44: Fix Your Picker by Looking At Your Imprinting!

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Belagandhi, founder of SmartDating Academy and your host of this beautiful podcast. We're here to bring more love into your life, regardless of if you're single, if you're married, if you're thinking about becoming single, if you're thinking about becoming married, or finding the lid to your pot, and we're going to bring more life into that love that you have or you want. You might have seen me on Good Morning America or Steve Harvey or the today show or a hundred other places, but I'm so happy that you're here with us because we're going to make your life and your love better. - SmartDaters, welcome back. I am so excited to bring you this week's episode. If I talk about fixing your picker, this episode is gonna blow your mind because it's gonna be like, fix your freaking picker because Dr. Rockbad is our guest today, and she is, I mean, she's the, what, you are the chair of the Department of Sociology at Manhattan College. She's amazing, she's a doctor. Her name is Roxana Badredoja. And so we're gonna go by Dr. Rockbad and she is going to talk about attachment on steroids, which is called family constellation therapy, which is how all of this stuff from our family's not just mom and dad comes into play with all of the shit that we do in our lives or we don't do. So Dr. Rockbad, thank you for being here. - Hey y'all, yeah, I'm Dr. Roxana Badredoja and as Bella mentioned, I'm an inherited family trauma liberation scholar, and I'm a professor of women and gender studies and critical race and ethnicity studies and the chair of the sociology department at Manhattan College. I am also a mother to like wonderful fierce energy beings. And so, you know, what all, I mean what that, what this all means is that I think study, write and teach about and identify and resolve generational woundedness and vulnerabilities, otherwise known as traumas, that impact how people show up in their relationships, particularly romantic ones, and how people operate in the world with others. I use a specific therapeutic method known as family constellations. And I've been doing this for almost 20 years now, family constellation therapy. So let's put a definition around that. We talk about attachment theory, right? An attachment theory has been made pretty mainstream now through a lot of books, a lot of videos, but typically people talk about attachment is something that happens to us based on our relationships with our parents from zero to five, right? And but family constellation therapy or family constellations, what you believe and what I completely subscribe to is it goes well beyond that. It's not just mom and dad, it's mom and dad siblings, people that are alive, that are not alive, grandparents, and how all of those traumas can be experienced by us as well, like talk to us about this. - Yeah, yeah, so let me tell you, let me tell you a little bit more about family constellation. So family constellation therapy is psychotherapy that like no other. It's like psychotherapy on Red Bull with like a shot of espresso. - Girl, that is my speed. (laughs) - So it merges, it merges known psychotherapeutic models, you know, like behavior therapy. And it includes inherited family trauma and here's the kicker along with indigenous epistemology which prioritizes the role of our ancestors in our life choices. So most definitely, there is a critically important spiritual component in family constellation therapy. Now I want to tell you about two basic assumptions that inform family constellation therapy. The first one is shaped by Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler and he argued that there are bonds and a sense of belonging that exist within a family tree. And the second one is by German psychotherapist Bert Helinger and he posits that our problems and issues shift through generations to cause stress in our lives. And so for me, I take this to mean that how we operate in relationship, especially romantic ones and how we show up in the world, they're informed by generational, generational familial, generational familial patterns. And I want to make a point here. It is true that Adler and Helinger brought family constellation into popularity, but this psychotherapeutic model is informed by indigenous epistemologies. I really want to respect indigenous epistemology and the ancestors because the reality is Helinger learned while living in South Africa in the 1950s that the Zoologyists buried their dead in their homes in reverence of their ancestors. And so the enmeshment of the dead and the living gives rise to this modern psychotherapeutic model. And so for me, family constellation is a systemic and psychospiritual therapeutic model that reveals the hidden intergenerational dynamics in a family, a relationship, a situation. And my therapeutic approach is towards balancing or neutralizing or what I call liberating the system. And so simply put, I identify patterns of generational traumas and family lines. And I work to create relationship interactions that are authentically supportive and nourishing. I love that, I love that so much. And to find, what is it epistemology? It's epistemology is knowledge, it's knowledge production. And so we are very quick, particularly in the U.S. A lot of mental health healing practices are considered European, but in fact, the root is these healing practices come from indigenous communities. So the knowledge is indigenous. I love that, okay, great. So, okay, go, like this is so fascinating. So it goes well beyond just mom and dad. But it makes a lot of logical sense, right? Because our parents are the products of their parents and their extended family units, right? And so what you're saying is so rich and so broad. And I love the perspective that it brought to me. I, when you and I first connected over the phone several weeks ago to decide I'm doing this podcast together, I was talking to my mom about family translation therapy. And we're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Why don't more people talk about this? - Right, right. So I think that it's really important since you and your mom were talking about, you know, why do, you know, let's think about doing this. I think it's really important for me to share with the listeners a little bit about the process and kind of demystify how I do this work. So look, apart from generalized talk therapy with couples and, you know, educating couples on collaborative communication strategies, I use what I call trauma eco-maps and genome-traumograms. So I'm gonna take some time to talk about trauma eco-maps and genome-traumograms. So in a trauma eco-map, I