Episode 404 Podcast > Full Transcript
Lori Holden, Intro:
One thing we know is that adoption comes out of a broken attachment – that the baby or the child we parent has already lost something primal; that biological connection to the first mother, as well as the genetic connection to her and to the baby's first father. So, right out of the gate, it's helpful if adoptive parents have at least a curiosity about attachment; what that means for them and what that means for the adoptee.
When a baby was placed in my arms years ago, I thought attachment meant baby wearing, having lots of face time and responding promptly when the baby indicated they had a need. I desperately tried to be perfect at all that and of course I could not meet such high standards I set for myself. Eventually, the baby days passed, and I filled in with other kinds of connection; play, music (lots of music), reflective listening and even knowing when not to have eye contact. Hello, car ride conversations, I've done the best I could.
Often, I resorted to parenting tools that I'd inherited from my parents and they from their parents. Tools I thought everyone used. I turned out okay, so it must be fine, right, to use a little bit of guilt and shame to get a child to do the right things and not do the wrong things. Things said with a tone, like, “You said what to your teacher?” or “I can't believe you did that.” And now I know better, “What were you thinking?”
So, I'm so excited today to bring to you one of my attachment parenting and boundary setting mentors, Dr. Brad Reedy of Evoke Therapy Programs.
Dr. Reedy hosts a weekly broadcast for Evoke's client families and others are able to also tune in. After more than a year of one-way listening to him, I am thrilled to be having a two-way conversation with Dr. Brad Reedy.
Lori Holden:
Good morning, Dr. Reedy.
Dr. Brad:
I'm so, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lori:
Welcome. I just can't wait to dig in with you. Let me explain a little bit more about why you are here. Brad Reedy, PhD, is co-owner and clinical director of Evoke Therapy Programs, which is an outdoor, experientially-based therapy program for adolescents, young adults and families. He also co-founded Evoke Intensives, an attachment-based, therapeutic intensive program near Park City, Utah. He's the founder of Enlightening Relationships and provides parent coaching, couples therapy and individual therapy.
Brad has served on the board of the Utah Department of Child and Family Services, the Board of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, the Choose Mental Health Board and the En Garde Arts Board; a New York based theater company.
Dr. Reed is a prolific public speaker and has been invited to deliver keynote addresses at conferences, private events, nationally syndicated radio shows and universities on experiential therapy, mental health treatment, childhood issues and parenting. And after today, you get to add, “The illustrious Adoption! The Long View podcast” to your to your impressive list.
Dr. Brad:
Oh, wonderful.
Lori:
After years as a parent educator, having broadcast over 1400 webinars on parent and family issues, Dr. Reed authored The Journey of the Heroic Parent: Your Child's Struggle & the Road Home and The Audacity to Be You: Learning to Love Your Horrible, Rotten Self, which I have read and highly endorse. He also hosts the highly successful podcast, Finding You, which is how I first heard of Dr. Reedy.
So, again, welcome. Let's dig right in. Do you find, Dr. Reed, that adoptive families are overrepresented in the families that you see in wilderness therapy and other Evoke Therapy programs? I guess first, you should also tell us a little bit about what wilderness therapy is and why families sometimes seek it out for their adolescent children.
Dr. Brad:
Yeah. First of all, wilderness therapy, to say it most simply is traditional psychotherapy models, but done outside in small groups; done in a camping setting, done in the wilderness. And so, not only do you have what all therapy is, which are traditional research-proven, evidence-based approaches like cognitive behavioral therapies and attachment-based therapy, family systems therapy and so forth, but you have this this venue that invites mindfulness. And also there's a distance that helps when the child is out there in the wilderness, which is a wonderful metaphor for finding yourself; getting lost and then finding yourself again. That separation gives the parents and the family an opportunity to reset, to look at themselves without the ping-pong reaction that we often have in our relationships and our discussions and our escalating arguments and conflicts that are repetitive.
So, it really gives everybody a chance to look inward at themselves, particularly the parents. We think of ourselves as a parent program, as much as we do an adolescent program. So, two months out in the wilderness in small groups, doing psychotherapy, practicing mindfulness, experiencing the benefits of being outdoors and unplugged and away from screens. And then parents, because their children are making such huge sacrifices and inroads into psychotherapy, into their work, I think the parents are even more willing to launch into their own work; to take the, as I call it, the heroic journey inward, to look at themselves, to discover who they are and how they're contributing to this dynamic and whatever ways that their background comes into play.
So, that's what we do, how we do it and kind of I love it. It's the most powerful, evocative intervention I've ever seen for young people and families.
Lori:
One thing that I heard you say once is that one of the benefits for the adolescents who go is that they can't negotiate with nature. And that really struck me as how you can get into these patterns between parent and adolescent. And the negotiation becomes the habit and the pattern, and you can't break out of it. And the nature is part of the healing, too.
Dr. Brad:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I learned that lesson when I'm out there because I want to go out there in this pristine setting and pull up in my vehicle and get out and sit around a beautiful campfire and do psychotherapy, but there's mud, there's rain, there's bugs in the spring and summertime. And so, you have to surrender. I mean, that's part of the process of healing is it's not that we abandon all will all the time, because part of the act of actually going to therapy is a willful act, but there's also a surrender that wilderness and nature invites.
