The Hidden Trauma of Being the Chosen Child & a Path Toward Healing—Making Sense of Your Family Story with Therapist Adam Young
Episode Notes
In this powerful episode, Dr. Alison welcomes Adam Young, a psychotherapist and author of the new book, “Make Sense of Your Story”, to dive into the complexities of family dynamics, and how the stories we tell about our families shape our adult lives. Adam shares his personal experiences and professional insights on how being triangulated within his family as a child impacted his psychological development and emotional health.
Here's what you'll learn:
* Why it’s crucial to identify family myths
* The unique trauma of being the chosen child
* Idealizing families—why we do it & how it hurts us
* The danger of self-betrayal in relationships
* The #1 way to heal childhood attachment wounds
* Traits of securely attached relationships
Resources:
- Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything by Adam Young
- The Place We Find Ourselves podcast
- The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan Allender
- Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
- adamyoungcounseling.com
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 79: Surviving Trauma & A Path to Forgiveness—Finding God In the Hardest Parts of Your Story With Esau McCaulley
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to www.organifi.com/bestofyou today and use code BESTOFYOU for 20% off your order today.
- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BESTOFYOU and get on your way to being your best self.
- Contact Restoring the Soul today at www.restoringthesoul.com and learn how their Intensive Counseling Process can jump start your journey to the place you want to be. As a special gift for The Best of You podcast listeners, visit www.restoringthesoul.com/bestofyou to download their pdf called "5 Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship."
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you are here today for this incredibly powerful episode with someone many of you are probably already familiar with. My conversation today is with Adam Young.
Adam is a gifted psychotherapist and now a brand new author. His new book is hitting the shelves this week. It's called Make Sense of Your Story: Why Engaging Your Past with Kindness Changes Everything. For those of you who may not know him yet, Adam has profoundly impacted the field of trauma and recovery with his insightful approaches to therapy.
His podcast, The Place We Find Ourselves, has been a huge resource for so many people in understanding the narratives of their lives and the psychological underpinnings behind them. Adam's work, especially this new book which we talk about today, invites all of us to do the work of digging into the narratives that shape us.
What's so compelling about Adam's approach is his transparency in sharing his own journey, exploring his early family dynamics and how these dynamics have influenced his adult life. He shares so honestly about some of this on the podcast today, and his invitation to explore our stories is never about casting blame, but instead about naming.
It's something we talk about a lot on the podcast. We have to name things in order to brave a path to healing and to freedom and to healthier, more deeply connected lives. Adam discusses the crucial role of examining our formative relationships and their lasting impact.
He shares personal stories about his own discoveries and some of the painful realizations he had about his own family of origin and how these revelations have reshaped his understanding of himself.
Honestly, it's so rare to find someone who's willing to open up so personally about his own story in a way that both educates and heals. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Adam young.
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Alison Cook: Adam, I am so thrilled to have you here today. We have known of each other and been aware of each other and followed each other for a long time, but finally here we are. I'm so thrilled to have you on the podcast today.
Adam: Thank you. Thanks for your generosity and for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.
Alison Cook: I want to dive into this beautiful new book. Is this your first book?
Adam: First book.
Alison Cook: It's so powerful. It got me thinking about my own story. The title of it is: Make Sense of Your Story. One of the things I love about what you do in this book, like all good teachers, is you take us into your own exploration.
I'd love to start there if you're okay with it. One of the invitations in the book, there are many, but one of them is the importance of exploring our early family dynamics. I want to get into that, because it's not to blame, it's not to shame, it's to understand ourselves.
You talk about a specific dynamic in your own family of origin that over time, as you untangled the knots of it, revealed some things about yourself. Can you take us back a little bit and share with our listeners about what you uncovered about your own family dynamics and that part of your story?
Adam: Sure. Sure. When I was 35 years old, I would have said that I didn't have a story. I would have said I had a normal upbringing, and nothing really traumatic happened to me. I just don't have much to report. That would have been my answer, if you had asked me to tell you about my story.
