Breaking Generational Cycles: Embodiment & Healing Trauma with Prentis Hemphill
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We can do hard things, PodSquad. Welcome back. Yeah, thanks. Welcome back.

I am really looking forward to today because I have listened to, I think every word this person has said in their career. And I just read their new book. And I think it's the most important work in the world that this person is doing, trying to get us all to heal, not only collectively, but personally.

Anyway, you know what? I'm going to let them tell you what they do. Today, we have Prentice Hemphill, who is a writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer, and therapist. They are the founder and director of the Embodiment Institute and the Black Embodiment Initiative and the host of the acclaimed podcast, Finding Our Way.

So good. Their work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, You Are Your Best Thing, edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown, and Holding Change by Adrienne Marie Brown, who you all know, PodSquad. And their new book is called What It Takes to Heal, and it is amazing.

so good and so beautiful and so important. Wow. Thank you. And PodSquad, if I seem like I'm talking really calmly and slowly right now, it's because I am jealous of Prentice's nervous system. Yeah. What did you say to me before we got on? You said, what did you say? Okay. So Prentice, first of all, welcome. Thank you so much. It's so good to be with y'all. Thank you for the invitation.

Usually the vibe of us is I invite people on here who I really respect and I love their work and it's helped me in my life. And so I was describing to Abby how unbelievably important your work is. And I said at the end of the description, and they are nervous system goals, which makes me trust you because your work is working.

That's so funny. I once heard Resmaa Menakem say that he thought people didn't come to him for answers. They came to him to sit with him.

someone with a regulated nervous system for an hour. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've never had anybody or maybe rarely, if I'm honest, I've rarely had anybody compliment my nervous system. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. I think it's the new measure of success to me. Yeah. You know, I really appreciate that. And it is a, it's a process. I mean, I live inside this body and this nervous system and part of the book is me

talking about what it's meant and how I have embarked on change and transformation in my own body. But it's also realizing that I think the changes, and I mean this, like you said, on the individual and collective levels that I think that we're up to are not a destination. So, you know, I'm still living very much inside my own body, inside my own path, inside my own journey. And I have a lot more breathing room in here than I once did. And that's great.

Can you talk to us about the new book, all of your work, I think. The new book especially feels like a gift to everyone who might be what you call in the book a transitional character, which by the way, I've never heard that term before. It's fascinating to me. I think a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are transitional characters. I think that's right.

Can you talk to us about what it means to be a transitional character in your life, family, community, culture, all of it? Absolutely. We were looking for in the Embodiment Institute a way to talk about those folks who are taking on healing. And the term comes from family systems. And it's about the person that breaks generational cycles. It's like, I'm not allowing this to go forward.

And what we were sort of sitting with was that, yes, we're inside of family systems, but there are all these other systems and networks that we're each a part of.

And I think for a lot of us, there's not much of a difference between the cycles we're trying to break in our families and the cycles we're trying to break in our society at large. And so we wanted to use the term to talk about those people that are taking on that transformation of themselves and the transformation of systems. But I also think one really key thing as we've kind of delved into this term is that we're not talking necessarily about the people that have it all figured out. We're talking about the people that are willing to try.

We're talking about the people that are taking it on and knowing that that might mean being courageous. It might mean being quiet. It might mean all these things to actually transform how we do relationship and how we do society. But it's not about having the right answer. It's about trying things out and being willing to do that. So all people that identify with that, that's who I'm talking to, the people that really want to make change.

In your experience, I have two quick questions about transitional characters. Number one, how do people even figure out, like you said, I'm not going to carry this on, which is a moment. Like you figure out, oh, I mean, it took me till I was 45 to even know what the things were that I was not going to carry on. I knew something was wrong.

But I thought it was just my personality. I didn't know that what I was dealing with was actually trauma from my family, from whiteness, from I didn't even know. So how do people even figure out that first moment where they realize they have something to transform? Hmm.

That's a great question. But one of the things that I really think about a lot around trauma particularly is we have to understand that trauma is, I say, a relational injury. It's disconnection. And so all the places where we feel disconnected or are disconnected are those places to look for. So, for example, if you're not able to feel the sensations in your body, if you feel disconnected from your own experience, that might be an indication that something has separated you from yourself.

And maybe it's what was required of you and your family. Maybe it's your gender training. Maybe it's whatever. But something has separated you from the experience of yourself. Disconnection from our natural world, from our ecosystem, from our environment is a trauma that I think gets reinforced all the time. Disconnection from society. I know, you know, growing up,

In the South, as a Black person, there's this looming question about belonging. And I think a question that Black people pose back of like, do I want to belong or how do I want to belong here? But one of the things you early on learn is that you weren't intended to belong here. And so there's this disconnection that sort of hangs over everything. Can I belong to this society? Do I belong to this society? And I think that disconnection indicates a trauma. Something has happened here.

