and it didn't work for me. Now, I'm into daily meditation again. I'm in to higher consciousness work. That's more important to me than anything in my life right now. I do dream work. I do some journaling. This is important kind of stuff for me. But I found that it's really going now, and when I was doing it back there at 22, it was almost like an athletic contest I was in. And it was very much competitive, and I was still into a lot of ego with it. And maybe those are some of the things. A lot of the spiritual masters say that if you have unfinished business in the ego, the energy will always draw you back to it. And that's one of the criteria. And it's like, are you really clear from the past? And I'll tell you the way that you'll know. You can say unequivocally that your life is perfect. That my daddy was perfect. He was just the kind of daddy I needed in order to be here right now. That my mother was perfect, that the whole system was perfect, that I came into this world, my soul had a journey, my soul has a mission, and that all of that was part of it. But you don't do that until you've healed the ego. Because if you're an incest victim and you say you're in the course of miracles and you said there's nothing to forgive, nothing really happened to me that was bad, I think that's terribly dangerous. If you go to Est and you do two weekends and they come out and they say, did you get it? Your dad's perfect. But you haven't done a lot of the work. That can be damaging. I'm not saying it always is. I'm just saying it can be. I've seen people damaged with it. I don't think it's bad. I think the stuff that's being preached is wonderful. But it's almost like there's one level of consciousness called ego and there's another level called subconscious and there'S a larger level. It's almost like, it's not that you ever get rid of your ego, but the ego becomes an axis and you've got to be able to cope and you're going to have enough security, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You've got enough security in your deficiency needs or your dependency needs that that's pretty well taken care of so that now you can begin to let go. You're not terrified all the time. You're no shame-based and you can began to soar. You can begin to let go of ego. You can began to let go of control. Your whole life's not around control and survival because I think to meditate well you've got to know how to give up control. That's the whole point of focusing on the counting is to get that ego distracted so you can get to that still quiet place and it's in that silence that there's another faculty available to us called enlightenment, and intuition. And it's at that moment that you can know God directly. You can know the oneness of the universe directly. So it's not even like the difference between that and ego is like transformation. It's transpersonal. But there's a danger in going there too soon in the sense that it can be a refuge and it's very exciting and it can lend itself to the kind of mood alteration that comes from addiction. Now, anybody who's really done a lot of meditating knows that it isn't all that mood altering. There's a lot OF hard work in it. It's like water dripping on a rock. What I wanted was grandiose stuff in the beginning. You know, I wanted to have the experience of God instantly. And, you know, I want to turn the faucet on full and now take me into outer space. And, you know, I would get these powerful meditations like my inner guide would tell me to clean up your desk. And that isn't what I wanted. What the point is, it's like ego has one point of view and that higher consciousness has another point of vue. And from the higher consciousness point of vu, your life is perfect. that it all makes sense when you see it in its totality. And Jackie Small says that some of us are evolving and some of Us are revolving. And I don't know why some of US are evolving and some Of Us are evolving, but boy, it's clear to me that you can't even be at a thing like this unless there's some energy in you to evolve. and the folks that have no truck with this as we look at their lives a lot of the time are revolving. They're in a squirrel cage, it's deja vu, it's the same old thing over and over again for the hundredth time it's a same fight over andover again and so to begin to break out of that so I really endorse the spiritual life and unitive consciousness and cosmic consciousness and moving into that arena of meditation and prayer and quiet and inner consciousness and I'm making these safeguards. I don't think that you've recovered from codependency until you've had a spiritual awakening because it's an inner kingdom, not the outer kingdom. Yes? Well, I think the higher power is there at every stage in the sense that in the beginning I used my higher power just like I always used God kind of as a great big bear aspirin. You know, you get me out of this and I'll promise you I'll... And knowing, believing in a higher power in the beginning was really salvation for me because I didn't trust people, but I could trust something greater than everybody. But for me that wasn't