But beginning in my mid-thirties, I began to explore the nature of my relationship with my mother and my father during my growing up years. The way I had made sense of my relationship with my parents as a 35 year old was, God gave me my sweet, tender mother to compensate for an often violent and emotionally distant father.
In my mind, the connectedness and the sweetness that I felt in my relationship with my mom was buoyed up in my heart, because it was often bludgeoned by the violence of my father. The dilemma with that is that it's not untrue. It's just not the full truth. What I came to explore and to understand was that I was what's called “triangulated” by my mother, which is just a fancy word for saying that my mother, from a very young age, trained me.
She groomed me and used me like an adult, like a surrogate spouse, because my father, her husband, was checked out emotionally from the marriage. When I came out of the womb, I became a very sensitive, tender boy, full of wonder, and extremely attuned to the insides of my mother. In time, that became sexualized and eroticized by my mother.
What I came to realize, and it took years to explore this, but what I eventually came to name, was that my mother used me as a surrogate spouse because her husband, my father was absent.
Alison Cook: There's so much in this. The first part is, there was a story until you were 35. So we have to understand that we create stories out of our families of origin, and there was truth in it, small t truth. There were truth pieces in it. Your dad was distant, you've experienced your mother as loving and close, but it wasn't the full story.
And it's important, because in the initial version of the story, there's a hero and a villain, and as you begin to untangle the knots of that, as that first story crumbled, I would imagine, Adam, that had to be a little bit anxiety-producing to let go of that first story.
Adam: Yeah. It wasn't merely anxiety producing. It was deeply disorienting. It was as if the foundation of my life had been pulled out from under me. I was falling through the earth. It's because my compass was whacked. My compass, as a 35 year old, was, Mom is true north.
She's the sweet, tender, in my dad's words, lamb of God. That was the word he used to describe her. She could do no wrong. My dad was violent, traumatized from the Vietnam War, and so my dad was true south. What I came to realize was, oh no, Adam, your compass is not oriented to the fullness of the truth of your story.
There is a wickedness and a darkness in your mother that is masquerading as an angel of light, to use a Pauline phrase. It was hard to name that, and deeply disorienting.
Alison Cook: My guess is there was an impetus at 35 for you needing to name that. Are you comfortable sharing that?
Adam: Sure. I had so many symptoms. Problems with anger, problems with anxiety–deep, debilitating anxiety, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning anxiety. I would have immense experiences of fear, trepidation, and overwhelming shame, particularly in my close relationships, like marriage and parenting, and I didn't know how to understand these symptoms.
More importantly, I couldn't find relief from them. I didn't know what was going on, why I was feeling these things in my body. What began the process of healing for me was somebody gave me a book called The Wounded Heart by Dan Allender, and that was my introduction to the idea that I had a story from my growing up years that was deeply related to the symptoms I was experiencing in my adult life.
Alison Cook: Were you a therapist at the time?
Adam: No. Oh no.
Alison Cook: Okay. Got it. So this was an opening to this whole idea that you'd been shaped by these forces and the story that you'd been told. As you went through this disorientation, how did you cope? Did you seek out therapy?
Adam: Yes. I sought out therapy. I went to what's called Recovery Week, which is a week-long program for men or women that have been sexually abused with Dan Allender out in Seattle. I had no category for being sexually abused. I would not have said that I was sexually abused. Why did I go to a recovery week for sexually abused men?
I can't tell you, except I wanted to be with the man who wrote the book that described the landscape of my heart better than anything I had read. So I read The Wounded Heart, and I'm like, okay, the author of this book understands something about what it's like for me on the inside.
I flew out to be with him, and he was the first person to name that my relationship with my mother was not what I thought it was.
Alison Cook: Wow. You talk in the book about how we have these fragments of memories, these scraps of memories, and I find this to be so powerful. I do a lot of IFS work, and in the work that I do, there's often this memory that in general is like, why is that important to me? Why do I care about that?