And there's something that is happening here. So I think the place to look is where we are uncomfortable or unpracticed in connection. That's really good. So when we feel like we don't belong somewhere, either because of the way we are or because it was intended by the outside for us not to belong, is that when we start what you're calling separating? And is that dissociation?

I would actually use the term alienation in a way. I think we can become alienated from our beings. And I use that term particularly because I think that there's a way for

In our families or in society, we can be almost incentivized away from feeling ourselves. Like we know that it'll be safer, better, easier if we do not feel ourselves or if we are not authentic or if we're not in our dignity or whatever it might be that we get incentivized away from being our authentic selves or being in connection with each other. And I think it's a form of alienation from our own lives.

You're talking about this transitional character. Glennon, I would say that you're a transitional character and you've been for a long time.

And there's been something that's happened recently in her world where she's understood the generational trauma that her parents and she's really tried to figure out the trauma that her grandparents have gone through. And so she is kind of the first one trying to stop this pattern from going on. Right. And there's something that I've noticed that's happened recently. You aren't as angry with your parents as you used to be. Because...

of what Prentice talks about with that, because I want to talk about our dads. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the reason I'm asking you about separation is because I am a year, whatever, into anorexia recovery. I kept telling my therapist, I don't know. I come to keep saying I come to, and I'm in the bathroom throwing up. Uh-huh.

I come to, and then I kept thinking, why am I coming to all the time? And all the times Prentice were times when I was at a table with a person who loves me very much. But okay. What I'm trying to ask you is that was separation. Like when I was little, I realized I don't feel like I belong or I don't feel safe here, but I didn't have the agency to do anything about it. That's right. Right. That's right. That's right.

Is that when we leave somehow? Like we, can you talk about that? Because I feel like it happens to so many of us and we don't know that's when we go into behavior. That's disembodiment. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's why we can get to our dads in a minute, but I think that's why we talk about embodiment and this way of it's, you know,

When we talk about being embodied, we're talking about the restoration of relationship to our own beings and bodies. And I think you can also talk about the results of that or the process of that in some way as presence. Like I am able to be here for more of my life.

And more of my body is doing the same thing at the same time. So that I'm not just with you now and most of me is actually hiding somewhere. That most of me can be here with you. And that to me is the process, a part of the process of healing, is coming into ourselves so we can be here. Yeah.

Okay. So talk to us about how this showed up in your life with your father as much as you are comfortable with, because I was so moved by those parts of your book. And I also read it like, it's amazing how, I mean, you know how Freud was like, I'm going to do a lot of research on trauma and then was like, oh, actually I'm going to hide all my research because I'm finding out that these women we thought were hysterical, actually they're being abused by men and I'm protecting my father. Right.

So I'm not putting it in my research. I appreciated so much your commitment to telling the truth in such a lovingly beautiful way. And it felt to me like an honoring of your family line. Thank you. Like the most healed version of your dad would be like, hell yes. She's doing it. She's doing the work that couldn't be done before. So talk to us about that process and how you really walked the walk.

Yeah. And yeah, honestly, I think I'm still doing it by having this conversation with you. And it's like, it's working a different angle of it to be open about it. You know, one of the things I learned or came to embody is,

a kind of self-protection from my childhood was hiding. You know, I would build these elaborate forts growing up because everything outside of those forts was unpredictable and scary. And so I was like, I'm going to build a fort, bring all my favorite books in here. My mom would say, you would just build these forts and you sit in there and sweat all day. You know, you did that too. Yeah. And it was, it was the unpredictability. It was the rage. And for a long time,

I didn't understand, and maybe you relate to this, is like, even as an adult, as much as I knew that my father, well, he hadn't shown me evidence that he could give me what I needed. I still was angry with him. I was like, give me what I need. This is the kind of love that I've been asking you for. Give it to me. And I got to this point where...

I understood that, oh, now it was my responsibility to get those needs met, but also to grieve what wasn't possible. And it transformed my relationship to myself and it transformed my relationship to him. And, you know, it didn't mean that I had to go back pretending like everything was OK. It was that I finally understood what is and I was able to be with what is.