And so, as you know, when children go out in the world and start to have the experience that, oh, a lot of the things that my parents, not all of them, but a lot of the things my parents were talking about or teaching me weren't about them. They were about life; the universe, the way that life works, because I'm experiencing the same kinds of dynamics out in the world that I was in my own home. The child starts to internalize those lessons because they can't marginalize the lesson as well. That's just Dad's opinion or mom's opinion. And I think that happens in wilderness so profoundly where they realize from the experience in nature that if you don't work on something, if you don't listen to the people who know what they're doing and teaching you how to pack a pack and build a shelter and tend to a fire, things don't work. You get cold, you get wet. And it's not anybody's opinion of things. That's just the way that life works. So, yes, it's a wonderful microcosm.
Lori:
I think when I only knew about wilderness therapy from hearing the words, wilderness therapy, I thought it was kind of a punishment. I thought it was kind of like, “Well, then you can go find out what discomfort is like. You can live in the elements. And I didn't really understand the therapeutic benefits that it all brings.
Dr. Brad:
Yeah.
Lori:
So, back to the question, do you find that adoptive families are overrepresented, because you're not an adoptive family program. You are for everybody, but are they overrepresented?
Dr. Brad:
When we take surveys of our of the population that we're serving, they're between 25 and 40% of our population. Around their third on average are adopted, which is a pretty significant overrepresentation of the general population.
Lori:
Yeah, and I just want to make the point too, so that nobody can draw a conclusion that that means that adoption creates all of these maladjusted children because there's lots of reasons why that overrepresentation may happen, but attachment is definitely a factor in all of that.
So, I'm thinking that people who are earlier in the parenting journey and haven't hit the adolescent stage yet might be where I was when my children were young or before I'd even started my path to becoming a parent. It was so difficult to imagine my baby or my toddler or my beautiful child one day suffering so much that wilderness therapy would become an option. But I would suspect that this can all be traced back, back, back and that all things matter. It doesn't start when you fill your arms. It doesn't start when the child has their first indication that there's a bigger issue than you're ready to deal with. The capacity of us as parents matters and our own attachment stories matter.
Why is it that people should start paying attention to our own inner workings as humans, no matter where we are on our parenting journey?
Dr. Brad:
Every child is its own being. Adoptive families, I like to say, are in a lot of ways like all other families. And of course, they're unique. There's one specific event, one specific process that all adoptive families share, which is the adoption; the giving up and the adoption of the child. And so, you know, I have four children, none of whom are adopted, but it's been my life's work, and I'm working in it still, to see each one of them uniquely and different. And they require and stretch me in such different ways.
So, I think with adoptive families, with children that are adopted, you have this variable that you can see that you know, that, as a therapist, you're always on a searching expedition, you're lifting up rocks and looking for things. And adoption is one of those areas that you're, for sure, going to look at that you think, “Okay, I know this happened.”
You know, children say, when they first get with us, a very common trajectory is children that are adopted say, “My adoption has nothing to do with my self-medicating, with my anxiety, with my depression, with my self-harm.” After reading a book, or maybe completing a writing assignment about adoption, 2 or 3 weeks in, they'll say, “Adoption is all of it. There's nothing else that is affecting me besides this adoption.” And of course, we find some middle path, some middle ground to that. It's one of the puzzle pieces and it's important to look at.
I heard a mother say, and I've heard versions of this so many times. In tears, she said, during a workshop that we were facilitating, she said, “I'm so angry because when I adopted this child, I thought (and they implied) if I just loved them, if I just gave them my heart that everything would work out, and that's not true. There were challenges that came with this process, there were genetic differences between the child and me that creates some subtle mismatches. There was a trauma experience of being given up for adoption and knowing that you were giving up for adoption.” She said, “I'm so angry that people didn't tell me that that love, while it's the foundation, it had to fuel this work on myself to figure out how can I be there for the child in a way that supports them to get to where they need to go.”
And so, that's the way that I think about it, is I would teach, and I do teach a lot of the same things to parents who are raising their biological children, who don't have adopted children. But specifically, with adoption, you know that there's something there that creates a unique experience for the child and it's going to stretch you and pull you and expand you in different ways. And that's what this work is, is becoming the container, becoming the supporter, becoming the facilitator of a child's upbringing. And that requires that requires work. That doesn't come naturally. It doesn't come naturally to me as a father of four very, very different children. And it doesn't come naturally, virtually to everybody that I meet. Some, maybe it does, but I don't work with them. It is a process that requires us to expand our capacity.
Lori:
I like how you said finding that middle ground earlier, because I think I've heard you also say that adoption isn't nothing and it isn't everything, but it's something. And I think as adoptive parents, we often try to find that sweet spot because we think if we talk about it too much, we might be planting the adoption issues. And then on the other hand, if we don't talk about it at all, then our child might feel like they can't bring it to us because it's in a no-talk zone. So, I think finding that sweet spot is really one of the things that we're called to do when we take on adoptive parenting, which is a big job. It’s just constantly be trying to find that that place in between the two extremes.
