ZuluOne: Heal the Wounds You Didn't Know You Carried
Welcome to the ZuluOne Podcast, your space for transformative conversations on systemic healing, family constellations, and transgenerational trauma. Inspired by the work of Bert Hellinger, this podcast explores the hidden dynamics shaping our lives and offers tools to heal ancestral wounds and foster personal growth.
Through biweekly episodes featuring expert guests and heartfelt discussions, we delve into topics like family systems, cultural awareness, and the path to deeper self-understanding. Whether you are seeking personal healing or exploring systemic patterns, the ZuluOne Podcast is here to guide your journey.
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ZuluOne: Heal the Wounds You Didn't Know You Carried
Why Most People Never Heal Their Trauma | Tammy Peterson | EP 15
In this conversation, I sit down with Tammy Peterson to explore how unresolved family trauma, suffering, and responsibility shape our inner lives and our culture. We talk about family systems, hidden dynamics passed down through generations, and how healing begins when we stop blaming and start taking responsibility for what we carry.
Tammy shares her journey through illness, prayer, and spiritual transformation, and how faith, humility, and truth have guided her healing. We reflect on how family trauma shows up in relationships, addiction, resentment, and identity, and why compassion without responsibility can keep us stuck in the same cycles.
This episode dives into family constellations, generational trauma, forgiveness, judgment, and the role faith plays in restoring order and alignment within families. It’s a conversation about carrying only what belongs to you, giving burdens back with love, and finding solid ground under your feet again.
If you’re interested in healing, family systems, spiritual growth, and understanding how the past lives on in the present, this episode offers a deep and honest exploration of what it means to truly heal from the inside out.
What you hear here is for reflection and learning—listen, take what helps, and seek professional support if needed
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Welcome to the Zulu One Podcast. Today I'm sitting with Tammy Peterson, a courageous Canadian podcaster, writer, and speaker whose life has been marked by cancer, prayer, and a stubborn kind of hope. Through her work, she stayed close to the basics faith, healing, beauty, and showing up in ordinary life. We're going to talk about her story, what she discovered in the middle of suffering, and the heart behind what she's building.
SPEAKER_01:Let's begin to John and I met a few few months ago at one of his events, and um I brought uh a few women women together, and it was very eye-opening. Uh, how would you describe your work now, especially after w uh witnessing what went on long ago with you? I don't even remember how long it is now. It's been a decade. A few decades, right? Yes. So this this is a this is a passion. And it's it's founded in uh it's founded in a very deep learning. And so maybe you could just tell everybody what how that came about.
SPEAKER_03:My my calling was I was I was a 25, 26-year-old punk kid, right? That my mom had somehow wrote me into this phenomenological, weird way of uncovering hidden dynamics in family systems, right? I was in the military, I was dating all the wrong women, it was I was making all the wrong choices. And my mom said, Hey, you know, come to Romania to where she was she's a U.S. diplomat, she was a retired U.S. diplomat and was stationed in Romania at the time and had just suffered a recent loss. And her psychologist was like, hey, come to do this this workshop. And in the Carpathian Mountains in um in Transylvania, former communist headquarters, right? These, these, you know, if you know Romania and I know you you guys know Romania well, we did with 55 Romanian psychologists this incredible work and facilitated by a man named Alberto Iturbe, uh Spanish family constellation facilitator. It's one of the original students of of Bert Hellinger. And we were introduced to this um to this incredible work. And I I first thought, and I say this a lot, right? You probably heard me say this, that I thought it was uh that neurolinguistic programming or those people that hypnotize people, and I thought it was a scam, you know, that they would like scour your in those days MySpace or Facebook to see if you had any, you know, things and then do the revival kind of situation. But come to find out that people that had never met me before or spoke the same language, and it was translating from Romanian into Spanish. We all, my mom, my sister, and I all speak Spanish. And um translating from Romanian to Spanish uncovered the hidden dynamics in our family systems in a way that was so profound that shattered my understanding of reality. And and to say that it's it's grace, the presence of grace is the only way that I can really explain it now. Um, that there's these hidden dynamics, like Romans 12, 2 says, um, that these there's these patterns of the world, and that there's this incredible technology to uncover those and and and heal them and let them go, right? Integrate them and and really really integrate those those processes into our day-to-day life.
SPEAKER_01:I thought it's it it has to do with truth.
SPEAKER_03:It has to do with the foundation of reality. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's that and that's you know, I've in so many, I just I wrote an article recently that I came back to Christ um through constellations, that I found Christ in constellations. And and Bert Hellinger would always say that Christ was always in the room. That that assumption that profound assumption of responsibility that that breaks the generational world humanity curse of the the first original sin, right? That victim and the perpetrator. And I think that's the arc of constellations in in many ways that is profoundly divine. And I don't know how else to explain it other than experience it. It's like having faith. It's like pr in the presence of faith of the when faith becomes real.
SPEAKER_01:It's so uh down to earth, straightforward, humble. It's it's quite a it's quite a thing to do. I I did a day with him, so it's quite a thing. So since our last conversation, which was in when was it? Do you remember?
SPEAKER_03:Around this time last year.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I thought so. About a year ago. The cultural tension has intensified politically, spiritually, and emotionally in Canada, like you said, in Venezuela, in in different places in the world, and in the Middle East, and you know, just everywhere. Uh, what do you think our society is revealing about its unresolved trauma that wasn't as visible even a year ago?
SPEAKER_03:That's such a good question. So I'll relate to my family.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:And and very, very I think it'll it will make sense. Um my cousins and I have this conversation. So my mom's side of the family is from a small town in Michigan, and my dad, my dad's side of the family is from Venezuela. Actually, we immigrated from London, Ontario. So I have, you know, um, you know, we're we're kin folk in some ways. Um, but um, you know, we said that we peaked in 1993, right? That there was this peak and we had this this um veneer that everything was okay. And underlying in the in the family system, there was these deep-seated breaks and that come from the the run-of-the-mill trauma that you would hear in families that you would be appalled to find out that is in other families, but in reality it's in yours. And that happened in mine. And my my and what ended up happening is that people started passing away. And in death and marriages, and divorces, and births of babies, there's cracks in the system. And the system cracks a little bit and then lets out some of these truths that for one way or another we forgot about it, or we put we repress that memory, and it shifts the system and it lets out some of this stuff. And in that process, the whole veneer came down. And we were presented with this opportunity. We were like, we can either deal with this stuff, heal it, and process it and work through it, or we can put our heads down in the sand and then wait until this whole thing kind of falls apart and comes apart at the seams. And in my family system, incest, abuse, all these, all the stories that you would say if you go far back enough, they're all in my story. They're they I come from, as I I I know that all of us do, come from all those, all those dynamics, right? That if we go far back enough, we're all the sum of all those things. And those stories happen in my family. Lost, um, I had cousins that I lost to addiction, to disease, to taken away too young. You start seeing the the the frack, the the fragments of unresolved trauma being passed down, and you're like, why is this happening? There's these patterns that lack logic. And I think in our social systems, we're experiencing the same thing. We've gained so much mental real estate back from, you know, it used to take all day Saturday to run errands with your with your parents, right? You'd say, we have to go to the grocery store and we have to buy the screw, and then we have to do this stuff. And then we have this device that's a square of of attention and that's built on trillions of dollars to activate those unresolved trauma systems because that's the what the thing that grabs your attention and lacks logic. So that's happening on a global scale, and it's giving us this incredible opportunity to say, now that we have, now that we know that there's something wrong, we can do something about it and heal it. And that's the carrying of your cross, right? The the carrying of your of responsibility, the ability to respond to this new information that we can be stuck in our old patterns or we can heal. And this there's this weird phenomenon that happens in families is as one person starts to heal and there something happens, there's something called systemic resistance. And it's the system's immune system or whatever you want to call it to maintain the system the same way. And so you'll see when you're on your way to do a constellation, your car won't start and the alarm won't go off, and you'll spill coffee on your shirt and and all the excuses, and your kid will, you know, have a have car problem or whatever, right? To say, we want to protect the system and maintain it the same. And there's this force that you have to overcome to grab it. And I think we're in the middle of that as a global consciousness, maybe I don't, I'm not entirely sure, but it's there, there's these these patterns that I see in the small and that I see in the big that in in mass scale that are that are resonant and they're they're the same. And it's it's just fascinating to see as a bystander and and know that if we don't do something about it, it can lead to the destruction of everything.