the major way I came in because I had all this theology and all this religiosity and all this spiritual discipline, I had to put all that in brackets. And actually what happened to me is I began to see how powerfully the spiritual was working in people's lives and how seriously they were taking it because a part of me had so intellectualized it. And I was too young to be reading Teresa of Avila and The Unitive Way and that kind of stuff at 22 years old. And for me, that's the way it went. You know, for some of you, you may have come a whole different route and that may be very powerful for you. I, you know, I'm a Christian theologian and Jesus Christ makes a lot of sense to me as a model of humanness, as one who forgave and didn't judge and who told us about his Father who was unconditionally accepting. That makes sense for me. He said that they may be one as I, Father, in Thee. That it's unitive that he's pointing to and forgiveness and total acceptance and how that gets botched up just terrifies me. But on the other hand, you know, I think it's God as you understand her, him, them, whatever. And that's what's important. I resent it greatly that my journey to God was dictated to by Baltimore Catechism 1-12 and that really they stopped me from ever discovering. They were giving me the answers before I even knew the question. It calls the experience of the holy and to come to it on your own. Yes, sir? Well, what I've been describing, that's a great question, that really it is a forgiveness process. When I talk about the anger, see what Kubler-Ross and Eric Lindemann and all these people who have studied grieving and death and dying because people who know they're dying are grieving for themselves. Kubler-Ross's stages of a dying person are actually the same stages Eric Lindemann found in 1944 when he did all that major study on grief. What he found is that to go through shock, you go through bargaining, you go Through denial, you go Thru anger. So when I'm talking about the anger with the family of origin, I'm talking about part of a grief process. Then you come to hurt and sadness and finally acceptance and forgiveness to give as before. But once I'm out of that system, then I can go back and have a relationship with my mom that's a much healthier relationship, which I do. And I held my dad on his deathbed. I talked to him about dying. I'd done all these death and dying courses. I had no unfinished business with him. And so it's not at all to not forgive that family, but in the process sometimes you have to get some distance. You have to make a judicious evaluation of how close you want to be. For some of you where you still have very abusive parents, that's where you may have to leave them to their fate. and you have to make the decisions about that. But yes, it's very important to get... See, the whole point of that second level work is get that finished. A resentment is a re-feeling of old feelings and just going over and over andover andover and you're in bondage to the past. When I teach resentment and forgiveness I say you're not hurting them with the resentment but you're hurting you. The resentment is like blocked energy. It's like a blood clot that you just keep going over. It's repetition, compulsion. And so we want to forgive so we can give as before and heal the past. And that's what this process is. Second-level work is a forgiveness process. That's what we're trying to do. Yes, ma'am? It's creating a personal myth. Well, what I'd say to you is if that works for you. See, because I think it's all mythology in the sociological sense that we're always creating meanings. You know, the great insight of Est is that they really give us the epistemology. That is, that you can take any event and have a bunch of different meanings for it. In fact, that's the basis of a whole therapeutic technique called reframing that you can look at the same event in two different ways. And if that offers you a kind of archetypal healing, then I'd go with that. And that is about unconditional love. It is about forgiveness. And if you're growing out of it... See, to me, the criterion, I mean, love always means spiritual growth. What spiritual growth means for me is an energy that fuels your lifestyle. That is, it gives you more life through creativity, which is the godly virtue. That is if you want to be like God, be creative. That I am, God is the creator of heaven and earth and we've had all this obedient stuff and had nothing about creativity over here. And certainly in this place, with the great artistic stuff that's going on here, what T.S. Eliot said, that all works of art are religious works, they're spiritual works. They touch eternity. What Baudelaire said, it's at once through poetry and art and music that the soul glimpses the splendors that are situated beyond the grave when an exquisite song or poem or work of art brings tears to the eyes or chills down the back. It's not so much an excess of joy, but rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, a demand of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect and demanding even in this life to