The other piece I want to just say about this as we're talking about transitional characters is that, you know, it showed up again when I had a kid. I have a two and a half year old now. And that same tendency to hide, to pull away from connection was present with me. You know, when a child looks at you and their eyes are just open and they're just receiving you and taking you in, I was like, oh God, this is dangerous. This is scary. Being looked at is scary. I don't know what's going to happen next. My nervous system was like,

danger, danger, get out of here. And I started to pull away. And I had this moment, you know, she was looking at me and I felt myself retreat. It's almost like I felt my eyes pull back into the back of my skull. I felt my chest kind of harden. I felt the self of me pull back as far as I could. And I had this one piece of me that was like, wait, wait, wait. This is how you're going to transmit this connection. She's asking to be met.

But your unprocessed stuff is saying, this is dangerous. How much of you can come back to this connection, can come back to this moment, can come back to this child's gaze? And so I took this moment. I was breathing, trying to relax my body, trying to come back into my face and allow myself to just be witnessed. And I say in the book that that to me

was a moment where what I had inherited from my relationship with my father that likely he inherited sometime before, what I inherited was not passed on to my child, at least not in that moment. And so that to me is the promise of healing is transforming that. My dad, it's a complicated relationship. It's a painful relationship.

And it also doesn't rule my life or my relationships moving forward anymore. Is there a way you can tell us how to become aware of this sinking back? Because I think that that is such an important thing.

And so many of us do not have the skill set yet to be able to become aware of it, of the moment where you're just waking up having just thrown up. That's right. That's right. Because there's all those moments before. There's little movements we make. The really interesting thing about this and about embodiment and having been teaching embodiment for a long time, what I learn more and more every day is that we're always practicing. So my hiding is

I didn't just get good at, you know, I would hide in relationships with other people. I would be like, here's just enough so you leave me alone. Or, you know, here's a little bit of connection that I'm going to run away. I perfected that through practice. You know, we think about practice in a sports context, which you know about.

But we practice how we protect ourselves and how we shield ourselves from connection. We practice it in micro movements. We practice it in the words we say until we get really, really good at it. And we don't have to think about it anymore. So someone wants to connect with me and I just subtly know how to move my body in a way that indicates I'm not here for this or I can't do this or can pull me out of the conversation.

And the way to really start to see that, one, you know, in embodiment work, we practice centering. So it's like you practice getting into that state where your body is somewhat relaxed. It doesn't mean that you're happy or calm or whatever, but your body is just there. And you can start to see when things activate you. Oh, wow.

That took me a little bit out of myself. How did I do that? What did I do? And a lot of times we tend to do similar things over and over again because we practice them. So someone might come towards you and you're like, oh, I just went way back in the back. How did I do that? I tightened around my eyes. I closed off my chest. There are all these subtle, subtle ways. So

I think making time to practice listening to being attentive to ourselves and what we're doing, that is embodiment. There's always sensations. There's always responses. There's always information about who you are right now. But we are often trained to be so externally focused that we're not very good at listening to the signals that our body is sending out. So practice. That's it. That's it. It's like...

The amount of times where we're in a situation and we think this isn't right. I don't like this. Yeah. And then we think our next thought is, but I have to survive anyway. I have to get through this. So we cut off the connection to our insides. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

And then we somehow come to when we're doing some survival mechanism that we learned it is like a relentless staying with the self. Would you say that's what it is? Yeah, I would say that. That's a beautiful way of saying it. It's a relentless staying. But it's also, it's an accepting, it's a learning, it's a bearing witness to self.

What is actually true? Because, you know, even as you say, I'm thinking I don't want to be here. Your body is actually doing something about that. You might stay in that connection, but your body is trying to indicate I don't want to be here. So honoring that and living more organized around that, what your body knows and is expressing is

I think also produces a kind of ease to staying, you know, when you reestablish that relationship. Okay. So a good night's rest is so important for any athlete. I speak from experience, obviously, but sometimes the place you're in doesn't allow for that. For instance, you may have seen all these wild videos online about how ridiculously uncomfortable the cardboard beds are in the Olympic village.

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Can you talk to us about your cry dates? Yeah. I've been learning how to cry too in the last year. Uh-huh. Oh, wow. So I just couldn't believe it. Just talk to us about that. Yeah, I didn't know how to cry as an adult. Now, my body probably...

It's like, yeah, I always knew how to cry. But I had gotten so practiced at suppressing the cry response in my body. So as soon as a cry would come, I would shut it down. And a lot of that came through training. I mean, maybe it's my generation, but I knew a lot of people that would hear from their parents, like, you know, stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about kind of thing. So you learn to, you know, suck it back in and push it down. But when I got to be, I think I was like my late 20s, I was like, I...

want to cry. I think I need to cry. I think I'm suppressing crying. And so I would take myself, you know, there was this really affordable place in Oakland where you could rent a private hot tub, which I think was the first time I'd ever been in a hot tub, but you could rent it for an hour. And I would rent a hot tub for an hour and I would listen to the saddest playlist imaginable. And I would just lay there and try to relax and I'd feel the impulse and I'd start to

push it down. I start to tighten around it. I'd say, breathe, relax. I would listen to the song and something would move me. And eventually I could just relax and stay open. And the sobbing came, the tears came. And I did that. It wasn't just a one-time thing. I would go pretty frequently to take myself on cry dates. I was like, I think you need to cry. And it wasn't something that just happened to me. So I had to create the conditions to cry safely until I could do it more often.