I tell a story in Boundaries For Your Soul about not making a basketball team. I was like, why is this an important memory? I minimized that for years. I'm like, this is ridiculous. Until suddenly, you go to the root of the memory and you're like, it's there for a reason. It's lit up in my mind for a reason.
Adam: Yes.
Alison Cook: In your story, there were these snapshots of times with your mom, where there was impropriety. The memories were there, but you'd minimize them or rationalize them or bypass them. Tell us a little bit about one or two of those where you began to go, oh, there's a reason for these.
Adam: Every day, when I would come home from school, walk in the door, the first thought I had was, do I need to tend to my mother? Does my mother need a hug? Does my mother need conversation? Does my mother need engagement? In other words, I was always taking the temperature of my mom's insides.
Then I was, automatically, based on what we can say is implicit memory, responding to my mother's needs. It was automatic and unconscious. I didn't think it was a story at all. It's just the water that I swam in as a boy. It was just normal for me.
It was not until other people spoke into that story with their perspective that I began to tilt my head and go, you mean you didn't do that with your mom? They would be like, no. I didn't ever do that. So then I was like, oh. Maybe there's something about this story that I'm not telling truthfully to myself.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It starts to crack that veneer. So Adam, I'm curious about this word
“triangulation”. You talk about it a lot, I talk about it as well. My experience with it was a little bit different, and I really want to have this conversation with you, because I actually think it's common in different forms in family dynamics.
You describe being triangulated where your mom leaned on you emotionally, essentially made you her surrogate spouse, and worked through her stuff with you. Instead of working through her stuff with your dad, she brings you in as that third person. Am I saying that right?
Adam: You're saying it right.
Alison Cook: I'm reading your book going, oh my gosh, there are so many ways this can happen. Again, not to lay blame–in many ways, people are doing the best they can, but to name. Adam, I love that you're such a truth teller; you name, and you don't mince words. We have to name what's really happening.
Tell me a little bit about what is happening in the person who is put in that middle position, who is put in that role they were never supposed to be in. Why is that so devastating to our psyches?
Adam: Two reasons. I'll just speak out of my story, at least to begin with, and then you can ask follow-up questions. The two dynamics of triangulation that the chosen child is burdened with is number one, they are consumed.
Usually, as in my case, by the opposite sex parent, but it doesn't have to be the opposite sex parent. They are consumed by one parent. My goodness, my tenderness, and my sensitivity was used by my mother to meet her emotional needs. Are her emotional needs valid? Absolutely. But they are designed to be taken to another adult, not to a child.
Dynamic number two is, as a result, there's a closeness, a connectedness between me and my mother, that everyone in our family knows. I have twin brothers, and if you interviewed them, they would say, mom and Adam were the two closest people in our family, besides the twins. The twins were probably closer to each other.
That enmity with my father, and it's not my fault, but my father was understandably envious that his wife preferred a child to him as a confidant, companion, and lover.
Alison Cook: That word “consumption” is such a powerful word. You're consumed for the purpose of the other person, and there is a power differential. The adult has the power. You are innocent. You have no way of understanding. It is supposed to be the reverse.
When you come home from school, all of those things that were going through your mind are what should be going through a parent's mind. How can I be there for my child? What does he need? It's crazy-making.
Adam: It is. It is madness for the chosen child, because here's the madness. There is a specialness that I understandably felt, and a power. It's not a good power, but it is a power. As children of a powerful God, we are designed to feel a sense of our own power.
The dilemma is, it's not to be in this particular way. I was not supposed to be the golden child who could come through for my adult mother. I was supposed to be 5. I was supposed to be 11. I was supposed to be 15. I was supposed to be needy, and I'm not using the term needy pejoratively. I bless the neediness.
Children are needy, but when you're serving another adult like that, you can't be needy. You can't be a child when you're functioning as an adult.
Alison Cook: You use that phrase, “the chosen one” and “the power”. I have power in my family that in some ways can feel good, and it's toxic in so many ways. It's power I'm not supposed to have. Figuring out how to give that power back to where the power belongs is so challenging for children who are chosen in that sense, the golden child.