Dr. Brad:
Absolutely. I was talking with somebody about transracial adoption years ago, and they were describing that one of the great wounds in transracially adopted children and families is that the parents are projecting onto the child this idea, this sense that the child should be grateful that they are living in a home with loving, caring, attentive parents and that the child has its own experience, which includes trauma, which includes, in the case of transracial adoption, a parent that may not and does not look like you.
And when I was listening to this person I was talking with in an interview and I was thinking, “That's the same with our children.” My daughter said the other day, my 15-year-old said a couple of weeks ago at our dinner discussion, just our casual discussion, she said, “I'm the only one my age (because my both of my parents are therapists and my sister's a therapist) who knows that we all have trauma. Everybody has trauma.” She said, “I could leave this family with a specific complaint I have about my parents and the trauma that they've created. And I would get to a new family and there would be new trauma.” And that's the work of being human.
So, I think there's things that are the same. I think there's things that are different. And I think the requirement is the same. The requirement is you have to go inside and find yourself as a parent. You have to. Just like you said at the very outset, we mostly do versions of what our parents did; the things that we liked. And we try not to do the things that they didn't do, but that creates its own kind of challenges en masse, too.
And so, the work is a lifelong process of knowing yourself, of understanding that your truth, that your context, that your background isn't the truth. It's just one possibility. And you have to figure out how to adjust to each child. And not just each child, but each child through the developmental process, too. So, it's a lifelong work for both of you.
Lori:
And as they're developing, you're also developing.
Dr. Brad:
Right.
Lori:
It's not like we reach a certain age and we're done. We're still figuring out the newest stages of our lives, our own lives.
Dr. Brad:
That's right.
Lori:
Let's talk a little bit about boundaries, because knowing yourself is kind of also knowing your boundaries. And boundaries is an added element that adoptive parents have. Because often we have birth parents either present in our lives or present in our child's thinking and hearts, if they're not actually present. They're there in one way or another. So, figuring out the boundaries, especially with contact of birth parents, birth families. Can you just talk to us a little bit about the principles of healthy boundary setting?
Dr. Brad:
I think one of – This is true of all families, again, but speaking specifically to adoptive families, I think one of the energies that comes into play that challenges boundaries (I'll say that first) is that the parent is inclined to think they have to make up for something, “I have to give something extra to this child. I have to I have to compensate for this wound that they have of being put up for adoption” is the energy and the thought that comes into it. And that energy, of course, sometimes makes the boundaries difficult. The parent has a hard time saying no and saying, “I'm uncomfortable” or “This is my line,” or “I'm not willing to allow this,” because the child gets upset and hurt and sad and frustrated by those boundaries and the parent is compromised. Then the parent thinks, “I can't let them suffer.”
Lori:
And not only with the adoptee, but also with the birth parent. We do feel such gratitude for finally being made a parent. And so, we may feel like we have to give back. And that makes the boundaries foggier or less easier to discern.
Dr. Brad:
Boundaries are – It's really the equivalent of knowing yourself and knowing that it's your responsibility to take care of yourself. One of the hardest lessons of my life is realizing that, yes, I have a therapist and I still go to therapy and I have a supportive wife who's amazing and I have wonderful network, but ultimately, I'm responsible for my happiness and serenity. I'm responsible for my life. And boundaries are that.
Boundaries are not about – I don't think of them. In fact, I think it can be problematic to think about them in terms of how they change other people around me, specifically my children. Boundaries are what I feel comfortable with, what I feel good about, what I need. Even from the simplest example of letting a child play with a sharp object; with a knife. The essence of that is I'm not comfortable with that. And the child could argue, “Well, I'll be careful” and “I can handle it.” But eventually, the only thing you really can stand on in a healed sense and somebody that's doing their work is, “I'm not comfortable with it.”
But we all grew up in families where it was about being right, about being good, and we had to justify ourselves and we had to make a cogent argument for whatever boundary that we were setting. But boundaries are about, “This is what I need to feel okay. This is what I'm comfortable with.” It applies to marriage, it applies to friends, it applies to our children.
And it's hard because we engineered children unconsciously to push against all of our boundaries. They know they know what compromises us, not because we tell it to them or because it's even overt, and we might not even know it, but they can tell because they push against something and it works, and we capitulate, and we give up ourselves in a moment and they do it again. And I'm not saying that as an indictment of them. It's human nature that we train children – we train those around us to treat us the way that they treat us to some extent. Of course, there's also genetics and organicity, but boundaries are the line that I draw.
My favorite moment was we are at a wedding last summer with my (I call her my fifth child) my ex-wife's daughter. My children all call themselves brother and sister. So, we were at her very small wedding and it was outside. It was beautiful on a lake. My wife was saying, “Do you want sunglasses?” And I said, “No, I'm fine. They're over there, but I don't need them. I'll be fine.” And another person asked me and said, “I'll go get them for you.” And my oldest son, who's 30, said to everybody around me. He said very clearly and humorously, he said, “He knows himself.” And that was a simple way of saying, “I can take care of myself. I've set this boundary and people are trying to, in the spirit of what they would call kindness and love, overstep it.” But I had stated very clearly like, “This is what I'm comfortable with. I know where it is. I can get it if I need it.” So, I think boundaries and knowing yourself are siblings. They're the same thing, just a different way of looking at the same phenomenon.
