#790 - Vienna Pharaon - How To Overcome A Difficult Childhood

Chris Williamson
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Vienna Faren. She's a licensed marriage and family therapist and an author. Learning to understand yourself can be the most powerful form of self care. It helps you fix bad habits and improve your relationships with others.

But how do you actually begin to understand who you are? And how do you start the process of becoming unstuck? Expect to learn how to reconcile what you needed as a child emotionally, but never actually got where your patterns in life come from. Why people have so much resistance around opening up about their past and their family how to avoid getting stuck wallowing in your history Viennas favourite questions people should ask themselves how you can unwind your patterns and much more ive been loving my cold plunge and sauna from the team over at plunge. I literally use them every single week because the benefits of hot and cold contrast therapy make me feel fantastic.

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Chris Williamson
Thats nomatic.com modernwisdom and MW 20 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire Worlds Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you are using the Internet without a VPN, you are basically dancing in a muddy field without any shoes on. It is not good for you if you use a public wifi network like a library or a cafeteria.

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Connor Williamson
You say that the past is not the past. If it's unresolved, what does that mean? Yes, I've been saying that the unwanted patterns in our adult lives that we can't shake, no matter how much we try, is the irresolution from the past really tugging at our coattails, wanting us to turn back around? And when we don't resolve the things that happened from our past, obviously, I take the. You know, my framework is looking at the family of origin, right?

Vienna Farren
The family system in which we grew up. Even though there's obviously plenty of things outside of that that can contribute to pain and wounds and trauma that we might experience through life. Looking at the family of origin, looking at our family system, is where I like to begin. And for so many of us, there's irresolution there, because as kiddos, when we go through something that's hard, we don't sit down and think at five. Yeah, you know what?

It's good for me to grow, grieve, or you know what? I ought to witness this, right? It's like we white knuckle our way through. We survive our way through. We get to the other side, generally without actually slowing down to process, to experience, to feel.

And so we just move through life, and we will wind up in our adult lives and our adult relationships repeating patterns. I think a lot of us are guilty of that and can raise a hand to that, and we'll be frustrated by it, and we won't understand why we can't shake it or why we can't make the change that we want to, that we say we want to. The promises that we make to ourselves. And for me, through the over 25,000 hours of working with individuals and couples and families, what I see over and over again is that it points directly to the irresolution from our past. How do you describe what family systems is to someone who's not familiar with it?

Yeah, our family system. It sounds like a fancy term for something that should just be as simple as saying our family. And yet we also know that blood related folks are not the only people who contribute to our family system. I remember being in conversation with clients of mine many years ago where they were talking about how after school, they would go to the neighbor's home from 03:00 p.m. until their mother would pick them up around 10:00 p.m.

to was working a night shift. And, you know, it struck me, right, is that. Oh, no, that's a family system, too, right? That is the system in which you are growing up. There's a significant amount of time that is being spent around these humans who are contributing to the framework and the foundation which we understand, how we communicate, how we navigate conflict, what's expected of us, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we look to the significant players in our lives. Sometimes that is our blood. Sometimes that's mom and dad. Sometimes that's a stepparent. Sometimes that's someone that mom dated for eight years who played a significant, but who's no longer a part of our lives.

It might be distant family members who've moved into our home that didn't necessarily start there. And so we're looking at the big players who contributed to the way in which we really understand the foundation and the framework of how we navigate life, how we relate to other people, how we relate to ourselves. We know, as I was saying before, of course, coaches, teachers, society, media, religion, all of those things will affect us and influence us as well. But we really want to look to these formative years and understand these humans, oftentimes adults or siblings who are really shaping our belief system around our own relationship with our sense of worth, our sense of value, our sense of belonging in the world, our sense of, am I a priority to the important people in my life? Can I trust the important people around me?

Am I safe and secure here? How would you categorize that broad bucket of lessons that people are taking from their family system? Is it their place in the world and how they relate to it? Is it something more existential? How do you categorize that sort of block of learning?

Yeah, I think that's right. It's like my place in the world a lot of times, family systems. And I talk about this in the belonging chapter. Sometimes families have this idea of like, this is who we are as a family, this is what we believe, this is how we operate in the world. And if you deviate from that at all, then you're not a part of us.

To be. To be a part of us, to fit in here, to be accepted here. This is the way that we're going to operate in the world. This is the beliefs that we're going to hold. This is how we see other people and how you see yourself.

And it can feel very controlled sometimes. There's beautiful parts to it, of course. And I don't want to sit here and just bash our family. I'm very clear that this isn't a wild goose chase we're not looking for. What did they do that screwed us up?

This is about us really understanding the impact and the effect that maybe we've glossed over before. But in the book, I talk about five wounds, the worthiness wound, belonging, prioritization, trust and safety. And when I sat down to write the book, I was scribbling down what are all of the wounds that humans come in contact with? And I do feel like these five really do honor the human experience. And when you ask that question, it's like we are learning about our worth, about our belonging, about our prioritization, about our trust, about our safety in the world through these people.

And whether it is something that is explicitly stated or whether it's implicit, whether it's through observation or through experience as a kiddo or as a teenager or as a young adult in these systems, it is shaping the way that we do see the world, see other people and see ourselves. And it's good of us to check those beliefs at some point and not just go along with them, because even though they might offer incredible, beautiful messaging along the way, we also know that humans are imperfect and that they're going to get it wrong sometimes. And that there's going to be things that actually do impact us and set us on a particular trajectory that needs to be reassessed and reevaluated, especially if there are things that we look at in our own lives today that we're frustrated by or feel like we haven't been able to really shift in the way that we want to. Why do you think people have so much resistance around opening up about their past, especially their family? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things, I think we're scared of opening up pandora's box and what am I going to find there?

I think a lot of times people hold the belief that our parents did the best that they could, the adults did the best that they could, and, you know, I want to just accept and honor them in that way. A lot of times it can be that their grandparents, right, were way worse. Right. My parents parents were way worse to them. And so I should just be grateful.

There's a lot of sacrifice that maybe we witnessed in the adults in our lives. And so we just think, okay, I shouldn't complain. I think there's a big problem with what I call wound comparison. And so when we see other people have a story that feels far worse. Than ours, who am I to have a problem?

Connor Williamson
Look at how much they've gone through in comparison. How petty and feeble of me to have an issue with this thing when they have that huge behemoth. That's right. You know, and I think that happens so frequently. I also think that we've had an issue with the word trauma.

Vienna Farren
And a lot of times when you hear the word, okay, you had something traumatic happen in your life. So many people check out from the conversation, I didn't have something traumatic. There wasn't anything super big that I can point to. For the folks who do, it can feel very easy to be like, here's the thing that happened. Here's the abuse that I went through.

Here's the thing, you know, my father abandoned me when I was three. You know, it's like, it's very obvious and clear, but we miss out when somebody says, oh, that's not my story. And because that's not my story, I'm not included in this conversation anymore. And for me, it's so important for us to actually expand that. That's why I use the word wounds in my book instead of focusing strictly on trauma.

I think when we think of the word wound, at least for me, it brings me back to my childhood scraping my knee. I fall. I've got a cut. There's a little bit of blood. Someone cleans it up, puts a band aid over it, tells me to air it out, take the band aid off the scabs there.

I bump up against it on the table, and boom, it starts to bleed again. And that's similar in our emotional experiences as well. That there is something. It doesn't mean that my leg had to be cut off and amputated. Doesn't mean that I have to have surgery on it.