ask for responses to three questions to assess how folks have chosen to show up in the world. And I do so by creating a topography of their relationships. - Okay. - The topography meaning a map, right? I create a map. And the three driving questions are, who's important in your life? Where do you spend most of your time? And what groups, memberships do you hold? So I use these three relational threads to determine strengths and weaknesses of bonds. the direction of the relationship energy, right, whether the relationship is reciprocal or not, and I also look for stress bonds. So the trauma eco-map shows me where and how someone is showing up in the world, where they're putting in too much energy, where there might not be enough energy. So for example, if I came into you and I'm like, I'm having like, I can't get this right, Dr. Rockman. I have dated and married narcissists or avoidance people that aren't good for me. You would ask me those three questions as a starting point. I would ask you those three questions. Yes, because I want to know what your support system looks like and what physicians you've made about where you've decided to put your energy. So if you saw my trauma eco-map, most of my energy goes into my work world, because that's where I'm most comfortable, but then that means that some of my other connections are a lot weaker. Right, right, right. I would probably be in that same quadrant, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of us make those choices because it's just more comfortable for us, right? We don't want to think about the other stuff, because I get to do this at work. I love what I do, and then I don't need to think about my intimate partnerships and my role as a mother. I don't need to think about that that much because they make me uncomfortable. Sure, 100%. So yeah, so what I was going to say, well, there's the trauma eco-map, but then there's also the Geno Traumogram, which is my primary tool, and with the Geno Traumogram, with what your mom and you were talking about, I assess at least three generations of a family lineage, and I ask questions around marriages and deaths and siblings and pregnancies, right? I ask questions about like abortion, the miscarriages, mental health, family illness, violence, historical events, right? And I compile all of this together, and I use the Geno Traumogram to identify what is known as a break in the bond with caregivers in the lineage. That is my first intervention, right, with caregivers in the lineage. And the reason that I do, the reason I do this is because my work is driven by attachment styles, and attachment styles go in overdrive, as you know, in romantic relationships. So I follow the work of Balbi and Ainsworth, right? So John Balbi argues, as you know, that we're pre-programmed to form attachments with others as a function of survival, and Mary Ainsworth argued our attachment style is dependent on the behavior our mother showed us. So one of the ways I use this framework is to explore our relationships to our mothers in the womb, okay? I explore relationships to our mothers in the womb, and I look for something called a core negative statement. So I have a lot of patients who will say something to the effect no one will love me, right? I'm unlovable, right? That's the statement. And so then I use this statement to engage in inner child therapy, and with a concept called the knowing field in family constellation therapy, to therapeutically work with three different anchors. I work with the physical, I work with the mental, and I work with the emotional, and I use these three anchors to support an argument or my positionality, and my argument is that our womb environment informs how connected we feel to our external environment and how safe we feel in relationships, particularly romantic ones. So look, working with me is a highly emotional, like embodied experience, because I work to release whatever needs to be released from our bodies, so that we can move forward in life with our emotions in functional manner. It's amazing. I mean, what you're saying, to some extent, makes so much sense, and we don't think about it in this way. The environment, when you're a little, you know, what do you call it, a fetus, or an embryo? You're a baby, right? We're all, we all come from a uterus, right? And now, if you think about what was your mom going through during her pregnancy, right? And I can tell you, for example, my parents are immigrants, and my mom met my dad on a Sunday. They were engaged on Thursday, married 72 hours later, then he went back to the United States. She joined him nine months later after living in a stressful environment with her in-laws, and basically had married a stranger, went to a strange country, was incredibly homesick, and then got pregnant with me. So now, think about all of like what this, and she was 21, right? And so if you think about all of the things that were going on in her body, that high levels of stress, maybe fight her flight, what you're saying makes so much sense. And I love it because, and tell me if I'm off track here, you can have three different children, right? Two, the same parents, but three kids can come out completely differently. Yet, and we always say, well, it's on the parents, but there's so much more to this. Yeah. Yes. And your story and my story is the same. My mom came here at 21. I mean, this is what I, this is what I want us to think about. My mom's in a new country like yours. She got pregnant with me. She doesn't speak the language fluently yet. She disconnected from her, from her family unit. And my dad is off doing, doing his, you know, my dad was a surgeon. He's off doing his job at the hospital all the time. And she's scared shit. She's young. She's 21 and just no friends. Yeah. No support system and coming from a culture that is an extended family culture, right? There are cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and people everywhere to come into complete isolation. Exactly. Exactly. And so you and I are sitting here just kidding. You and I were both sitting in rooms that were stressed. And so you can, you can bet that the cortisol levels were up, right? Her adrenaline was pumping. And so that means that, that, that is our chemical makeup too. Wow. And that has a tremendous effect, right? So it's not just, did my mom attend to me from zero to five? It's like, what's your own DNA? What was the environment like in your womb? All of this stuff is crucial in thinking about. So to some extent, what we've been thinking about with our pickers could be sort of oversimplified. Like the biology part has been greatly oversimplified. Yes. And I'll talk more, I'll talk more about that in a bit because we tend to, we tend to choose people whom we can redo our initial, I call it the original sin, but what I mean by that is our initial trauma. We try to work that out with our partners. I'll talk about that in, you know, talk about it. If you want right now, go there. That's so fascinating, right? So take it away. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Let me, let me actually first though, because we are talking, because you mentioned DNA, let me clarify something about family constellations. And it has to do with epigenetics, because essentially Bella, what you, what you've tried to express is that our ancestors, I'm giving it different language, our ancestors impact our relationships and they impact how we can love in our relationship. And so I want to briefly talk about epigenetics, right? Because it's work is tied to epigenetics and my research is tied to epigenetics. Define epigenetics for people that don't know what that is. For sure. Okay. So simply put epigenetics is a study of how our environment can modify our gene expression and cause changes to the ways in which our genes work across generations. So as an example, with my eldest child, my daughter, who's now 19, I had a deeply high-risk pregnancy with her and she was in stress. And so for the first three months, she was literally starving, along with other things that were happening. So I was under stress, she was under stress, and that impacts how she operates in the world. And so my daughter, because she didn't eat for three months, she doesn't know this. But she has this particular relationship with food, which is tied to the fact that she was starving for three months, right? And so all of this plays into how she shows up in the world. Yeah. So I'll tell you a little bit about Dr. Rachel Yuhuta's study because she is one of the most famous epigeneticists in this country. And she has some ground breaking research on a children of Holocaust survivors and pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks in New York. And so Dr. Yuhuta found genetic changes that stem from the trauma suffered by Holocaust and 9/11 survivors and that these change gene expression was passed onto their children. And so the offspring were more prone to depression and anxiety compared to the general population. And this informs secure, avoidant, or anxious attachment styles. And my own research, my current research, it continues to demonstrate that our, and I really want everyone to hear that our personal experiences are not merely individual and insular. Our experiences are embedded within our family system. And our family system is entangled with national history. So my family system is tied with the partition in the Indian subcontinent, right? And so my answer, my answer to a connection in this world is historically tied to forced migration and immigration. Wow. And what this means is that how we show up in the world and how we engage in relationships is unconsciously informed by our family system across generations. Wow. Wow. Amazing. And, and how this can affect your relationships, not just with people, but your mental health, your anxieties, your addictions, your relationships to food, your relationships to lots of vices, right? I mean, it's, it's astounding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let me go back to your original question because we were talking about attachment styles and how people choose partners and they're recreating the, what I call the original thin. So, so love, I know this is going to sound weird, but love and trauma are intimately intertwined. I, I argue that they're in an unhappy romantic partnership. And so what I mean by this is that our personal and inherited traumas create a landscape or a blueprint for our ability to love. And so family constellation work shows me that we attempt to get what we didn't get from our caregivers. And we are almost, almost always drawn to someone who will re-enact our childhood traumas for us. And so my vision is to uncover a generational trauma that the person recreates through attachment styles and whom they tend to romantically gravitate to. So give us some classic examples around us. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. So, um, okay. So let me say this. 90% 90% of what's going on in a relationship is baggage that we are bringing in from our family of origin and our ancestral lineage. And so the work that I do is to help folks identify the baggage and areas of codependency. That's what I find, right? And I'm trying to assess what the person is trying to recreate in an intimate relationship to have their unresolved needs met. And so we bring into our relationship, how we were encouraged or discouraged to show up in the world. And and there is a common dynamic, right? So this is the example. There's a common dynamic that informs distressed relationships. And it's it's explained by something called the Cartman drama triangle. So there are three positionalities in a relationship most often. There's the rescuer, which is, you know, let me fix it for you, right? This person needs to be needed. This is me, by the way. I'm the rescuer. Same. Yeah. I'm the rescuer. Then there's the persecutor. And the persecutor is it's all your fault. Right? Angry controlling. And then there's the victim, the poor me, the helpless, powerless, not responsible. But here's the thing. We don't just take one of these positions. We rotate these positions in our relationship, right? We we both do in the relationship. And we rotate according to what we feel our needs are at that moment. Sure. So this is the reason why I look for that core negative image, right? I'm not lovable. Right? No one will love me. I'm not deserving of love. This is like the most common stuff. And what I'm trying to what I'm trying to argue is that people who believe they are unlovable as an example, they will attract people who will confirm that. Yeah. Right? Right. So I ask couples, ask couples and and and and people who are interested in I work with a lot of folk who are like, I can't find my person. I can't be in a relationship. I, you know, what's going on? Why can't I find someone? And so I ask folks to become deeply curious about how much it's from wounded childhood and generational inherited trauma versus what their partner is doing or what their past partners have done. And the reason I do this is because my goal is to end the projections because the the Cartman triangle, it's a projection, those three positionalities are projections. And what I want to do is create differentiation, right? Differentiation within relationships. It's a different way. I want to show people or what I try to do is show people a different way of operating in the world. So so basically getting rid of the old operating system and inserting a new operating system. And you can do that. I can do that. But let me let me rephrase that versus saying I can do that. I can help facilitate that because the work is not mine. Right. I'm here to heal you. Yeah. I'm here to provide a space where you can do the work and I will facilitate it. Yeah. I don't claim to know. Look, Bella, I don't claim to know anything. You know, I can help take those pieces and put together a landscape so that you can see in front of you what it is and where you want to go. Right. Right. Right. And you give people better tools so that they can, you know, shift out of the drama triangle into a healthier role. Yeah. That's exactly right. The question is, you know, how do you want to show up in the world now? Now that you know all of this. Yeah. How do you want to show up now? And it's okay if you don't want to show up differently. It's not good or bad, each choice has particular consequences and results. But instead of behaving from autopilot and auto programming, when you ask your patient or you, I asked myself, let's say if I was your patient, how do I want to show up right now? That's conscious. Yeah, instead of becoming the victim or the persecutor or the rescuer, it's like, how do I want to be right now? How does Bella want to be? Okay, she wants to be the rescuer. Or does she want to turn into the coach instead of the rescuer, right? Right. And I want to fix it for my kids. But then there are times where I'm like, I have to teach you to be competent, independent adult. Like, how are you going to fix that? How can I help you versus just doing it? So going from rescue word to coach, right? Right. And so just putting more words to or framing it, it's being intentional and deliberate. You said conscious, that's exactly right, being intentional. The work that I do is intent, it's to be intentional and deliberate about the choices that we are making and how we're showing up in situations that are relational in nature. And what I love is that you have people think beyond mom and dad, you know, it's like for me, like I can think about gosh, most of my grandparents are past at this point, but what were they going through? What did they go through? And if you don't have three generations, you know, back for me, it's like, you can, you do the best that you can with the information that you have, right? And so what like, let's say someone comes to you and says, okay, my, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, right? And my mom's a little nutty and neurotic, maybe behaves narcissistically or unpredictably. And I continue to pick the wrong people like that could be something, you know, and if you're not a Holocaust survivor, you could be survivors of the great depression. You could be like my parents and have immigrated or your parents that were partitioned. There's so much trauma in the world. But it's really naming it and being aware of it. And then looking at the impact that it has on you. And that's something that you help people to do, right? You would have me define all of the things that my people have gone through. And then you're like, well, here's your stuff. And here's how you might show up. Is that how you want to show up? And I'll probably be like, no, you're like, well, here's how you could show up instead. Am I getting it right? No, you're totally getting it right. And I love the way you described it, you know, because you're like, here's my stuff. And so the way that I think about it is, you know, it's this huge knapsack that you're carrying. And it gets heavier with each generation. And so you, you know, you, you can't stand up straight anymore because the knapsack is too heavy. Yeah. So my work is let's get everything out of the knapsack and see what it is. That's so interesting. It's funny. This is a personal side note for you, dear listeners. I, I'm super claustrophobic. And I had to get an MRI for my spine. And I've tried a closed MRI and an open MRI cannot go in the tube. I just walk out of the facility. I, as my son says, I'm an MRI failure. My mother has the same strange fear. The first time she went into an MRI tube, she, she, she sobbed like someone was killing her. And I was, as we were talking about this constellation therapy, this was a conversation my mom and I had like, why do we both have this irrational fear? And my brother doesn't, he just told me, I got a full body MRI today. I was like, I'm kind of jealous. But I, you know, they're like, we can give you Xanax for that. I'm like, you don't know my brain Xanax. I like, you'd have to put me under general fricking anesthesia to get me in that tube. And I don't know why, but this is the kind of stuff I'm guessing that you can track back to some thing. Yes. Yes. And I, I can for a moment, speak to claustrophobia because I have a similar situation and speak to it. The MRIs are like, no. My personal therapy session is, so um, part of for my family constellation is that, you know, my, my grandmother during one of the partitions of the Indian subcontinent had to go into hiding and was in a very small space. Wow. And so this was passed down through my mother and then it was passed down to me. And in fact, if you look, if you think about being in the room and if you think about multiple generations living in one body, because when my grandmother is pregnant with my mother and my mother is about four or five months old and in utero, she's produced the egg that is going to be me one day. So in effect, there's three generations living in one body, in one moment, and all of the stress that my grandmother experiences from partition, right, is encoded in my mom's DNA, which is then encoded in the egg that is going to become rule. This is epigenetic, holy crud, like my mind is blown. I can't, I can't close, like, I can't close the doors to bathrooms either. Like I just, like, I don't close the doors to my bedroom. I don't close any doors. I can't handle it. I feel like I'm going to stop breathing. Oh my God, literally, and my kids know what they laugh at me. They're like, you're so crazy. And they're fine. And my brother's fine. And my dad is fine. And my mom, I don't know, like, there's some thing. And I was like, I might just have to die at before I didn't have, because I'm not going into, right? Are you the first, are you the first daughter? Yes. Okay. So I'm just born first daughter. Me. So same here. And so this, it usually the first daughter takes out, if there's a long history and theory behind this, which I won't get into, but just very briefly, it's the first daughter that takes on a lot of the mom's trauma. So my mom takes on my, my grandmother's trauma. I take on my mom's trauma as first born, the first born daughters. We get the biggest dose. That's actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. We, we get the biggest dose. Great. No wonder. So my brother escaped the scourge of claustrophobia, because I took it all from my mom. I know like we're being funny about this. And, you know, but this is, this is exactly it. Wow. And, and so much of the way that we show up in relationships can be something that's, you know, epigenetic, right? I mean, it doesn't just have to be, my mom did this, my dad did this. So it's really, this is such a, a, a broader way to think about who we are in the world and how we show up in romantic relationships. So what tell me, you know, what advice, like if you had someone in your office that was having trouble with their picker, finding love, like, are there some things that you can give, you know, our dear listeners at home that they can start to think about that they can start to do. Yeah, absolutely. I ask most, most people who come to see me, I ask them to deeply sit in a space and think about, and this might also sound weird. But I have people think about love and what they think love is. What demonstrates love? In essence, I, I work to have folks operationalize love for themselves, right? And so I use this as a pinpoint to start thinking, help them think through what it is that they think they need from others and then connect that to why they, why they think they need that. So, so for me, for example, my history of understanding love is that someone needs to take care of everything for me. That demonstrates love, right? So my understanding of love is most definitely informed by codependency. Take care of me because I can't take care of myself. And so this is actually, in my therapeutic practice, the million dollar question, right, what, what is love? And And I think over the years, I've come to have a different understanding and love of love. And so I follow a psychiatrist, Dr. M. Scott Peck's guidance on how I want to understand love. And I help my patients get to this point. Yeah, right? I love him. So you're familiar with his 1978 book, "The Road Less Travel," right? It was a college bible for me. My news says it revolutionized her world as well. Yeah, absolutely. And so this book, I've multiple copies of this book in my office so that I can have people look through it. And so is it OK if I talk a little bit about how Peck defines love? 100%. And I want you to take some notes, my sweet listener, right now, because this is some big shit that's coming. So first of all, you all need to get the road less traveled. This is exactly, as Bella said, it is the bible of love. And so Peck actually borrows from Eric Fromm, who's a German social psychologist, to understand what love is. And I love this definition of love. It's the will, the will to extend one's self, right? The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another spiritual growth. There's a couple of key words here. Will, extension, and nurturing one's self or nurturing another's spiritual growth. And the reason that I adore-- I completely adore this conceptualization of love because it honors that love is a choice versus how we understand it as an instinct, right? So I love that love is a choice versus an instinct. And Peck, in fact, writes, love is an act of will. I love this. Love is an act of will. And he says that it's both an intention and an action. And what I think is brilliant is that we don't have to love. We choose to love. Love is a decision. Yes, love is a decision, right? The herb. It's not a feeling, right? Right. That's exactly what he says, right? And so because exactly what he says-- That's exactly what he wrote. Right. I remember being in college going, oh my God, my entire landscape shifted because, wait, it's not a feeling. I thought, that's what I've been told. My whole life, it's a feeling. Do you feel like you're in love? And that's where I'm like, this is all nonsense. These butterflies, this wanting to be swapped off my feet. I land on my back every time I get swapped off my feet. It never ends well. So I'm choosing to do something that's good for him or good for myself, but it's an action and a decision. It's not a feeling. Because I could say I love you, but still be a jerk. That's not love. Yeah, yeah, this is exactly right. And so these statements, like, I fall in in love, or I'm falling in love, I'm like, do you really fall? Do you want to be falling? So there's something that we need to rethink here. And so when I hear these statements, I'm falling in love, or I fall in in love, for me, I think about love as-- OK, so here's how-- so that was pecking from. So how do I define love in my words? That's rock, bad, define love. Exactly. So for me, love is an intentional and deliberate practice of showing up in the world fully. And I want to operationalize fully. What I mean by fully is-- to me, love is developing a capacity, OK? Developing a capacity to show up in our lives, to engage in the good, bad, and ugly with fidelity, versus recoiling into passivity and disconnection, and where there's no room to move deeper into one's life beyond the standard bitterness, anger, resentment, and of course, narcissism, right? So this is what I mean by living our lives fully. Love is about living our lives fully. Love is about living our lives fully, to be willing to step into the world and offer ourself without fear and create interactions that are authentically supportive and nourishing. Even if that intersection-- interaction is for one minute versus 55 years. Exactly. Because you've decided to have that interaction, which could be with a homeless person on the street or your mother of 55 years. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I'm actually glad you brought up the example of a person who's experiencing homelessness. Because here's what we most often do. And this is especially true in New York. We don't want to make eye contact. And I'm saying that we don't need to offer money. We don't need to offer food. We can make a five-second connection through eye contact to acknowledge that person's existence. Yes. And that's a mark of love. 100%. You will never-- if somebody looks dangerous, nobody's saying, make eye contact with someone that looks like they're strong out and could hurt you. But if someone's sitting on a corner, they're a human. And you can look at them and you can smile and nod and keep walking on your way. And a lot of times-- and I do that as practice-- and they'll say, thanks for the smile. It's like most people will just walk past. And again, I'm not suggesting you do this. I'm just saying, how do you show up? What does that mean to you in that moment? How do you choose to love? Do you love yourself? Are you loving someone else? But love is an action. It's not a feeling. What do you do for someone else? That's right. That's beautiful. And for ourselves, which you already fed for ourselves. Yeah, right? Because if I want to do good, people sometimes argue, isn't it selfish? We give you your reaping benefit out of when you do something good for somebody else. You're like, oh, I feel like a good person. But that's self-love. That's self-love. It's not selfish, right? It comes into definition of love. Yeah, no, this is exactly right. And I'm glad you brought this to the forefront because I also want to de-link our contemporary notions of self-love, which is tied to, I don't know, go do yoga, go to spa, and get on that side. Green tea, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's self-care. It's not self-love. Yeah. Right, take care of yourself. Get eight hours of sleep. But that's not self-love. That's self-care. Yeah, right? Taking shower is self-care. Self-love to me is about making a choice. And the choice is, it's about making a choice to show up with honor, with dignity, and respect. And it's not a one-time thing. We need to make this choice over and over again. And then there will be times where we can't, I have, I have fallen down on my knees. And be like, please don't leave, please don't, or please forgive me, I've done all of that. We all have, we've all been there, okay? We've all been there on our knees. And all right, today I did an act with dignity, but tomorrow I'll make the choice. Or maybe I'll make the right choice. Exactly, well, and speaking of that, tell me, you know, we've talked about love. What is trauma, okay? And what is the relationship between romantic love and trauma? Let's kind of circle back to why we pick people that don't always serve us. Like talk about love and trauma. Sure, okay. So this question about, you know, this question, you know, what is trauma? I actually think this is like the golden, the golden question of the day. And the reason I think this is the golden question of the day is because I find the word trauma is overused and in a way that is loose such that it becomes devoid of meaning. And so, and I think this is particularly true in the context of COVID, you know, we've we've lost a meaningful conceptualization of trauma like everyone admits trauma and we use the word trauma in a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything. And so, here's the question, I mean, I will respond to it, but the question that I want all of us to think about is, you know, how might we think about trauma or like how should we think about trauma? So, I'm inviting all of us to take a deliberate and intentional journey to understand what trauma might mean. And so, as a social scientist, I've got that standard definition of trauma, right? To me as a social scientist, trauma means an internal response, right? To overwhelming pain, grief, hurt, scare. I talk about it in terms of a reprobial heartbreak, right? It's an internal response to a reprobial heartbreak, a horrific experience that can't be processed in the now, but I have another dimension that I add to it. It can also be that it's not it can't be processed now and or over time across a single lifespan and or across generations. So, the trauma doesn't have to be ours personally, it could belong to my grandmother, right? So, that's like one level to understand trauma. I'd like I'd like to bring in my role as an interfaith and cross-cultural scholar who's committed to Indigenous epistemology and Indigenous psychology to expand our understanding of trauma. And so, here's the expansion part. I would love for us to include in trauma what is known as susto and the direct translation of susto from Spanish to English is scare. And so, the way that I work with trauma or understand trauma is I combine modern psychotherapy with Indigenous mental health healing practices and I see trauma as a disruption to our soul. So, I define trauma as a disruption to our soul, which in Indigenous communities, a variety of Indigenous communities, it's known as soul fright or soul loss from you know, a sudden shock or startling experience that interrupts our vital substance or life force, which is often known like as Chi or, you know, Prana. And so, for me, trauma is a disruption to the soul, which could happen at the personal level, but trauma is also generational. So, I really want us to think about trauma collectively. We have our own and everybody's before us. Yes, exactly. And the historical moment of which we are, which we are products of, right? So, you know, our children, your children and my children, their youth is a product of the pandemic, right? So, this is, this needs to be included in understanding trauma as generational. And so, the way that I would invite all of you to think about generational trauma is that we are born into a world that imprinted with pain, right? Imprinted with grief, hurt, scare, heartbreak and horror. So, we are, we are born into a cultural dimension that is imprinted with grief. And so, that informs our trauma. Our personal trauma is informed by our generational trauma. Right. And it can even be right. It can be independent of it, but it's, it's certainly like you can have things that happen to you because they happen to you and they suck. And it's not because of anything that your ancestors experience. It's like this just happened to me and it's freaking sucked. I got cancer or I lost a baby or whatever that is, which, you know, is just and now my children and their children will feel that. That's absolutely right. And yes, there are many, there are many forms of trauma that are individual to us. At the same time, I'd like to temper that because what family constellation has taught me is our individual traumas are also informed by something that has happened in the past in our in our generations and in our path generations. Right. Because we might be more susceptible to certain things. We might behave in a certain way based on what we're carrying already. Yes. And we may be called, oh, you're so sensitive. It's like, but I might not be maybe or maybe I am sensitive because I'm carrying around a lot of intergenerational stuff with me. Yes. Yes. And this, all this stuff that you're talking about informs our attachment style, which then informs how we are unconsciously choosing to show up in our relationships. Wow. Isn't that amazing? And how we choose people to your point that reenact the original sentence. So meaning either I'm going to put words in your mouth and you can correct me either a dysfunctional relationship with one of our caregivers or mom or our dad or maybe even early relationships. But no, this is exactly right. So it can stem from the womb and most likely it's stems from the womb. But it can also be it can also be something as simple as you were separated from your mom in the hospital because you were sick as soon as you were born. And so your mom didn't get to hold you for the first couple of hours. That is a break in the bond. And that informs our attachment style. So my attachment style, my mother had a very traumatic pregnancy with me. I was a twin. And my twin didn't survive. And so my attachment style is very anxious. Is this person going to leave me? When is this person going to leave me? Hold on. Don't go. Don't go. That's my attachment style. Totally. I hear you. I didn't even have a twin. And I feel that way. So I can only imagine how right you had someone else wound with you potentially. There was an identical twin. Exactly. Exactly. And so my twin left, my twin left. So to your point, my twin left. So with my partners, my my my M.O. has always been, if you love me, you will do everything for me. Otherwise, you don't love me. Yeah. Right. Right. Isn't that so interesting? And I love sitting down and really thinking, what does love mean to me? And sometimes people like to use the five love languages use that as a primer, right? But think about what makes me feel loved by a romantic partner. Yeah. Long-term, not right away. And it probably maybe it has to do with flowers. Maybe it doesn't. But really sitting there and thinking about what that safe, secure love feels like. And for a lot of us, listening, I know you've never felt that safe, secure love. You don't even know what that feels like. Yeah. And then comes the recreation of trauma. Yeah. No, this is this is exactly right. And I I'll say this for myself because I don't want to speak for others for me. So I'm I'm almost 50, like I'm pushing 50. And so in these decades, these past decades, the question that I really needed to ask myself is what I expect from my partners. Am I able to give that to myself? Most of the time the answer was no. It wasn't until recently that everything that I expected for my partner, that I could say, well, you know what? I can offer this to myself because it's from there that I can form a statement. connection with my partner. Because you can give it to yourself so you don't fear it being taken away from you. Precisely brilliant. That's exactly what I'm saying. Amazing. Amazing. And so really sitting with yourself, right? And what's an exercise we can do to this? Just sit with that. And what's a question to ask? For now to sit with that, right? Much of this work, I'm not, I'm not arguing that there aren't techniques and theories and methods involved. But much of this work does rely on us acknowledging what is and being able to engage with that with fidelity, right? Honoring the good and honoring the bad and honoring the ugly. So part of this work, a large part of this work is acknowledging what is. Yeah. And I'm not trying to glorify meditation on a mountain kind of thing. That's not what I'm trying to argue. But acknowledgement is the first step to see the truth of what is versus projecting. It's so interesting. I think sometimes I have women that will come in and say, well, I need to marry or I need to find someone who makes at least this much money and has a PhD and an MD. And I'm just talking about women for a moment that are looking for men. And there are times that this has become such a preoccupying issue. And it's caused us to screen so many people out that I have said to them before, you have an obsession with degrees or intelligence. Is there something inside of you that doesn't feel smart enough? Maybe you need to go back to school. So, so here's here's what I'll say to that. So true or false? Yes and no. Okay. No. So let me so let me respond to that. So on a surface level right wanting, you know, x, y and z completely okay. That's their preference. Yeah. But what I love about what I love about what you said is that you are interrogating them to think about their intentions and be deliberate. Yes. So it's okay to have those preferences. It's more important to understand why you have those preferences, right, to be intentional and deliberate. And from there, then you can make an informed choice about whether this is something that you want to stick with that's something that you can loosen up on. What what gap are you, which is what you're I think arguing what gap are you trying to fulfill? Yeah, I mean, requirements. Exactly. Like is there something inside of yourself? Because you're dating all these smart people. Like I don't understand, right? And so, and so these conversations have really helped people to go, okay, what am I looking for and why? Why is this important to me? Is this something that I want to become? But I haven't been able to do that. So if I find it dated and marry it, then that makes me successful. If I don't feel successful enough, but if I marry someone super successful, or if I don't feel like I'm pretty enough, but I marry someone that's really good looking, then that must mean that I am good looking too. And so it's like we reach around the back of our head to grab our ear instead of looking at what is. Yeah. No, this is exactly right. And so I think here's what I think, Bella, that you are putting on the table for us. And there's, and it's two variables that I actually wanted to speak to. And you kind of just great made a great platform for it. It's really vital. Like with this example that you gave, it's really vital that we understand how we connect to people and how we communicate with others and why. So to understand, you know, these requirements, right, this is the, this is the platform of connection. This is one of the platform of connection to really understand how we're connecting and why we're connecting in this way. Because connection connectivity and communication are the two central variables in our relationship with ourselves and to the outer world. Totally. So I love this. You know what this, you know, this example that you gave. I love this example because this is maybe it's a side note, I don't know, but I think it might be important. It reminds me of Thomas Hubell, who's a spiritual author. It reminds me how he defines trauma. He talks about trauma. Trauma is inflicted by inappropriate relationships. Fair. Right. Because you're talking, you're kind of, you're arguing, okay, well, is this appropriate or inappropriate? Right. Well, why don't you check yourself? It's kind of what you're arguing. Totally. Right. So I love this, that Hubell argue that trauma is inflicted by inappropriate relationships. And I'm bringing this up because the mental mental health research and indigenous psychology, they teach us that we are forged through relationships and relationships are managed through stories. So what story are we telling about ourselves and what and to ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Brilliant. I love it. And what do you think? I mean, you know, it's one of the things I was thinking about. It's so important for you, dear single listener, to really think deeply about this, right? Like this was a freaking episode, right? Like sit back and go, wow, it's not just my stuff. It's like my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, wow, like how do who am I, right? How do I show up? What do I need? What does love feel like to me? And then looking at what do I need from someone? And what I love about what you said, which one of those needs could I provide for myself? Holy cow, like wow, and what that does is that is the definition of self love. What do you, what have I been sitting here, stewing about, meeting from someone else? Why can't I give it to myself? What is that? Right? Yeah. My mom said we came into this world alone and we die a lot. Yeah, my mom says the same thing, but I'm like, but wait, you were there. You were there. Right, right, right, like we go, right, we go. And so it's really interesting to really think deeply about who you are, what trauma's could have, what trauma, right? Your, your inappropriate relationships with whatever that is in your background, how are those playing out in your connections to other people? And maybe it's not just romantic relationships. Maybe it's even with friends, with siblings at work, like work at work at work is a big deal. It's a really big deal, right? And you deal with suppliers with service providers, right? With children, with people you have power over. Think about do you show up differently in different situations? And why? And sit in that. And I think that just knowing that if your picker's broken, there's a lot more reasons than we ultimately entered this conversation. It's not just mom and dad, but it's lots of people before us as well, as well as historically, what's been happening as well, that there's a fingerprint of that generationally. So what is fascinating, amazing conversation? Is there any last gems that you want to drop on our listeners? Yeah, I think I'll wrap this up before the wrap up, though may I be able to just maybe reorient? I understand what you're saying about the picker being broken. May I reorient the language a little bit on that? You may. Okay, I would argue our pickers are imprinted by those who came before us. So I wouldn't necessarily argue our pickers are broken. I don't come from the platform of that we are broken. I come from the platform that we are imprinted and how we behave and operate and make choices are imprinted by those who are standing behind us. I work with a lot of women and we end up because of the roles that our mothers have taken, our grandmothers have taken, our great grandmothers have taken. We end up with an imprint of being the caretaker. And to be quite honest, I don't like taking care of anyone. But I feel this need to control and manage and care take everyone, even my colleagues at work. Like, I run my department like that, because I'm imprinted with this. Did that? My radar is imprinted with that. Right, that even if you don't like it, you don't enjoy it, you have to control it for the outcome that you want. Yeah, that's, that's, no, that's exactly right. And then how do you connect with and show up with people? That this is a whole episode two, just on Dr. Rockpad. All right, so let me, I guess, let me say some final, um, say some final words here. So I don't want to give the impression that I'm here to save people, right? I'm not here to save people through, you know, the theories and techniques that I use as like the expert. I see my job as listening with all my senses to the story that is unfolding and how, you know, how the person is making sense of their experiences. And so I see my job as helping to uncover free will, agency and, and, and choice. And I really ask two questions, right? When will you be ready to release old relationship patterns that are no longer serving you? And then the second question is when will you be ready to be filled with the light of a new relationship pattern, you know, a new vibration. And here's why I think this work is really important. And it has nothing to do whether you're a parent or not or whether you want children or not. Um, I do this work because I believe we have a responsibility to our youth. And I think Bella, you were alluding to this too. And my world orientation is that it's imperative that we leave this world a better place than how we entered it versus compromising the lives of our children before, like even before they arrive or other folks children, just children in general, right? The youth in general. And so I would say for those of us who in ending, you know, those of us who are searching for our romantic partners, I'm inviting all of you to think about to become aware of all possibilities of transformation, like in each moment of our own creation, right? I'll end there to think about all the possibilities of transformation in each moment of our own creation because it's not just about us. It's about the imprint that we are going to leave behind, right? 100%. So knowing you're imprinted, but you have agency as well to love, to choose to act, to take care of another or to take care of yourself. The imprint has agency hashtag. I think we should make t-shirts. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Thank you. This is yes. Yes, yes, yes to all of it. Oh, thank you so much. This was so super profound. I feel like I have a lot of thinking to do and I'm sure everybody listening. Also, it's like think about, think about who you are and where you've come from and how you come to the world. Super interesting. So, well, thank you so much for this awesome conversation and smartdators. Until next week, I will have you think about all of these profound questions that we threw out there. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and you're ready to finally make a change in your dating life and fix your imprinted picker, go to smartdatingacademy.com and set up a consultation. Big love and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening and, as always, download us, share us, show us the love, follow Instagram @smartdatingacademy and if you or someone you know wants to learn more, check out our website at smartdatingacademy.com. We're here to bring you love.