SPEAKER_01:And so if you talked about this in biblical terms, what would you say?
SPEAKER_03:If I talked about this in biblical terms, I think it would be no on the flood, right? That it's gonna say, we're gonna we have this chance to be actually to actually do something before the flood happens again. And that's the repeating story that there's this cataclysmic event that happens that wrecks everything, unless we we take on this this responsibility. And I think that's what the story of Christ is, is we literally fractured time in two. And when you match up the constellation's principles, they're not anything other than religious principles. They that's all it is, and it's and it's a methodology to be able to uncover those things. And there's some weird way that about 10 to 12 people, you know, eight to twelve people small group. There's there's such wisdom in the circle of groups. Uh, if you're either an AA, NA or Al Anon, and it would like we've been sitting around fires for many years and uncovering these hidden dynamics, and there's these beautiful souls have care for each other, and and we we experienced that in in Phoeni in Arizona. That it was just it was one of the most beautiful things that I that that I've seen. It's like how much care um and and people holding space for each other. And I think that that's we have this opportunity to be able to do that. And more than anything now, we're you know, you're somewhere in the country, and I'm in across across the country and in in the Western hemisphere, and we're talking and we're talking about these things, and we would have never met each other. And we just have this massive opportunity to to really heal. And and I think that's what at the end of the day, what the opportunity looks like.
SPEAKER_01:It's gonna take some humility, it's gonna take us to be humble, willing, uh, accepting that um we have something to learn.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And and that's exciting. If you can get by the shame and the guilt and everything, it's exciting. On the other side of it, it's uh it's light and and forgiveness and understanding. Put something solid under your feet.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because I I like to say when logic is not present, entanglement to unresolved trauma is. And that somebody that you would that you that you care about, that you love, that is extraordinarily intelligent, that is having this repeating pattern over and over and over again. You're like, why is this happening? This person is extraordinarily successful in many aspects of their lives. They're everything that they touch turns into gold, but this one thing, there's this one thing, they date the same person or they're in a relationship with the same person over and over again. Because maybe they're trying to heal the relationship with their mother or father through that relationship. And so go back to go back to mom and dad, the family of origin, and let's figure out what's going on there so we can heal together in that relationship rather than repeat the pattern.
SPEAKER_01:And you see it in uh drug addiction as well.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And how does that play out?
SPEAKER_03:But generally, so generally, um it's it's a void that's trying to be filled with anything other than the true connection. And that's that disconnection is what that addiction of whatever, whatever the substance is, because it may be addicted to disconnection. It really what you're seeking is connection at the end of the day. And when that connection is re-established, then the healing can begin.
SPEAKER_01:And so people will turn to drugs rather than turning to the true relationship with God. Correct.
SPEAKER_03:Correct. And and at the end of the day, the relationship with mom and dad. That's where majority of the dynamics come from is your relationship, and they say as facilitators, you're real ready to be a facilitator, not when you get the certificate, not when you graduate, not when you walk across and get the diploma. No, no, no. It's like when you when you heal the relationship with mom and dad, full stop. It's like, man, if I if I can sit in full support of mom behind my left shoulder and dad behind my right without judgment and saying simply, thank you for giving me life. Thank you for giving me life, and truly meaning that is that they came together regardless of the circumstances, regardless of if it was violent, if it was not, if it was in love, if it was in, you know, in a in a single occasion, we two people came together and we we have life and we can honor that process. Uh I was looking at um at some biblical terms and talking about honoring your mother and father in Hebrew. And the the word is not to, and I may be getting this wrong, so you know, asterisk under this one, but the word is not to honor to say, like, I, you know, uh revere your position. It's to say to give them their place. That the word in Hebrew is to give them the place, the place in the family system. And that's what the orders of love and family constellations talk about. It's like you can, you can literally not have a relationship with mom or dad. They could be past, but in your heart or in your in your in your being, you can say, you are my parents, and I honor that position. And I'm not bigger than you, I am smaller, and I honor that chronological hierarchy in the family system that you came before me, and because of you, I am here. And that just creates this alignment, and I I feel it in scoos bumps that are happening, right? That you you create this alignment that we can be in our place and not carry the burdens that belong to other people.
SPEAKER_01:You know, that's I just want to say what I experienced because it had to do with that where my I have uh three siblings, they're all older than me, but they're quite a bit older than me, so they're five, seven, and eight years older than me. So I always felt like I was separate from them. Uh and I was in a way, because they were teenagers when I was a little kid, so we didn't have a lot in common. I mean, now we're we're all old and we're all close, you know. It's it's it's different, except for there's always this feeling of me being an only child. But my mother lost a baby in between my closest sister and I. And so during your uh session with us, I brought that up as my theme that you'd like to work on, yeah. Right that I would like to work on, and so everyone that was there took a part. So someone was my father, and someone was my mother, and someone was my brother, and my oldest sister, and my next sister, and then someone was this brother who had never been born, and he stood right beside me. And I was like, There he is, I knew he was there, like I knew it, and it was we I think because I was younger, it was very significant to me because he was a placeholder for me. Whereas my siblings I think had each other and maybe it wasn't as significant for them because they had each other, but I was really like, Where is that? And because we never mom was like, Oh, I just lost this baby and it was a boy, you know, but that was all that was said. There was never any conversation about it or any anything that went through the years about what that what that was and who he was and who he might have been, and oh, I don't know what have would have made it more real for me, but it wasn't real for me. But after this phenomenological approach where we stood in our places, I was like, oh yeah, there he is. There he is, and I feel good about that. I feel I understand where I'm standing. Yeah. So that was my experience with that, and it was it was it seemed to make perfect sense.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And that's more than anything. Um, I think what constellations do, it just reveals something that we've always known. And that's more than anything, you know, in that that we're revealing and uncovering the hidden dynamics and the hidden patterns of our family system. And it's not a miracle, it's not a cure. It doesn't, it doesn't say, you know, hereby in a power vested in me, you are now, you will now leave this. It doesn't. It does you at the end of the day have a choice to accept that information or not. And it's, you know, as facilitators, we say we do this together. We don't do, I don't do this for you. We do that, this is a journey that we're going to do together. And I don't the reality is I don't do any other work. The person in the in the chair is the one doing all the heavy lifting and going through the stuff and bringing the people out and revealing the dynamics. We're here as facilitators, and that's at the end of the day, all that we really do is is is provide the space where that can be that can be revealed and guide a bit people through that that process. But they at the end of the day, they have the choice. You can sit in that chair and see something very difficult in your family system, be like, I'm not dealing with it. Nope. And you could be like, okay. And you and as a facilitator, you have to respect it and say, I'm no one to save you.
SPEAKER_01:So this has to all be voluntary.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, oh, 100%. And that people have to be ready for it. And sometimes they're not, and that's all, and sometimes they're never ready for it. But the beauty, the beauty of it is that anybody that feels ready can start doing it for for them. And that echoes through the family. There's secondary and tertiary effects about that. And and Nicholas Christakis, I um I think he he's at Yale or um I can't remember, but he he Nicholas Christakis has this so the social effect and and the widower effect that if there's a sp a a partner, um a couple, excuse me, that have been together for a long time, if one of the partners passes, the other partner, the surviving partner, has a high pro like a significant probability of passing within the follow-following couple years, right? But it doesn't just go to the partner, it goes to the best friend, to the cut the closest cousin, to the sibling, to the that family of origin. And I think that's the manifestation of the social phenomenon that happens if that door swings one way. I think my suspicion and from the anecdotal evidence that I've seen in constellations is that it swings the other way as well. That if you have a healing effect in the social system, that that echoes through, and I think the timelines is a couple years, and it's that's the what the math looks like. And it will continue to create these challenges, but you're seeing the challenges from a new perspective and be like, this doesn't make sense. This this is a family system pattern. This is something that we haven't looked at yet. And then you you create this awareness that you that gives you back the agency rather than systems leading us, we can start to begin to understand how these systems have effects on us. And I it's just so full of hope that we can actually do something about it, right? It's it's hard, but we can do something about it.