I think the human body is so fascinating to me. The fact that we can even to begin with stop ourselves from this natural urge because of this psychological fear of attachment or detachment, whatever.

But it's so beautiful to think about it in that way because we taught ourselves things, which means we can teach ourselves different things. I hope everybody heard what Abby just said. Yes. We taught ourselves to do it. We can undo it. Absolutely right. And that's what you mean when you say practice. It's practice because you practiced the other thing for 48 years and it's going to take

remaking new neuropathway, right? Like it's hard. It's hard work. Yeah. And mostly it's like practicing staying open in different conditions and different moments with different stimuli. How do you practice staying open? And you need safety. You need relationship. You need all these contextual things to make that happen. But that's the practice is staying open no matter what happens.

And that's not just something we do solo. I just want to say that. You might need somebody's hand at your back. You might need someone that loves you in your life to be able to trust that it's safe enough to stay open. It's not just something you've got to figure out how to do by yourself. But we can do that. I think we need each other to figure out how to do that.

I have a question around your experience and folks, because, you know, we've been doing a lot of embodiment work over here in our house. Awesome. It's been an interesting journey. And I was kind of alluding to this earlier. And the part of my question I didn't get to was how long do you it's going to take as long as it takes. I understand it. But I think those who are listening might.

be of the mindset like they might want to be the ones that can stop the generational inherited trauma. But the decision to do that also comes with a lot of pain and upset and

And there's like a grieving process, whether it's because of a parent or a grandparent. Or how much you've lived your life in this trauma, thinking it was your life. Yeah, thinking that you were fucked up. Yeah. That's right. Like, I want to acknowledge that process before the actual healing works. It feels like there's this rage, this pissed offness with everything.

you needing to be the one. It's like you are self-selecting kind of a harder road in a way. You're going against the grain. And I want to acknowledge how hard that is and how long that usually takes somebody to work through that part before they can actually get into the embodiment part. That's right. That's right. I love that question. And I feel like it's so compassionate too. So what people are going through, there's so much grieving in

doing healing and transformational work. There's so much grieving. And one thing I just want to soften for all of us is that we're not going to heal it all in this life. Thanks, Prentice. I don't mean to disappoint. No, that feels like a relief. That's a relief. Yeah. Yeah. You're not going to do it all.

And I think the hard part about accepting that is especially when we really imagine ourselves as so individual, which I think we get taught to be, that I've got to fix it. I've got to take it on. But fixing is a way that we avoid feeling often. You know, if I can fix, fix, fix, fix, I don't have to feel what's there. But this is generational work. You know, I was talking to my wife the other day, the other night, and we were just thinking about the kind of

delusion that, say, our parents had to grow up under about who they were in the world or who they were to each other. And I'm not saying that we're not growing up under or coming up under tremendous delusion at all, but I can see theirs a little differently than I can see mine. And I'm like, oh, we're not going to get out of this puzzle quickly, as quickly as we'd like. It's going to take generations. And I understand myself as a

a person who is in relationship to the future through the young people in my life, through my relationship with the world around me, I will do my best. I will do my work. And then there will be more for them to do because there's a lot for us to unlearn.

So we can also relax in understanding we're not individual bodies. We're communities. We're families. We are parents. And it's a dynamic process. And that's partly what I wanted to convey and what it takes to heal. This is not just about individual healing. This is about collective healing. This is about societal healing and transformation. And you're not going to do it all by yourself. And that sort of orientation is also part of the thing we have to let go.

I just appreciate your insistence on the and both of it all the time because I know through reading your work that there's a resistance to that sometimes, especially when you're doing the important work world that you're doing. It can be very like, we don't have time for feelings. We're saving the world. Yeah. Or the other side is like,

Don't try to fix the collective. Heal your own trauma. Yeah, that's right. But all of us have been in spaces, in activism spaces, where nobody's working on their healing and it can be as dangerous as any other space. So talk to us about the and both and the story where you told your friend that you were working on your own stuff and she said, oh, you're going to be one of those feelings people now. Yeah. And how hurtful that was to you.