Lori:
And I think the less clear you can be on your own boundaries may stem from the less you know yourself. So, the more clear you can be on the boundaries, the more you know yourself, the less you feel the need to negotiate and explain what those boundaries are.
And that's one thing doing it with your child. It's a different thing, because of the emotional charge around it, doing it with birth family members. When I work with adoptive parents, I talk about knowing their boundaries, but also understanding what their capacity is and perhaps growing their own capacity regarding birth parents. Because if adoptive parents are coming – if their boundaries are coming from a place of insecurity, guilt, judgment, anything that they're kind of is below the surface that they're not aware of, their capacity is not optimal for making those discernments around birth family boundaries.
So, can you talk a little bit about the dual track of setting those boundaries, but at the same time looking at what you bring to those boundaries and evaluating the capacity?
Dr. Brad:
Yeah. One of my favorite stories that I talk about, the journey of the rogue parent is an adult child graduating from our therapy program 22, 23 years old, and asking their parents, who lived in Canada, to bring a brand of cigarettes down after graduation so that they could – they hadn't smoked in a couple of months in our programs, and they wanted to have a cigarette. And one of the parents called me and said, “I'm troubled by this. I don't know what to do. My father died of lung cancer. I hate smoking. I don't want my child to smoke, but I just don't know what to do.” And I said, “Well, I can imagine you coming down with that pack of cigarettes that they've asked for and giving it to them and saying, ‘You know, I'm uncomfortable with you smoking around me. I don't want you to do it in the car, but this is my symbolic gesture that this is yours. This is your decision. It's your life.’ I could also imagine you coming down to the graduation experience and saying, ‘I didn't bring those. I'm not willing to participate in buying and getting you your cigarettes. If you want to do that on your own, that's your life.’”
And so, the boundary is, like you said, it's where it's coming from. If it comes from a place of fear, control, anger, resentment, insecurity, virtually you can't get it right. If it comes from a place of love and capacity and awareness, kindness and creativity, I mean, you can't get it wrong. So, it's about, like you said, it's about understanding where it comes from, because a lot of people will use boundaries to control and manipulate people. And the very behavior itself doesn't dictate the quality of the boundary.
What dictates the quality of the boundary is exactly what you said, where it comes from. A psychologist asked me one day when I was giving a talk on codependency. She said, “How could you possibly suggest to us that we tell a mother to kick her opiate addicted son out of the house at 22 if the possibility is that he could die?” And I said, “I would never tell a mother what to do and something important like that, ever.” I said, “What I would do is I would help her heal her codependency, get a sense of her boundaries and where they're coming from and what her healing is. And then she would decide.”
So, I love what you said, where it's a deeper process. And that's why boundaries, like a few things, are so difficult to talk about and discuss because it's nuanced, it's subtle, it's internal. It's not defined by, in my work, you don't come to me and ask a question about, “How much screen time should I give my child?” and I have an answer. We have a dialogue about it. I want to understand where you're coming from. What's your goal? What's your intention? Who are they? How old are they? Where are your fears coming from? Where is your anxiety? Where is your anger coming from? That will then reveal who you are. And then from that place, just like you said, comes your truth comes your boundary, comes your line in the sand. And nobody in the world, including me, gets to say, “Well, that's the wrong boundary or the right boundary” because it's yours, it's you, it's who you are.
Lori:
So, it's a lot less about what you say when a birth parent wants to add more visits or more frequent contact or some other request that doesn't feel right to you. It's less about what you say in response than how you get to your response. It's the internal process of that.
Dr. Brad:
Right. And a lot of people, I mean, it's easier to talk about what to say. That's an easy discussion to have. Like, “Tell me what to say” “What should I say?” “What should I do?” is the question that's presented to me all the time in therapy. And my answer is, well, you know, if I'm going to use the word, should, I don't like the word and I try to use it as little as possible. But what I will say is, “I guess you should be yourself, whatever feels comfortable, and then whatever you say will be okay. It's appropriate. And how they respond to it won't be an indication of whether or not you've said it the right way. It'll be an indication of where they're at in this process.”
So, yes, absolutely. That's the shift in healing. The shift is from being right and good to being yourself. I talk about this, in my work, you don't get to be right anymore. You don't get to win anymore. But you do get to be a self, which is so much better.
Lori:
Yeah, I love that you don't get to win, but sometimes you just get to choose the best way to lose.
Dr. Brad:
Choosing how to lose is one of the most liberating ideas that I've learned from my therapist is that you get to choose how to lose. And I repeat that to myself almost every day in circumstances, either professionally or personally, I get to choose how to lose because I'm wired or trained, I should say, to win, to be right, come out on top, to be justified as a person instead of just to be myself.
