Understanding Your Origin Wounds with Vienna Pharaon
In today's episode, I'm joined by Vienna Pharaon. Vienna is a licensed marriage & family therapist, creator of the hugely successful @mindfulmft Instagram account, and recently published author of The Origins of You. Vienna has the gift of conveying complex and emotionally dense topics with such nuance. Today she joins me on the podcast to talk about origin wounds and how they impact patterns in relationships as adults and how we can honour our pain and experience.
WHAT WE’LL COVER:
What happens when you hide behind a façade of being "fine"
The five origin wounds (worthiness, belonging, trust, safety and prioritisation)
Why we might struggle to explore our family dynamics
What happens when we avoid being in pain properly
Finding peace with the pain
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Apply for my 6-month Homecoming Mastermind
Follow me on Instagram: @stephanie__rigg & @onattachment
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Episode Transcript
0:00:00.17 → 0:00:33.58
You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge, and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.
0:00:33.61 → 0:01:05.66
Today I'm joined by Vienna. Vienna, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So you've just released a book, The Origins of you, which I am partway through, and I have to say, maybe like a few pages in. I was listening to the audiobook, but what I imagine would be a few pages into the introduction, and I was in tears, vouch for the fact that it's incredible. And your work, more broadly has been so insightful for me.
0:01:05.76 → 0:02:05.80
I was saying to my partner in advance of recording this that in the early days of my Instagram account a few years ago, before I had any confidence to share any original thought, I think my Instagram account was more or less a proxy fan account of yours. We share so much of your work because it is so profoundly insightful and you have such a gift for conveying really complex, emotionally dense and tender topics with such nuance and in a way that is so compassionate and really invites people, I suppose, to feel safe to turn towards those things in this work. So I love for people who are maybe not familiar with your work, although I suspect many people will be. You focus a lot on family systems and origin wounds. Can you give a little context for why that's so important and why that's kind of the lens and the starting point for your work with people?
0:02:06.97 → 0:02:14.31
Yeah. And thank you for that generous introduction. Yeah. Just taking that in. Thank you.
0:02:14.46 → 0:02:56.67
I came into this work unsurprisingly, as most therapists do, to resolve that which was unresolved in my own life. And I chuckle because I think sometimes we know it as therapists that that's why we're entering into this field of work, and other times we don't know. And I didn't really know it. I think I had taken an aptitude test when I was in 7th grade, and it said that I would either do something in sports or I would become a marriage therapist. And I got into psychology, and I was curious about relationships, and I got into this work not actually knowing that there was unresolved pain in my life.
0:02:56.87 → 0:03:28.73
We'll rewind a little bit. My parents went through a separation, nine year divorce process when I was in first grade. And when I look back on it now with perspective, it was highly conflictual, really hard to be around and witness. There was a lot of psychological abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, paranoia, emotional flooding, just high, high, high conflict. And I am an only child, so as a little tiny human in this system.
0:03:28.93 → 0:03:50.96
One of the things that I took on was believing that there wasn't space for me to not be okay. Because what I saw were the two adults in my life not being okay. And whether that was true or not didn't really matter. What mattered was that was my perspective as a tiny human existing in this environment. And so I started to fly under the radar.
0:03:51.02 → 0:04:22.47
I started to really present as a needless little girl. I was always okay, I was always fine, I was always unaffected. And that role that developed early on really came through with me into my adult years and relationships. And I continued to be this needless woman, was always fine, the cool girl persona, totally unaffected by things, boundaryless, et cetera, et cetera. And it's funny, when I started my graduate work, my parents divorced.
0:04:22.52 → 0:04:33.41
Didn't affect me, I promise. They're good friends now. We do holidays together. They can drive in the same car. I had all these explanations and reasons for why it did not affect me.
0:04:33.48 → 0:05:21.70
And what it eventually brought me to was that I had to hold that position in my life because not holding that position would require me to feel not holding that position would require me to make space for me to have not been okay. And that was a very overwhelming and confronting thing for me to be with for a long period of time. And there's a catalyst in my mid, late 20s that really brought me to the surrender, really brought me to my knees. It's like, oh, my gosh, I see that I have maintained this role forever my entire life, and there's no room for me to not be okay. There's no room for me to have an emotional experience.
0:05:22.39 → 0:05:58.60
This was still just the extension of what I had internalised and absorbed as a little girl. And that's a bit of my personal story. But professionally, I continued to come up against this, like people who would present with unwanted patterns in their adult lives where they weren't able to just make a behavioural shift. And what I kept finding was that it kept being tied to unresolved wounding that happened in their past. I take the lens of looking at our family of origin.