SPEAKER_01:Things that are true are hard.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:You know, ever since uh have come after my conversion, uh life has got way more difficult. But but it isn't but I don't misunderstand it. And so I think it gives me more courage to persevere. Before maybe I was kind of iffy about things, but now I don't feel so iffy, I feel like pretty committed now. So it's a different feeling.
SPEAKER_03:Can I ask you a question?
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_03:After after we did the constellation, have you seen things in your orbit shift and soften and and things get tighter and looser? How have you s because it takes a couple up to a couple years?
SPEAKER_00:So these are really wavy.
SPEAKER_03:I would imagine. I would imagine.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Not this not in my life.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:But in the people around me. It's just born like this.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah. it it there's an effect and I I think we talked about it in the workshop there's a fact there's an effect that happens that you're taking the snow globe and you're and you're shaking it and everything kind of falls back into its into its place and it's such a powerful movement to see how that affects different people in the in the family system. And you know um and I'll this is a little bit of hope on my side right is that we started this journey in 2000 my mom started in 2006 and then I was in 2008. We recently did a constellation where my dad of all people like this you know Latin Hispanic very machista you know love him to death he's my father I I I love him to death um but he was sitting in a constellation and sitting next to us and doing the family const family family constellation and my my mom was there my sister was there we lost uh uh my mother and my mom and dad lost their first pregnancy that that child was represented in the family system it's like this is the picture that we're supposed to be and my dad was in a constellation after all these years that you know old dog don't don't don't learn new tricks type the the whole the whole stories that we tell ourselves it was just it was it was just so profoundly moving and humbling to see my dad now I talk to him and he's like yeah you know the person really struggles with their religion but their mom and dad. And you're like who are you? This is amazing right that you're like man this is just it's just uh it makes me emotional to say you know how how fulfilling this could look like and there's a million things that I could be upset about. And there's a million things that everybody could be upset about. And I and I I don't judge and I say I can have my opinion about stuff and I can say maybe you know there's certain things that I wouldn't do the same as you but I honor me being your son. It's like that's amazing and and our relationship is so strong now and it's just it's really beautiful. So that readjusting has effects in the family system. But there were there was times in the in those 20 years that I was at odds with my father and we had very difficult and we had a lot of challenges but little by little you work through them and do the stuff and I can say man after all these years I have an incredible relationship with both of them. It's beautiful it's I feel so fulfilled and it makes my children stronger right my it makes my kids stronger because they're they're fully supported by their lineage and it's it's just it's such a blessing and I I I don't I don't have any other choice but to scream this from the rooftops as loud as loud as I can.
SPEAKER_01:Many women carrying uh invisible family rules the emotional stabilizer the peacemaker the overfunctioner the strong one how do these roles emerge from family systems and what do they quietly cost a woman in marriage motherhood and her spiritual life that's a good question.
SPEAKER_03:That's a great question. That's an outstanding question. You know we we talk about these archetypes and we see archetypes all the time right the the woman that marries their son not their spouse right that it's not a partnership is they marry a child. And so they're like that's not an equal relationship and so that creates resentment it creates a resentment loop is like you're supposed to be my child not supposed to be my spouse or you're you're your mother's spouse rather than being mine. And so there's these these dynamics that you and this happened to me in relationships at the at the beginning right I was trying to find because I was entangled with my mother I was trying to find a relationship with with a woman that would mother me right because I was my mother's partner in some way in some emotional way right and so I'd find a and the woman would be like this is not my my responsibility not to fix you. I'm like why not you know and it wasn't until I healed that relationship that I found my wife right and I found a person that I'm equal to and that we're a part in a true partnership. I think that's a part that that does it as well. But if you have if you're if you're the emotional partner of your father there's no space for your spouse and so you take on things that don't belong to you.
SPEAKER_00:What happens to the spouse?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah that they they don't they'll drift away one of the children will take on the the the position of the partner as well.
SPEAKER_01:So if it so if it's the so say it's the daughter and the father that have too close a relationship that that are on equal footing rather than father daughter.
SPEAKER_03:Correct.
SPEAKER_01:So then the husband is lost yeah so then the relationship with the daughter can be elevated.
SPEAKER_03:Correct because they'll find a partnership in that in one of the children. So you constantly have to be creating those boundaries right and say no you know and and because that comes from a pattern in the family system. There's a pattern that came on that we take on a responsibility that that doesn't belong to us. My my cousin and rest is God rest the soul is we we we're a family that has extraordinarily dark jokes right we and all the trauma and all the stuff we've gone through it all and laughed and cried through all of it but we would be you know um this is this is a very profoundly touching story but my for me emotional right is that my my my aunt developed uh cancer right and she went to pick up an envelope and broke her hip and metastasized to the her femoral head and what ended up happening is that um she it was angiosarcoma and she died within um about a year but before that she was in a constellation and the facilitator said this problem is really hard. This is a really difficult problem but if you work on it for two years you'll be okay on the other side of it. He said these two she had three boys these two boys are the ones that are most in trouble that are most because they were represented in the in the constellation. Well come to find out he was a captain in the Air Force special ops guy um was in Afghanistan elite athlete Air Force Academy did a combine for the NFL super athlete but we would joke that that's my aunt's boyfriend. It's like oh you know you know so when she was passing we would be like oh you know you know her her youngest son that kind of path his own way was joking. It's like yeah you know um when we went to pick him up at at the airport it's like yo you know the long distance relationships are really tough. So we're all laughing about you know this this this entanglement that happens in the family because comedy has a way of of lifting those truths up right and come to find out about a year later he developed the same a different type of cancer that manifests in the same exact place. It was his left hip he had a pelvendectomy half of his left his whole left leg was removed and he died within a short period of time and his mom and his mom this makes me so so emotional said she he died in the same town right in the same place we had my grandmother's place that that everybody would go to die to during this 10 year period. Thank God that's over but she came and said kid you have three days she came to get him and so he said I just want to be with my mom. She was so loyal and there's a there's a book by Stefan Hausner called Even It Cost Me My Life that he took on that pain but he was her emotional partner. That was her boyfriend, right? We would all joke about it in the family and take on this pain that didn't belong to him but but because there was a deep deep deep father wound in my family system. And all the boys of all the different you know my mom's sisters took on this relationship that was an inappropriate dynamic. And it happened it's so common it's not even it's so common. It's not a it's not oh woe is me I'm the only people in the in the world that this is happening to it's it's a very very very common dynamic that happens in family systems.
SPEAKER_01:It's probably almost a natural response to uh the loss without proper intervention spiritual intervention.
SPEAKER_03:You know we see those are young archetypes we see these stories happen over and over again the biblical stories have all these stories built into them. So it's not it's not really news it's not it's not anything that I discovered I didn't I certainly didn't discover any of this information. It's just you start recognizing patterns after you've been doing this for a little while I was like oh that's what that is that's what that is without judgment without everybody goes through it you know you just really and our job is to be the facilitator to help people unentangle those things because our kids will inherit that same pattern as well.
SPEAKER_01:So it's worthwhile doing oh yeah. In our last conversation you described the shifts from wounded father archetype to the wounded overprotected mother archetype in culture. How are you seeing that play out now in families especially for women trying not to overcontrol or emotionally absorb their children.
SPEAKER_03:I I think now those those chickens are coming home to roost now we're seeing a whole generation of broken boys that of just broken men and broken boys because the women had to take on too much and what what ends up happening is that when a mother is wounded in that way they'll repress or steal their boy's masculinity and they'll say anybody but you you won't do that to me and it's like man it's the devouring mother that we that that we I've heard I've heard so much talk about right I've heard I've heard Dr. Peterson talk about this. It's like that's where that wound comes from I think it comes from a wounded father. And when women fix their relationship or heal their relationship with their father then they can accept the masculinity of their male child. And a lot of the I think destruction of of current society that we see is this cycle that happens that you know the wounded mother is ra raising a wounded boy and then that wounded boy ends up being you get a lot of wounded boys together and they tear down everything.
SPEAKER_01:So this happens let me see so there's a father and the father and the daughter they have a there's a problem with their relationship an entanglement in the beginning.
SPEAKER_03:And that's because the mother so there's the if the father and the and the daughter are having an entanglement then that and that's the wounded mother you're talking about is the There's different flavors of this what it what it ends up being depending on what the trauma looks like depending on what the trauma kind of script looks like this these take on these take on two different things. If the mother was abused by the father the mother has a high it's this these are just probabilities and risk. The mother will have if she has a boy has a risk of like suppressing the masculinity or grabbing them so close that they'll never hurt anybody again type of situation.
SPEAKER_01:You know women because there's a birth control pill women have given up their agency to the to have their boundaries properly set. Now they're like oh well we're in bed you know like we're 16 and we're in bed and he expect he expects this and and he and I'm in bed so I've already pretty much said yes and so and so they and so they end up compromising themselves and that wounds that wounds a woman and who knows what it does to the man because now he's taken advantage of a woman outside of wedlock and that's a big deal in our society now since the beginning of the 60s.
SPEAKER_03:So who what that has done and I'm not um you know I haven't seen that that dynamic come up in in constellations the dynamic that I've seen is that that may be a secondary or tertiary effect of the original wound of that wound with mom and dad that happens at and they're usually abandonment abuse neglect um emotional unavailability of all those things that we repeat these patterns and in some ways we found we find these social systems that socially we create scaffolding around like broken systems. It's a broken scaffolding yeah exactly right right yeah yeah and then that's that's where you start seeing you know in in uh like the divorce the divorce industrial complex right there you see people wanting to destroy their partner it's like all you're really doing is destroying kids and you're creating a full generation of kids that had to pick between mom and dad when regardless of what the circumstances and the outcome are we can we can say I I wish my the father of my children or the mother of my children the best because if they're strong and they're successful and they're even if our relationship dissolved I can wish them the best for the sake of my children. And in some you know it might have been a difficult relationship whatever that is you can from a distance say I wish you the best from a healed position not from a not from the wounded you know the dynamic that happened and that's that's a really powerful dynamic. And you start seeing you know I did a this is my personal relationship right happy to talk about it. But you know I I started doing consolations at the beginning and I was like my working on my marriage with my wife and going through those those processes and I would be like you know my mom's my best friend like no my mom's my mom my wife is my best friend and so you would see you know I I did a constellation where my mother was too close to me and my wife's like all right dude whenever you're ready and so I had this patience of you know this patience for my wife that's a man she's a she's she's a she's just a gem that was like trusting enough that I was working through these dynamics because I have those wounds in my family system to say that and that's why I understand it at a at a very visceral level. And that's the wounded the wounded male right the wounded male that I had to join the military and I was at odds with my father and I was at a peer level with my father so I'd have all this contention with him. And he was like I I would I would try to parent him and be like no you're my dad I got to be in my position as a child that you do you whatever you want to do. You're the parent I'm the little one and I and I for many years had to re-establish that relationship in myself to make my marriage stronger and make my kids stronger and and everything in my life is the more I've healed the more the more I can show up from a place of connection and alignment rather than from a place of broken scaffolding.
SPEAKER_01:You describe judgment as the thing that entangles us most deeply with those who wounded us. How does that actually show up inside marriages and family where resentment has been building for years.
SPEAKER_03:I talk about forgiveness a lot and you know I've I've really wrestled with this because when this concept comes up people kind of their cultural systemic resistance comes in it's like we have to forgive people. It's like we're no one to forgive only God can forgive like because that puts me in the higher position than the person and says I absolve you of the sins or the the the wrong that you've committed and I have the power to do that. And I'm like I'm no one to do that. What we can do is I can say I see this for what it is. That's it. You can really say and I can see this for what it is is solid grounding for us not to be entangled with the dynamic right and judgment holds us in a in a in a rigid frozen position against the thing that we're judging. If we have an opinion about it it creates a little bit of movement especially with our parents and and I think we talked about this in the last in the last podcast it's like when we're judging somebody it's not like using your sound judgment to navigate the world right it's like I shouldn't do that I should do that I should you know we're talking about more the righteous judgment the a judgment that's saying I am better at the end of the day that all evil in the world comes from this simple phrase and and Gary Stewart taught me this about about Bert is that all evil in the world comes from the phrase I am better. And that's what judgment as its root is is that I am if you literally go to court, the judge is at a higher level than everybody else they're taking on the position at the throne of God. They're saying I am the arbiter of what is good and what is wrong. It's like no no that is only for God. We can have an agreement and that's what laws are in some ways be like I'm gonna agree not to trespass and I'm not I'm gonna agree not to uh cut you off in traffic or use my blinker or whatever whatever those dynamics say we can have agreements as a society but I'm not going to say I I am better than you and judgment entangles us to those outcomes. And when we stop judging our parents and that's where a lot of these wounds come from that we judge our parents because you abandoned me I wasn't there I wasn't cared for I was hurt I was and then this righteousness comes over us we're in we're at very high risk to repeat the same pattern. We repeat the pattern through that judgment. But if I say I honor you I honor you as my parent and I'm gonna do and please bless me if I choose to do do do things differently you can create a little bit of distance and create opinion and be like I can be grateful for and maybe you had the most difficult relationship with parents. And certainly being in Romania we saw a lot of that there was there was some really dark stuff. Say I'm gonna create some distance and I can send you love from afar and that softens the dynamic that it can heal and fall into a place of alignment rather than entanglement. That's really what judgment is at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah it's a control.
SPEAKER_03:And we live in a in a social system that all it does is judges. Just judge judge judge judge everything is micro these microjudgments on and again the you know this trillion dollar device that is that is pointing us towards judging everything and it creates I think the society that we're living in now it's this this this broken scaffolding that is arrested everything and together and we all know that we're careening towards an absolute disaster and we're all like hey guys who's who's driving the train it's like it's the momentum that's driving the train. The momentum is going to careen us off the off the mountain. The momentum is going to lead to a hundred million 150 million deaths in the twenty in the 19th century right the 20th century excuse me that those are the when you start seeing that victim perpetrator start taking into social systems and you're like now I understand. Now I understand that they were taken by a momentum that was fueled by judgment by righteousness. It's like this mental parasite that happens that leads to some of the most horrific things that have happened in social systems.
SPEAKER_01:What do you think is going on with the gender uh confusion or it's like I'm not in the right body but this idea that you don't feel real right it's almost like you don't feel real oh if I change this maybe I'll feel real there there's there's definitely some woundedness there. There's definitely woundedness there.
SPEAKER_03:I don't know where it comes from but seen from constellations it's it there's you entanglement takes on different flavors. And those different flavors are and there's I think there's uh an aspect of social contagion but there's also you when you start seeing it for what it is for this entanglement is be like there's an underlying trauma dynamic here. And we can create a space where that underlying trauma dynamic is held to be able to be healed rather than to perpetuate that those patterns of pain.
SPEAKER_01:If everybody is in their proper place father, mother you know the people back your siblings beside you and everything if that is a skew then maybe one person thinks oh I'm the daughter but my mother there's something with my mother if I was a boy or you're representing a child that wasn't that wasn't acknowledged in the family system.
SPEAKER_03:Right. Oh yeah and that has degrees and the degrees vary from and like how I how a uh a Jan Jakob Stam talk uh talks about this in organizational systemic leadership there's three consciousness there's three levels of consciousness the consciousness of the individual the consciousness of the group and then the evolutionary force and how I like to to say it is like a river right you have salmon in a river and they're going upstream and they're doing their thing that one salmon knows that it's a salmon right well metaphor here right that one I know that I am and you know that you are and we know that we are right but there's a systemic momentum that's about the group and the group follows and adapts to the Individuals, but they kind of keep moving forward and they they do their thing. And if they get up to a collective rock, they all kind of go around the rock and you see the person in front of you, and you're you're kind of caught in a momentum that's sub that's subconscious, right? That you're like, I'm gonna go, you know, if you've ever driven to work and you just like forgot about work, you're in that subconscious momentum. You're like, I'm thinking, listen to the radio or thinking about, you know, God knows what, and then you suddenly teleported to work. That's that uh uh a phenomenon that happens. And then there's the evolutionary force. The evolutionary force is that if there's a drought and the river dries, all the water goes away. Or suddenly the water, the river goes into the to the ocean and the ocean has a different pH level than and then all the salmon die. Or the the climate changes, or you know, the the weather changes and everything gets really cold. That's evolutionary force. It doesn't care about the individuals or the group, it just happens. And all we can really do is adapt to it. I think this is that those three levels of phenomenon that we're as individuals, we can have the agency to deal with our stuff. But if the social contagion says if I heal, then then I can be the the thought leader of that group, I can shift the the evolutionary force, or I can shift my group to do another, another dynamic, to see another way. But the evolutionary force is going to happen regardless of that's the modern internet, that's healthcare, that's modern sewerage, that's world wars. Those things happen, but I think we the more we heal as a social system, the more influence we have on those larger groups. And we can literally careen our ways away from catastrophe rather than repeating the pattern. So when we're talking about this, it gets, you know, they say it gets darker, it gets darkest before dawn. I think we're in that place that we're saying, hey, these come these types of conversations, I think that's why they're so important. And I've and I find this as a calling, is that we can actually help people heal. And they if they make the choices that they make, they make them without the entanglement. They make them based on what they're what they what they truly feel, not based on the systemic momentum of the group.
SPEAKER_01:You can see what's going on in your society, and you want to change it, you have to change it at the individual level. Yes. You have to. There's no other change, and you have no agency any further than that. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:And we're the only it's the only thing that we're we can control is our reaction. I mean, it's just this is biblical, right? At the end of the day, it's like it's it's barrier cross. Assume your responsibility. Do barrier cross. Bear your cross, yeah, exactly. Right here, right? It's right here, right? So it's barrier cross. It's that's what at the end of the day, that's what it is. It's it's the only thing, and that's what responsibility is. When we're it's that that compounded word, the ability to respond. Because if we're frozen in trauma, we're full frozen in the systemic momentum, we're doing that teleporting drive to work, we don't have agency. And when we when we're outraged, it's the same thing. We're triggered by the stuff that we haven't dealt with, and it all comes bearing in. And you say, man, my my argument with my wife is not about all the times that I wasn't seen or heard when I was a child. It's just we're having a discussion about the thing. So it's a it's a three rather than being a 10 on the on the trauma scale, right? It's a it's a three that we're like discussing, hey, I don't, I don't agree with that. You, okay, let's hear your point. You hear my point. We can figure it out and move forward as a relationship rather than me being, I'm not seen or I'm not heard, and I'm in the position of um emotional entanglement with my mother or with my father, and he didn't see me, and I wasn't hurt about like all those things come barreling out of the discussion bucket and then blow the relationship up. It it seems like that's the mechanism of these of these dynamics based on the the work that you have you and I have experienced on the constellation side.
SPEAKER_01:Do you often work within families or is it usually strangers that come together?
SPEAKER_03:So both. Um yeah, both. It's usually strangers that come together or people that are loosely connected.
SPEAKER_01:How do you actually get a family? Because that means everybody has to be voluntarily there. That's sounds like a miracle to me.
SPEAKER_03:So that that's you know, um we we I recently did this with a friend of mine, and she she hosts constellations for me here in in South Florida, and she brought mom, dad, her cousins, her uncle, aunt and uncle, you know, she brought the whole bit, and they were like 40% of the group that we had. But the others were friends and and and people that that knew them, but not super close to them. So that that is a hundred percent doable. And we did that. You have to be careful because I'll do it that exercise that you have two people that meet, and and you we did that exercise that two people meet, and one represents, you know, their mother or their inner child, or they represent you you want to make sure that you don't pair up people that are that are familiar, that are a spouse, you know, spouses or you know, a child or a parent. Like you want to kind of mix the group up a little bit, but you don't need a massive amount of people to be able to shift those things. So if you have a group of friends, extended family that are interested in doing something like this, you can mix the group up with that. But I also, this has been, I recently did this with my with my um, I have a group that I that I'm I'm I'm in the uh I'm in the car business, right? So I I I do technology and IT and cybersecurity for car dealers. And I brought systemic constellations to my group. And we were so I had this group of business owners that were sitting in a in a in a circle at uh one of our conferences, and I had these plushies and the plushies that you saw me me do, right? And I had all everybody really knew each other.
SPEAKER_01:Tell me a little bit what are the plushies?
SPEAKER_03:So the plushies is um so you buy them at uh the the local family constellation store called Five and Below, right? So it's just these nondescript little plushies. It's one's like a it's kind of like a cactus. It's a pillow, yeah. One's a pillow, one's a cactus, one's like a green kind of thing. It's they're just, you know, plushie. Like they can literally represent anything. And I have a medicine ball. I have an eight-pound medicine ball. And you can put those things in the field and literally put a sticky note on them as a representative of something, and you can work through the dynamics in that thing. I don't know where it comes from. It doesn't make any sense. It's completely fundamentological. Most people will call me crazy and I'm okay with that. But it is it is the foundation of reality that is emergent in this process. And and that's you can use those two as these to bring out the dynamics, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01:When you witness an adult child finally seeing their parents, not as villains, but as wounded people in a long chain of pain, what usually breaks open inside them emotionally or spiritually in that moment?
SPEAKER_03:Understanding empathy is a is a is a terrible word, is I'll suffer with you.
SPEAKER_01:I've been researching that it's taking the place of sympathy.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah, it's taking the sympathy and having having compassion and having the I with feeling see this is compassion, with passion, with my feelings, I see this. I see this really for truly what it is. And that's like you can you can see your parents as humans. You know, when when we're kids, we see our parents as like these arbiters of the universe, right? They're like these omnipotent people that can, if we they're not around, we don't survive, right? And then you can say, no, actually, you know, they made mistakes and they had issues and they went through difficulties and they won and they lost and they made challenge choices, but I I take them fully as they are. And that's like such a powerful statement. It's like I take you fully as you are with everything, even regardless of the story, I take you in fully as you are. And that really creates understanding and it it softens the relationship. And you can have and you may be doing this with somebody that is truly by social standards, a very challenging person. And you can create distance, not exclusion, distance. And if they're being okay, that you can get a little bit closer, and that's what opinion really does. Gives you some flexibility of getting closer as needed or getting farther away, and you can send them love from from afar and you can wish them the best. That's I I think that's the the the proper dynamic to be able to be in.
SPEAKER_01:How generational trauma quietly shapes a woman's inter inner world, right? The anxiety, the self-doubt, the people pleasing, the overfunctioning. And she doesn't consciously choose them either. They happen to her. They happen to her, I guess, because of the dynamics of the relationships that they are that they grow up in. And so the relationship isn't Yeah, there's a there's kind of there's leaning on each other, right? When when you should be standing on your own, you're trying to oh I'm trying to get from someone something that you're missing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, then you warp, like you warp that relationship. Yeah, because you're not um centered and trusting that you're gonna get what you need.
SPEAKER_03:A lot of that is inner child work because we disconnect from our inner child when we're wounded. And that joy and that connection and that alignment that we have these inner this inner child, that I can go back, and in family constellations, we bring the inner child a lot. It's like, okay, how did because we let's say, and this is kind of real world stuff, right? Let's say there was a mother that had a difficult pregnancy, and mother got sick at the beginning, uh, and she had to be taken away, or was in the hospital and the baby was raised by grandmother or, you know, whatever that dynamic, that early disconnection from mother, because that's our first, that that's our first line of love, right? And especially the mother-daughter connection is so difficult because three generations of women are in that pregnancy. Because the the base ingredients of the next generation are already in the baby's womb, right? The female child's womb, caring by the mother, and all the dynamics that the mother's feeling, and if they went through war, if they went through exile, if they went are all being intergenerationally transmitted from one generation to the other, and you start seeing like that's not one person, that's three. Three people connected. And so it's it's a delicate dynamic when we see that. And three is an important number religiously, right? Like you see this, this, the the present, future, and the past. The you see all of this, you know, really created in in one person. And and the world has its dynamics. There's stuff that we can control and stuff that we can't. But when we abandon that inner child, because we have to disconnect in order to survive, we can go back in family constellations and reconnect with that inner child and bring that inner child back into our heart. And so much of our misalignment as human beings come from a disconnection of early childhood from our from our inner child because of fear, anxiety, abandonment, all the normal world happenings.
SPEAKER_01:You've said that if victims don't heal, they become perpetrators.
SPEAKER_03:The victim perpetrator entanglement.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So what do you think this tr why do you think this truth is so hard for people to accept? What happened to a society that keeps denying it? If victims don't heal, they become perpetrators. And they also, I find, I find that if there's a someone who's playing out the victim, they force the perpetrator onto the place and say, Yeah, that's that's creepy.
SPEAKER_03:That's that's wild. And it's such an incredible observation because and it goes back to this momentum. You know, the the the theater has been set, and everybody has their own place and set and setting to play, and everybody has been giving their scripts. And when you're, you know, I've I've had this happen in my life that I've been taken over by a momentum, right? And I've been I've certainly been the perpetrator in somebody's stories. There's people out there that I think that I am the villain in their story, and they're totally 100% right. And I've also been in that victim and the righteous victim position. Like, how could I be wounded and abandoned? Like that that creates the dynamic for me to recreate that catastrophic dynamic. And it goes back to Cain and Abel. It goes back to the righteousness of the victim and the perpetrator, and that, you know, I I I think I talked about this a bit, but I represented um in a constellation, I was going through doing my own stuff, right? And I was I was wearing all black, and I was picked to be the perpetrator, to represent the perpetrator in three different constellations. And I'm like, oohesh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so um uh this Michelle was the one that was facilitating the constellation for us. And you know, there was this this person that was going, you know, that they're they're ethnically from Russia, and it was a minority that had been, you know, ethnically cleansed and it was difficult dynamic. And I was I was the representative of the perpetrator, the meta-perpetrator. And the victim was looking at me and was like, how could you, you know, the whole the righteousness, right? The righteous indignation. And I was the the representative that I was, that I, that I, the feelings that I felt as a representative is like, who do you think you are? You need me as much as I need you. We're two faces of the same coin. I'm just filling my part as much as you're filling yours. It doesn't absolve you of the responsibility of what happened, but it sure does give you the agency to do something about it, right? That I say, if I identify as a victim, I can be like, okay, what can I do about it? What, what responsibility can I take? And I think that's the meta-narrative of, and people may lose their minds when I say this, but the meta-narrative of the of the Bible is Jesus literally took on the responsibility of the world and bore and sacrificed himself for everything to break that curse. That's the curse that destroys everything. That victim perpetrator, the unrighteousness, the that that that constant struggle between the pattern that is that is that is recreating victims and perpetrators and victims and perpetrators and through radical responsibility, through radical responsibility, we can break that curse. Like I like that makes me so emotional to think about that, to say, man, this is this is is beautiful. It is the most profound thing that I've ever come across to say that if I step up and have the courage to take on, to take on the world, to take on the most difficult parts of me, then I can heal and I can let these things go and live and live in grace and alignment.
SPEAKER_01:So if one person has healed in a family, but the family is still under the throes of all of the enmeshment and everything like that, but it's at a time where there is urgency, how do you go about bringing it up?
SPEAKER_03:One one of the things that's most difficult was man, this is so this is so hard for me to to say. And and it's so for hard for me to because we went through this. And it's the the thing about constellations is also respecting people's choices. You know, and and we saw, you know, with my aunt and with my cousin, it's like they're careening towards a disaster. And it's like it's still so heart-wrenching for me to, and I I wrote an article about it recently. It's just like so heart-wrenching to see my aunt stand there and say no. And we like at the end of the day, had to like respect her choice and be like, oh, like just it was just so I mean, I mean, for me, it still now is so so gut-wrenching to see this, and that's that's where where the loyalty part is like I don't think the strongest force on the planet is loyal is love. I think it's loyalty. It's like it will make people that are that are incredible make wild choices, like to not see, to not see, to say, I don't want to see. It's too painful to see what this is. Because they're so loyal to that, to that broken system. But I I do think that there's there's hope in that, that once somebody like the the process starts like that echoing in the family system, and there'll be cracks and there'll be little things and little opportunities and opportunities have to come up. And you know, for some so many of my friends and people that I've talked to, you know, I've lost a lot of three friends through constellations, right? So you people just are like, I'm not with that vibe of healing and the weird stuff that you do. I'm gonna do my thing. Like, perfect. I understand. When you're ready, let me know, and we can do something. And um, you kind of lose people along the way, and you're it's like very lonely when you take on this journey. But, you know, it's there's there's this thing that there's this shifting that happens in the family, and you start like when you start seeing the stuff and you start seeing it in in culture, and I think trauma blinds us of pathways that you you just fill up the script, and what we were talking about earlier on the victim perpetrators, like, oh, here's the script. When I feel when I'm having this argument about this stuff, it's about abandonment, it's about stuff. I'm gonna load up the script, and every time you blah blah blah blah blah, and always, always and every time, and you see kind of see this always and every time, and I can't believe, and uh, you know, you go through this righteousness, right? I think the same thing happens in in in the family, right? That that, but then that script shifts. And when you no longer participate in the dynamics, it's like a song that doesn't resolve. Like it goes through the chords and then it hits like a dissonant chord. There's a dissonance in the family system. And then everybody goes, every time I played this, this happened, and that made me feel comfortable. And now it's not happening. So I can either choose to learn a new song or figure out if my instrument's wrong, or try other ways of making sure that the thing happens. And you're like, Nope, that doesn't happen, right? And you can almost feel the trap. Like the trap's happening. You're like, oh, here's the trap. And then now that you're on the other side of it, you're like, there's a trap right there, I'm not gonna do it. And the person's like, they have a little bit of tantrum, right? Like, I thought every time I was gonna do this, this was gonna happen, and now it's not.
SPEAKER_00:How can you do that? You're cruel, you're mean, you won't, you won't play, you won't play there.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's it's it's wild. It's so and that part creates a well, maybe maybe this isn't. Maybe this isn't the play that we have to do. Maybe this is maybe there's another way to do this. And there's a million books out there that talk about constellation. There's a million books talking about this, these dynamics. There's is there a good book you like? Um, yeah, Mark Wollen's book, um, It Didn Start With You is a good one. I just man, um, this is one of my favorite books, and it and it it it shook my foundation is Dan Booth Cohen's I Carry Your Heart in My Heart, and it's Family Constellations in Prison. And he was at Bay State Prison for five years. Oh my gosh. It was it's uh it's the presence of grace. It really is because you see people that did horrific things, yeah, and restoring the dignity to the perpetrator and like to just be that that story of Christ of like you know, to the thief that is like you will see you, uh I will see you in the kingdom of heaven, is like it's just that every ah I get emotional. Um that that every person is redeemable.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Like that that nothing is lost, and that that through the forgiveness of Christ and through the forgiveness of God that we all are redeemable, that there is that we all are in that we have the spirit of grace that is in all of us, that is just even in the deepest, darkest, and and most places of despair, that we can come back and and and and be redeemable. It's just yeah, it's just it's it's it's difficult for me. It's glorious, yes. It's it's it's in the presence of glory.