Lori:
Yeah. In one of your podcast episodes, you took on a super common way that parents try to guide their child's behavior, which included my parents, and which included me with my own children. And that method is using guilt and shame. And you said, I'm going to quote you here. You said, “If I could wave a magic wand, I would erase shame and guilt. Many people would be terrified. But love and compassion and empathy and connection to other people and connection to yourself, those are the building blocks of morality and empathy and kindness. This idea in Western culture that guilt equals conscience is a myth. The guilt is the problem, the treatable issue.” That's the end of the quote.
So, help us understand why is guilt a problem? Why wouldn't chaos ensue if we stopped using guilt to guide behavior? And what instead would happen if you could wave that magic wand and guilt and shame were no longer used to guide behavior?
Dr. Brad:
I think a lot of people get distracted by this simple idea that sometimes is taught in self help that shame is feeling bad for who you are, and guilt is feeling bad for what you do. While that may be true, it's relevant because guilt causes one to hide. It causes your authentic self to be compromised. It is this idea that if I cause somebody pain, I'm doing the wrong thing. And that's just not true.
I mean, my favorite way to answer this question is everybody listening to the sounds of our voices on this broadcast, everybody can think of examples where they would, in a certain situation, do the right thing for themselves, do the honorable thing, do the moral thing and yet it would still cause them guilt; saying no to a friend, saying no to a child. I can't tell you, it's numberless, virtually, the amount of people that have said to me in psychotherapy, “I knew the right thing to do in this situation and I didn't do it.” And I said, “Well, why didn't you do it?” And they say, “I felt guilty.”
Guilt is this training that we have from our parents that it's this idea that if you cause somebody pain, if you cause somebody discomfort, essentially them, that you're doing the wrong thing. And it's just not true. It's how our parents – I mean, our parents brought us up – I was brought up this way. And I think even well-meaning, educated parents are still thinking this by and large, which is, “I will tell my child when I'm happy, I will tell them when I'm sad, I'll tell them when I'm angry or when I'm worried or when I'm disappointed or proud. Those will then be their indications as to whether they're doing the right or the wrong thing.” That's how we condition our children: I'm upset with you. I'm angry. I'm sad. I'm happy. I'm proud of you. And then that child gets wired to believe that what the parent feels is their responsibility. And then they go out in the world and they operate that way with everybody else. They say no to friends. They break up with somebody in a relationship. That's the right thing for them to do. And they're held hostage by their guilt.
Guilt, I think, is more toxic than shame in a lot of ways. It's not as intense, perhaps, but it's more toxic because it's more nuanced and it's more subtle and it's more culturally endorsed. You ask, why wouldn't chaos ensue? It does a little bit, actually, when you start getting rid of and fighting against your guilt. That's what the midlife crisis is. Carl Jung says that the death is the midway point of a well-lived long life. And there comes a point in our lives as adults, if we're growing and healing, where we stop doing things from a place of guilt and we do crazy things. We have a midlife crisis, is what it's referred to. But after a while of experimenting with that, and you're still open and you're still growing, you find balance and you replace that guilt and that shame; those old mechanisms for driving behavior. And it gets replaced with love and empathy. Because once you nurture and care and connect to yourself, you can't help to connect to everybody else because the relationship we have with ourself is essentially mirrored in all the relationships we have with everybody else.
So, yeah, you go a little crazy sometimes. You make some mistakes. And if you're healing from a childhood where guilt and shame were the primary motivations for behavior, and you're starting to shed those and let go of those, the experiment's going to be a little bit messy. But over time, my experience is, over and over and over again, it comes into balance.
And the last thing I'll say is that Plato had this idea; this is an old idea. He said, “In a utopian society there would be one law and the law would be to be yourself.” So, this is not a new idea that I or the attachment folks have come up with. This is an idea that is enduring. It's what Nietzsche talked about. He said, “Once we kill the dragon of should and should not, our last stage of life is we become a little baby. We become who we are, essentially.”
Lori:
And I love knowing that this is the process. That shift would be a process. And it'd be kind of like cleaning out a garage. It's going to get messier before it gets cleaner as you kind of get through the layers of the debris.
Dr. Brad:
Absolutely, Yeah. I've been on both sides of that messiness. Yeah.
Lori:
So, this idea is kind of predicated on the fact that the authentic self is inherently good. What about the possibility that the authentic self is bad? What about that?
Dr. Brad:
It's not that I don't believe that, it's just that I just don't have any experience with that. What I love about psychology, what I love about psychology is it's the most compassionate way to look at human life; human beings. When I shifted from a more religious lifestyle that was built on dogma to using psychology as the way that I see the world, the way that I see myself and others, I change from should and shouldn't, from good and bad people to can and can't people; from people that are wounded or healed.
There's one of my favorite quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is that if we could read the Secret History of our enemies, we would find in each man's story suffering sufficient to disarm all hostility. Or more simply put, as Abraham Lincoln said, “I do not know that man. I must get to know” Excuse me. “I do not like that man. I must get to know him.”
When we find the story behind the “bad behavior” or the “evil behavior” we find a wound, we find something that disrupted development. Human beings are built for connection. They're built for empathy. It's what has made us the most powerful creature on this planet is our ability to group up and to take care of each other. That's why, as a species, we dominate the earth. We have both the most negative impact and positive impact on the planet.