It's so fascinating to me, Adam. Some of this was, your mom picked up on these natural gifts in you of being a healer, and instead of helping you steward those gifts, she exploited those gifts. How do you go on?
I'm thinking of the listeners who have high sensitivity, high empathy, are intuitive about other people, and deeply kind. And a parent or a sibling or whomever exploits those gifts. How do you learn how to steward those gifts in a healthy way? I know that's a huge question.
Adam: It's a brilliant question, and it's a necessary question for healing. I'll say the one word answer and then I'll expound on it. The one word answer is blessing. What does blessing mean? Blessing is naming the goodness, the gloriousness, the godliness of that ten year old boy who could attune to an adult woman, who could adjust, who could adapt, who could tend to her, and with his God-given sensitivity, who loved her.
There has to be a blessing of the goodness of that boy's heart. And, at the same time, there has to be a grieving of how that goodness was exploited and used. Both blessing and grieving have to be there for healing to occur in the brain.
Alison Cook: I want to bring this to the beautiful book you've written and this invitation, because the first step of that is you have to tell the truth.
Adam: That's right.
Alison Cook: You have to tell the truth of the reality of your story. Why is that hard? What are the obstacles? Why are we fearful of looking at the truth of our stories?
Adam: That's a great question. There are a couple of answers to that. Number one, truth is largely lacking in our world. According to Jesus, it's the truth that will set us free. The nature of being human is very often to idealize our parents, our upbringing, our growing up years. Why?
It's not because we are deceitful, per se. It's because we want Eden. We want it to be good. A seven year old boy, a nine year old girl, does not have the mental capacity to lay down at night, put her head on her pillow at night, and say, my alcoholic father, or my sexually abusive stepfather, is doing what he's doing with some measure of intentionality.
A child's brain cannot confess that, if you will, or acknowledge it. It's overwhelming to their nervous system. So they make sense of it in other ways. The biggest way we make sense of the dysfunction of our families is with some measure of self-contempt, a turning on the self, like the problem is me.
That's how our narrative becomes coherent. For many of us, it’s well into our 30s, 40s, and 50s, until we begin the hard but good labor of exploring what was actually true for us.
Alison Cook: So we have to be willing to give up that story. It was there for a reason and we used it to survive in many ways, because I needed to tell myself as a child that this is normal, that this is good, and often we're parroting the story that was told to us. Parts of us have to be willing to let go.
Adam: Yes.
Alison Cook: That's hard. Sometimes that narrative is easier than the truth. How do you help people? I know this is what you're trying to do with the book. How do you help people move past that and move into healing? Because sometimes it feels worse before it feels better.
Adam: Yes, the starting point, in my opinion, and this is what I tried to get across in the book, is that you need to write one or two of your stories. Now, what do I mean by your stories? I don't mean an overarching, 25 minute telling of your life from 0 to 18. Like, my parents got divorced when I was 7, and then we switched schools, and then we moved towns, and then this happened.
You didn't make the basketball team. I want to hear that story. I want to hear when you saw the roster on the gym wall and your name was not on it. What did that stir in your heart and body? What was the interaction with your mother and father like when you told them? That's a story.
That story will give me more access to how the neurons in your brain have been shaped than if you tell me a 30,000 foot view of your overarching life narrative. It's in the details, on the ground, that our hearts are formed.
Alison Cook: Okay, I get what you're saying. We can have all the knowledge. We can give all the data, the fact points. But you're saying, actually begin to notice those scraps, those shreds, those stories that stick around even though you don't know why.
Adam: I love the word sticky. You remembered not making the team and you weren't sure why. My guess is, at some level, you minimize the story as this shouldn't be a big deal. This shouldn't still be affecting me. Why do I still remember this? But at some point, you found a new level of kindness, a new level of curiosity, and you gave that story weight.
Something opened up for you in that space when you gave the story weight. What my hope is for the listeners is that they would give their memories weight, even if they don't see how that story could possibly be a big deal.
