Get off your latrine it's episode
15 oh my god, I lost count
Oh
All right today did I just echo I'm hallucinating today we're gonna talk about
Family I do
Family what's the family matters team song real love the family
Can a worms family families an interesting one because
Families can look very different. They're just each family is completely different
depending on the person like not only
What it's made up of is their mother father
brother sister other people uncle other
Mother-dutter
Butter family things other shapes other forms other formats for a family could be anything
Not only that but also every family
Hive kind of has its own little family culture going on and also is kind of the blending of
Other cultures like in-laws and stuff like that
Different little mini family cultures coming together and making
Venn diagram flowers of different smushing things of habits and trauma and all kinds of stuff mixed up in the family soup
and
So what is a family? What is a family to me?
I mean the most basic definition to me of a family is who are the people who were
Supposed to be meeting your basic needs when you were a young vulnerable child
I mean that's your first perception of family of
mother father person sibling whoever is there for you
and that's your first impression of
Kind of the world and people the world and the world's gonna be nice to you or not
If the world's gonna accept you or not
If people are safe to be around
How to interact with people it's your really your baseline
relationship with
Your life with everything in your life that is human
So that's a really
important foundational step in someone's life is like who are the people
Who are supposed to be meeting my needs what needs are being met?
What needs are not being met? What does this say about me?
What does this say about the world and it impacts you for the rest?
I mean in theory for much of your life
You can do a certain amount of healing and that can be very helpful, but
All in all we haven't found a total cure for the wounds of childhood. They kind of
Just make you who you are
or at least give you a starting off point to become who you are very interesting
And
Yeah, I mean I wonder about that I wonder about
You know if certain needs weren't met for me as a child
Did I just grow to expect them to never be met and
therefore do I not go after meeting those needs and
And certain other needs I always had met and because I have the expectation of those needs always being met
Does that make getting those needs met profoundly easier to me than to then someone else who didn't have those needs met initially?
Or did them not having their needs met initially?
Give them the strength to overcome that and pursue those needs even more
I mean it really is a nature and nurture interaction at that point, isn't it like two people can go through the same
level of trauma and come out of it in
Profoundly different ways and affected in profoundly different ways. I mean case-in-point Oprah
I don't know if you love her hater, but man
difficult childhood and
Came out what is she a billionaire? She must be close
Crazy
All right
So let's talk about like parents or parental figures. I mean there's a lot going on there
There's also the parents of parents right the grandparents or whoever raised the people who were raising you
And that impacts the way they raise you
sometimes it's that they didn't have certain needs met and so they overcompensate by
By overwhelming you with too much of that need, you know like somebody who grew up in
In starvation always trying to feed feed feed their kids
You can see this in certain cultures
That that lived through famine eat eat
You know because there wasn't always food and now the kids have food so eat it eat more
You know in the same could be said with
Love and attention like maybe someone didn't get enough love and attention when they were a child
So now they pour all their love and all their attention on the child's at the point where the child may or may not feel a little bit overwhelmed
And it may present some problems when the kid becomes a teenager and starts needing to self differentiate
starts needing to
separate themselves from
That loving gaze and figure out who they are without it or who they are separate from it
Because in the end it's fulfilling a need for the child, but if it's to the point of overwhelming
It's really the parent treating the child like the parent that they never had and
Isn't that so sad?
And that's hard and that's scary about parenting a child isn't it that it's just gonna bring up all of those
Kind of
realized potentials of
the corners that left that were not safe to explore as a child of
That maybe would have been safe under other circumstances
Family also means for a lot of people and not everyone siblings
Siblings and that is to me your first experience of
competition
Competition and how you're gonna outshine or undershine or where you're gonna fall in the hierarchy of society
In terms of getting your needs met because when there's multiple children, you know, there's only so much attention and love
And money that can come from the parents
And then so the children find their own little
You know children are kind of a little bit sociopathic because their brains haven't fully developed yet
And they you know so they devise these interesting ways and they're not conscious of this but of trying to manipulate their parents to get the love and
attention that they need
And that's in the face of the the very real
Composition that their siblings are having with them to get also get that love and attention now for me having been the
youngest in the family
You know, obviously I've spent my whole life trying to figure out what that meant and
if maybe I would be
If I would have been a more successful person as a firstborn
Or I don't know what is a middle child?
Maybe also more successful, but as the youngest I mean youngest children are often entertainers
They're often the goofier ones and I think it's because they come into a situation that's already quite tense
There's a fierce level of
Competitiveness for the attention and their parents attention is already divided when they're born other unlike the
Firstborn where they just get all of both parents attention when they're little
But me being the youngest of three my parents was our attention and love was already divided between two other people
I'm the third one coming in so it's like
You know you go with what works so in the end I think I
Conceded that I was gonna get less
Less attention
necessarily from my parents and then maybe my siblings got when they were younger
But also, but I could get more attention from them by being kind of
The agreeable one or the the silly one or the one that's always okay with everything
that that would make
Them grateful that they have this third child. That's kind of just easy
And that's how I would win their affection. I mean I must have unconsciously come to that conclusion
Extremely young or or maybe I didn't or I'm just naturally
More okay with things and that's just my nature and had I had a different
Set of genetic predispositions
I wouldn't have just been agreeable and okay with everything and everything would have been different
And maybe they would have hated me. I don't know
But family at the end of the day
Who they're supposed to be are the ones that always have your back no matter what they're your original understanding of love and trust
And if you don't have that I'm so sorry and hopefully you have found a chosen family that can serve that function in your life
Because there's always other people out there
Good people that you can build trust with and create relationships with and hopefully
Cultivate your own family culture where you can truly thrive and truly get the love and support that you never got when you were a child
But when I think of family
I think of like those are the people that like one shit really fucking hits the fan like you can stay with them
They will help you they've got your back
No matter what because a lot of the time you share genetics and I think there's some kind of natural predisposition to looking out for people
That have part of you in them
But not necessarily because chosen family can be just as strong
Yeah, so just people that have your back no matter what people that you always know you can go to
Even if you haven't been talking to so much
Even if your relationship is kind of on the fritz at the end of the day like if you're starving if you're homeless
If if you know you're really ill they in theory
I mean and obviously lots of people don't do this but but family should have your back and should care
They should care if you're dying
God this got really dark
and
I count myself very lucky to have grown up in a loving
Family that the world all my basic needs were met and I really do know
That they have my back and I have theirs and even if you know things are hard sometimes
And obviously we've had our own ups and downs and problems, but
I'm really grateful for that and I hope everybody listening has the chance to experience that feeling of safety and security
You