0:05:58.70 → 0:06:35.82
Obviously, there are plenty of other influences that affect us along the way. Media, society, coaches, teachers, past partners. There's plenty of influence that will contribute to this. But I look at our family of origin the first place, the first model, our first education on all of the things from communication to conflict to boundaries, to what love is, what love is not, what safety is, what safety is not, and so forth. And to look at how those frameworks are running the show today.
0:06:36.75 → 0:07:15.63
Yeah, and thank you for sharing that snippet of your story. That was really what impacted me when I was listening because it really struck very deeply. And I think my kind of inner child, my wounded little one, felt so seen by that story, because even though our circumstances are different, that was very much my pattern in my family system, as well as my parents relationship. They're still together now, but definitely went through pretty regular cycles of strain and, oh, we're going to get divorced. Oh, wait, no, we're not.
0:07:15.72 → 0:08:02.20
From when I was very young. And so, in addition to that piece, my sister struggled with her mental health and so there was really this experience of, like, why would I want to contribute to the tension and the drama and all of this stuff that's going on that feels so unsafe for me. My only priority in this system is to stabilise other people and to not contribute to all of that stuff that's going on. In my first therapy session a couple of years ago, I turned up and sat down and sort of proclaimed that I was low maintenance. I just had to figure out whether I needed to leave my relationship with my partner at the time, who was bringing up so much stuff like, yeah, I'm fine, it's just about him.
0:08:03.77 → 0:08:35.75
I can be the priority. Yeah. And you can imagine the raised eyebrow that I got plonking myself down in the therapy chair and declaring my low maintenance, saying, yeah, I've always been the low maintenance one. I'm pretty go with the flow. I don't really have much by way of needs, but I keep coming it up against these patterns and I can kind of look back on that and laugh at it now, but, yeah, I think it is, it's like the being fine is evidence of the wound.
0:08:35.80 → 0:09:03.11
And it's not to say that that's a bad thing, but it costs us, I think is a good way of looking at it. There was a line in your book, I was driving, listening to the audiobook and I had to pull over and write it in my notes. I think you're actually quoting I think it was Alexandra Solomon. You said, I'm going to butcher it like our wounds and our gifts are next door neighbours, or maybe vice versa. And I thought that was so beautiful, I actually used it as sort of a discussion point in my Mastermind programme this week.
0:09:03.23 → 0:09:54.34
But looking at it's not that these things are bad or wrong, it's that we've come up with strategies to keep ourselves safe and get our needs met from a very young age. And they are formative in moulding us and who we become and how we move about the world. So I think that it's a really compassionate lens to see ourselves in that light, rather than to feel like this is a pattern that I have to break because there's something wrong with me and seeing it as some sort of defect. Yeah, that's the reframe, right, is that our systems are brilliant systems. Our systems are incredibly clever and instead of being at odds with them instead of being in the shame, in the guilt, in the embarrassment, in the frustration, irritation, annoyance of oh, here we go again, right?
0:09:54.52 → 0:11:01.03
It's to replace that with the curiosity of what is this behaviour serving to be fine, which is something that you and I both can connect to, was part of the survival, was part of how we learned to navigate through the system at that time. And as you pointed out, if we continue to hold on to I am fine all the time, what that does is it decenters us, it makes it so that there's no space for us to have anything outside of being fine as something that can be prioritised. And all of the things that that affects is intimacy, connection, ability to actually communicate, ability to be in conflict in an authentic way. So we start to see how the things that allowed us to survive back in the day may be blocking many of the things that we crave and wish for. The quote about our pain and our gifts being next to our neighbours, it's a powerful message.
0:11:01.20 → 0:11:25.27
Most people will say well, I wouldn't be who I am today without what happened. That is true. The valid point and this fear that if we actually tune into what happened that that somehow means that it will eradicate our gifts. That somehow we will lose our edge. That somehow this piece, this part of ourselves that became exceptional at whatever the thing is.
0:11:25.34 → 0:12:27.65
So I became exceptional at following stories, at listening to the details, at never forgetting something. Because when you grow up in an environment where there is a lot of manipulation, where there's psychological abuse, where there's gaslighting for me, what that required of me was to scan my environment constantly, to look for what was true and what was not true. To remember every last thing that was said so that I couldn't be hoodwinked. And what that turned me into was a phenomenal therapist who remembers everything that people tells her, who can follow a story successfully. And the difference though, so that we do not have the intersection of trauma and gifts is that there is a shift at some point where our gifts are either motivated by the pain or by the trauma or by the wounding or they're motivated by the healing.
