Tell me about your vision.
My vision is that
people
understand themselves better,
understand what drives them as my book is titled and the way that I
talk about it in the book is using the metaphor of a car to
represent a family and
we
We sit in this car whether or not your family had a car is irrelevant, but we all sit within the confines of a family
system that is like a car and
the power of
the influence of the behaviors in that car when we grow up
Really have tremendous amount to do with shaping the people that we become
and so
we all grow up with some stuff that works really well for us and and
most of us have stuff that doesn't work really well for us and
my book is helping people to be able to increase their self-awareness about
Themselves and about about their family members
and mostly to increase self-compassion
so my vision is that we would live in a more compassionate world and
When people have self-confession
Compassion, they're able to look honestly and truthfully at themselves
understand their areas of challenge and understand their strengths and
When we can do that compassionately we then get to be
More purposeful in trying to make changes that might serve us better
So we all leave our cars
When we grow up and then we go on to create new cars if if we have a partner or have children
But even if we're on our own we create a new car
And so what happens in the car when we're growing up and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about myself because I think it will
Explain my journey and how I got here
I grew up as an only child and
My mother and father got divorced when I was a baby and I didn't really know my father very well
but my mother ultimately remarried and
That man is the man that I consider to be my father
The reason why I tell you that is because if you think of our little family
Think of our little family in the context of a car
The father in my family was in the driver's seat
My mother was in the front passenger seat and my seat was in the back seat by myself
now
When I was 18 months old and my parents divorced
The father
All of a sudden was gone from that driver's seat
Basically never to be spoken of again until I was much older
And my seat changed as happens
very much when families are when there's the death of a parent or divorce of a parent
Or separation of a parent my seat then became to be in the passenger seat beside my mother
So in my very young life
I had three people a driver and a passenger and I was in the back
and I stayed in the back for seven years until my mother remarried
And at that time a new driver came in and my mother moved back to the passenger seat and I moved to the back seat
And my role in that back seat the rule in our car
Was that little girls are to be seen and not heard
Which was a very common rule back in the day that I grew up
And so because my car had had been had changed so much in my early life
My goal when I got this
New father in the driver's seat was that I was not going to rock the boat
I was just going to try to follow the rules and be a good girl
And what that meant for me was that I spent my entire childhood as an only child
By myself in the back seat of my car trying to be quiet
Trying not to have any needs trying not to disrupt everything and just keep everybody happy
So I learned good things from that
Like I'm a really independent person
Like I know if there's something I want that I'm gonna get it
I'm not gonna wait for someone else to get it for me
I learned that I'm industrious that I can be friendly
I can outreach to people they can come to me
But I also learned to sit quietly and most importantly not have a voice
So I grow up learning that what I had to say didn't matter
That my feelings weren't important
And that I was just supposed to sit and look nice in this car
Because that was another rule of the car is that you always
Looked your very best
And so as an adult
Some of those things are really helpful
I'm still highly independent
My family just laughs at me that I just don't ask for help
Because I was trained not to ask for help
But I also as an adult have had a very very hard time and still do in many ways
Having a voice
And so the way that I decided to have a voice in my adult life was to have two different occupations
That required to talk
That required me to be myself and be with people and say what I needed to say
One is being a therapist
People pay to hear me talk
And the other is that I taught social work students graduate students at the University of Michigan for over 20 years
And again, this is a whole class full of people that came to hear me talk
So I have been able to get my stuff out there
However, when it comes time to saying something negative to a family member
I'm probably not going to do it. Yeah, because or if I do do it
I'm going to apologize for 10 minutes before I finally say what I need to say
Because that training in me that fear
That you just can't do it is still in me. My body owns it
And our bodies carry all of this learning that we do
In as we grow up within our families
So I came up with this concept while I was teaching social work students about how to work with families
And it became a really valuable thing a lesson for them for their own lives
And also learning about what's happening with this family that i'm working with
And as my book has come out and people have read it
Just the what I hear about people that read it
They're able to say of now I get why I do that. I hate that I do that
But I understand that it was taught to me and it's my default behavior