I'll say one more thing. I just wanted to say this because I just thought it was so sweet. Somebody told me a story recently, some novel that they were reading about where you could get into the mind of a dog. And the dog was asked, “What do you find most peculiar about human beings?” And the dog said in this make-believe story, “I find the most amazing and peculiar thing about human beings is their capacity for compassion and love. They have the most capacity for compassion and love.”
So, I guess, Lori, my answer is I just don't have any experience of pure evil. I don't have any experience. One of my favorite philosophers, Charles Eisenstein, said, “We need to understand that that evil is a consequence, not a cause.” And I just believe that.
And maybe I should just end with saying because I've done bad things, evil things in my life to people that I care about, innocent people in my life, and through my own work, I realized that all of those evil things that I've done, all of those bad things that I've done to hurt people in my life came from a scared, hurt and wounded place.
Lori:
Yeah. And I suppose if we were to look back at some of the heinous acts in human history, we could probably tie all of those back to some sort of trauma. And rather than guilt and shame ameliorating trauma, it probably helps cause and create trauma. So, that's one reason why we might really want to decide mindfully how much or if we're even going to use that.
So, it seems like about at least once an episode we say around here at Adoption! The Long View to do your own work, people. And in the same episode of yours that we just talked about, you said that the real work of attachment is compassion and self love. For so long I thought, as I said before, that attachment meant babywearing and being really responsive when my child had a need. But what you're talking about in this sentence about attachment is compassion and self love is that it's deeper. It's longer lasting. It's more than just eye contact and meeting needs and meeting bids for connection. So, why are compassion and self-love at the root of it all?
Dr. Brad:
Well, first of all, because when you have compassion for yourself, I'm assuming that that's based on some knowledge of yourself. It's not an ignorant thing. It's not just generic; I love people. I love the universe. It's you've come into contact with who you are. And typically, that means that you've come into contact with parts of yourself that others have suggested to you are unlovable. In my favorite story. I use a lot of stories to teach, and I'm sure most of your listeners have read the book or watched the movie or seen the musical, Les Miserables, where the escaped prisoner in one scene accosts a bishop, attacks him and he steals his silver and then is brought back by the police later that morning. And the police said, “We found this man leaving your property with all the silver. We assume he's stolen it from you.” And the bishop says, in an act of pure compassion to the prisoner, he said, “You silly fool, you left behind the candlesticks; the most expensive part. Don't forget these.” And he gives them to them. And then the police excuse themselves.
And this moment that Victor Hugo wrote is about when you experience compassion, when you experience being loved as you are, not just the pretty parts and the smart parts and the talented and successful parts, but the parts that are ugly or the parts that people tell you are stupid or dumb or whatever it is, all you want to do is give it to everybody else. And so, it starts with compassion toward yourself. If you have self-compassion, then when you make a mistake, you can say sorry even to a child, which I think is a really important thing. You can own up to things. You can be accountable because you don't have the defense up, protecting that idea that you need to be good and all the time.
So, it starts with compassion toward yourself. And then inevitably, without variation, a person who experiences deep, profound compassion towards them and they're able to absorb it immediately wants to share that with everybody else. You want to give that to everybody else in the world.
And the thing about – bringing it back to the parenting, when I hear parents talk about certain decisions, behaviors, you know, parenting decisions that they make with their children, I always look for the deeper process about connection and attachment and seeing themselves and being a person. Because, again, the top-level behavior doesn't describe really what's going on. I can respond to my child's cries, but if I'm responding from a place of fear, if I'm responding from a place of unhealed trauma in myself, I will over attend in some ways. I can over attend to them. I can listen to my to my teenage children, yell and scream and call me names because when I was a kid I wasn't heard and therefore I don't want to cause that wound in my child too. So, I'll let them mistreat me or abuse me past the level that is good for me.
And so, I always say it's not about where you draw the line. It's about how connected you are to yourself, because your child, if they grow up in a home where there's a healthy self of a parent, they learn what it means to be human. And that's the lesson we're trying to teach them. So, it's deeper than the decision that you make about if they can go out on Friday or if they're grounded, if they skipped school or whatever it is. It's not about that. It's do you see them clearly and what they need? And that ability will be based on how well you see yourself. And that ability to see yourself will be based on how much compassion you have for yourself. Because if you don't have compassion, you're going to not see a whole lot of things about yourself because you'll judge yourself too much. And so, you'll push into your unconscious, into your shadow, all those parts about yourself that you've been taught that are unacceptable. That's kind of a convoluted answer to the question. I hope it answers it. But those are my thoughts on it.
Lori:
Absolutely. And you've led me into another question I wanted to ask you, which is to talk about the subtitle of your second book, which is called, The Audacity to Be You. We'll have all of these links to your work in the show notes. But remind us, what is the subtitle of that book and why did you choose that.
Dr. Brad:
The subtitle; I loved it as a title, too, but I got it in the subtitle, is Learning to Love Your Horrible Rotten Self. My therapist used to say, and I've been seeing her since 1999. So, that's 24 years now. And in the first several years of therapy, she used to just make that comment very playfully about my horrible rotten self. And what she was teaching me, and what I'm trying to show the reader, is the things about yourself that you have come to believe are unacceptable, are horrible, or are rotten, aren't that. Again, they might be expressions of a wound. You know, hurt people hurt people. So, the hurtful behavior that you that you project out into the world comes from a hurt place. And so, learning to love your horrible rotten self is the key to, I don't want to be too ridiculous, but it's the key to the universe.