0:12:27.78 → 0:12:54.73
And when we can step into the awareness that I can still have this gift, even though I am tending to my pain. There's such a beautiful opening that happens there, and that feels so important for me to say out loud to your listeners. Because I think a lot of times people hold on to the story of, well, but I am who I am today. I'm proud of who this person is. And yes, be proud of who you are, absolutely.
0:12:54.90 → 0:13:19.03
And the gifts that you acquired through going through the hard things that you went through, those gifts will not be taken. But you do not need to hold on to the pain in the same way and be motivated and driven by that pain in order to still show up in the world today in this incredible way that you do. Yeah. Beautiful. I'm thinking it might be useful if we sort of took a step back.
0:13:19.07 → 0:13:53.69
And I know that a lot of people have a level of resistance around looking at family stuff and a level of kind of innate protectiveness over how their childhood played out. And again, I can relate to that. Up until a few years ago, I would have said, nothing to see here. And I know you talk about finding this balance of not overstating it, not understating it, not maximising or minimising, I think is the phrase you use. What would you say to people who do notice that kind of impulse to protect or defend their childhood and their parents?
0:13:53.87 → 0:14:05.33
Oh, yeah, right. Again, I know this one well. There's a lot of reasons why we want to steer clear of it. Sometimes we're afraid of what it is that we're going to find. It feels like it's going to be too overwhelming.
0:14:05.38 → 0:14:29.85
We don't want to go there. What's going to happen when I open up Pandora's box? We appreciate the relationships that we have with our family at this point. They're in an okay place, and the idea of going back in there and looking for something and exploring something might change the dynamics that we have today that we're happy with and feel like we can manage all right. Maybe other people have somebody deceased in their family.
0:14:29.94 → 0:15:22.66
And so the idea of exploring something and that person not being here to have conversation or for reconciliation, that can be a constraint. We hear people often say they did the best that they could with what they had, and there are tremendous narratives around that that will block us from going to that place. And sometimes we idealise what our childhood was. This was pretty good. We put ourselves on the I talk about the wound comparison in the book, where we sort of put ourselves on this spectrum where if somebody had it worse than we did, based on our own perspective and opinions about it, then we feel foolish or silly for, quote unquote, complaining about something when it was, overall a pretty good experience.
0:15:23.51 → 0:15:50.79
All of this part of this work is about holding multiple truths. I say it pretty early on in the book that this is not an act of throwing parents or caretakers or the adults in our lives under the bus. This isn't us going on a wild goose hunt. This is about being able to name and honour what our experiences are. And all of those things, all of those games that we can play with ourselves, the distractions, that's what they are.
0:15:50.83 → 0:16:08.56
They are distractions away from us, honouring our pain. It can be true that they did the best that they could with what they had. It can be true that their parents were way worse to them than they were to us. Right? I have endless stories of what it could sound like.
0:16:08.69 → 0:17:08.80
All of that can be true and it doesn't take away from what your experience was. And it's so important that we are able to honour what the experience was and put a period at the end of that sentence. And one of the questions that I ask in the book is what did you want most as a child and not get, well, I wanted to be prioritised more by my dad, but he was working so much and he was doing that because he was providing for the family. Well, that's really different than saying I want it to be a priority period to just hold there. Because the moment that we go into the explanation, even when the explanation is true, invalid, it moves us away from being able to honour our pain and begin to work with our pain and acknowledge it and witness it and grieve alongside of it.
0:17:08.90 → 0:18:11.38
And so absolutely I understand that turning towards this can be scary, can be overwhelming. Sometimes people are like, I don't want to go to therapy because I'm going to hate them, or the relationship is going to end, or I know that those are concerns for people. And we go at a pace that feels okay for the person, whether listening, reading, in therapy, because ultimately, at the end of the day, if we avoid being with our pain properly, our pain will find very clever ways of trying to bring us back to it. Yeah, that feels like a nice segue into this tendency that we have often subconsciously to gravitate towards people, situations, relationships that touch our wounds, that feel familiar, that recreate past patterns. Maybe not in a really obvious literal surface way, although sometimes why do we do that?
0:18:11.43 → 0:18:42.56
I think so many people at a conscious level go, I don't know why I keep doing the same thing when it's not in alignment with what I want. I want a healthy relationship with an available person and yet here I am, chasing after this person who is unsure about me and I'm trying to earn their attention and affection and prove myself and whatever else the pattern might be. Why is there such a magnetic pull to familiar pain? Yeah. Oh, I know.
0:18:42.61 → 0:19:28.41
Like I said, that irritation, that annoyance, that frustration with the self when we find ourselves right back at the thing that we said we wouldn't do, whether it's engaging in the conflict in the same way, to your point. Dating that emotionally unavailable person for the, umpteenth, time patterns, the unwanted patterns in our adult lives that we can't shake will point us to our origin pain. I want to ask the listener to take a moment to try to externalise pain for a moment. Like allow it to be a separate entity to exist outside of your body for a second. Maybe it looks a certain way to you, maybe it has a colour, a shape, whatever, but allow it to exist outside of your body for a second.