Yeah, you know, I'm a really unlikely person to be talking about healing if you knew me 20 years ago. I think a lot of people from that era are like, how in the world did you get into this healing thing? And I have to say, it's like doing my work helped me do my work in the world, if that makes sense. So the both end is there's tremendous work to do.

I think the way that our systems are designed, they're designed with a kind of exploitative center a lot of times. Like, how do I take as much, get as much from you as I can? And that's kind of the organizing principle in a way of our society. There's maybe others, but I think that's one.

And I'm asking this question of like, what would a society look like where an organizing principle was healing? How would we distribute resources? How would we structure our society? Who would have access to what? And I think those questions have a real impact on how people feel their well-being. Oppression, I talk about it all the time, is trauma.

And it is, to me, how we organize trauma in a society. That's what we're doing through oppression, is organizing trauma into certain blocks, into certain communities, into certain bodies. And so if we're really talking about healing, we can't just stop with our individual selves. We have to understand how our society and how our world is actually functioning and how it creates trauma and how it limits people's ability to heal from trauma. Mm-hmm.

On the other side, we are embodied in a whole lot of things that we have learned through our families, through the way the world is sort of structured, how to move through it and try to stay safe. And we can then embody all sorts of things that we don't really value or believe in, but they come out of us. We've practiced them in social settings or in our family. And so there's work to do. There's work to do in our interiors. There's work to do around realigning relationships

who we actually are and how we behave with what we believe. And it's not just going to happen because we think it, we have to practice. And so it's both and. So embodiment is also acting on the outside or in a way that isn't aligned with our true intentional values and capabilities, right? Because I think all the time I dissociate, it's like,

I'm saying you should be able to handle this. It reminds me of your dinner with your dad when you came back after the rupture. Like whenever I am gone and not embodied, it's because I have told myself, oh, I'm noting this signal from my body that I don't want to be here. But my brain is saying, oh, you should be able to handle it. Right. Right. There's a should. There's a should. Absolutely. There's so many shoulds. And those shoulds get almost like implanted in us.

by the relationships around us, by the models around us, by the climate almost. Like what is possible in our homes? What's not possible in our homes? What can you feel, do, say, think in the home? And what can you not? What's off limits here, right? So my family growing up, we were, I mean, beautiful family in a lot of ways. Everybody in my family is funny and loving and warm. And it's really hard to talk about what hurts you.

It's like, oh, suck it up, put it away. It's really hard for us to talk about that. And so I learned, oh, that's kind of off limits. And because of practice, at a certain point, it's not even accessible to me anymore easily. I don't know how to find it. The hurt, it's like the crying. I have the impulse to cry. It's not that I even know it. It's like I have it and before I know it, it's gone because my body just takes it over.

And that's sort of what we're dealing with. And that's why when Abby asked a question of how do we start to pay attention to, it's really building a kind of intimacy with ourselves to be able to listen that compassionately, that closely, that well, so that we know, oh, this thing is coming up. And I, what I know now is that I need to be checked on. I need to be reassured.

Because that's the thing that didn't happen a long time ago. So freaking beautiful. Tell us the difference between internalization and being awake. How do we know if we're internalizing or we're awake? Choice. You know, I always think about one of my teachers says a relaxed body is the most powerful body that we have.

And he says that my interpretation over the years is because when we are relaxed, we can do almost anything. I can make any kind of move from a relaxed body. I have a lot of choices from a relaxed body. From a body that is tight, tense, or protective, has taken on a protective shell, there's only a limited number of moves we can make from that body.

We've already sort of foreclosed certain options. So when I think about what it means to be awake in ourselves, living inside of ourselves, it's that relaxed body. It's that choicefulness. It's engaging with the world now, not carrying our stories from the past into our now moment.

As much as possible. So. That one hit you heavy. Yeah. Cause it's like embodiment, partly Prentice, right. It's just a constant remembering.

that we are not children anymore. It's like, we actually weren't crazy. We were in situations where we weren't safe to use our agency, where we couldn't be connected with our emotions. Those were survival mechanisms. Options are limited. Yeah. And so is embodiment, this constant remembering, not just checking in with yourself, but also checking in with reality of like, oh,

I'm not defaulting to the situation I was in 25 years ago. Now I'm a grownup and I get to make decisions about my own safety. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times I say to people, when I work with people and when I've done my own work, I realized that there are parts of me that were locked in other moments in time. There were parts of my body that were in a perpetual response to something that happened in 1993. Yeah.