reveal paradise. So I think the artwork is a beautiful example of godliness. So lifestyle... Sorry about that outburst. folks. Lifestyle, where did that come from? Lifestyle is the fuel that gives us more life. A lifestyle means you have more life, you have more life and more creativity and expansion and growth and love. So to me, that's the criteria that I want to look at. And of course, sometimes you can't know. People ought to, you know, the thing I hate about all this evangelism and Jimmy Baker and Falwell and Oral Roberts, is that it's all that extrinsic religion. Gordon Allport at Harvard did all that work on extrinsIC religion and how extrinsically religious people were more bigoted, more prejudiced. Where's the inner life? Where's The Kingdom that's within? The still, quiet voice. The private life where many are called and few are chosen. We're the narrow gate that very few enter because it's private. It's deep, it's profound, it isn't garish, it isn't making a lot of noise. It's that deep nourishment of the spirit and it frightens me to see so much of the other and so much fanfare and so much money being given to it. And, jeez, I don't know. Another question. Yes, ma'am. Healthy families being able to fight. Well, what I think is that it's so important whether to send your son to religious school and what was the other part of the question? Fighting fair. fighting? Well, I think standards, giving standards is sort of my own inner state. If I have standards, then I model that for children. Children are learning what you're doing and the job of parents is to be models. And the more I model good boundaries, discipline, Scott Peck, It's delaying gratification, telling the truth at any cost, self-responsibility. Boy, if we were modeling that for our kids, see, we don't have to teach them a bunch of rules and regulations. Fighting fair, you're going to come... I'm an unrepeatable diamond in the rough. You're an unrepedable diamond in love. What happens when these two unrepeatables clash? Which they inevitably will do because we're utterly unique. You're not always going to see it my way. I'm not going to say it to you. How do we fight fairly? And we're going to fight. You can't be intimate if you don't have the capacity for conflict. I have couples come in, 18-year marriage. The woman says, I've never been happy in this marriage. He says, what? Quit telling him that. Tell him you have been happy. Now, this woman's been lying to her husband for 17 years, pretending like she's happy when she's not. The capacity for conflict. Well, stay in the now. Be self-responsible. You're only an authority on what's under your skin. I feel real uncomfortable when you dance five times with Farquhar. It looks to me like you're attracted to him. I feel scared. I feel rejected. It taps my abandonment issues. Is there something we can do about that? rather than, who do you think you are dancing with that young boy at your age and as fat as you've gotten? Second one is unfair fighting. First one is I'm just telling the truth. I'm telling you about what's going on in here or I'm confronting you with something that's bothering me. Stay in the now. Argue, you know, fight about what is happening. You know, you're late for dinner at night. You brought your mother to our condo at Padre Island in 1947. I'll never forget that. Don't fight about details. You're 15, I'm 14 minutes late. I just checked my watch. 13 and a half minutes late." See, all of that just gets us. And valuing, if I use iMessages, I feel rejected when I see you staring at that guy. And I understand that you can... If it happened to you in that system, you'll have it happening to you at work. You'll have married somebody and you'll still be in the role. Because remember I said relationships are as much about me as they are the person I marry. If I'm a victim, who am I going to look for for a spouse? How can I play the role of a victim if I don't find an offender? And victims will walk in a room and look around. They'll find the only offender in the room. And offenders will walk into a room. They'll look around and they'll find the only victim in a row. And it's the darndest thing I've ever seen how people will find each other in these roles because we know the rules and it feels right. It feels right. See, what we say here is roles in any family are inevitable. It's appropriate for the father to be in the father role, mother in the mother role, son in the male child role. There are many roles in functional healthy families, spouse, housewife, student. Roles in healthy families define behavior that leave the individuals free to have uniqueness, spontaneity, and feelings. In dysfunctional families, roles can be destructive because they are selected to meet the needs of the system rather than the individual. Roles are mechanisms to maintain balance in the family at the expense of individual uniqueness, spontaneity, and feeling. To become a doctor in my family would have been utterly unique. And I now get it that my not finishing that dissertation was about my family system. remember we do not choose our roles they're imposed