0:19:28.50 → 0:19:57.21
And I bet if your pain could talk this is what I think my pain sounded like. It was like, hey, I know that you would like to move on with life, and I know that you have goals for yourself, or who you want to date, or how you want to navigate this conflict differently, or the fact that you want to be able to set that boundary. I promise you that I am not trying to destroy your life. I promise you that I am not trying to ruin you or keep you stuck. I know that you want to get on with things.
0:19:57.28 → 0:20:31.64
I know that you want to have this new way of living, this desirable way of living, being in relationship, dating, et cetera. But if you just move on, if you just brute force your way through and try to change something, then you forget about me. And so I can't let you just abandon what the hurt or the harm has been. You can't just move on from me. That's why I keep bringing you back into the patterns, because that's the only way I can get you to pay attention to me.
0:20:32.33 → 0:21:06.13
And so if you could turn towards me, so that you could acknowledge me, just witness what we went through, so that we can just be in the grief of what that was, then I promise you I will loosen my grip. Then I promise that I will not have to keep bringing you back into the same patterns over and over and over again. But I promise that when I bring you into these patterns, it's just my way of trying to get you to pay attention to something that you haven't spent enough time with. Totally. I'm curious.
0:21:06.71 → 0:21:26.95
When is that an opportunity? And when is it prone to being retraumatizing or just a reenactment of old pain in a way that isn't productive or constructive? How do we know the difference? And how much of that is within our control versus circumstantial? Yeah, right.
0:21:27.10 → 0:22:33.31
I think part of it is about what the intention of it is, kind of going back into something that is painful. We don't have to remember all of the details, we don't have to necessarily even go back into a particular scenario to relive it. It's about honouring the pain, honouring the experience of not feeling good enough, of not feeling safe, of not feeling like it was okay for you to be authentic and still loved to the feeling and sensation of not being important enough to the people you wanted to be important to. The actual details are far less important than what it left you with. And to honour that you maybe did not feel safe, that you were not protected to honour that you did not feel good enough unless you were perfect, unless you were performing, unless you were pleasing, unless you were XYZ, whatever it is, that is what we're tending to.
0:22:33.46 → 0:23:26.16
And so, yeah, I think for folks who have trauma, complex trauma, doing this work alongside a trauma informed professional is incredibly encouraged. Because certainly this is not about just like going into reenactments to drum up some stuff and have it be super raw, but it is about getting intentional with witnessing the experiences in terms of the sensation, in terms of how it was internalised, in terms of what we were left with, because that is what is ruling our lives. Yeah. So in your book, you talk about these five origin wounds, and I don't know that we'll have time to go through each of them in turn, but they are worthiness. Belonging, safety, trust, I think you've got it all.
0:23:26.85 → 0:23:57.07
Maybe we could just start by talking through the worthiness wound, because I know that's where you start in the book, and I know that tends to be pretty universal to varying degrees and in different expressions, but I know that your take, and certainly my experience is that we all have some version of a worthiness wound. What does that look like? How can that manifest? And maybe what do we do with that once we realise that that lives within us? Yeah, right.
0:23:57.24 → 0:24:52.09
As I was writing the book and really working on this wound, I was struck by I really think that every single one of us rubs up against a worthiness wound at some point. And yes, as you said, some to a much more intense degree than others. But the worthiness wound is when you there's a lot of conditions around worthiness. So this idea that I am not good enough or valuable or deserving unless I am XYZ. So if I am perfect, if I am a pleaser, if I perform the way that you want me to, if I am the comic relief, if I get the straight A's, if I am a really strong athlete, that is the thing that gets me love, connection, attention, validation, praise, approval and so forth.
0:24:53.71 → 0:25:37.80
So oftentimes there is a condition there. So I usually say to the perfectionists, the pleasers, the performers out there, those are usually the folks who will have some version of this worthiness wound, present my worthiness wound. And I shared a little bit about that story of kind of flying under the radar, being this needless child feeling that there wasn't room for me to have feelings and not be okay. And one of the things that continued to contribute to that is my dad was phenomenal in so many ways, but one of the things that he did was if I behaved or acted out or said something that he didn't like that. He didn't agree with when I wasn't easy going.