And yeah, embodiment is saying, how do I become aware enough or have the resources and the space to work through those things enough so that I can be here? It doesn't mean that I have lost the learning that I have, but it actually means that I've been able to incorporate it. And I'm able to live in this moment with the wisdom that I learned from those moments, but not the reactivity. The other point you make about children, again, it's like parenting. I'm realizing that

That children come with a lot of this already. And I think it's to the point we were talking about earlier. It's like when children don't have the options to express or to develop their own understanding of themselves and they have to create these kind of, it's like when you put water in a glass, it shapes itself for the conditions, but the child might not know, why do I have to shape myself like this? Why do I have to suppress this thing to be safe here?

Why do I have to move this around or act this way? But they learn how to do it to stay safe because they have to. But when we can grow up or when we have children that grow up where choices are explained, like, you know, I have boundaries with my child, but I say, I have this boundary for this reason. This is why we're doing this. And in a way, I'm asking you to entrust me with this because I'm bigger, older. I've done this more times.

But I'm not trying to shut down her body for the sake of my comfort. You know what I mean? Because it feels like dysregulated parents use the people around them to regulate themselves. That's right.

They're not regulating. They didn't learn how to deal with their own anxiety, their own worry, their own anger. And so they actually believe that what I'm supposed to do is arrange you, control you, quiet you, silence you, because you are making me these things. That's right. Yeah. I just am trying to understand what you just said, Prentice, about you being able to have boundaries and allowing your child to also...

I forget exactly what you said, but to have her experience or their experience too.

Yeah. How does that look? Can you give me an example? Because I think that it's we have a lot of parents listening to this. And we came from authoritarian families. Yeah. Which is so, you know, I'm learning as a parent. Oh, there is a shortcut where I could scare you to make you stop doing this. Or I could disconnect from you to make you stop doing this. I could retract my love to control your behavior because I know that is a shaper for you.

I know it will cause you to take on, for my sake, some kind of behavior or posture that would make me happy. What I'm saying is, and I'm not saying it's easy at all. Parenting is a daily, like this is a daily spiritual practice. It is a daily centering practice because they find different ways of testing the limits. But my work with my child is not to...

scare her into submission is to, with her, I'm really, really lucky that I can do a lot of explaining of why. And even if she doesn't understand the words, she feels respected by me explaining. She like nods. I'm like, you don't even understand these words I'm saying, but now she's learned to say, okay, okay.

Sometimes she doesn't say, okay. Sometimes she's like, I'm going to fall out in this floor and I don't believe that you can't give me a cookie right now for breakfast. And I have to explain to her that, you know, that's not going to happen if you're going to have this fit, but it's not going to change the reality, which is that you're not going to have a cookie. And if I can withstand her taking it to the edges, then

of emotion, usually we can be okay. I check in on her. I say, how are you doing? Do you feel ready to re-engage? And sometimes she's like, no, you know, but even that is building a kind of self-awareness that I think will serve her in the end. So staying in communication, having limits and letting them do things that make you uncomfortable, all of that as a constant dynamic process is kind of how we get through each day. It's amazing.

So good. Because you staying calm and allowing her to have her big feelings is also you saying to her, I'm not afraid of your big feelings. Yeah. Look at me. I'm still fine. Yeah. And our relationship is a container that is strong enough to hold this, but it doesn't mean that I acquiesce. It doesn't mean that I give in. It also doesn't mean honestly that I don't

say that I'm displeased or upset. I do communicate that, you know, I do communicate that, but it's not in a way that she has to take care of it or make it go away.

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on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash hard things. That's linkedin.com slash hard things to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Do you ever find in your practice that, and this could be just me always trying to make sense of my past, so it could not be true, but do you ever find in your practice that the people who end up being the transitional characters are

were like the bad kids when they were little were like the alcoholics or the kids who say kept getting arrested just talking for a friend or like who could be outcast yeah yeah do you find that because it feels like it might be the first step in a person saying oh hell no to this I don't know what else to do but hell no to this situation I'm in knowing in your bones

And having just destruction and rebellion being your only first step. That's right. Until you do better. Is that a thing? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I used to,

work as a therapist and, you know, when families come in, they usually come in, they're like, here, my child is the issue. And then you realize, oh, there's a whole family dynamic here. There's something that this child is speaking to or trying to express. And so everything is contextual in that way. And I absolutely feel like