People always ask me – It's Ram Dass says this idea that we can't counteract the idea, the feeling of “I'm bad” with “I'm good.” We can't counteract the feeling of “I'm unlovable” with “I am lovable.” And most people try to do that. They try to counteract those feelings with “I am good” and “I am lovable.” And he says, “We have to go beneath the polarities. We have to escape that way of thinking.” As Einstein said, “You can't solve a problem in the same context, the same thinking that created it.” So, you have to transcend it.
And the solution to “I am bad” and “I am good” is “I am;” I am sometimes generous, I am sometimes stingy. I am sometimes loving. I am sometimes careless. I am sometimes wise. I am sometimes ignorant. And when you can accept yourself, that's what all the great teachers show us. They don't tell us how great they are. They tell us what fools they are. If you listen to the Dalai Lama, which I did in Salt Lake City right before the pandemic, he spent 20% of his speech talking about what a nincompoop he was, because he's made peace with himself, which is the key to his compassion and connection to the rest of the human race.
So, learning to love your horrible rotten self is putting yourself in a situation. I think of it as psychotherapy. That's what it is for me. It could be support groups that could be really, really supportive and connective networks in other ways. But learning to put yourself in a situation where you can be seen and accepted, and not just not just the good parts. I mean, that's what psychotherapy is, is you come into it and eventually you start to tell the truth about who you are and what you feel. When a client says to me, “I know I shouldn't think this” or “I know this is wrong. I'm a white male and I should be grateful. I shouldn't be depressed, but…” and then what they're about to tell me, the truth that they're about to tell me, that's the gold, “but I'm angry,” “but I'm depressed,” “but I'm sad,” “but I'm hurt,” “but I'm resentful.” And when I say to them, “Those are normal feelings to have,” the irony is they heal. They move through the feelings, or more accurately, the feelings move through them and they come back to balance and they come back to compassion and love, because who they are is not something to hide, not something to prove to the world that they're worthy of love and so forth.
And so, learning to love your horrible rotten self is about re-experiencing yourself in the presence of a compassionate, capable other and starting to see yourself as human.
Lori:
That subtitle and the title so resonated for me because I've had these perfectionist tendencies. And so, my horrible rotten self is anything that wasn't perfect. And it made me really judgmental of myself, which makes me, because I'm still working on it, judgmental with my children and other people. And so, your book unlocked some things for me. So, that was very helpful.
Dr. Brad:
I'm very glad.
Lori:
Let's talk a little bit about codependency, because I'm thinking, isn't that a term for people who have some sort of addiction that's so negatively impactful to them that they need help with it? What is codependency? How does that fit into our topic?
Dr. Brad:
That's where the context where the word was first coined. But codependency basically arises from a fractured attachment. Some kind of attachment that was broken or harmed. And essentially, it is that I see myself through another person, I see my value through another person. I see my worth. I see even my goodness, my badness through another person.
My daughter wrote last year, a couple of years ago, she wrote this beautiful quote in the context of a blog that she was writing where she said, “Codependency is essentially the illusion that you're taking care of other people when you're really taking care of yourself.” So, we codependent people. We suck other people dry. We take from them their energy, their sense of things, and we make it about ourselves.
It's the opposite of a secure attachment. It is an anxious or an avoidant attachment where we are either reactive to other people or we are fawning and people pleasing to other people. So, it's really attachment, but it's the pop psychology term for it. I love what the author James Hollis, said. He's one of my favorite writers in psychology. And James Hollis points out that the American Psychological Association considered putting codependency in the new diagnostic manual that we therapists use when we're doing therapy, but that there was too much pushback from the insurance companies because virtually everybody would qualify for it. So, it's a continuum that we're all on, too. It's not designed just for people that have somebody in their life that's addicted.
Just yesterday morning. True story. Silly, true story. I was looking at my closet thinking, “I've got to get rid of some of these clothes. I'm not going to wear them anymore.” And then I saw this blue shirt hanging up and I thought, “Oh, that shirt really took care of me at a time in my life where I was where I needed it, and I don't want to get rid of it. I don't want to hurt its feelings.” That all happened in about one second in my brain, but I was codependent with my shirt in my closet. Or I feel guilty when I get mail from the mail carrier when it's raining.
Codependency is a lack of boundaries. It's a lack of sense of self. It's a lack of that line that separates me from you. Compassion isn't really present with codependency because codependency is taking care of yourself and your ego and compassion, It comes from a place of wholeness. People say, for example, some people that are codependent love too much. And what I say to that is, “There's no such thing as loving too much. If you're if you're loving too much, it's becoming something else altogether.” So, the opposite of codependency is a strong sense of self and a clear connection, a compassionate connection towards others in your circle, in your life.
Lori:
And I've found that your speaking and your work on this is so helpful in me in not only examining my own codependency with my children, but also as I'm navigating things with their parents.