Right. There is something that is there that represents, hey, something happened here before. Something happened here before, and it's going to get dinged up against something else from time to time. And wounds can range from, sure, the traumatic things that all of us might think of, but they also might be something like a client of mine who shared with me years after we had been working together, that he would only date women who he had been friends with for a long period of time. And when I inquired about it, he said, you know, when I was in fifth grade, there was a girl I had a big crush on.

And when she found out, the response that she had given was, oh, I would find him cute if he were taller. And I remember how much that moment struck in our session together and how impactful it actually had been for him since fifth grade, where this little message from a fifth grade girl had shifted his trajectory with the way in which he related to his worth. My worth is tied to my height. And so now, as an adult male in the world, I need to become great friends with women so that they can find my value there first, because otherwise they're gonna look over me. Oh, he thinks that he needs a justification, a verification that these women like him.

Connor Williamson
Aside from the immediate, oh, he's so hot. And what, the rest of it, because he has derogated his own sense of attractiveness immediately. Mm hmm. Wow. And I share that story because I think sometimes we miss the subtle moments in our lives, the things that we might throw away, the things that we might say, oh, that's nothing compared to someone who's gone through an abusive childhood.

Vienna Farren
And it's so important that we don't hang out in that comparison space, because what winds up happening is that, one, is a distraction away from our own pain and our own experiences, and two, it is simply just invalidating and minimizing and distorting of what our experience in this world. And so I don't need to make it bigger than it is, but we do need to acknowledge it and honor it for what it is. And again, the way that those moments shift our trajectory. Right. That changed his road in life, that one moment.

Right. So I want us, as we're listening to really think about the expanse of our experiences, right. The things that we want to throw away and say, this shouldn't be something that I make a big deal about versus honoring, you know what? It was a big deal or it is something thats impactful. Yeah.

Connor Williamson
I think this is a sticking point that a lot of people get to. If youre a type a go getter with big dreams, you want to leave it all out on the field of play. You like the idea of being competent and taking agency over your own life. Theres something incredibly disempowering about whats seemingly a small, innocuous memory that you maybe can or cant even recall from 2030 years ago coming up. And you're right.

I think the branding trauma really needs a rebrand because it has been used and over identified and pathologized and kind of bastardized in many ways. And yet these things can shape the way that we move forward. And I think that sitting in this tension between there are things that have affected me, and I don't want to. I don't want them to own me. I don't want them to be.

Almost even by admitting that they have had an impact on me, it reduces my sense of agency and authorship over my own life. I hate that idea. But the bottom line, and this is something that I've kind of come to realize maybe over the last six months, is that these things are affecting you, whether you want to admit it or not. And I don't think that there is anything braver about denying the things that affect you. In fact, I would go as far as to say that facing up to it, and there is bravery in identifying just how small and petty the things from your past have been in affecting you.

Because in order to be able to do that, you need to have the humility to be able to say, this is something I'm ashamed of that has happened even in its microscopic seeming size, and yet I'm going to face up to that. Like that, to me, seems like a very courageous thing to do. It's well said. And I think it's a shift from the belief that it's a disempowerment to a space of empowerment. This idea that if I go there and I have to feel or experience all of this, whatever it is that presents that I am going to be powerless or helpless in this space, I think part of this work is a journey towards empowerment.

Vienna Farren
I think a lot of people, too, will fall back on the idea that what happened to us, what my story is, is how I became who I am today. And I'm not going to argue with you. You're right. It is true that your storyline is what brought you to this moment. And there's a lot of beautiful stuff that's there.

A colleague of mine, Doctor Alexandra Solomon, says, our gifts and our wounds are next door neighbors. Beautiful. So important, right? It's like you're right who you become. The edge that you have, the skillset that is there comes from the hardship.

Your excellence in life is birthed through hardship, except sometimes that can be birthed through a chaotic storyline or one that is contained, one that has an initiation to it. And I think when we sort of mix up this idea that, okay, I hear people say often, well, if I heal, will I lose my edge? Right. If I heal, will I become soft? It is strange, this sort of impulse that people have to protect and defend their childhood and their parents, especially if.

Connor Williamson
Here's a question, actually. Who is the prototypical avatar of someone that comes to you to start thinking about their family? Like, just who's a. An average? Well, right now, at this point in my career, people know the type of work that I do, and so I don't have to really convince many people to be curious about this.

Vienna Farren
Most people don't come in thinking that they're going to talk about their family. They come in because they have a communication problem. They come in because they have heightened conflict in their relationship and they can't find a solution to it. They come in maybe because there's something acute that's going on in their relationship, like an infidelity, or they're dealing with in laws that are difficult and challenging for them, or they're trying to figure out about family planning and trying to have these conversations. Individuals might come in because they keep dating or pursuing the same types of people.

And there's that pattern that keeps showing up. And so people want to talk about the moment that is happening and playing out. Right now, if we rewind to earlier years of my career, what I would say in that first session is, yes, I want to hear about what's happening in your life today, right now, why you're coming in next session. We're going to talk about your family. And they will look at me and think, how come I'm not paying you to go backwards, right?

I'm paying you to go forwards. And my answer will always be, that in order for us to move forward here, we have to look at the past to understand the underpinnings. Right. What's happening in the underbelly of what, what's playing out here right now. And if we just stay focused on the current moment, we're going to have a lot of blocks.

I believe that there are as many different modalities and ways of doing therapy and processing and healing as there are humans on the planet. But what I will stand by is that if you do not look at your past, if you don't ever take a look at your family of origin, there's going to be so much that is missing there. And so whatever pathway you want to take, beautiful, whatever aligns for you, whatever works for you, whatever language resonates with you, wonderful. And also, we must look at the family of origin. We're not going to stay there, we're not going to hang out there forever.

But we have to have an understanding of the family system, what you saw, what you experienced, and how that shapes the way that you're showing up in your relationships or you're dating or whatever it might be today. I think on top of the minimization of that wasn't such a big deal. The girl that made a passing comment to me in fifth grade, why should I be so. Both? How petty and weak and vulnerable am I to still be concerned about that?

Connor Williamson
I think another element, especially when it comes to our parents, is that something tells me not many of your clients are in their twenties. I think that in your twenties, you've still got this carryover from the rebelliousness, the independence that you wanted as a teenager, and you're breaking out into the world and things are going well or badly, and your patterns are there, but you haven't done the patterns sufficient times for it to be a pattern. These are just like individual instances that arise. And maybe there's kind of a bit of a line, but certainly for me, looking at my friends, who are usually most of them in their thirties and some in their forties, there's a different challenge. Which is, well, I'm not a child anymore, and maybe mum and dad are a bit older and everything's in an okay place now, at least functionally, relationally, between us.

I'm no longer dependent on them. I don't need their validation or whatever. So what you're asking me to do, misses therapist, is reopen for them, potentially closed wound, one which they don't even really see. So I'm gonna, like, cause an issue in a thing that doesn't have an issue in order to fix a thing. That's for me, there's this sort of sense of, you know, maybe like narcissism or this odd prioritization of myself.

You know, maybe mum and dad don't have many years left and God, well I've got to try and like bring this up, open it up. Maybe they haven't done the self work to be able to deal with it and then bring it into land and close it off without them going to the grave thinking that they were terrible parents. That has to be a huge challenge, people. It is. And I think part of it though is that we don't actually need to use them in this process.

Vienna Farren
We don't have to. And there's a part that is protective and we, and we ought to be, right. We ought to actually be considerate. Sometimes people will say, you know, we have parents who are, who are in their eighties, right? They're in their final chapter of life, right?

If I were to bring this up, what would happen is that it would become so destabilizing to this individual, right. To my, to my parent that feels dangerous, hurtful, harmful, maybe even to do. And gosh, we will work tirelessly at having to avoid what it is that needs to be addressed. I say that very lovingly and it's not to minimize the reasoning. I think we can sit here and come up with plenty of reasons in which it would not be a great idea to do the thing that you just described us doing.

And yet we also have to be accountable. The alternative is what? You never address it. You continue to be in destructive patterns in your life. You continue to feel frustrated with your life.

You continue to say life is really unfair and there's nothing I can do about it. We don't have to hate the people. We don't have to destroy and blow up those relationships. We don't have to walk down that path. And there also might be moments where when we visit some of this, we do feel emotion.

We experience something that is significant, that's lied dormant for a while because we haven't addressed it. And that might shift our relationship with the adults, the parents in our lives. And I know that that can be really intimidating sometimes people don't even want to do this work until a parent is deceased. And, and also some of the people who are listening right now might have parents who are deceased already. And what does it mean to address this without having the possibility of even being able to talk to them about it?

Or am I going to change the way that I see them and relate to them and they're not even hearing to be able to express something or have a conversation with me, right. There's endless examples and ways that this can be such a challenge. But what I always come back to is that the alternative is that we stay stuck. The alternative is that we don't acknowledge our story. The alternative is that we don't honor the experiences that we went through, and we don't actually have an opportunity to witness and to grieve and to begin to make these shifts and changes that we actually desire for our lives and for our relationships.

And so we have to find a very tender, sometimes slow process, compassionate, contextual. One of the things that I say right at the end of the book that I think is really important for people to hear is, and this is an offering from a psychotherapist, Michael Kerr, who says they want you to think of your mother as your grandmother's daughter and see how that perspective shifts. And I think it's a beautiful offering. And for some people, that might be deeply confronting to hear that, but to remember that every single one of us was a tiny human, likely in an imperfect and flawed system, family system, that there were many challenges that we all faced. And so even if we become angry, even if we become rageful towards someone, that we are still holding compassion and grace and the complexity and the context that is important for us to navigate these waters well, because I, again, I don't need you to hate anyone.

I don't need you to destroy and blow up a relationship. That's why context can be very important. But I also don't need you to excuse behavior. I don't need there to be an absence of accountability, ownership, responsibility. And we're really trying to find a way to walk that line in a way that allows us to honor our story without it necessarily meaning that all of our relationships burn.

Connor Williamson
How frequently is it effective for the people that you work with? How often do they need to speak to the people from their past in order to be able to really deal with these patterns? I don't think it actually is as frequent as one might think. I think a lot of times there's a lot of limitations and constraints that we do find with our parents, that generation. And probably the message that I receive most from people is the frustration that there's defensiveness or there's reasoning, or they just can't get it.

Vienna Farren
And so what I find, actually, is that so much of our healing is about being witnessed by someone who can do the witnessing, which has its own grief to it, because so many of us will say, but I just desperately want the person who put the pain there in the first place to be the one who's going to acknowledge it and witness it. And sometimes there's blocks, sometimes there's constraints. Sometimes they cannot do that for loads of different reasons. But that's not the thing that allows us to have healing. Thank goodness, right?

Thank goodness they're not the gatekeeper of that. We'd be all lost if they were. But to have other humans in our lives who can do the witnessing. I remember there was a frustrating pattern in loop that I would experience with a family member and over and over and over again. And one day I had my phone on speaker.

My husband, who you've had on the show, Connor was listening. He was in the room. He wasn't trying to lit, but he's there. He's listening to it all go down. And I remember getting off the phone so frustrated at the end of it, and I heard him go, I see what you're talking about.

And this was early on in the relationship, I remember and I understand. I see what you're talking about in this really heartfelt way, in this really grounded, present way. I remember. And it turned into a conversation after that. But I remember how powerful, how potent it was to have someone else, someone I love, someone I trust, someone I value, say I see you, I comprehend what it is that you have gone through time and time again.

And I remember how much that shifted. It was like a switch went off that said, I don't actually need this person to get it anymore. Because having someone who loves me and cares about me, with whom I feel safe and secure, whether it's trust, say I see you and I comprehend, was enough for me to release the need to try to control the dynamic anymore. Is a good bit of that. The fact that it almost gives you justification that you're not crazy like that, you're not being unreasonable in your assessment of whatever's happened, because someone else who didn't go through that childhood is like.

Connor Williamson
Actually, yeah. I think that your evaluation of what you've told me is accurate based on even the small. That's right. You're an only child as well, aren't you? I'm an only child.

Vienna Farren
Which plays into this, certainly. Yes, that's me as well. Yeah. Okay. Right.

So maybe you could relate a little bit to this, but I. Yes, there's a. I respect and I trust you husband partner at the time. Right. And to have someone I respect and trust.

Tell me, because I also know that you'll tell me what I wrong. So I know that I'm crazy enough time for me to believe when you say that I'm not right. Exactly. And so there is something that's deeply validating about it. And to your point, to the only children out there where you didn't have siblings or you didn't, my parents also didn't remarry after they went through their nine year divorce process, which I don't know if we'll get into, but I didn't have any other adults in the home ever who would look at me and give me the nod or the woman or the eye or the whatever to say, hey, I see you, or hey, I can understand what's happening here.

I was this tiny little human in a really chaotic system that was trying to figure out a lot of things. And I also grew up with a father who was very manipulative, would gaslight a lot, was psychologically abusive. And so there was a lot of tracking, not to me, but to my mother. And so there was a lot of tracking that I had to do. What is real?

What is true? Is anybody else seeing this or am I the only one that's seeing him? And I was really the only one who was seeing it because he was so good at it. I sometimes think about a team child and team adult, and unfortunately, if you're isolated as a child, or maybe your younger brother or older brother is eleven years apart from you, so you kind of are an only child, at least in this regard. Team child will always lose.

Connor Williamson
It will always lose because you don't know how the world works. So you just take for granted. Oh, this is the physics of the system. This is I was in the wrong. You, I think a lot of the time subjugate your own sense making and outsource it to other people because there is no one else to back you up.

When you say I, not too sure if that's right. You don't even have any. If you're having the argument with the person, they're not going to help you sense make. Whether or not you were right. They've told you that you're wrong and upstairs you go.

So, yeah, I think one of the other things that a lot of people will struggle with, I know that I do this. I don't have that many memories of childhood, certainly not before, sort of like 1112 ish. It's not a total amnesia, but many of my friends that have got brothers and sisters, they use each other as reference points and way more. Oh, do you remember when we went to that hill and we got the ice cream and someone spilled it down their shirt and said, oh, oh, fuck, yeah, I do remember that. Right, but you don't have that relational memory bank thing going on.

So what happened? We're talking about unpicking the patterns of the past, looking at how the experiences that we've had have shaped us. What do you do if you don't have that many memories? Right. It's a great question because I think a lot of people will resonate and relate to this.

Vienna Farren
And you have to remember that sometimes part of why we can't access something is because it is too much for our system to access it. Right. It's a protective strategy that we do. So when we're thinking about origin stories, yeah. We are thinking about the first time in which the way that we relate to our worth and our belonging, etcetera, etcetera, as we go down, the list of wounds has been ruptured and how it's been changed.

But if we can't go back that far, then we go to the last time. Right. Then we go to a time, right. Then we go to something that allows us to connect to an experience that we have contact with. And I think that's very important is that sometimes people get lost.

And I've also heard people be like, well, I can't find anything at three, four and five, and then we'll have more of a conversation, and then they share. But then I stumbled upon my dad's affair at 13, but you know that. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, slow down. There it is. You know, and sometimes people, like, when they think about childhood, they're thinking about a particular age.

And when I think about origin stories, I think about any moment that does predate this one right now. And of course, we are journeying further back most of the time, but it's the first time that we can connect to an experience that changed the way that we related to our worthiness and belonging and safety and trust and prioritization. And so we start there. We start where it is available. The beauty is that we don't need memories all the time, right?

Our body holds so much. It's the was on the show literally yesterday. Okay, so. So we'll run off of one another here, right? It's like we don't actually need to have the memories.

We don't need to recollect. Recollect, you know, all of the details. In fact, a lot of times that can be re traumatizing for us. And we don't want to move into that space. And so we want to actually tune in, into what we're noticing inside of our bodies when we're talking about something.

Connor Williamson
Or just before we move into the wounds themselves and how people can identify them. There will be a good chunk of people listening, maybe a lot of guys who are sort of hearing this idea about stuff from their past that's affecting them and it feels disempowering or sort of like weak and vulnerable and fragile, and they don't want that. They don't want to have that. How would you help bring these guys into land gently and say, look, like this is something that you can and should do and it's not disempowering. You said it so well before, where you talked about the bravery that it does take to actually look at this and address it.

Vienna Farren
And I think I would piggyback off of that when you're so clear on the message, which I am, because I've worked with so many people at this point in my career, and I've worked with a lot of successful men and analytical men and people who want to stay up in their heads and are worried about going into that place. And I think sometimes when your message is very clear and you're direct about how important this work is, that can be an invitation for people to at least humor you and go on the journey for a little bit. It, when you do that, though, I think it's so important, and I said this before, you're not going to lose your edge. You're not going to lose your gifts. This isn't about you entering into weakness.

This is about you entering into your power. You are disempowered when you do not address this period. There's no way around it. You can create the illusion all you want, but there's no way around it. You are not in your highest power.

Whatever you want to call it, whatever language works for you. You are not in that position when your past is dictating what you do, how you respond, how you're reacting, what's going on. What you're choosing is not you running the show. You're not running the show as much as you think you are. And I think that's a.

I mean, that's a good invitation. You're not running the show. Do you want to run the show or not? Right. You think you're running the show, but if there's stuff that's playing out that you can't change that you're frustrated by you're not running the show.

And so I think there's this beautiful invitation to say, let's run the show. Okay. But in order to run the show, we have to do some of this work, and we'll go at a good pace and we'll check in and all the things, but that's, that's what we have to do. If you actually want to create the life and the relationship that you say you want, is that a good selling point? I think it's okay.

Connor Williamson
I mean, look, if you want to get guys on board with something, positing it as half challenge, half performance enhancer is a very strong marketing angle. Okay, so let's go through the five wounds. Let's explain those. Okay, so, worthiness, who here is a performer, pleaser, perfectionist, comic relief. Right?

Vienna Farren
What? One of the things that when we're in, when we learn that love, connection, attachment, validation, affirmation, peace in the home is connected to our ability to show up, to perform in a particular way, then we learn conditional love. It says, if I get the straight a's, if I score the hat trick, if I look a certain way, if I can make mom laugh, if I can make dad less angry, then I get the outcome that I want. So when there's conditions to love and connection and attachment, we learn that our worth is predicated on that. So a lot of times, again, and this is where our gifts and our wounds our next door neighbors, because we know that the perfectionists out there have a lot of assets and skill sets that we really admire and we respect and, you know, look good to the outside world.

But we do want to understand how that is getting in the way of our sense of worthiness. Right. Our sense of value. Am I worthy in value without the performance? Am I worthy in value without the perfectionism?

Am I worthy in value with that? Valuable without needing to please everybody at the expense of myself? Yeah. And, you know, obviously with worthiness too, like a statement of heart. Some of us grew up with adults who said, you're a piece of shit.

You have no value to the, to society. You shouldn't have been born. Right. These are abusive statements, obviously, but they. So they hang out in the safety wound as well.

But statements of harm will absolutely impact our sense of worthiness. I have a worthiness wound. I shared a little bit about my father, but one of the things that was deeply impactful was that when I presented in the way that he wanted me to present, good girl, whatever that looked like, you know, not not challenging of him. He was so helpful, so wonderful, so available when I was difficult, that is challenging of him. The way that I was punished was through silent treatment, and that would happen for days or weeks on end.

And very quickly I learned, and this is compounded on an earlier part of my story, but I learned very quickly, that to have accessibility, right. To have someone who is available for me, to have somebody who is connected to me and loving towards me, means that my worth and my value is predicated on my ability to just go along and be fine and be unaffected and just be the cool girl. That's what it turned into as an adult and as a child was, okay, just be the good girl, be the good daughter, what he wants you to do, and you'll get what it is that you need. Yeah. I think for a lot of over performers, high performers, this is one of the most common patterns that you're going to see.

Connor Williamson
Love, acceptance, praise, belonging, worthiness, all come from me being able to offer something in return, whether it's subjugating my desires and putting myself first, whether it's not making a noise or upsetting the parents, whether it's performing and. And coming first in the sports game, whether it's getting a's in school, whatever it might be. Yeah. And this is, you know, probably a really good example of what you were saying to do with the things we're most proud of and the things we're most ashamed of, being next door neighbors, that the correlation between these two things feels almost direct. Right.

And, you know, there's this great question. Does the world love you for who you are or for what you do? Then the more difficult version of that is, do you love you for who you are or for what you do? Because a lot of the time, we're asking the world to show up for us in a way that we're not prepared to show up for ourselves. We want the world to love us for who we are, not for our accomplishments, not for whether we're clever or funny or smart or successful or rich.

And then we castigate ourselves when we fall short of our own high standards. So, world love me for who I am, self love me for what I do. It's like. It's so. It's such a common pattern, and, yeah, this is.

This is one, I think, that'll resonate with a lot of people. Yeah. The worthiness wound is, I think when I was writing about it, I was like, I think every human on the planet probably rubs up against a worthiness wound at some point. In our lives. And obviously for some folks, it's going to be more, you know, primary and predominant.

Vienna Farren
But I think many of us, potentially all of us, will rub elbows with it at some point. The belonging wound, there is a gabor mate talks about how as a child, the two lifelines, the two things that we need are attachment and authenticity. But when attachment is threatened, we will trade authenticity for it every single time. We must. We have to.

And so when you have a family system that requires you to show up in a particular way and sort of what I was saying before, this is how we do things. This is what we believe. You have to be one of us in order to belong here, right? Otherwise I'm going to either try to control you into it or I'm going to push you away or I'm going to ignore you or I'm going to pretend like you're not here, right? But it's like it's the black sheep in the family a lot of the time, right?

And it's so sad, right? Because when we are kiddos, we will trade our authenticity every single time for that attachment, for that closeness, for that safety, for that connection, and we lose. Okay, I'll be a little less this, I'll be a little more that. I will believe the way that you believe because this is what the adult is telling me to do. And so it must be true, or at least is the only way.