0:25:38.49 → 0:26:27.96
What he would do as punishment was he would give me the silent treatment, sometimes for days or weeks on end. And so that really reminded me that when you're easygoing, when you don't have needs, when you're not difficult, then you get presence, love, connection, help support all of the things. But when you are difficult, then that's when it's taken from you. And I found myself in that space of that really reiterated the origin around that role that I had taken on as a kiddo. And it reminded me, yeah, don't speak out, don't express anything that's outside of the pretty little box because when you do, the thing that you want the most is withheld taken from you that there is a punishment that happens here.
0:26:28.33 → 0:26:58.21
And so, yeah, just again to encapsulate it, that worthiness wound comes when we grow up in an environment where we don't feel good enough, when we don't feel deserving, when we don't feel valuable. And sometimes it's the full stop. It doesn't matter what we do. And for other folks, it might be, unless you are perfect, unless you do what we require you to do. I can probably touch very quickly on each of the wounds just to at least high level give everyone a bit of a sense.
0:26:58.28 → 0:27:33.40
So the belonging wound is some people grow up in families where a family system will say something like, this is what we do in this family, this is what we believe, this is what we think. There's this emphasis as to be a part of us means this is what we do think, believe. And if you go against that, then you're on the outside. Dr. Gabar Mate talks about how when we're kids, when attachment is threatened, we will trade authenticity for it every time.
0:27:33.58 → 0:27:51.79
Makes a lot of sense. And authenticity and attachment are our lifelines, they're vital. But when we're kiddos, when we are really tiny, attachment is necessary. That is literally our survival. And so we will change who we are in order to fit in.
0:27:51.83 → 0:28:33.82
That's the first stop. Somewhere along the way, we might take a path of rebellion. So sometimes in those teenage years we're like, screw it, I believe this or I'm going to do the exact opposite of what a parent wants me to. But in those early, early years, we adapt to what the system requires of us so that we can quote, unquote, fit in. So often, if you felt like you were the black sheep, if you had differences that the family didn't understand or maybe shunned or rejected, those are oftentimes the experiences where a belonging wound might originate, the prioritisation wound, okay, this is when we didn't feel important enough in our family.
0:28:33.95 → 0:29:19.88
And so how might that manifest? Maybe a parent who is a workaholic, maybe there's a different type of addiction in the family system where that is the priority, a mental health challenge that takes up the space, the energy. You mentioned this earlier, a sibling, for example. I think you might have said mental health around that, but an illness of some sort where the attention and the priority is somewhere else, where it just takes that energy away from you and we can sit here and say, well, it makes good sense, or oh yeah, of course that needed to be the priority. But it doesn't change that you did not feel like you were important enough in that space.
0:29:20.06 → 0:29:57.41
I share a story in the prioritisation chapter about a client of mine who in the book I call Andre, and he has a single mom and he would talk about his mom with such love and adoration and respect. She would work multiple jobs, double shifts every day except for Sunday, where they would go to church together Sunday morning and then they would have brunch together afterwards. And he would sit here and he would say, I respect her. He could really rationalise how her working double shift was her way of prioritising him. He could find his way to that story.
0:29:57.58 → 0:30:41.62
But ultimately still what was at the core of it was that what he wanted most was to be a priority through time spent with her. And that was so hard for him to come to that space because he wanted to protect her, because he knew she was absolutely doing the best that she could. She was giving everything that she had. And it's scenarios like this that are incredibly heartbreaking because you can see how much love and respect and care that is there, but it doesn't change that a wound still exists. And I think that's an important reminder for the listener that wounds do not have to come from abusive, negligent, mal intended places.
0:30:41.76 → 0:31:33.35
Sometimes wounds are created because of the natural circumstances of life, and I think sometimes that is hard for us. It can be even harder when it's not so obvious to actually allow for and create space for there to be a wound there, when it isn't this blatant lack of respect or this blatant abuse that takes place. I was just going to ask, maybe you were going to sort of move to this is how does the prioritisation wound show up and shape us kind of behaviorally in the way that we relate to ourselves and others? Yeah, in a number of different ways. One of the ways might be that we, through patterns, will keep choosing people who do not prioritise us, where there are other things that are very important to them in their lives, where it doesn't need to be apples to apples.
0:31:33.43 → 0:32:03.41
Where if you grew up with someone with addiction in the family, that you necessarily partner with someone who is struggling with addiction. But you might choose someone who prioritises something else over you and that keeps bringing you back into the wound. You might be someone yourself who is a lot of times people with a prioritisation wound become over givers. They do everything to prioritise everyone else. To try to teach people, show them this is how I want to be prioritised.
0:32:04.63 → 0:32:36.21
What's the giggle for there? I relate to it. It's also been a discussion I've been having with the clients in my mastermind group. This tendency of the frantic over giving and deprioritizing ourselves prioritising others, but then this kind of bubbling resentment of what about me? And we have to look at the ways in which we participate in that dynamic and I think get really honest about not creating lots of space for ourselves.
0:32:36.31 → 0:33:08.50
Because that's the other side of the coin, right? When we've got this story that the loving thing to do is to neglect ourselves in favour of tending to others, then I think to the extent that other people don't reciprocate, we have the story of you don't care about me the way I care about you or as much as I care about you. So I think that whenever we notice those stories, it's a bit of a smoke signal for something deeper that we need to look at that's, right? Yeah, always a smoke signal. Right?
0:33:08.52 → 0:33:38.21
Because it just recreates. Why don't you care about me as much as I care about you? There's something familiar about that and that's in this book, the goal is what is familiar about what's happening when we have reactivity. That's a great indicator that there's an origin, you said it before. We're able to give advice that we can't take another indicator.
0:33:39.51 → 0:34:04.25
We say to our friends absolutely don't go back to your ex. If your ex is messaging, don't respond and then you're there responding yourself. It's not as easy when you're in the experience of it because that's your wounding, that's playing into the decision making rationally. We know the quote unquote right thing to do. We're able to give that advice, but we can't take it.
0:34:04.32 → 0:34:38.42
And so these are really good indicators that there is some irresolution around a particular wound that is showing up in that space. I think to your point about the prioritisation, it's like ultimately, of course, we want to be in relationships with people where there's reciprocity, where we do feel like we are important, that we matter, that we are valued. But you spoke to it so well, this tendency to actually wind up deprioritizing ourselves. So instead of coming to ourselves, first of what does it look like to actually prioritise me? We continue to outsource it.
0:34:38.47 → 0:34:56.33
If I give to these people, what I hope will happen is that they'll give to me. If I show you and model how great I am at prioritising you, then maybe you will be able to do that for me. And again, that's not a really good way to heal a wound.
0:34:58.59 → 0:35:44.30
That's a good way to just keep it going and keep it going and keep it going and to be able to go inwards and tend to that pain so that we don't have to keep finding these ways of reenactment, either through repetition or through opposition. That's really the goal here. And so in this origin healing practise of being able to identify what our wound or wounds are, number of people now at this point exactly. Have that one, have that one, have that one. It's like, yeah, we do have to find that appropriate way to be with this pain so that it doesn't have the same lock on us.
0:35:44.75 → 0:36:36.98
The trust wound unsurprising, where there's an experience of betrayal, deceit, lies. It might be something that happened to you or it might be something that you observed or witnessed. So obviously a really common one is if there was infidelity or an affair that took place in the family system, if there were family secrets that you were expected to keep, or if there was a family secret that was kept from you. Sometimes these are a bit more of the outrageous ones, but they still happen. Where maybe a family member gambles away an education fund or someone who takes out credit cards in your name as a child, and then kind of in the more day to day ones, where maybe there is a promise that is made over and over again that somebody doesn't actually follow through on.
0:36:37.16 → 0:37:19.31
And I'm not talking about, oh, a situation had to change. Of course we've got normal life stuff, but I'm talking about these commitments, these agreements, these promises that always fall through, that let us know that we can't trust the important people in our lives. And also one of the other ones is that we can sometimes hear, and usually this will come from an unresolved adult too, but someone might make sweeping generalisation statements. Never trust a man, never trust that there's some storyline that then gets imprinted in us and absorbed by us based on what the adults are telling us. And then the last one, of course, is the safety wound.
0:37:19.36 → 0:38:00.75
And when we're talking about the absence of safety, we are often talking about the presence of abuse. This is a really tender, raw chapter. I remind people to take very good care, of course, when we're reading it, but we have to name it and unfortunately, we have to talk about abuse when we are talking about the absence of safety. And so emotional, physical, sexual, psychological abuse, negligence, recklessness. But ultimately a safety origin wound is going to arise when you didn't feel like your well being was cared for, had concern for, was respected, honoured and protected by the adults in your life.
0:38:00.92 → 0:38:30.19
Yeah, thank you for that summary. I'm interested on the trust wound. Something that comes up for me like none of those kind of big dramatic headline ones, but certainly my memory of my family system was a lot of things being swept under the rug. Let's just collectively kind of pretend that things are fine. We'll sit down at the dinner table even though we know mom and dad aren't talking, and there's stuff going on and just kind of playing that game.
0:38:30.34 → 0:39:01.38
And I notice for myself that I have such a visceral response as an adult in my relationships to we're not talking about the things that are clearly going on here. I don't know if that's an expression of a trust wound or maybe something else, but that's certainly something for me. Yeah, right. I can't trust you to be able to have the hard conversation. It's not necessarily a family secret, but it kind of hangs out in that space, the unspoken hidden thing that is right here in front of us.
0:39:01.48 → 0:39:15.61
Right, exactly. The pretending. And I can't trust the people here to not pretend, to not hide. Can we just say the thing, bring the elephant into the room and let's expose them? Right.
0:39:15.65 → 0:39:47.11
It's like that's, that craving, because we don't have to go deep into it. But what did pretending and hiding lead to? Yeah, I think for me, it was probably even as a very young child. It's like, if I know what's going on, then I can shift into my fixer role and my peacekeeper role and I can go about tending to everyone. And I would go to my mum, then I'd go to my sister and I'd counsel and I'd try and kind of bring everyone back.
0:39:47.18 → 0:40:06.22
But if we weren't talking about it, I don't have enough information to do my job in the system. Which sounds crazy when we're talking about a six year old, but I think that was the thing. No, it doesn't. Right. You see how clever I mean, there's a lot of layers to what you just said.
0:40:06.35 → 0:40:36.08
I needed you to not hide and pretend so I could go into appointed manager. Right. We can see how much is caught and stuck in there. But to your point is that you wanted the adults to lead, you wanted the adults to take charge. You didn't want to be in that role, you did it because you had to.
0:40:36.18 → 0:41:01.91
But ultimately, what I hear you saying is that I needed the adults to be able to say what needed to be said and be responsible for what they needed to be responsible for, so that you didn't need to step into that role. And can I trust the people in my life now to do that? Or do I need to be hyper vigilant, constantly looking, scanning, trying to figure out what's brushed under the rug right? Now. Did I see it?
0:41:01.92 → 0:41:26.50
Did I not see it? What's being said, what's not being said, what's being pretended, what's not being pretended, what's being hidden, what's not being hidden without trusting that it requires you to be in a hypervigilant vigilant space of constantly scanning your environment. Can I trust you to be able to have the hard conversation with me? Can I trust you to be able to bring uncomfortable things forward? Can I trust you to be honest?
0:41:26.63 → 0:41:33.75
Whatever it is, fill in the blank. Right? Yeah. But that's how it can continue to show up present day. Yeah, absolutely.
0:41:33.87 → 0:42:23.27
It's like I have to be on the front foot and get ahead of it, because I can't trust that as and when things arise, they'll be spoken about openly and navigated in a mature way. I feel like it's my responsibility to spot the problem, name the problem, take courage of working through the problem and ultimately getting us to a resolution. Because I've taken that on as my role and I don't trust that that will happen in the absence of my leadership or my stewardship. And I think that in adult relationships, that can lead us to a lot of burnout and resentment, this sense of like, everything's my responsibility. And yet again, we see this theme of because I'm making everything my responsibility, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
0:42:23.43 → 0:42:53.82
It's like if I don't ever create space for someone to show up, or if I don't voice the need and voice the fear and explain it, I just go and do the thing, preempting that if I don't do it, no one will. We don't really create space for change. Yeah. And that's what I get into into the third part of the book. Because it's only so much to be able to identify our wounds and witness and grieve and be in the emotional component of this.
0:42:53.84 → 0:43:13.65
That's really important for us to move some of our pain. But then it's like, how do wounds get in the way when we're talking about healthy communication, navigating conflict. Well, navigating boundaries properly. Right. Because exactly.
0:43:13.74 → 0:43:56.35
To your point, if I don't shift anything about this, then I remain in this hyper vigilant space. I do not ever let someone bring something forward. I can't have a trusting relationship, whether it's with partner, friendship, whomever. It's like all of these things that actually block what I imagine that you or someone in a position like this would feel. And so to be able to see our part in blocking what it is that we're looking for and craving for, but instead of it being shame, blame, guilt, embarrassment, we're actually able to step into the compassion, the grace, the curiosity of OOH.
0:43:56.48 → 0:44:13.14
Yeah. My behaviours serve something. They're here for a reason. And when I can get curious about that, then I can make a shift. I remember I was in a I know you just had I imagine maybe his episode will come out before mine.
0:44:13.17 → 0:44:42.34
But you spoke to my husband earlier and I remember early on in our dating, there was a conflict that we got into. I have no idea what it was about, but what I do remember is that I was very committed to proving my point. I was very committed to being right and I was going in on it and he's like, okay, I got it. I understand. And I kept my favourite part about this is he told this story as well.
0:44:42.39 → 0:44:51.66
So I'm so interested to that's so funny, your versions of it. Okay, please. Let's see.
0:44:53.79 → 0:45:06.04
Yeah, you put me on notice and lol because my version clearly is going to be right. Naturally. Of course, naturally. So I keep going. He's like, I got it, I understand.
0:45:06.14 → 0:45:20.41
And I'm doubling down. I'm tripling down. I can't stop. And I have this out of body moment experience where I'm almost, like, looking in on myself, just continuing to go, and I'm like, stop. Like, enough.
0:45:20.50 → 0:45:37.31
This is not this is not attractive. Like, this is not good. And I remember once I finally stopped, there was a lot of shame and embarrassment that came in, if I'm being really honest. It was early on before we were even engaged. This behaviour is really unbecoming.
0:45:37.36 → 0:46:13.31
Like, I don't even know if this person is going to want to be with me. And certainly if I were to continue behaving this way, I don't think that he would want to be with me. But instead of just staying in the shame, I got really curious about what needing to be right served, what is that all about? And we'll link to what people already have heard and understood about my story. I already shared that I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of psychological manipulation, gaslighting and yeah, changing of stories.
0:46:13.47 → 0:47:02.32
And part of my survival, part of my safety, was that if I'm right, if I can prove my point, then I am safe. And if I am not right, then I am unsafe. And the moment that clicked in for me, there was so much softness, so much gentleness for myself, because I could see how this part of me needed to be right as a form of creating some type of protection and safety for myself. What I needed to do, however, was I needed the wise, adult, mature Vienna to actually step into her driver's seat, as opposed to the unhealed, unresolved, pained little girl who was like, this is not a safe environment. You have got to have it right.
0:47:02.37 → 0:47:24.23
You have got to prove your point. Otherwise it's not okay for you. And so to be able to step into this space of who is in front of me, it required some healing around that safety origin wound for me, but eventually that discernment of, okay, where am I now? What do I know to be true? Who am I with right now?
0:47:24.35 → 0:47:47.59
And how can I step away from the pain driving this behaviour versus my healing driving this behaviour? And easier said than done. Lots of layers and complexity to this, but I think that this is I hope that that offers something of just because I'm doing something that I feel ashamed of. Just because I'm doing something that I'm like. OOH.
0:47:47.61 → 0:48:12.33
I feel very embarrassed about this part of me when we can shift away from just existing in the shame and embarrassment and move towards the curiosity of what this is serving. Why is this here? What is this trying to protect me from? That's where the gifts are. And so, yeah, I would invite people to think about the things that they don't like about themselves, the things that they do that they're like, oh, this is not great.
0:48:12.40 → 0:48:33.83
I hate this. I wish I'd stopped doing this, and to actually become more curious about them, to see what it is that that behaviour might be attempting to protect. Yeah, totally. Beautifully said. The question that I know Dick Schwartz always asks around our parts, it's like, what is that part afraid would happen if it didn't do the thing?
0:48:34.00 → 0:49:02.22
In your case, what is it afraid would happen if I wasn't right or I didn't make sure that everyone was in agreement that I'm right? And we can get to the heart of, like, what's this really about? For me? Why does this feel so important and big and life or death? But, yeah, it's big work and it's messy work, but it's very rewarding and liberating work when we can have the courage to do it.
0:49:05.15 → 0:49:44.50
I'm glad that you said liberating. That's part of the subtitle of the book, how breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live in Love and very intentional about what the titles were. And that's right. I think in this work, there is an incredible liberation that takes place and that doing this work does change our relationships and our lives. My hope, my goal is that there is a much greater internal peace that actually takes place to live the life that you want, to have the relationships that you want.
0:49:44.55 → 0:50:07.52
Beautiful. Yes, of course. I think that's probably most people's goal, but this sense of internal peace, so profound, so powerful, so important. And when we begin to do this work, I think that leads us to that, to a sense of internal peace. Beautiful.
0:50:07.97 → 0:50:23.59
Vienna, thank you so much. This has been such a lovely conversation. If people want to go deeper with you and your work, where should they find you? Yeah, you can find me on Instagram. At @mindfulmft as in marriagefamilytherapy.
0:50:23.77 → 0:50:43.16
Viennaferon.com, NewYorkcouplescounseling.com. But almost all of my offerings are always in the bio of Instagram. But of course, the book, you can find that anywhere that books are sold. There's a lot of beautiful work there. And I'm always posting new offerings that we have going on.
0:50:43.95 → 0:51:00.89
Beautiful. And, yes, I echo all of that and certainly go out and buy the book and read the book or listen to the book. It is really profound and beautiful. And certainly, if you've enjoyed this conversation, you will love, love the origins of you. Thank you so much.
0:51:01.09 → 0:51:22.29
Thank you. Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you want to go deeper on all things attachment, love and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at Stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a five star rating. It really does help so much.
0:51:22.41 → 0:51:25.48
Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.