Meredith Miller Toxic Relationships

avaya has changed my life avaya has made me the woman i am today avaya is my home avaya is personal freedom avaya is the reason my life continuously improves let everyone in your life know about avaya everyone needs to know about this amazing company thank you avaya for appearing in my inbox what ike allen and andy anderson have created at avaya is what the world needs hello everyone i'm andy anderson co-owner of avaya university with my partner ike allen welcome to our breaking free from toxic relationships curriculum i'm so excited you're here with us we have another great class lined up for you today with meredith miller she's going to be talking with us about transgenerational toxic relationships and ending the legacy of trauma meredith and i dive into how toxic relationships become transgenerational how you can identify the particular cycles that you might need to break free from in your relationships and once you identify them how can you break the cycles and end that legacy of trauma and so much more and as you go into this class i really invite you to take a look at becoming aware of these particular cycles that you might need to be aware of in order to break free from transgenerational trauma transgenerational toxic relationships so take a look at your family tree really take a look at what are the personalities of your family members what were the personalities of family members that maybe you didn't experience but you know maybe you heard stories from from family members that you uh grew up with those kinds of things and also taking a look at what what's your personality what kind of patterns do you see what kind of patterns do you see that are similar to patterns of your grandma or your great grandma or anything like that and once you become aware of these patterns like maybe people pleasing is a big pattern in your family that is definitely a big one in mind especially in the women in our family self-sacrificing perhaps or maybe losing yourself in relationships having that kind of codependent tendency or just ultimately not living a balanced life right focusing more on pleasing other people and really lacking in self-care and taking care of yourself to the extent that it might even affect your health like meredith is going to talk to us about so just take a look at um take a look at those patterns what kinds of things do you see that come up in your life that maybe have been handed down from generation to generation and ultimately when you become aware of these patterns you can start to make new choices in order to change those patterns and break that cycle and i also want to make a note that meredith is frequently featured in avaya events so if you resonate with her class and i know you will and if you'd like to watch her other classes at avaya she was also featured in overcoming narcissistic abuse as well as breaking free from codependency and you can go check out her classes there at avaya.com and get started and enjoy this class everybody hello avaya family thank you so much for joining us for our breaking free from toxic relationships curriculum i'm andy anderson my partner ike allen and i are teachers mentors and the co-owners of avaya university avaya is a creator of over a thousand books films courses teachings and other supportive resources thank you so much for being here and joining us our fellow teacher meredith miller is back with us today to talk about transgenerational toxic relationships ending the legacy of trauma meredith is a coach author and speaker and she helps people to self-heal after toxic relationships her mission is to bridge the gap between trauma and purpose and she teaches the mindsets tools and actions to help others in their recovery after narcissistic abuse welcome back meredith thank you so much for inviting me yeah i'm so so happy to see your face again and i'm so excited for this topic this is going to be really good i love the trans-generational um topic around toxic relationships so let's let's dive into that um what like could you tell us a little bit about how toxic relationships can become transgenerational sure so essentially what this means is that there's a transmission of the trauma from one generation to the next that keeps getting passed down it's like transferring the pain that's unresolved from one person one generation to the next generation and that could be physical pain emotional spiritual mental it could also come in the form of say beliefs or values or the stories that we tell about who we are and how life works our perspectives of life in general so essentially it's like we keep passing forward this pain if we don't resolve it ourselves and that's generally what happens is that people are unaware of the traumas that happen to them either on an individual level and or also on the collective level so there's also collective traumas that happen there's what they call historical trauma which is the kind of transgenerational trauma that can happen to a mass amount of people at the same time which is actually what's happening right now around the world we're about six months in kind of like if you imagine being six months into an abusive relationship like the signs are starting to show something's not right people are starting to show signs of trauma but we're really not going to see the long-term effects of that until the future so one example of historical trauma too could be the holocaust you know that one affected a very particular group of people and you look at slavery you look at colonialism you look at war and all of this creates a form of transgenerational trauma so it's not necessarily that a person is a bad person who passes on trauma like it doesn't have to be someone who's intentionally doing that and quite often most often i think people pass this stuff on unconsciously like we're just not aware of it and that's unfortunate for the next generation because we just keep passing it on and passing it on and then you get into adulthood and then you're repeating these same patterns and so it's like it's not always that we find the same exact scenario that we had in childhood because the characters can differ it's not always like say you grew up with a narcissistic parent or an alcoholic parent or an addict parent or a parent who had mental illness and for that reason the trauma was passed down so what's not always the same is that you're going to run into people of those same patterns but your role and let's say the feelings that you have that get repeated relationship after relationship that's going to be the same and this will show up not just in intimate relationships not just in familial relationships with children and whatnot but also in friendships and work relationships and social interactions in general got it awesome thank you and i'm so glad that you talked about just the collective collective trauma and the experience that we're we're going through right now because it is a very interesting um highly tense time i think for so many people and and yeah right there therein lies a toxic relationship um yeah as a whole um so can you also talk about like how how can we identify the cycles that we need to break free from like specific cycles that we might be in so that's definitely the first stage right of change is to be able to identify what's wrong what's going on so the easiest way to identify the transgenerational toxic relationships is to ask yourself what stories