It is the lifeline for me to get the acceptance and the love and the praise or whatever it is. And so, yeah, we look at who did you need to be in order to fit in? Is very. It's different than a sense of belonging, but it's, you know, when we look at kiddos and we look at them at school systems and with friends, right, it's like life or death, I must fit in, right? And it's true, life or death, I must fit into my family when I am a kiddo.

Because otherwise the alternative is I don't get fed, I don't have shelter, I'm not okay in the world. And so there's a lot of trading that happens. And so when we look at ourselves as adults, how are we trading our authenticity still today? Right? Yeah.

Connor Williamson
I think the adaptive reason of you as a homo sapien infant is so reliant on your family around you, you are completely helpless without them. So of course you're going to subjugate what you want in place of them. Wanting you always, every single time. And there's a point where it'll change, right? The rebel comes out at some point where they're like, screw you.

Yep. Hate you. Absolutely. Yeah. Once we hit those preteen and teen years, right, where it's like, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of what you are requiring of me.

Correct. I mean, even that. That has its roots in being adaptive as well. Right? Like you want to learn what am I outside of my family?

Because if you've gone through a westermark window, you don't want to have sex with any of your family. You actually are actively being like two and north ends of a magnet. You're being pushed apart from that. You're testing the boundaries. What does it mean to be an independent person?

All of these things make complete evolutionary adaptive sense. But one of my friends has got a daughter who's 14, one that's 16 and one that's like twelve, something like that. And he said that there is a day and no one tells you about this as a father, but there is a day when you stop being their hero and start being the least cool guy in the room. And that is a sad realization, I think, for many, especially dads, because I think mum will maybe have a different kind of relationship than dad's. Maybe a bit more of the disciplinarian.

He's the one that's kind of saying yes and no and all the rest of it. But yeah, that's the typical trajectory. You're going to subjugate that and these patterns are going to continue into adulthood. Even if you've managed to be the rebel in your teenage years, this sort of need for belonging is going to reappear, right? Because even if you're the rebel, it doesn't solve the problem.

Vienna Farren
But you still feel far away from people. And I think that's, you know, that piece of, you know, taking a path of adaptation or taking a path of rejection. Later on in the book, I talk about path of repetition or path of opposition. No matter which way you go, you're not integrated. You know, it's like that's the.

That's the problem, right? It's like you'll test the boundaries and you'll take this path and you're like, no one will control me, right? And that could still show up today. No one will control me. And yet what does that do to your relationships?

What does that do to connection and intimacy and closeness? Is that. That's why we have to go back and do the reparative work and the resolution work so that we can actually integrate and move forward in a way that allows for connection and closeness and intimacy in our lives and our relationships. Prioritization wound, pretty simple. A lot of these are straightforward and what you think they are, but, okay, what could it look like?

And I think, you know, prioritization for me is, you know, you don't feel important to the important people in your life. And how, what ways might this show up? A parent who's a workaholic, addiction is in the household, a sibling who has a mental health challenge. That takes a lot of the energy from the parents, and they're focused there it can be. And I always share this story with the prioritization wound because a lot of times when we're thinking about wounds, we're like, oh, you know, the parent is not doing their best.

Mal intended in some way. And I share a story about Andre. That's azalea in the book, who loved and respected. He has a single mama, loves her, respects her, admires her so much. She's working multiple jobs, doubles every day except on Sundays.

They go to church together, have brunch together afterwards. That's the time that they get. And he could sit there and rationalize in session. My mom is doing everything in the world to prioritize me. Look at how hard she's working.

She's trying to give me a better life. And I see that, and I honor that, and I respect that. And it took a lot of work for us to get to a place to say, but I crave prioritization through time spent with her, and that's just not available. And so we don't need to say, oh, look at this mal intended parent. Look at this negligent parent who didn't do x, Y and Z.

Here's a woman who's doing everything she possibly can to provide for her son and to give him a beautiful life and opportunity. And I can still have a wound. That's. I mean, that's such a difficult acknowledgement that it is. We can have been wounded even when our parents were trying their best.

Yeah. And it's important that we name it, because otherwise, again, we bow out of this conversation. They did their best. Look at how much they sacrificed. I don't have a right to experience and feel what is there.

And that's why I always say, we don't have to hate them. We don't have to throw them under the bus. We don't have to badger them. We don't have to do any of that. We can honor and love and respect them and the beautiful word and honor our experience, connect to our experience to name that, we felt a sense of deprioritization through something that was really important to us.

Right. And so some of the ways that that might show up is choosing partners who also deprioritize us today. Maybe we operate in the world where we're prioritizing every single person around us at the expense of ourselves, because that's the way we're trying to model the type of behavior that we hope will be reciprocated to us. So there's a lot of different ways that it might show up. Maybe we are deprioritizing people in our lives as an unconscious attempt for them to get, to feel and connect and understand what it was like for us growing up.

Connor Williamson
Safety. Safety. When we're talking about the absence of safety, we are often talking about the presence of abuse. It's a very tender wound, and one that we have to just be very careful with as we sort of move through, whether it's physical, sexual, emotional, mental, financial. We're talking about recklessness.

Vienna Farren
We're talking about negligence in this space, right. There is a lot of. Yeah, there's a lot of trauma that can show up in this wound, especially we. And this is true with the trust wound and the safety wound. A lot of times they go hand in hand, right.

When there is an absence of safety, there's often an absence of trust. And when there's an absence of trust, there's often an absence of safety is that it turns us into hyper vigilant individuals scanning our environments. I was a scanner with a psychologically abusive father, manipulator, someone who was so quick with his words, someone who I saw destroy the psyche of someone I cared about and loved very much. Much. I became a scanner and an observer where nothing would get past me.

And there is also a skillset to that, of course. In fact, it makes me pretty good at my job. But I remember, and I think this message is a very important one for all of the wounds. I'll bring my relationship back into the conversation here. I remember being in conflict with my partner.

This was before we were engaged, and I don't know what we were fighting about. But what I do remember is that I couldn't stop proving my point, doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down. It just couldn't stop. And there Connor is saying, babe, I got it. I hear you.

I understand. I got it. And I keep going and going and going, and I have an out of body moment. I'm looking in, listening in Vienna. Shut up.

Let's just stop talking. And I couldn't. And I keep going and going, and finally I have a pause and a moment, and then I go into the shame spiral. But very quickly I move out of shame and I move into curiosity. And I think this is an important message, that our job, when we're doing this work, is to bring curiosity forward.

Because if you keep shame or guilt or embarrassment or any of that stuff front and center, we're going to lose the thread. You must bring curiosity forward. And so I did. And listen, it's a skill set that I have because this is the work that I do. So I bring curiosity forward and I ask the question, what does needing to prove my point and be right serve?

What is it trying to protect me from? And I'll offer that question to every single person who's listening to us today. What is this behavior, this unwanted behavior, this thing that I can't stand about myself, this thing that brings shame forward or embarrassment forward or guilt forward? What is it trying to protect me from? We, all of us, all of our behavior make sense when we understand the context.

It doesn't have to always make sense in the moment, but the context is historical. Right. There's a story here that is going to make my behavior, my reactivity, my need to protect myself in a particular way, make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I didn't have to journey very far to connect to and understand that when I watched that play out between my father and my mother, what I was able to code is that being right, being manipulative with your word, right, being right, proving your point, showing that you were ahead of the other person, was safety, because the alternative, not being right, not being able to keep up, was unsafety. And I walked through life needing to be right and needing to prove my point as a way to protect myself and as a way to feel safe in the world.