Alison Cook: Yeah. You invite people to do this, to take this approach, not only with family of origin stories, but with spiritual stories, with God, and cultural stories. Talk to us a little bit about that. What are some other categories for us to consider these stories that may be a portal into deeper understanding and truth-telling?
Adam: Sure. You've named two already. Everybody has a story with regard to God. Even if you don't believe in God, there's a sense in which the cosmos has broken your heart, or let you down, or disappointed you. But for people who do believe in God, how do you come to terms with your unmet desires and your deep disappointments?
Because at some level, God is the one who's implicated in those deep disappointments and unmet desires. The question is, will you wrestle with God honestly and candidly about the true feelings in your heart and body with regard to how your story has unfolded so far?
Alison Cook: That's good. That's good. So there might even be the same story. There might be a relation back to parents and underneath that, a relationship or a belief system or a disappointment that came in with our attachment to God.
Adam: Yes, absolutely. Any time a boy or girl's heart is broken by heartache, by abuse, by trauma, the nature of the human heart is to make sense of that story in some way and then to resolve to live differently so that bad thing never happens to me again.
Very often, those resolutions or those commitments or those vows or agreements are made about God. They're made about how the world operates. Those become what we call our personality. Okay, so somebody says, I'm a diligent hard worker who doesn't trust anyone. I do it by myself. That's my personality.
I'm not going to argue with the language, but it's far more accurate to say, your heart was shattered as a child, in a particular moment or moments, and you made sense of the world as “I am alone and on my own”. I go to a gym here in Fort Collins, and there's this big sign. “If it is to be, it is up to me”.
Look, I get it for physical fitness. I get it. But sadly, many people go through life believing that's true about their life. That it is up to me. That is an incredibly lonely way of being in the world.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Adam, you provide so many practical ways in the book for people to begin to do this work. There are exercises, there are questions. There are so many ways into this work. It's so good. One of the things I've noticed, both in my work with clients and in my own life, and something you're saying there, is that we have a need to be seen, to be mirrored.
When you're walking in the front door, you need a parent who sees you and says, how was your day, Adam? You look a little down. When you haven't had that, and now you begin to realize and you begin to tell the truth and you're now in adulthood, how do you replicate that?
I know some of that is what we do as therapists. We provide some of that for our clients. And we can begin to map that onto God. I'm curious, how do you both in your personal life and in your practice when you're helping others? How do you remind yourself, wait a minute, it's not all on me? Because that's where that kind of comes from.
There's this almost Christ-figure feeling–it's me out here to be there for the world. Oh no. Wait a minute. I can start to use my imagination to go, wait a minute. Someone out there can see me and I can be small and held in that presence. But that takes a lot of mental work. I'm curious how you do that work in your own life and how you encourage others to do that work.
Adam: Sure. Neuroscientist Dan Siegel says that the greatest way to experience healing is by getting in as many relationships with a securely attached person as you can.
Alison Cook: I love it.
Adam: And that's a brilliant comment. What does he mean by that? He means that the way the human heart heals, the way the human nervous system heals, is by having healthy experiences of relationship.
By relationship, I mean navigating rupture and repair with other human beings and with God. The most healing thing for me has been relationships, and that includes my therapeutic relationships, when I'm getting therapy. I've had those relationships and I have them still, but I have non-therapist relationships also, where I experience and navigate rupture and repair.
And that does more to heal the fragmented neural networks in my brain than anything else. Relationships. Why? Because we are created in the image of the relationship. We are so relational in our core. The way the human heart heals is through relationship with God and relationship with human beings.
Alison Cook: You talk about attachment a lot. A lot of what we're talking about here are these secure attachments. How do you define and how do you experience a securely attached, reparative relationship?
Adam: If you and I were securely attached to each other in a relationship, we just met, but if we developed a relationship, here's how I would know. Whenever there was conflict between us, you would be able to bring your true feelings and experience to the dialogue. I would be able to bring mine.