Dr. Brad:
Right.
Lori:
Figuring out where I end and they begin; knowing that line and knowing what takes me up to that line is, is so helpful in the discernments that we have to make as adoptive parents.
Dr. Brad:
Yes.
Lori:
Let's shift to your first book. You've spoken before about the hero's journey, and your first book is even called The Journey of the Heroic Parent. And that word Hero. It's like, let's talk about the heroic journey. I think of something more like Star Wars and King Arthur, which are truly epic journeys. And how can those equate with something so everyday humdrum, typical like parenting?
Dr. Brad:
Because all of those stories, all the stories, are metaphors. I mean, I think metaphor and spirituality is synonymous or they are bedfellows for sure. And those stories are about going out for something, going for the Holy Grail. And like in the story of King Arthur's Knights, they did not find the Grail. They did not find the thing; the widget they were searching for. But what they found was adventure. What they found was a life worth living. What they found was themselves.
And so, the heroic journey in our stories, in Star Wars, everything, everywhere, all at once is a beautiful, heroic journey. What we find is a deeper, richer, clearer version of ourselves. In storytelling, the cave, the dark forest, the Deep Ocean, 20,000 Leagues under the sea and everything everywhere, all at once is the metaverse. Going into this place that is terrifying and scary is a metaphor for going in here, going inside yourself, looking at yourself, discovering yourself, looking in the closet of your mind.
And the thing that we're searching for, of course, in parenting, is to save our child. I would do anything. I'll walk across, cut glass for my child. But sometimes you can't save your child and sometimes the child doesn't want to be saved. And sometimes you do save. Sometimes you do contribute to their being saved and they're healing. For sure, that happens a lot of the time. But ultimately, the only thing that happens that can be guaranteed by this process, if you do it honestly and courageously, is you find yourself.
And that's really what all of these stories are. That's where they come from. They come from us. All the stories about the gods, the goddesses, the great epic tales, come from inside of us because they are a story of the human condition of this striving for something. And really, a good Hollywood movie often doesn't end with the hero getting what they're looking for. It ends with them having a greater, deeper sense. And you feel that at the end of those movies. You feel like, “Okay, they didn't get the girl. They didn't get the job. They didn't get the heavyweight championship of the world, like in Rocky One. But what they found was so much better, so much deeper, so much more transcendent. That's why something like the story of Superman in the movies is really just a story of coming back to ourselves. And that's an everyday process.
Lori:
So, what is the metaphor that kryptonite and dragons and rodents of unusual size are in our journeys?
Dr. Brad:
Guilt, shame, fear. In Star Wars, they made it pretty clear; after his wife died, Anakin Skywalker in his incredible, unsuitable pain gravitated toward the dark side, which was gravitating toward anger and control. Darth Vader didn't think he was causing the problems in the universe. He thought he found the solution to suffering. So, it's our attempt to avoid suffering. That's what happened in everything, everywhere, all at once, is the main character, the daughter. She's perhaps the secondary character. She had gravitated toward the dark side because when we get hurt, we try to prevent that hurting again and that prevention causes all kinds of symptoms.
And conversely, I always used to ask my students what was Yoda's solution to pain? And the answer is feeling it. He felt it. And so, when we get at war with the universe and trying not to feel pain, try to hide from our suffering, that's when we cause injuries to ourselves. That's when we cause symptoms and defenses and mental illness. When we accept feeling, when we accept grieving, when we accept life as it is, when we go with the Tao, the way, it's not always pleasant, it's not always wonderful. Sometimes it can be acutely painful. But there is a liberation, there is a freedom, and there is a deeper joy that comes along with going with it instead of going against it.
Lori:
That's such a refreshing way to reframe obstacles and hardships along our parenting journeys. So, thank you for that.
It's time for our last question. I've really enjoyed the time we're having together and I don't want it to end, but I am going to ask you what I'm asking of all Season 4 guests. How do you think parents can best support adoptees in building healthy identities and healthy connections, right from the start or from wherever we are right this moment?
Dr. Brad:
I know it's going to sound simple and perhaps a little repetitive but go to therapy; something therapeutic. If you can't afford therapy or you don't have the time, go to Codependents Anonymous or Adult Children of Alcoholics or Families Anonymous. Go for a therapeutic process where the task is not to be good or have all the answers, but to find out and be in touch with yourself. I was just talking to a very close friend this morning about this who just a young person who just had a child. We were talking about therapy for a few minutes and I said, “Doing your own work is the best. Right now, It's fun because you have this beautiful little infant child and everything is wonderful and he's sleeping and eating well and safe, but it's going to get vastly more complicated.” So, my answer is, do your own work, always. Do your own work.
Ann Lamont, the novelist, said, “The most profound thing that we can do for our children is to do our own work, to do our own healing.” And that's my answer. And I'm standing with it.
Lori:
I am a fan of Do Your Own Work, people, too. So, thank you so much for spending this time with us, Dr. Reedy, and sharing all of your hard-won wisdom and insight on parenting.
Dr. Brad:
Thanks for having me.
Lori:
And being yourself.
Dr. Brad:
Thank you.
Lori:
Thank you.
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