Now, there's a lot of compassion that I have for that young girl and for that woman who had to operate in the world that way. And also there's accountability and responsibility and ownership that says, well, great, I've connected some dots here and it all makes sense. But also, if I continue to behave this way in the world, that's going to be destructive to my relationship. And I can't just say, hey, here's why it makes sense. Hey, here's, yeah, it's not a whole pass.

Connor Williamson
It's not a whole pass to behave and keep these patterns going. That's right. But I think it's so important for us where we feel stuck, or where we feel that frustration, where we feel that rub to ask that question or to ask that question of our partners too. Hey, I see this part of you. What about this part is trying to protect you from something, right?

I mean, when somebody else brings things up, I think the ability to sit with that discomfort and not feel like you've been accused or to not sort of shy away. I was having a conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and they mentioned any time that I say that there's a difficulty, anytime that I'm dealing with something, it is always immediately followed up with the sentence, but it's okay. But it's okay. But I'll be okay. It's okay.

It's fine. It's a sort of minimization of like, don't make a fuss. It's not. Something needs to be done. Done.

And they said, well, look, you can just not be okay. It's okay to not be okay in that way. And you don't need to always try and manage how this lands for me. You don't need to make yourself unhappy. Trying to not make me unhappy.

Vienna Farren
Right. You're allowed to sort of lean on people. Yes. And without us going into a Chris. Therapy session here, that's in an hour and a half.

Yeah. Right. It's like we might explore any role that you had where you were some type of emotional caretaker or protector of other people in your life. And how beautiful to have friends in your life who can reflect something back to you and say, hey, man, this is something that I notice. And that would be the hope in partnership too, right?

That there's enough safety, there's enough security, that there's enough trust and love, which I know is not always the case. And I know sometimes these conversations really don't feel like there's space and availability for them. But the hope would be that we get to that place so that in these moments and it. Listen, it's an art form to know when to bring something up. There's a lot of times you ask that question and your partner might say, f you.

I don't, not ready to go there right now, but to when, I think when we're not in conflict is our most ideal moments to inquire about this with ourselves and with the people we really care about and love, where there's not activation, where we're not dysregulated, where we can just sit and say, okay, here's this thing that I notice. Here's this pattern that keeps showing up. What is this behavior trying to protect you from and serve. What's familiar about it. I love that question.

What's familiar about it? Because if we dove in right, maybe we would find a period in your life where being that emotional caretaker and protector and. And, you know, the gatekeeper for someone was something that you had to be or something you realize and observed should have been somewhere in a relationship with parents, siblings, whomever. And that becomes access points for us to dive deeper and begin some of that healing work and having those conversations and understanding its impact and its effect on you and what it was like for you, and then why that behavior continues to show up today. Like your friend is saying, I don't need you to protect me.

In so many words, I don't need you to protect me. I got it. You can bring it here and it's okay. Yeah. What is the difference between safety and trust?

Safety is about. So trust ruptures. I know we sort of skipped over that one. Trust ruptures will. There's the big stuff that I think many of us think about, like an infidelity or an affair.

It might be a parent who gambled away an education fund or someone who took out a credit card in your name when you were a kid. But it can also be some of the subtler stuff, like making promises repeatedly and not following through family secrets that have either been kept from you or you've been expected to keep from somebody in the family. Trust ruptures are really hard to come back from as our safety ones. Safety really challenges your. That you feel honored, respected, secure in the world and in your relationships around you.

That your best interest is kept in mind, that the adults in your life are considering you and your experience and that they are keeping you safe, whether it's physical safety, sexual safety, emotional safety, and so forth. Trust ruptures, I can count on you. And again, you can see where there's a lot of blending of the two. One of the things that's probably important to say here is that we don't fit into buckets. So a storyline doesn't then point an arrow to a wound.

It's how you internalize the experience. So, for example, a parent abandoned you when you were four or five years old for someone, they're going to internalize that as a worthiness wound. You left because I wasn't good enough for you to stick around for somebody else. They're going to internalize it as a trust wound. You left, and now I can't trust important people in my life to be here for me right.

So you're not look, oh, do I fit in this bucket? Do I fit in that bucket? No. This is about how you experience something and how it shapes the way that you then relate in the world. And as you're essentially pointing out, so many of these wounds kind of feel very close to one another.

You're like, is it prioritization? Is it worthiness? And that's for you to identify a name for yourself. That's for you to really understand and acknowledge the way that it got internalized for you and the way that it shifted the way that you relate to some of these wounds. You have a knack for prompting people to ask themselves questions that are very uncomfortable.

Connor Williamson
Can we go through some of your favorite uncomfortable questions to ask yourself? One of the ones from earlier on, when a pattern arises or when something arises, what is familiar about this? But what are some of the other best prompts? Someone needs something to make themselves vomit under their journal. Okay.

Vienna Farren
One that made me vomit the first time that I heard it was, what is something that you wanted or needed as a child and didn't get?

And I really challenge you to not brush through that or to not give an answer. And then a rationalization. Put a period at the end of the sentence. You know what it could sound like, oh, my mom was the breadwinner, so she was gone a lot, and, you know, but that's because she needed to provide for us. What if you just said, I felt deprioritized, period.

We don't need to protect everybody in our journal entries, right? Like, put that down. See if you can put it down. See if you might just be able to acknowledge what you needed, what you craved, that you didn't get, and put a period at the end of that sentence.

When we and I went down this path a little bit. But I think there's. It can be uncomfortable because it means that it offers ourselves compassion. And I think we struggle with offering ourselves compassions. I think compassion.

I think that many of us have an internal dialogue that is quite vicious, that if other people heard it, they would be taken aback. It might even veer on abusive at times. Truly, right. That the way that we speak to ourselves sort of in the quiet is really quite awful. And so to offer ourselves compassion, I think, can be very, very confronting.

And so when I was saying, okay, look at something that you criticize about yourself. Look at something that you can't stand. Look at the part of yourself that you hate or find undesirable, or maybe somebody has offered you feedback that has said, this part of you is hard to be around. And then I want you to try to find, one, the way that that part is trying to protect you from something, and two, where it is, you might be able to offer it compassion. Now, compassion does not mean an excuse of behavior.

It does not mean that you're not going to take accountability, ownership, responsibility, but that we must bring forward a sense of compassion when we're doing this work. You can't heal from a self critical place. You can only heal from a self compassionate place place, period. You can't self criticize your way to the other side. It might make you run faster sometimes, but it's not gonna help you heal.

Connor Williamson
It's a potent fuel, but one that's toxic. Okay, give me one more question. One more vomity question.

Vienna Farren
I don't know that this will be vomiting, but I think, where am I most reactive in my life and with who? Whom? That's going to point an arrow to your resolution. Reactivity is the neon sign that says, hello. Hey, hi, over here.

We have to look here. Your reactivity will indicate where you need to go. And so, again, I don't know that that's necessarily vomiting, but I think it's something that says, here is the direct line into your work. Go there. All right.

Connor Williamson
So people that are listening have identified some of their wounds. There's also a test that you can take on your website that will help people to work out exactly who they are. What does origin healing look like? Where do we even start? Okay, we have to acknowledge it first, which, based on our conversation here so far, we recognize can sometimes be some of the most challenging pieces of this work.

Vienna Farren
Right? Is to even say, hey, I have a wound. Hey, I struggle with worthiness. Hey, I struggle with prioritization and understanding, maybe where the origins of that is. But, yeah, we have to identify, name, acknowledge that that is there.