I think anybody can be a transitional character. I don't think it's limited to those folks, but I think often the clarity about what the fundamental challenges and issues are come from those people that are acting out where it can't, they don't have whatever it might take actually to just hide it, push it down, make it go away. It's coming out of them. The middle children, I think you could extrapolate it on a societal level. I feel like there's so many of us that are

odd, black sheeps, different kind of queering of it all that have something to say about the well-being of the society at large. It makes me sad for those people too, because to me, your work, it's about freedom. Embodiment is about freedom, right? It's about if we're in cultures or families or situations that we are

intrinsically rejecting of, we can sometimes feel like our only reaction can be just rebellion. Yeah. Which actually is just as much of a cage as just assimilating. Compliance. Yeah, that's right. That's right. They're both not freedom. They both have nothing to do with me and what I want. They're both being controlled by

the very power structure I don't want to be controlled by. That's right. That's right. That's why center, you know, when I started doing embodiment work and somatics work, center was such a revolutionary idea to me. There's a place inside of me where safety lives. There's a place inside of me that can trust inside of my belonging, that there's a place inside of me that is wise, where all the

lessons of my life have been learned and I can live from that place. I can settle into that place because reactivity to me is what you're talking about. We are living in a reactive stance to what's happening. I often think it's hard to have relationships. It's hard to do our work in the world when really what our bodies are doing is running from a lion all day. We're in that reactive state where we're feeling under threat.

And center is, I think, that opportunity to live more deeply inside of our actual selves and feelings and sensations without being as reactive to the world. Now, I think the challenge that we have in this moment is that so much of the way we structure things is geared towards keeping people in a reactive state. Say more about that. I mean, I think the way that I'm not anti-social media, but I think social media is a place that

creates a kind of reactivity in the body. How moving quickly, we can go from incredibly tragic things to happy things. We're just constantly reacting. We're not processing. We're not taking it in. And I think the challenge of that is we may take action, but it's not our most powerful action from a reactive body. It's often not the most centered action from a reactive body. It's not the most relational action.

from a reactive body because that's not how we are designed as human beings. And what I really long for is for all of us to have the space room place to practice so that we can live more from our centers, which I think

make our relationship stronger. And you talk about doing hard things. The big question I'm in is how do we stay together through hard things? How do we stay in our power, stay in our centers and stay together when things are hard? And I think it's a question that is an important one for all of us, I think, in this moment. So this would be your tenant of, is this when things fall apart, like the falling apart of it when things get tough? Yeah. Yeah.

It's the reason why I'll be giving your book to everyone is it's the end both of, I think sometimes the people who really do care and who really do want to be engaged are the people who are most often on social media, watching the news. And so it makes sense that sometimes our reactions would be not as powerful as the intention of being in those places is often good. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

But your book is a way of being completely engaged and also doing the work of sitting with yourself as opposed to just this shallow reaction to everything. Absolutely. What have you learned about how we stay together when things get hard? That's a great question. I've learned a lot through my own life, through my own family. I think some, as I've said, I've learned a lot with my daughter. I've learned a lot with my wife of how to...

fight without dehumanizing, how to, this is really, I think a thread in the book too, of like, I know how to be small now, how to not know how to be tender, how to need, but that has opened back up for me. And I think because of that, I feel more connected to my power somehow. So I think this, you know, we're often staving off this feeling of needing, being small,

Meeting each other, reaching for each other. I think when we can get more in touch with that, I think we can realize that reaching for each other does not make us less than anything, does not make us less worthy or less adult, less whatever it is it might be, that it actually is where our power lives. And so I've been learning how to reach when I don't know. I've been learning how to reach when I'm afraid. I've been learning how to reach

Even when I'm angry sometimes, you know, through a mad face, say, I really am afraid right now that you don't love me. And I'm mad. I'm mad about it. And even that is reaching for connection. Even if I don't do it beautifully or perfectly, I'm wanting to be known in relationships. I'm more so want to be known. I'm willing to be known. So I think that and.

I think it also matters who you're doing it with. It's lovely to be, I see you all on the path together, to be in relationships with people that are on the path too. There's more space, there's more room to reach for each other then. And it feels so counterproductive to bring up these little insecurities or big insecurities we have about ourselves. As soon as we do that,

There is this magic that can happen with a partner that you're like, I'm scared. And you don't even need to embellish. It's just like, I feel afraid. I'm scared. And they don't come and fix it. It's just acknowledging that you are this full person, that you have all of these parts to you and all of these emotions. And when you say the thing out loud, even if it's like your biggest fear to say the thing, this little secret,

Once you say it, what you're saying out to the universe is I'm full. I am a human. And when somebody doesn't reject that because maybe it was rejected in the past, but when you say it and can be honest with somebody in the moment, in your present life, and they don't reject you, you become more of yourself. That's right. The person you've always been, the person you will always be.