I talk a lot about what's default for us what just comes out of it
And oftentimes what comes up is not really a thing that we would do or say if we were truly being intentional about something
But our bodies just react
So my vision is a vision of people who understand themselves who
Take ownership of who they are and what they do take ownership of their relationships
Especially primary relationships like being a partner or being a parent
These these are just life with lifelong results
And I believe that if we had a society that had self-compassion
And other compassion
That it would change everything it it changes everything
It would change everything it it changes us as individuals
It changes how families operate so that one child isn't the scapegoat
so that one child
Isn't just the good one that nobody can catch up to and leaves the rest of their siblings kind of in their in their trail
So that a child can feel
Seen and heard and worthwhile
And the problem that happens in the workplace is
people get into workplace teams and assume
The role that they have always played without this kind of
Um
Intentionality I would say
And so the one who sat in the back seat that nobody noticed
Is likely not going to be the one with very smart bright ideas
at a meeting
Because they have been trained
that
Not to do that
And so it would take
Um a manager or a boss who understood this person
To be able to get them to part fully participate in a team setting to not be afraid that they would be ridiculed
By suggesting something not be afraid to ask a question
And also to be considerate of the other people on the team and
What what their roles were and their cars and how those roles are coming out?
And is this really helpful for our team?
Or is it just people acting?
Rotely because they just don't have the awareness for the self-compassion to act differently
and
Um, thank you for sharing that
Would you say when what was the age or when when did you realize that this is something you had?
And something that you realized that hey, oh my gosh. This is something that's been going on in my mind
I need to fix it or change it or overcome it. What when was that?
So it happened at in various stages in my life my mother used to talk about
That they couldn't take me anywhere. She used to say we'd go to a restroom
Anywhere she used to say we'd go to a restaurant and sit down
And before in a minute i'd be up out of my seat making friends with the people at the next table
And my mother would say it kind of teasingly to me. I don't think she really liked it, but she didn't stop me
But that tells me that even at that early age
I was seeking way more than just being the one child in the back seat
And I do remember in grade school being in my friend's cars
Literally cars with their family their families and their cars were so noisy
And these kids were all interacting and being upset with each other and being mad at each other and
Laughing with each other and joking with each other and I noticed even then
You know before I was a teenager even that other people just did not have it the same way I did
With this very quiet
You know perfectly acting threesome in this in this car
and another another thing that influenced my life is it
Very coincidentally both of my parents were also only children
And so it's not like I had a cherished aunt whose house I spent a lot of time at
So we were really alone a lot of the time there was not extended family
And so I began trying from the time I was very young to make a lot of friends
to gather people around me
um and to and to
Be a part of something bigger than just myself
myself
When I went away to college a thing happened to me. It really changed my life
Um a girlfriend and I went to talk to the head of the person in the dormitory
because we were
Upset not about the dormitory but just we were sad and she was talking to us about our families and
I just remember her saying to me something
When I had said something about my parents or they don't want me to do that or they're just really
criticizing me
She looked at me and she said I just can't imagine
How parents wouldn't just be so proud of you?
and that was just
Like here's this person who hardly knows me who sees my value
And yet I I really never got a sense of that in my house growing up. I never got a sense of it
so
At various stages of my life I came to understand I would say
Um, i've had a lot of therapy. I needed a lot of therapy just
To be able to be this person and know who I am and not have to
Apologize for myself and understand that I do have worth
Because I just didn't think I had that and so in my 30s and 40s. I really began understanding
This concept and understanding that this vision that I had of myself that I was
Worthless and a disappointment and that I didn't matter
That that was really much more about my parents than about my actual value in the world
And and with that understanding and lots of work
I was able to come to a much more self-accepting place and a much more
compassionate self-compassionate place and
Ultimately, the real gift in that was being able to have compassion for my parents
or the
for the
Faulted people that they were who were only trying their best
That didn't work out for me
but
That was just a major thing was to be able to develop compassion
For that. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to vision pros live
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people
To participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself