Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
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Coffee With Hilary and Les from State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre
The Idea of Family: Unraveling Traditions, Dynamics, and Emotional Complexity
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How do family traditions shape who we are, and what happens when those traditions collide with modern family dynamics? We invite you to join us as we peel back the layers of what family truly means, especially as we approach the emotionally charged season of Thanksgiving. Our conversation isn't just about the nostalgia and warmth of family gatherings; it's also about the tension and conflict that can simmer beneath the surface. Through personal narratives, we explore the spectrum of family experiences—from the unwavering bonds of the mythical traditional family to the fluid, ever-changing structures of blended and chosen families.
In our latest episode, we promise you a heartfelt exploration of the nuanced roles family plays in our lives. Whether it's the joy of a cherished family ritual or the bittersweet evolution of family names and their emotional ties, each story offers a unique perspective. We challenge conventional definitions and invite you to reconsider what family means to you. With humor and introspection, our reflections on sibling relationships and the emotional complexity of family connections provide a canvas for your own reflections. Join us as we navigate these profound themes, offering insights that could redefine how you view your own familial bonds.
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Welcome and thank you for joining us for Coffee with Hilary and Les. Brought to you by the State of Mind Hypnosis and Training Centre located in the heart of the Kawartha Lakes. This is our almost daily community podcast about the mind and how we all might change it in the most simple and helpful ways. Every day we sit staring at the lake and sipping our coffee, chatting about hypnosis and how to make those meaningful adjustments to our state of mind, because nothing's more important than your state of mind, because nothing's more important than your state of mind.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're on the line.
Speaker 1:The sun is shining in my eyes, reflecting off the water. It's like there's two suns out there shining on my face.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's the two moons.
Speaker 1:The two moons. No, it's the two suns. The intensity of the sun is reflective of the intensity of our topic today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's funny because I have good day sunshine blasting in my head for some reason.
Speaker 1:Because I've been humming it. Oh, have you really? I thought it was some spiritual thing. Well, except it's not, nothing has any meaning, except the meaning you put on it. So go ahead and say you know.
Speaker 2:I thought it was my great-grandpa. It might have been I thought it was you.
Speaker 1:Well, he might have put it in my head, I don't know. Oh my God, I don't know, but it's a good day, sunshine, isn't that funny? Yeah, well, there we go. Referring to family, that's our topic today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We've been the last few days had lots of family interaction on both sides, in all directions, of family interaction on both sides, in all directions. And as family is, it can be deeply loving, safe and nurturing and it could be the crazy dynamics of individuals all pulling in their own direction yeah and so we thought, okay, let's talk about family. And now we're overwhelmed.
Speaker 2:Well, I have three little sentences on my paper and you've got a university paper over there.
Speaker 1:I'm on to my second piece of paper.
Speaker 2:Good God, families are wild things.
Speaker 1:I mean, you use the word family and people listening. Some people are immediately cringing. Some people have a really hard time with their family and even to the point of, you know, animosity and and exclusion and, um, complete rejection. And some people it's the center of their life. There's nothing more important they. They live their life in their family, through their family, about their family, completely for their family. Um, and others actually live that way, but it's a family they've completely created. That is not their family of origin, not their birth family or the family they were raised in.
Speaker 1:They've stepped away from that and they've created a whole community of people that they call family, and they could be miles and miles away from their original family.
Speaker 2:Like family doesn't have to be blood-related right.
Speaker 1:Well, that's just it. How do you define family? I mean, we use the word family and we immediately react to it, depending on what our past experience is. But we can define it really any way we want, although there are a lot of really strong forces out there trying to tell us what family is, what family should be yeah and how to operate as a family.
Speaker 1:So family is just this hugely loaded concept yeah, it really is that, um that, yeah, I think that for most people it is of their own definition yeah, yeah and I I think, coming up to Thanksgiving, everyone's starting to feel the family. Yeah, that makes it a good topic right. Thing two right. Some people are thinking Thanksgiving oh my God, that's going to be so much fun. And other people are thinking Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:oh, my God, do I have to go home? Do I have to go home? Yeah, oh, do I have to like fly home? Do I have?
Speaker 1:to be there? Do I have to put up with these people? Do I have to actually be in the same room as them? Do I have to listen to old Uncle Bill? Whoever that might be, everybody's got one. Sorry, uncle Bill, I had a bunch of Uncle Bills, believe it or not. Yeah, I had like three.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what happens when you come from a big family. Big family, small family, family that's assembled family of choice versus family of birth. Yeah, what a broad concept and such a core concept at the same time. Right, a core concept to our society, because our society is built on families. Our government governs us on the basis of us operating as families. It taxes us on the basis of us operating as families. Right, when you think about government services that they provide, your familial connections are absolutely essential in to determine what, if any, government services you get. We have this society that appears, when you break it down, to be built on family units.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All of that has got to really take a toll on people's emotions, positive and negative. And people who have big families that are well-connected and interactive, people who have small families. Some people have no real family, and family creates a story right, the story that we tell ourselves about our lives yeah, that's why I said this is probably going to turn out to be a trilogy.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's so much to talk about when it comes to family and the impact we have. Right, yeah, and it's shaping of us as a human being, because there's aspects of our family that we just adopt. We don't have a choice, it just seems to be part of who we are.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and I think you're right there. Right like, when I think of families, I immediately think about the stuff we pull forward from our families, belief systems, routines. You know, what I'm brought back to is a story that I heard on the weekend where someone would cut a roast in half and and put it in the oven, like so you know, her granddaughter would do the same thing and then found out afterwards that the grandma only cut the roast and put it in the oven because not because it cooked better or something like that, but it wouldn't fit in the tray. So they pick up all kinds of things and we just do it because great-grandma did it, and we don't even know why we're doing it. Sometimes that's a metaphor for limiting beliefs. You know, we think this way because grandma thought this way and great grandma thought this way, and it's like a bad recipe that just gets handed down well, it is this way that we we pick up um methods of living.
Speaker 1:I guess, for lack of a more clear phrase, I mean our habits, the behaviors we exhibit over and over and over, the behaviors we engage in over and over and over, which we take on because we think they serve us, they help us. So many of them just come from the observation of our family members. It's such an important unit Because it really starts with people who are connected that's the right way to say it from infancy, from the beginning. Sometimes I think it's really valuable just to examine something, without trying to fix it, without trying to understand it, just try to observe it and just see all the dynamics within it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's definitely what's happening here with this topic is. You just have to look at it and there's no way to fix it, there's just ways of maybe analyzing it and seeing, well, oh well, maybe like I don't need to feel this way because grandma did, or I don't need to do that thing because grandma did, if it's something you don't want to do or it's detrimental or something like that.
Speaker 1:Well, along comes that word traditions. Right, traditions. There's a deadly word, there's a word that some people love and embrace and think. You know they value traditions very, very much and you know we've talked about that when we've talked about Christmas, when we've talked about some of these bigger topics. You know that we're seeking to relive ecstatic moments. To relive ecstatic moments and we find traditions help us to go back to those beautiful experiences and re-experience them almost almost an attempt to replicate or relive a moment of joy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we think of traditions, that we also think of tradition sometimes as traps and and and you know, deep, dark caves that you're trapped in that you can't get out of. They serve no purpose, they don't seem to serve you, who you are, they don't seem to help your life any and you just want to break away from them because they, you don't relate to them, you don't seem to help your life any and you just want to break away from them. Um, because they, you don't relate to them, you don't have that incredible positive experience from them.
Speaker 2:Um, you often do things traditionally, in spite of how they make you feel yeah, usually I think it's kind of like the first time, maybe you do a tradition. It's that excited feeling, that feeling like you're. Maybe it's somebody who decides to do Thanksgiving for the family. Right, they're making stuff for people, people are enjoying the food, and then suddenly you're doing it every year and then it's not as exciting as before and now it feels like a burden or something. You know, I don't know. I think that is something that comes up with people too.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, do you mind talking about your family, not about the people, but about the structure of your family? I find your family to be fascinating in terms of its structure, right? Especially when I contrast it with my own background, right? You know I come from a. I'll talk about the structure of my family and then you can contrast it with yours. Yeah, I come from two, two cultures, but very much similar cultures. They're just sort of, I suppose, religiously and and um, yeah, family tradition basis very different.
Speaker 1:My mother is irish catholic, was irish catholic big family, 13 kids. Only nine survived past the age of 14. That was quite common in those days. My dad comes from a family of two kids and he was the second and he was told that he he was a mistake because you should only ever have one kid and that's sort of the, the place that that he comes from. And then together they created a family of six kids, created a family of six kids, and they approached it from a very traditional point of view. My mother, family was probably her highest value. Family was to always be cared for. They were, they formed the central basis of your life. Although my mother had friends, she certainly spent much more time with certain siblings than she did with her friends and that my mother's decision-making was always around what's best for the family and I think my father took that on. They stayed together right until my mother passed away. My father never remarried. They had, I guess, 20-odd grandchildren.
Speaker 1:You know my dad's into the great-grandchildren phase, he's got half a dozen of those children phase. It's got half a dozen of those. So this this to me represents kind of a what's the right word I'm going to use the word mythical mythical view of family, this idea that there's this really tight group that really take care of each other, that they get big and as a result they they have a loyalty and a connection right, they come to the table in a really, really kind of normalized way. I'm trying to be really nonjudgmental about how I'm describing this, because I'm very aware of how different families can be, because in that next generation myself and my sisters there's a few divorces and there was a couple of blended families and that sort of was a very interesting dynamic that we didn't have a lot of awareness of and managed that to, you know, varying degrees of success, some ways well some ways not very well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's like, there's like a description of a family unit. You know, I had a buddy and he was one of two kids in a family of two older, an older couple because they couldn't have kids and they adopted, and he and his brother were adopted from two different families. They weren't connected by blood, so that essentially he grew up in a family unit, aware that he was not the offspring of his parents, that his brother was not the offspring of his parents, that he and his brother were not biologically connected, and so much more about choice than than tradition. Right, you know, I have a, uh, my daughter, my stepdaughter.
Speaker 1:I look at her life and I think it's wild. She has, um, six brothers. She has a brother through her father, she has a brother through her mother and I and she has a brother just a brother between her parents. So her, she has one brother that people would call a full brother. She has two brothers that people would call half brothers from. She has two brothers that people would call half brothers from different families, and then she has three step brothers and I think, wow, like, like that's, that's wild, that's definitely family, a lot of family by choice right, you gotta open your your mind to the idea that you know your parents can have children outside their original unit and things like that Like this is to me it's like whoa, these are different kinds of families, very much family, very different in their dynamics, very different maybe in their view of things, but really, really, um, definitely families, but definitely, uh, diverse. Do you mind talking about your?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, yeah. So my family, in comparison you know if we're drawing comparisons in comparison to yours it's relatively small. I think of yours as a full lush tree and mine is kind of twiggy.
Speaker 2:It's got a few branches. So, yeah, I mean, my stepdad is ultimately my dad, uh, cause he's been there since I can remember, um, and my brother is my brother because he grew up in my. He grew up with my mom and I, um, same mom, um, but at the bloodline it's different dads. And then I've got an older sister who we don't know, but, uh, um, I only met her in when I was 21. Um, and then I have a younger sister who we don't share any blood whatsoever, um, but we have the same stepdad, her dad.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's kind of all over the place, and I do. Part of me wishes that we were all closer, but, god, we could go months without talking to each other. A little text here and there, and I'm not a fan of that, but it is what it is right, um. And then my mom's side is my mom and my nana and my great-grandma. That passed a couple years ago and that's it. That's pretty much it. And I've got, you know, an uncle, an aunt, on my mom's side, a great uncle, yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk about your mom, so it's not just your generation. Go back a generation and your mom's parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so her parents are my nana and her uh, her biological dad. They were very young when they had her. They ended up splitting up when my mom was quite young I don't want to guess an age, but between four and six, I think and and then my grandpa, john um he, he's passed, but he came into the scene and and married my Nana um and adopted my mom. That's where my last name comes from, so so your last name is not even blood.
Speaker 1:There's no blood connection whatsoever.
Speaker 2:No blood connection. No, but I'm attached to it because it's you know, I'm the only Hillary Leigh in the world. Now you see it. Now you see it. But yeah, it's a funny family dynamic.
Speaker 1:We're not always Well, and talk about your dad.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, so my dad, my stepdad, who's ultimately my dad? Just so people don't get mixed up between biological and not so my stepdad, he is one of three adopted children, so my grandparents were not even blood. Yeah, it's nobody's blood related. We don't know where he came from but he's gone and found his biological mom, and so has your aunt. And so has my aunt. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like.
Speaker 1:I don't, I don't know, and you have grandparents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That you um my Grammy and Grammy, yeah, yeah, and see them, grappia, yeah.
Speaker 1:And see them once a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my mom's biological father.
Speaker 1:And your biological dad's family.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, so I see them once a year when I go out to Newfoundland, but they don't have contact with my dad, or maybe they do and they're not saying, I don't know, we won't go there. But yeah, all in all is very limited contact with everybody, right, very, very limited contact, which, when I saw your family, it was quite a stark difference, right. And and I don't know if the limited contact is is because of distance. You know, my brother and I lived in Peterborough like houses away from each other. Now we were young, so I don't know, maybe that had something to do with it, but I mean, I saw him in Peterborough when we lived basically right next door to each other, the same amount of time that.
Speaker 1:I see him now.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a funny dynamic, our family now people you know people I work with and my friends know them that I say this a lot. I said I say judgment is an unnecessary next step. I always use the the idea that I, if I want to have ice cream, I want it with brownies in it and maybe a little caramel saucy stuff there, and that's the way I like it. If somebody says, well, I've got some strawberry ice cream, it's not my preference, and I'd say, well, that's not my preference, it's not something that I enjoy. But I don't say strawberry is bad, strawberry is yucky, strawberry is a waste of time. That's an unnecessary next step.
Speaker 1:I can be just focused on my preferences, my experience and say this in my experience is what I prefer. I don't need to judge and I think that you know. Just telling this, these little brief stories of saying these are our family structures, there's a lot of inherent, there's a lot of impulse to judge. I think that families as a unit, within and without, when you look at other families, when you look at other family dynamics, when you look at other family structures, there's a tendency to want to call one good and one bad, one better, one worse, and it just isn't so right. You grew up in your family, quite comfortable, quite content, not out there yearning for things to be different not comparing your family to others, right that there's this natural implication.
Speaker 1:I hope, as people listen, they're looking at the ways that their families aren't I don't like the word, but I'm going to use it anyway traditional the way to look at families when they're not in that standardized format that we grow up looking at and reading about in books and watching on TV and movies. And really it's only been in the last 30 years that things like media have started to acknowledge that families can come from a lot of places. I mean, now we're obsessed with the Kardashians, right and the Kardashians that's a really neat blended family right that have their own dynamics and the people coming in and people going out, people being part of the family, people no longer being part of the family. So I guess for me, the first thing that I want to point out when we think of ourselves as hypnotists is that nothing has any meaning except the meaning we put on it, and the word family means something different to everybody yeah
Speaker 1:although we we talk in similar terms, although we speak of similar roles, we talk about mothers and fathers and grandparents and siblings, we talk about those kinds of things. The truth is is that we all grow up in something that is uniquely ours, called our family, and, although I suppose it's not my place to tell you whether or not to judge your family, but don't judge the idea of family and don't judge the differences in families. Family can mean a lot of different things to people, and judgment is an unnecessary next step. It's okay to say I would have preferred if my family was more of this and less of that. That's a preference, but to judge as right or wrong or good or bad, I think, is an unnecessary next step.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just by our little examples. I mean family can mean all kinds of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's still so central to us all, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do think so, even if it's, you know, not as close-knit I. You know my family is very important to me. But yeah, and I think there's a call, and whether or not people answer this call, but for me there's a call to be more um open with my family, talking with my family close to my family, because I think that's important, I think that's important, I think that's important.
Speaker 1:So I think that's on me, though, to do that to try to do that.
Speaker 2:You know, I can't sit back and expect them to just read my mind and reach out.
Speaker 1:There's a really neat aspect of family. Right, we all have our place within our family. We're all observing our family from our own perspective, based on our own experiences, who have fully and completely rejected and detached themselves from anything that we might typically refer to as family, and people out there who have completely created their own families based on people that they have an affinity to. They've completely detached themselves from these otherwise traditional units I don't like the word, I'm gonna keep using it because I think we understand it and they have then created for themselves these deep, tight bonds that include loyalty, that include commitment, that include, you know, dimensions and degrees of unconditional love. Mm-hmm, right, and that's family.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it doesn't have to be blood. Yeah, there are dynamics and relationships and emotions that really define family. If you had a list of emotions, what emotions define the idea of family for you? For me specifically yeah everybody's gonna be thinking of this question as they're listening. What are the emotions that define?
Speaker 2:family for me, hmm, they're not all positive.
Speaker 1:Um God.
Speaker 2:I've never thought of that before. Yeah, for me they're not so positive. Mine's more of a longing to be closer. I think that's why I was so attracted to your family, right, because everyone's really close to the point of frustrations, to the point of frustrations To the point of frustrations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think there's high, high emotions when it comes to my siblings, especially. You know, my brother. You know my brother who's the only one you really lived with, yeah, and I I've often thought about that over the years, like is that why I have such? It's like I just want to keep him safe and coddle him. And you know, like, um, I just want him to be happy and and and safe and and in, you know, find love and be happy in life. Um, so he, he's probably the one that can bring me to like intense emotions, like sadness and and uh, yeah, I'm going to go down that road right now because I'm going to be a mess, but, um, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Emotions Like there's tons of love, there's tons of love, there's tons and tons of admiration and acceptance, protectiveness, forgiveness, compassion, deep awareness of connection, willingness for sacrifice, frustration at some of its highest levels. You know, I'll even go to the point of you know saying that you really kind of normal, I think, for at some point or another you know kids to hate their parents and and hate each other and and that, that there's those kinds of emotions.
Speaker 1:um, uh, you know very much. Family shapes our identity, sometimes in relation to family and sometimes in distinct contrast to family. We create identity who I am, what I am, what I think I am what I think I want to be. You know I think about, want to be. Yeah, you know I think about blame. Holy smokes, the family is the place where we learn blame. It's not my fault. She touched me. Yeah, mom, you know. And from the parents' point of view, you know parents getting really angry and you kids, you're making me angry, you're making me frustrated.
Speaker 2:I think there's a whole other side to which is very important, I think, to talk about, and maybe it's its own podcast, um podcast. But like what you're saying in terms of wanting to live up to expectations and feeling like we what's the word, I always forget it we always wanted, we always want our parents to see us as having like, lived up to them, like aspiration as well. Aspiration, sort of like kids doing not kids, but like, as you grow up, doing what you think your parents want you to do or maybe honoring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, you see it a lot with careers. So a parent will say, oh, you should be this or that or the other thing. Um, don't be an artist because you'll never make money, that kind of thing, right, but you should be this or that. And I think the best thing I heard years ago I don't know who said it or where I heard it it was like 20 years ago that I heard it is one day your parents aren't going to be there any longer. And then who are you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a friend, somebody I really admire, and he's got a saying he says growing up is learning to forgive your parents. Maybe I'll get that quote from the five people you meet in heaven. We'll talk about that on the next podcast. Basically that it's to the effect of parents wreck their kids. It's what they do. Yeah, it always happens and you got to deal with that. Yeah, I think of the family unit as the place where we really really learn ideas of compassion and forgiveness and loyalty. It's where we learn honesty, for better or worse. Easier challenged is where we learn ideas of honesty and all of those things, all of those values and all of those meanings are shared, usually shared by the people within the unit. At the same time, there can be those who reject some of those things within the unit, mm-hmm yeah, I think it's definitely worth a couple more podcasts yeah, I'll mention you know one of the
Speaker 1:most. One of the most widely used systems of therapy today is cognitive behavioral therapy and family systems therapy. I know people who have embraced it and are saying you know, who I am has really been impacted by who my family is and how my family worked. Because everybody's family works in different ways. Roles and responsibilities and I guess day-to-day practices are very much defined by your place in the family.
Speaker 1:I mean, we talk about the middle child, we talk about the youngest one, we talk about the oldest one, right, in my case, you know, the conversation is always about me being the only male I'm the only boy of six kids and that conversation goes there and it has incredible resentments and frustrations and it has incredible envies and jealousies and it has incredible sadness and a sense of dynamics. I'm not sure how to say it and I'm not even talking about myself yet. It is the role that we get within our family. The place we play, the person who we are, is defined relatively to the other members of the family and we look at patterns and we look at sort of roles and responsibilities as defining our expectations. And that's family systems therapy is to look at that, see how you've been affected, to see why you behave the way you do as hypnotists, we just look to the experiences that shape it, but absolutely when we're dealing with clients, we're almost always regressing to something that happened within the family.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A dynamic between members of the family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think it was a good topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah how to resolve ourselves relative to our family, how to understand ourselves relative to our family.
Speaker 2:How?
Speaker 1:to understand ourselves relative to our family, and what does the concept of family mean? That's just the beginning. Now we run out of time yeah, we're at 41 minutes, okay. Well then we better stop but now I'm gonna think about this all day long. Oh good, I hope we have lots to talk about tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Yes, Okay, see you later. We hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that maybe it helped even a little. If you have any questions, we would love you to send them along in an email to info at psalmhypnosiscom. Thank you for being part of the State of Mind community. For more information about hypnosis and the various online or in-person services we provide, please visit our website, wwwsomhypnosiscom. The link will be in the notes below. While you are there, why don't you book a free one-hour journey, meeting with Hilary or Les, to learn more about what hypnosis is and how you might use it to make your life what you want it to be? Bye for now. Talk to you tomorrow.