It's so good, but it's so hard. It's counterproductive. It's like nothing in the world tells us. It's like you're never safe. Okay. I've never been safe a day in my life because I keep protecting myself. Like, is this, I need to ask you, this sentence just keeps this whole year of recovery in my head. And it might be ridiculous because I don't exactly even know what it means, but

But I just keep thinking, you have to get rid of every single thing that you think is protecting you. Yeah. Everything, every person, every medication, every defense mechanism. And I don't think this just in my familial situation. I think of it in terms of understanding my place inside of whiteness, all of it. Every single thing that they told me was going to protect me is killing me.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Does that make any sense to you? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Often what we think is protecting us is keeping us from our lives. It's keeping us from our expression. It's keeping us from connection. And again, it's that point of like, can I feel vulnerable enough to actually figure out who I am, to actually know who I am?

I think the other side of that is that we do need protection sometimes. We have these mechanisms for a reason. Sometimes I go into rooms where I'm like, oh, I'm so glad I know how to wall off. I'm so glad I know how to tighten my jaw in this way and my eyes. I'm going to do it extra in this moment.

So we need protection. It has, because it protects, you know, we need it. And again, it's a question of choice. Am I living my life from that place? Has it become so generalized that I think I need it whenever I might actually make a connection with another human being because of something that happened a long time ago? Now would I apply it to every relationship? There's danger in every relationship. Or is it something that I can put on like an outfit?

I'm going to wear this to this or I'm going to wear it for this moment. But I haven't confused it with who I am.

Yes. That's good to hear because not every circumstance you walk into in your life is going to be a safe one. No, absolutely not. And so it feels like, because in my mind, the enlightened embodied person, right, is somebody who is themselves everywhere they go and walking around and whatever. But this is not necessarily always needing to be true. No. I think that that's important. Sometimes you need to leave.

Sometimes you need to fight back. Sometimes you might need to appease to get out of a situation. You need all of those moves in different scenarios. The challenge is sometimes they get stuck in on. Yes. And we do them for so long that we start to think, oh, this is who I am. I'm the person that does this. Or this is how everybody else is.

I don't know why everybody else always makes me do this thing. And it becomes this general thing so that we're no longer actually engaged in relationship. We're no longer here. More what I'm saying is you need all of that. It's just, do you know when to use it in the right moment? I think I have a quote that's like healing helps us.

fight in the places we need to and love in the places we long to. Yeah, I have that here. If you need any other of your quotes, just let me know. Thanks. I forget. So I have to keep them on hand. That's a freaking good one. Okay. I knew this was going to happen.

I feel like we've been talking for four minutes and now we're at time. So do you think that, I'm just going to ask you this while you're on the spot and recording. Do you think that at some point you would come back to us and talk to us about your tenants? Yes. And could we just do a whole, I just felt like, oh my God, this is the process. This is it. This is it. And I just want to talk to you about, I want all the pod squad to hear this.

I mean, they'll go get the book for sure. And is there a process that you could maybe take Glennon through that the listener could listen to in terms of an embodiment exercise that while

I don't know. I was going to spring one on y'all today. And yeah, I have to come back and do that. I would love to do that. Great. Take you through practice. I can have y'all practice together even. Yes. Yeah. I would love to take you through the tenets of the book because it is to me, and I'm glad you could really see it and feel it. It's the kind of journey. It's the arc of transformation.

As we call it. Practical. Yeah. It's practical. You do like the, I need both. I think of it as like the art and the science. If you just give me the science, I'm just going to die. And if you just give me the art, I'm just going to have feelings and not know shit. Right. You do both so beautifully. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I know that for transitional characters, I've had very many moments in this journey where I think, okay, in my pettiest moments where I think, thanks a lot.

ancestors. Like, what the hell were you doing? Like, why did I end up with all of this? And I was talking to my sister about it and we actually started looking back at our ancestors. It was only two generations ago or three generations ago that my great-grandfather was on a boat escaping a famine from Ireland. Like, people were crossing oceans and your ancestors, I mean, the stories, it's what people were getting through. And sometimes I think of

My ancestors being like, okay, this is your ocean. And it's supposed to be as hard. You get to be the one who...

transform some of this trauma that we were not able to because we didn't have the time and the resources and the privilege to do that. And now, lucky one, this is your ocean for us. Like this is your link in the chain. And you get to do that. The blessing and the curse. That's right. But it's a beautiful thing to honor.

where we've come from. It's a remembering, you know, that they, and they are us, you know, like you said, this is your part in it. You're the edge of your lineage and there's something for you to attend to. There's something for you to transform. And that's what, you know, I'm hoping with this book that I'm calling out to those folks that are like, I want to actively be the edge of that lineage. I want to transform what is mine.

And I want to leave this world better than when I came in it. So good. Most important work in the world. Yeah. Thank you, Prentice. Thanks, Abby. Thanks, Glennon. I really appreciate it. You're so great. We can do hard things, people. Prentice promises us. We'll see you next time. Bye. Thanks, y'all.

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LaGrasso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. ♪