SPEAKER_01:And every Sunday there's a glorious day, that's a glorious mystery. It's it's glorious. Yeah, that's what that means.
SPEAKER_03:That's that's what that means. And there there was a place that opened in my brain, and there's a door that I can see almost like underneath a crack, and the magnitude of of the presence of God is so big that I want to throw myself on the ground, and I'm just I'm like, I'm not worthy of being in the presence of this. It's it's just it's just it's catastrophically, it's catastrophically earth-moving and and reality shattering for me that you know we get to do this. And sorry for that's a balling, but yeah. Yeah, that's that's the the part, and and I think Dan, Dan's book does that. I was this is so embarrassing. I was on a flight, and it's this tiny little book, and we're I was flying with my wife to Chicago or something, and I'm reading this book, and thank God I'm on the I'm on the on the window aisle because I was like I'm going through this book, and there's a portion of it that's Just gut wrenching and so profoundly beautiful. And I'm sobbing on the flight, you know. I'm like putting the book over my face and I'm like, cover me. I don't want to be sobbing in front of everybody on this flight, you know. So, but it it is a profoundly that book, that book is is one of the ones that that changed it for me.
SPEAKER_01:I want to write this book down. So tell me again.
SPEAKER_03:I carry your heart.
SPEAKER_01:I carry your heart.
SPEAKER_03:Your heart and my heart by Dan Booth Cohen. It's Family Constellations in Prison. Yeah, it was that's that that book changed me because it talks about and he he did his PhD on this book. It was his his thesis of his PhD, and it's very well cited. Um, and it it really talks about just that that redemptive power. It's it's it's incredible.
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's it's the from your perspective, what's the most dangerous spiritual lie being sold under the language of healing today?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, your truth.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, right. That's a bad one.
SPEAKER_03:Your truth. Like that is like your truth just puts you in that is not uh the your truth is one of the most dangerous things that you can you can this is my truth. I was like, no, it's your perspective. And that perspective may be broken, right? Right, maybe c entangled with this trauma, you know, because it it it gives everybody the it gives everybody the permission to be on the throne of God. I was like, no. Truth is not something that it that you possess, it is something that is emergent.
SPEAKER_01:If you could speak one sentence to people, step blaming their parents, but refusing to move forward, what would you tell them?
SPEAKER_03:Don't think that you could have done it better. Don't think that if you were to have been in the same circumstances and doing the same thing, that you would have done it any better. That you weren't if if you were in their shoes, that you would have made different choices.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good that's a very good thing to say. Because otherwise you're always thinking, if I was if if that was me, if that was me, I would Yeah, the hindsight is like a power of hindsight.
SPEAKER_03:Like if you were in that situation, you know, that's that's that's wild. Yeah. To think that we're we're so all knowing and all that we would have made out the different choice. No, no, yeah. That we're flawed, we're all flawed.
SPEAKER_01:What does it look like practically to give a burden back in daily life, not just in a constellation workshop, but in how someone thinks, speaks, and reacts at home?
SPEAKER_03:I like to think when something like this comes up, what's the thing behind the thing? You know, I read Chris Voss's uh Never Split the Difference, that book. It's like there's there's always a thing behind the thing. And that's when when in constellation work, I'm always looking as like, what's behind this? When where's the logic not present? And I can say that that gives me the ability to not take it personally, which is great. And I'm like, I'm choosing not to participate in your dynamic. Right. And so that's like that's that's a that's a powerful sentence to say, I'm right now, I'm choosing not to participate in that dynamic. And you can create space rather than fulfilling the role because the role, and we're going back to the the victim perpetrator, right? That role is so enticing to fill because it it hit it activates all the the wounds in us. And mentally, and I try to do this prayer meditation is like, you know, God, just let me carry what only belongs to me and give back everything that doesn't. And say, and and I can say that from uh and I the have the the the meditations, but like let me just carry uh what belongs to me and give back everything that doesn't. And you can that that that dynamic creates the why am I participating, why am I again in this pattern? I run my business that way, I run my relationships that way, my my relationship with my wife. If I keep making the wrong decision, I'm like, okay, all right, I got I'm I made a wrong decision here, I made a wrong decision here, I did this again. What have I not seen? What I haven't given back, what am I still fulfilling out of loyalty that doesn't belong to me? And I'll make that, I'll just try to make that that mental note to see what I can give back and what can and I'll do a constell. I'll like I often be like, man, I haven't I haven't worked that dynamic out because that pattern keeps presenting in my life.
SPEAKER_01:And how would you then work through a constellation on that yourself?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I'll I'll say something like, you know, I I there's a there's a let's say a dynamic at work that I have a difficult relationship with one of my team members. And I'm like, man, so I'll talk to somebody and I'll be like, I am I am I wrong here or am I fulfilling something? And I may be blindly completing the circuit for this person. So I'll literally go into a constellation and be like, I would like to work on, like to do a systemic constellation. I want to work on my relationship with this person and what this person is representing in my in my in my life. And we'll bring up that dynamic, and it might be like I have a sticky note here on somewhere on my computer that literally says, work on this dynamic. And I I'll go into the constellation be like, I want to work on this and make sure that I'm that I'm approaching it with the care and the attention that it needs, and I'll work on that dynamic specifically. And then over the next two years, it will literally disappear. It's it's wild. I was literally able to shift the full dynamic of my organization and other people's organizations through family constellations or systemic constellations that they were creating towards disaster and now are thriving because the leader of the organization, the organization takes on the dynamics of the leader. And so the more we heal, the more our organization heals, and the more alignment we can create, and the more it's it just it's it's like magic. It's wild. It's it is it is truly wild. And so I I work on that portion that I say, I like to work on this dynamic, and I specifically say that.
SPEAKER_01:Sounds practical.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's very if I'm anything, I'm practical.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_03:But if I'm if I have a dynamic with a mom and dad, I do a prayer meditation that I say, I give this back to you. In love, I took it, in love, I give it back. You hold it in your hand. And I there's this meditation that I hold in my hand, and I say, it's like feel the size of it. Feel the size of it, the weight of it, the color, and you really put hold it in your hand, whatever that thing is. If that's anxiety, if that's abandonment, if that's self-worth, if that's you know, uh self-talk, um, if whatever that is, that's like negative self-talk, whatever that is, you hold it in your hand and you look at you in your mind look at your parents and say, in love, I took this, and in love I give it back. And you literally give it back to where it belonged. It's like this no longer belongs to me.
SPEAKER_01:What are the signs that someone's repeating a family pattern? Even if their life looks very different on the surface from their parents' life.
SPEAKER_03:I think if they just tremble. And you know when somebody's out of alignment, they just look the story, so you know how they say history repeats itself? I don't think it repeats itself. I think it often rhymes. So the rhyming of a problem is this is similar, right? And you talk to somebody's like, if they bring up a pattern that doesn't have logic, you take a step away from the pattern. Like, what's the pattern really about? Is it about not being seen? Is it about being too too close? Is it about control? Is it about controlling that person? Is it about talking down to that person? Is it about them fulfilling a role, the expectations that you don't have? And then when you start putting clarity to the problem, like, where else, where in my system did I feel feel that I wasn't seen, that I wasn't heard, that I wasn't given my place, that I don't have the relationship with my inner child, that I don't have those things, and you're like, that's a pattern. I can put it in a constellation I can work on. So it's like the rhyming. You know, you've you've probably met people that they have dated the same person over and over again.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:It's like you're dating your mother.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I need to John over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. It's like you're dating your mother. Go to the root, your relationship with your mother, the relationship between siblings. That's like you're out of order in the family system. You you're taking the position of the first child rather than the third because there was a child that wasn't recognized in the family system. I had massive conflict, not massive conflict, I had constant conflict with my sister. And that conflict in the with my sister came from I'm the I'm really the middle child, and I act like a middle child, I feel like a middle child, I know I'm number two, I'm not number one. I I've always been that way. I've I'm I'm I'm very much my personality is of a middle child. But I'm the firstborn because my parents lost it, and then my sister jumped me and she would try to be the oldest sister. And I'm like, you're not the oldest. You're the third, you're the youngest, you're the baby. And so a lot of our conflict came from her wanting to tell me what to do and to do this stuff. I'm two years older than she is, right? It's like that dynamic happened. But that as we've as she's done her work and I've done my work, that dynamic is now appropriate. She's she's number three, I'm number two, and there's a number one. There's a firstborn. And the child order is extraordinarily important.