We would both have an embodied sense of hopefulness that this will get repaired soon, without you having to sacrifice your perspective or your individuality and without me having to sacrifice mine.
What many people do is they either sacrifice their own truth, their own gut, their own experience. They ignore it. They dismiss it. They discount it. Why? Because they want a relational connection with the other person.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Do you find that through the process of healing, when you begin to tell the truth about your story, you begin to realize that you conflate the comfort of that actually-not-securely-attached relationship with your mother, and map that onto adult relationships?
To use terms like codependency, where I can feel connected to someone that is not actually a secure relationship. I know this is the experience of a lot of listeners. You're really saying something important here.
It can feel good when I'm abandoning myself to make you feel great. I might feel like, oh, I feel good in this relationship, when in fact that is not healthy.
Adam: Because you are dismissing an important part of your heart. You're doing it with some intentionality.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
Adam: I'm not blaming. I understand why you're doing it, because you are so relational. This relationship matters to you, and you are picking up, through your attunement to the other person, that if you don't swallow your feelings, it will jeopardize the relational connection. And that feels unbearable to your heart.
Alison Cook: Early on in the healing process, it can almost be like a backwards day at school. I remember when I was dating my now husband, I was like, this is weird. I don't feel right. It took me a long time to realize, this is health. Because we're not in that enmeshment, where I'm constantly picking up on his emotions and meeting them before he even realizes it.
I'm expected to show up as an adult in this relationship. It didn't necessarily feel safe initially. It didn't feel unsafe.
Adam: It didn't feel familiar.
Alison Cook: That's right. That's the word. That's right.
Adam: In the unfamiliarity, there was a disorientation in your body that you came to sort through as, oh, this is a healthy connection or a healthier connection than I am not accustomed to experiencing. I'm not doing what my brain typically does in relationship and it felt a little weird
Alison Cook: Yes. Did you go through that in your own experience?
Adam: I have gone through that. I've had experiences of that.
Alison Cook: It is actually this healthy back and forth. Someone is also attuning to me, when I'm showing up with my own sometimes negative emotions, and it is leading us to a better place because we're working through something. This is actually a secure attachment, versus that enmeshment.
Adam, one of the things I love about your approach, both in the book and just as I hear you and listen to you, is you're a truth teller. You use this word “intentionality”. You don't want to remove accountability from anyone, and simultaneously, you are deeply kind and you emphasize the importance of kindness. How do you hold those two intentions? That's rare in this world.
Adam: I think the way you hold those two in tension is with the word honor. For me to honor you, Alison, is to tell you how I experience you. There is nothing more honoring to another person than the gift of being told how you experienced them. So for example, my daughter tells me frequently how she experiences me.
I'll never forget. She's 8 years old. She's furious at me. She's at the top of the stairs looking down and she says, dad, the rocket ship of not caring about me is blasting off and you're driving it. Okay, now that is an 8 year old girl who is willing to name intentionality and harm.
She's expressing how she feels about how I just interacted with her, without trepidation. She's just telling me like it is. That was honoring to me.
Alison Cook: That is a brilliant example, because that shows how safe you are.
Adam: That's right.
Alison Cook: That she can tell you, dad, this is my experience of you right now. That you'll receive that. That's so interesting. So what you're saying there is, she's telling the truth of her experience. She's not being mean. She's honoring the fact that you're somebody who she cares about enough to let you know, this is what's going on.
Adam: Yes. For me to honor my father and mother is to tell the truth about my relationship with my father and mother. My parents are both dead now, but I did get to speak with my father before he died in a very honoring way about the ways that he harmed me. How did that transpire?
I called him up. Dad, would you be willing to have some conversations about some of the ways that I felt harmed by you as a boy? To my astonishment, he said yes. We began talking every Friday at 4 p.m. in 2009. It lasted nine months. I would share with him the stories of his harm to me. We would talk it through.
He owned what he could own. It was incredibly healing. However, for many people, the idea of picking up the phone and saying to their mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, hey, could we sit down to dinner and have a conversation about some of the ways I felt harmed by you? That would cause World War III in their family constellation.