The next two parts of the origin healing process is about witnessing and grieving. They go hand in hand. I often say when stuck, grieve more, experience more, feel more. It means that when we can't get unstuck, we haven't acknowledged, honored, addressed something that is asking for us to address it. I think I started our conversation today to some degree, saying, you know, if.

If pain could speak, what I think it would say to us is, I'm not here to destroy your life. I'm not trying to ruin you, but I am going to keep presenting patterns for you because you're not turning around and looking at me. And so the only way I can catch your attention is by presenting patterns that are distressful enough for you to need to turn back, back around. So again, I'm not here to ruin your life. I'm not cynically rubbing my hands together, laughing at you.

I am tugging at your coattail so that you can turn back around. Because I, pain, would like to be seen and acknowledged and felt by you because it didn't happen before, right? What we said before was, you know, when we're kiddos, when we're going through it, we are white knuckling our way through. We are surviving our way through. We are not pausing.

We are not connecting to what the experience is. We are just getting to the other side. And then we're adults who don't actually go back to those moments to address the pain, right? So pain would say, hey, could you look around here and spend a little bit of time with me? And I promise once you do, I'm going to release the grip.

That's the beauty. I don't need to cling to you anymore, right? If you just addressed me and spent a little bit of time with me, I don't need to cling to you anymore. So I think if pain could speak, that is a version of what it might say to us and invite us into that space. The witnessing and the grieving.

I think we do this with ourselves. We do this with trusted people in our lives. Maybe there is a partner, maybe there is a therapist, maybe there is a coach, maybe there is a dear friend like the one that you were talking about who maybe sees us very clearly. Witnessing is. It's such a huge part of healing.

It feels hard to heal without being witnessed because most of us want so badly to have someone get it. As we were saying before, see me. I'm not crazy, right? Do you understand what's happened here? And so to practice witnessing, one of the things that I take the reader through, and again, I'll share a little bit of my own.

My story. My parents went through a nine year divorce process. At the time, it was the longest in the state of New Jersey. And no, I don't wear it as a badge of honor, but I still quite remarkable. And as a tiny human only child going through that, it was a lot to see.

There was gaslighting, manipulation, psychological abuse, conflict, you know, just to the ends and back. And one of the things that I did to survive, especially around the manipulation and gaslighting, was I would perch myself atop of the stairs at my mom's home. And there was a little sort of opening where I could listen in. I also got really good at picking up the second phone line upstairs in both of their homes when they were yelling at each other. I pick it up because I knew they couldn't hear the click.

And I would listen in on their conversations to know what was true, because I couldn't really decipher that otherwise. And what was really important for me when I was doing this work for myself was to see her. I was like seven, eight, nine years old when this was going on. To see a seven year old having to sit by herself in a bedroom or at the top of the stairs and to listen in so that she could have a sense of what to believe or what to trust or what to know was true or not true, because who knew what was going to be said to me is really sad. You know, when you have that image, I think it evokes something for many of us listening.

It's like to see a kiddo having to do that in order to create some sense of trust or safety for themselves is not something that a child should need to do. And the witnessing was actually, for me, closing down my eyes and really just making contact with that younger version of myself who was there sort of hearing this and trying to digest it and making contact with her and just noticing and being like, that's so awful that you had to do that. And I think grief is the authentic expression of emotion. Our experience when we are doing the witnessing, what's there, sometimes it's tears, sometimes it's not. It can look a whole heck of a lot of different ways.

There's no right way to do this. But there is something about making contact with the part of us that had to do things or had to survive in a certain way that wasn't appropriate it. And to see it, to honor it, to witness it, to bear witness to it, right. And to make contact with it in that way. And as we grieve, right.

There's something that does shift. There's something that moves through us, right? And really in a. I think there's like a physical sensation almost that we can feel if you've ever had that practice before. And when that moves, there's a space that begins to open.

And the third part of my book, I talk about boundaries and communication and conflict, and why this work is so important for that work is there's a quote that is attributed to Viktor Frankl about between stimulus and response, there is a space. And when you do this work, when you witness and grieve, what happens is the space between stimulus and response starts to extend.

I see myself, I know myself, I have compassion for myself. I understand what's happening here. I know what's familiar here. Right? The more that we understand this, the more that we connect to this, the more that that space grows.

And when that space grows, it moves us from a place of survival to a place of choice.

Connor Williamson
Corey Allen calls it the mindfulness gap. And he says yes, in between stimulus and response is your opportunity to make a different sort of decision. Okay, so when it comes to conflict, communication and boundaries, how does everything that we've learned so far help us to fix and change that sort of behavior? Where we have to look at where we struggle with boundaries, conflict, communication. And something might come up very clearly for, for those listening right now.

Vienna Farren
Oh, here's where I struggle with it. Or here's, you know, I am a passive aggressive communicator, or I am porous in my boundaries, meaning I will prioritize connection over protection every single time, no matter what, because that is my lifeline. But what it means is that I'm not very protected. Or what it means with communication is that I never actually get to say what it is that I need to say because I just don't know how to get it out. And we behave in all of these different ways, again, as a form of self protection, as we said before.

So again, we're understanding, okay, this behavior is protective of me in some way. And also I know that it's not going to allow for me to have the types of relationships that I want, whether it's friendship, romantic, whatever it might be, whether it's with my children. Okay, fill in the blank. So when we do this work and we extend that pause, we extend that gap, then we have the opportunity to choose differently, to not choose from a wounded place where I need to protect myself, but to choose from a relationally protective place. This is a big shift that's so important.

Most of us operate in the world with self protection. To move from self to relational protection is what happens here. And when we go to relational protection does not mean thou that self is not protected. We're not trading something. We can still be protected as self.

But I am also caring about the experience of the other. I have capacity to care for the experience of the other, right? And when I have that space, because ideally, when we're doing this work and we're doing it relationally, that somebody, our partner or our friend or whatever, is that they're also doing that work too. And so I see myself compassionate, compassionately I see you compassionately. And so, in that space, we are choosing differently.

I'm going to make choices that are going to lead me to my goals. Healthier communication, a different way of navigating conflict, setting boundaries that. Okay, I disappoint you, and I'm. I'm aware of that, and I. Sure you have an experience of that.

And also, I just need to honor that. I need to go to bed early tonight or whatever it might be. Yeah. And so we're in this space where we are honoring the relationship without it being at the expense of ourselves. Boundaries is an interesting one.

Connor Williamson
There was that Jonah Hill scenario that happened last year, him and his ex girlfriend. And there was sort of a talk of this misuse and abuse of therapy speak, and one of them was him using the word boundaries. What ways do boundaries show up in people's lives in a manner that they might not realize? And sort of, how can we using boundaries in their best form? What do they look?

What do they look like? I think we talk about boundaries and the need to set them quite a bit more than we talk about boundaries and the need to lift them. I think many of us are so familiar with. You got to set the boundary with this person. You got to set the boundary over here.

Vienna Farren
We're not talking about where we need to lift boundaries. So on the spectrum, you can be porous, healthy in the middle, rigid on the other side. We don't talk about rigidity that much. Rigidity happens when we are prioritizing protecting ourselves over connecting with others. When we're porous, we're prioritizing connecting with others over protecting ourselves when we're healthy.

It's balancing both. Okay, let's talk about rigid, because I think it's one that gets underserved in this conversation. And so what it is, is it's the wall. It's the. I don't open up to people.