SPEAKER_01:What's one small spiritually aligned step someone can take this week to move from entanglement towards freedom in their family system?
SPEAKER_03:Take three deep breaths, imagine your mother and your father in front of you, and say, Thank you for giving me life. And that's enough.
SPEAKER_01:How has becoming a father changed the way you approach healing, responsibility, and masculinity compared before you had children?
SPEAKER_03:Becoming a father softened me in many ways. And to uh had a business partner to talk about holding things lightly, like an egg, rather than white-knuckling things. And I think I think holding things lightly. Um so my my my oldest um was in the NICU for he was born at uh seven thir 32 and a half weeks. And so that was, man, just to be like the fragility of of life and you know, this this precious this precious being that you literally would do anything for. You're running down and you're taking the little bit of breast milk that my wife was pumping at the time, and we're driving down to my son was born in Mount Sinai in Miami Beach. We're like flying down there to during work hours to bring the little bit of you know milk that she had to this little baby in this NICU really puts things into perspective. You know, the fact that I've seen my stuff in real time go into my kids and be like, that doesn't belong to you, that's mine. So I gotta deal with it. And so they're this just like little reflective pattern, and you can real time, I don't know how else to say this, but troubleshoot your systems with your kids. Be like, you're taking on something that doesn't belong to you. So I'm gonna go, where am I, where do I have anxiety? Where do I have stuff that doesn't belong to you? And my my son had, you know, talk about him. He had that happening. Every time, every time my wife or I would like go outside the door, he would fly to to see if if we were leaving or something, that he felt like that there was his abandonment. And we started working on it and it went away. It literally went away. It's I don't know if he matured out of it. I th I like to think that it's a constellation, you know. But I all the above that the more that we that old was he? He was seven at the time.
SPEAKER_01:How old they have to be, do you think, before they can do this work?
SPEAKER_03:So they they don't um I don't recommend children to do constellations. Us as parents, until our children are emancipated, can do the constellations for them. They're just they're just mirrors of our stuff, right? So they're just you know very clear channels of our the stuff that's going on with us internally. And so the more, you know, us as parents, we can say, I'm gonna bring in this dynamic. And it's like, and it doesn't have it, it has nothing to do with them. It all has to do with you, and you're like, crap. So that's the the power of it is as until they're emancipated, and emancipation can happen, as we all know, at very different ages. Until they're emancipated, we can do consolations for them. And that's where that those orders of love in the family system are extraordinarily important because we can, as parents, our main responsibility is a child, and their only responsibility is to take love. Our only responsibility is to give it, and their only responsibility is to take it, not to make us happy, not to fulfill the whole that we have in our lives, not to be our partners, not to be all those are inappropriate relationships. The only thing is that they should rest in the love that we give them.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. That's a good, good answer. I like that answer. Where can listeners go if they feel called to explore this work further, whether through Zulu One, your workshops, or community work?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so um there's a massive community of family constellation facilitators uh globally, right? And the South Florida has a ton of them. Um there's there's incredible workshops. And don't do mine to find somebody else's, right? Find anybody that resonates with you. They say that the right facilitator shows up uh at the right time for the right people. And um there's communities on Facebook, there's there's a Reddit community that I that I manage that has family cons that's family constellations, literally. And um on our on our website on Zuluan.org, that's Z-U-L-U-O-N-E.org, we host all and post all the constellations that we have in Chicago and South Florida and that we do across the country. And and there's there's some and now in I think March of 26th, the International Family Constellations uh conference is happening as well. So there's there's tons of work out there, there's tons of literature books, uh, podcasts. The podcast that that that I host, the Zulu One Podcast, has a ton of information on it as well. So March is it's um a a gathering of a lot of facilitators across the country or across the world that are gonna come into North Carolina and are gonna participate in in a conference together. And so talks about different everybody has their own style of family constellations. That's constellations are very they're they're very stylistic, uh let's just put it that way. They're creative, they're cre very creative, yeah. They're emergent, you know, so for from one way or another. But there's some people that are very kind of in the woo-woo-woo world. There's some people that are very in the very technical, there's some people that are in between, and there's structural constellations, there's constellations with horses, there's you know, constellations from all different walks of life, and constellations with dogs? I'm not I've never heard of it.
SPEAKER_01:Huh?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I've not heard of constellations with dogs.
SPEAKER_01:Dogs are so into like that.
SPEAKER_03:They really are. Yeah, they really are. But constellations with horses has been um has really been a thing. And then horses, you know. Horses, yeah. It's it's wild. It's um how is that?
SPEAKER_01:Horses.
SPEAKER_03:It's one of the craziest things that I that I've seen, but it they literally uncover the hidden dynamics in the family system just as a representative would would do.
SPEAKER_01:From your horse.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, from a horse.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's why I think dogs would be good.
SPEAKER_03:I think, yeah, I I've never I've never seen about I've never heard about it with dogs, but I think that you know, with horses is one of the most wildest things I've ever heard. Who am I to judge? I sit in a room with complete strangers that start out with, you know, with uh with with solid faces and then leave as a soul family. So, you know, everybody's like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't want to do this. Why am I here? Why did I get drugged into here? And then suddenly at the end they're like, oh my gosh, this is the most that that was that was and and Tammy, I have to I have to say this before before we leave, is just that was one of the most beautiful constellations I've ever participated in. It's just, you know, the the before and after of you guys was just you know, and you're so courageous. It was just like, you know, just kind of go up there and march in here and it's like I'm gonna do this thing for my friends. And it was just it was just wild. I was I was just so humbled and and it was beautiful to experience that with you guys. And I I'm I'm so humbled that we were able to do that. And it was just it was it was really beautiful to see the before and after that like that little break that we took, and everybody was like, this is for real. So it was magical.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Yeah, you know, I told you I went to Alamon, right? That started my journey to uh being somebody who brought people together. I never was like that before that. I would always be, I could do this on my own. I could do this on my own. I was always doing everything on my own. Yeah, and uh I'm just not like that anymore. Yeah, just not like that anymore. Things have changed, and now having all those all those people, they were so they're all so important to me. People I love.
SPEAKER_03:They're beautiful, they're beautiful people.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, it's funny now because now I'll say I want to introduce someone to another one of my friends, and they already know each other.
unknown:Like we are.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that was I was just so humbled, and it was just you see when people are truly of service to each other, you know, and it's just it was it just that was profoundly moving. And especially the set and setting and where we were and the spiritual aspect of it, it was just it was full of grace. It was just it was it was really beautiful. Thank you for that opportunity.
SPEAKER_00:You're both there together, I think made it very uh deep and profound.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. She's she's an she's an incredible woman. I and you know, so grateful for for her supporting me and supporting us through this process that she was a courageous one and went to the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania to do this wild work, you know, out there 20 years ago and then came back with this gift. It's just it's just it's profound.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, thanks again.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, thank you, Tammy.
SPEAKER_01:We should stay in touch.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll talk soon. Thanks for tuning in to the Zulu One Podcast. If you found value in today's podcast, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. Your support means everything to us. And thank you for being part of this journey.
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