Alison Cook: It would not be safe.
Adam: It may not be safe. So not everyone can do that. But then the question is, how is it that your mother or father is unwilling to hear your heart? That is a devastating realization, whether you're four or 54.
Alison Cook: Therefore, if you cannot do it with them, all the more that you have to find a place to tell the truth.
Adam: Yes. If you cannot tell the truth to your parents, your nervous system is going to be shaped in such a way that you will be very reluctant to tell the truth to your spouse or your coworker or your boss, or your best friend.
You have learned, and your neurons have wired in response to your experience of telling the truth, that “Ouch, that hurt me dad” never goes well.
Alison Cook: Yeah. It leads to breach. It leads to rupture with no repair, which is a void. So Adam, this gets back to what you said about the antidote. If you cannot find it with the people who hurt you, you need to build up as many securely attached relationships where you can practice that muscle.
Adam: Yes, and that's what, in a book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, he calls the village. He says, in contemporary American society, the village is largely absent. What does he mean by the village?
He means other elders, like warrior princes and princesses who have engaged their own story, suffered their own grief, and know how to use their power on behalf of the wounded. That's the village. We are sadly, often longing for one or two people that can be the village for us, and we don't know how to find them.
What you keep returning us to in this conversation is we need those people in our lives to heal. You're absolutely right.
Alison Cook: Yeah. As we wind down here, one last question–you allude to this in the book, as we grow that muscle to be able to tell the truth about our stories, do you think it facilitates our ability to tell the truth about ourselves and face the truth about ourselves?
Adam: Oh, absolutely. Look, truth-telling is a holistic endeavor. The more truthful I am about how you, mother, have harmed me, the more truthful I can be about how I've harmed my son. The invitation is into the light of truth, 360, all the way around.
If I can tell the truth about my own failures, as a father, as a husband, if I can tell the truth and own those without shame, but with integrity and honor for the other person, which means to repair, then why am I unwilling to tell the truth about the ways my heart has been harmed by others?
Alison Cook: So good. It's so good. For many of us, it's easier to tell the truth about our own shortcomings than to tell the truth about how we've been harmed. Just to listen to you say that, I imagine even when your little girl says that to you, you have the capacity as a dad to hold that, without shaming yourself as a parent.
You also have the ability, in the way that God holds up that mirror of truth for us, you can also hold up that mirror of truth for others. It's so freeing. It's so worth doing the hard work of facing your story and the things that we don't want to face. It's so worth it. I'm so grateful for your voice, that you're talking about it and that you've brought this book into the world.
Would you tell our listeners how they can find you? A lot of them already are listening to your podcast, but how can they find you and your work and your book and all the things that you're putting out there?
Adam: Sure. You can find me at adamyoungcounseling.com, or you can listen to the podcast that I host called The Place We Find Ourselves, which is on all podcast platforms. The book comes out March 4th, 2025. It's called Make Sense of Your Story, and you can pre-order it anywhere books are sold.
Alison Cook: Adam, I want to close by asking you a couple of questions I like to ask all my guests. What would you say to that younger version of you, that young boy showing up worried about mom after school on the front doorstep, what would you say to him now?
Adam: Your heart for relationships is so good. Your heart for bringing goodness into this world is so holy.
Alison Cook: And what is bringing out the best of you right now?
Adam: My marriage. Engaging with my wife. Engaging is a fancy word of saying: fighting, listening, refusing to misattune to her, and refusing to ignore myself, which is to say, refusing to misattune to me. Bringing attunement to my heart, my perspective, my reality, and bringing attention to her perspective, her heart, and her reality.
And then especially what God is mysteriously and playfully doing through our fights. That's bringing out the best of me.
Alison Cook: Wow. That's a podcast episode. I love that. Adam, you are bringing so much good. into this world. This is a powerful book. It's impactful. It will make you consider your own story in new ways. I am so grateful that you're putting such goodness into the world. Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Adam: Thank you, Alison. This was a delightful conversation.