Right. If you have ever had a partner who has, you know, feels like a stone wall that's wrapped around them or they don't share or they don't, you know, there's just no availability for closeness and connection and intimacy. There's a rigid boundary around them. There's no way to get in. And again, that rigid boundary is there for a reason.

Why does a person feel the need to protect themselves at all costs, at the cost of connection? And so, a lot of times when I'm working with people who have a rigid boundary, we're having to understand how that rigid boundary got there in the first place, because it's there for a very good reason. They're not being silly with it. It's there for good reason. But also, how do we start to move into a place where we can discern with whom we can allow closeness and connection and intimacy generally?

Most of the time when there's rigidity, it's because there's a rupture around connection, closeness, intimacy. It's been taken advantage of. We're exhausted by it. Maybe we're an emotional caretaker for a parent who needed us all of the time, and now we just don't want to be needed at all. I mean, there's endless examples of what it might be.

And so that protection is so high that they can't maintain relationships, that they can't have closeness with people, that maybe the closeness, quote unquote, that they might have is really surface, or there's only certain topics that they might talk about. And you might feel this in friendship as well, where you're trying to get to know someone on a deeper level, but there's just no opening there. And so, yeah, I think rigidity just doesn't get a lot of, you know, us having conversations about it. But it's one of the things that can be so detrimental to relationships, because I think at the core of it is that we want to be close and connected and intimate with the. With our partners, with the people in our lives.

And when there's no access point for that, it's going to shut things down and it's going to maintain disconnection. People will trade it, though, because disconnection for safety is sometimes more appealing than risking something. All of this work requires us to risk something. I like to say that it's not about a reckless risk, that this is about an eyes wide open risk that we take. There's no human guarantee.

I can't say, if you follow these steps, you know, here's what's going to happen, or here's how this other person is going to respond to you. They might betray you, they might hurt you again, they might take advantage of you. They might continue to deprioritize you. And also, we know that the alternative is staying stuck, as we've been saying here throughout the conversation. And so we have to take, take these eyes wide open risks.

We have to use discernment. We have to go through this process. And I think it's why the origin healing practice is something that allows us to have more access to discernment as opposed to just operating in this black and white. And here's how I protect myself in the world. It's like, okay, I have a connection now with discerning with whom, because maybe I will keep a wall up with someone because for good reason.

I know that they're not someone who's going to care about my internal world, but I'm going to choose to lower it or practice it or drop it down an inch with this person over here. Because my discernment says, I think, I really do think, and I feel you are someone I can trust. You're someone that feels safe in this moment right now. I'm going to practice it here.

Connor Williamson
How much can we make this stick? There's a lot of people listening who probably think, this sounds great. I love the idea of revisiting, of honoring, of grieving, of taking responsibility, of moving forward and all of the rest of it. But how much can we actually unwind the source code of our own programming? Because a lot of people don't know anything else.

It's the fish. Asks the fish, how's the water thing? This is the way the world is. What do you mean this. Even if I do get to know it, like, it's gonna be there and now I'm gonna be aware of it.

What sort of success stories have you seen with unwinding this and making it stick? This is not gonna sound super sexy, but I'm gonna ask everyone to lower their bar significantly. This isn't about raising your bar. This isn't about having some outcome that looks shiny and beautiful and all the things. This is about recognizing that this work we know is lifetime work.

Vienna Farren
And that sometimes the big steps are really just these little budges that happen. You're going to go back into your old ways many times over, probably forever, but it's about finding the moments where we step out and do it slightly differently. I remember a client of mine, she had exited a relationship in therapy with me, and she was frustrated once, as she said, I can't believe I stayed for six weeks after I knew I should have left. And I smiled at her. She said, why are you smiling at me?

I said, feel like that's such an improvement from the ten year relationship that you overstayed in. And I remember seeing the gulp and the little corners of her mouth going up as she said, all right, busted. And it's like, oh, we're so hard. If I don't do this perfectly, then it's nothing. And it's like, no, sometimes this is not about not entering the dynamic that you're like, have entered, that this is about exiting a dynamic far sooner than you had before.

Maybe it's not about never missing a moment of setting the right boundary. Maybe it's about noticing that you didn't set the boundary and coming back around and setting it, even if it's a few hours later. This is not about setting yourself up to operate in this way perfectly. This is about making tiny little movements and motions and noticing and observing. Where we entered in, in the familiar way is part of the healing.

It's not always in the doing, right? A lot of this is in the noticing and the observing and the ability to find yourself much sooner and faster than you've ever found yourself before. Sometimes healing is in taking ownership faster than, than you had before. So I tell people to lower your bar right off the bat, because if you're like, okay, great, and I'm gonna read this book, and da da da da da. Now I'm gonna operate in the world this way that you're gonna be really disappointed in yourself.

So lower it and begin to find these tiny little moments where we notice where we have an opportunity to replace passive aggressive communication with something that is clear and concise, right? Notice where, oh, normally I would have not set this boundary, but I'm going to practice it. Maybe I'm going to tell a friend, hey, I'm reading this book, or, hey, I'm going to therapy, or, hey, I'm working on this thing. And it's really hard for me to practice this with people, but I really want to try and practice it with you. Beautiful.

Those are the things that help it stick the same way that anything stuck with us before we practiced it over and over and over again. Repetition, repetition, repetition. And so our job is to try to repeat some of these things over and over and over again. And hopefully we have a lot of life left to live here, and hopefully, and we're certainly going to have a lot of opportunity to practice it, because. Thank you, pain, for giving us our patterns over and over again.

And if you are relational, as we are as humans, you will have plenty of opportunities to practice. So making it stick is about you noticing, observing, practicing in the moments coming back around, bringing that compassion forward, while having that compassion and grace intersect with your accountability and ownership and responsibility. How can people give themselves more self compassion? What do you advise for the chronic, uncompassionate self is out there? Well, I think it's important to understand what the absence of self compassion serves.

You know, whenever we're resistant to something, I want to understand what it serves to push away from it or avoid it if you're hard on yourself. What, why? What does it serve for you? What do you believe it serves for you? Because this idea of saying, just be self compassionate, right?

It's like a lot of people will laugh at that and scoff at that. And for me, that question of, okay, I'm not going to ask you to just do, just have compassion. Just have grace for yourself. Right? It's like that doesn't work for anyone one to understand why not having that is productive for you.

Why not having that safeguards you from something. That's what I have to understand. That's what we have to understand. Because then we can work with that. But if I just try to force you into a place of compassion and grace, it's not going to move.

It's not going to budge anything. So if you struggle with this, I want to understand what you believe. Pushing away from it or resisting it actually pretty protects you or serves for you because it serves something. It will always serve something. Vienna Farron, ladies and gentlemen.

Connor Williamson
Vienna, I really appreciate you, you and your power couple husband. I really love the insights that you guys put out into the world. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the different things that you do. Thanks, Chris.

Vienna Farren
Yeah. If you want to read this book, the origins of you, how breaking family patterns can liberate the way we live in love. The book is available wherever books are sold. And yeah, just excited for people to be on this journey. You can find me on Instagram mindfulmft, as in marriagefamily therapy, New yorkcouplescounseling.com for the practice, fannafarin.com.

but the link in my bio on Instagram is where all the things live. And so you can find that all there. So thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. And yeah, I love this conversation so much.

Connor Williamson
Hell yeah. We did it. Thank you, Vienna. Thanks.

#790 - Vienna Pharaon - How To Overcome A Difficult Childhood

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1: Introduction to Family Systems

2: The Impact of Childhood Experiences

3: Breaking Free from Past Patterns

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