keep repeating in my relationships and again we want to look more broadly not just at say intimate relationships but look at our friendships our family relationships the relationships we have at work or in society in general like what's that story that keeps repeating so one example might be if you start to do the recapitulation process and you're looking back at all this repetition you say you know the thing that keeps repeating is that i keep losing my sense of self in relationships i keep getting into these relationships that aren't really balanced like i'm giving a lot i'm not receiving much in in return and so often that first stage of identification comes when we're kind of looking at the other person at the other people involved and how that affects us then we start looking internally and recognizing okay what choices am i making that's participating in this dynamic because we have to be able to own the responsibility of that and the thing that some people get confused is that that doesn't negate the fact that abuse for example was not your fault like the trauma that happens to you was not your fault sometimes it's an act of god sometimes it's an act of will by another person or a group of people that was not your fault and it is our responsibility to make choices now to own our choices to resolve that trauma now so one does not negate the other and i think that sometimes when people are stuck in the victimhood when they hear the word responsibility it sounds like blaming and shaming because it feels like then it must be my fault that you know this person abused me or that this trauma happened to me that i had no control over and that's not true so i think that's something we need to be aware of is so first identifying the story that keeps repeating and then next like how are we going to start to break those cycles is we have to look at our own choices so if i'm saying okay in my relationships i keep losing my sense of self i keep finding myself in these imbalanced relationships what role am i playing i'm playing the people pleaser i'm self sacrificing in order to maintain that relationship so what does that mean that means i'm sacrificing my own needs in order to take care of the needs of the other person first it means i'm sacrificing my values and my worth in order to to take care of that person or just maintain the peace and the relationship with the person or to fulfill a role that that person is setting up for you so again it's not always like an evil person or a bad person on the other end of this we can all be true we can all be toxic as we repeat these patterns it could be this person that you're dealing with is an alcoholic and they're not a bad person they have an illness they have an addiction and that addiction unfortunately destroys the life of that person and then the lives of everyone around them so if we enter into relationship even friendship with someone like this what happens is we start to pick up the pieces of the alcoholism for them because they're looking for someone to to take responsibility they're not taking responsibility for their choices they're not working on resolving whatever traumas happen in childhood that's causing them to have this illness this addiction now so what they're doing is they're passing it on to the people around them and then if we sacrifice ourself and our needs we put aside our needs and we start taking care of this other person we get into a very toxic dynamic and i think perhaps one of the greatest deceptions that we are taught in families sometimes sometimes in religions and even in society is that this idea of self-sacrifice is noble and virtuous and that is a big lie that's the lie that someone tells you when they want you to sacrifice yourself for them and i think that's something we really need to take a look at dr gabor mate people your listeners have probably heard of him he is a book in the video that presentation he did on the same name as his book it's called when the body says no and he starts reading all these obituaries of people that died of cancer and heart disease and all these things and what's the bottom line like the common denominator of all these people is self-sacrifice like they all sacrifice their life for someone else but the worst part is that the way the obituaries are written it's like that was that was what made this person so great and so we see like as a society it's almost like we idealize that person who is you know the altruist the humanitarian sacrificing themselves but that's actually not good at all because self-care right which is how we take responsibility for ourselves we clean up our own mass we resolve our own trauma we rebuild our self-worth redefine our sense of self that depends on self-interest if we don't put ourselves first we're not going to take care of ourselves we're going to sacrifice ourselves every time somebody else has a need and again that's not always an evil person on the other end which is why it can get very very confusing when you're in the moment it can look like the good thing to do and the noble thing to do and your empathy and your compassion could be telling you i need to help this person but you got to stop and ask yourself at what expense am i am i sacrificing myself in the process that becomes a very toxic dynamic yeah i love that yeah the whole that and very interesting the whole thing about the obituaries and and absolutely yes a self-sacrifice is a noble um thing that we should all strive for has been this big message that i think has been handed down for the generations and yeah absolutely so um i guess like do you know like in your experience where's the balance you know so let's say someone uh obviously starts to do self-care and work on themselves and all of that but is there a point at which they're being too self-um centered as opposed to like then helping others or like how do we know like how to balance the two and obviously help ourselves help others if we're inspired do you know what i mean i think finding that balance in life is always a challenge you know and and so life always offers us these little tests right so we start working on our self-care we start prioritizing our needs ourself taking care of ourselves and as we get better as we get healthier we have more to offer others so if something that makes you happy and brings you joy is to help other people that's awesome and first you need to be okay right because if you're depleted if you're not well if you're unhealthy you're not going to really be able to help other people and you're going to dig a deeper hole for yourself so i think that balance will also vary through the recovery process right so maybe earlier on maybe there has to be a lot more self-interest and self-focus because there's so much work to do and you just don't have the energy to take care of anybody else because you have to take care of yourself you have to rescue yourself so then as you progress through the recovery journey now you're a lot healthier now you have a lot more energy now you're able to offer other people more help because you've done it yourself and i think that's also one of the things that the self-sacrifice can sometimes look like hypocrisy it can sometimes be a manifestation of hypocrisy where someone is telling you that you have to sacrifice yourself you have to be an altruist and they're acting like they're doing this but they're actually not they're doing that that form of showing their virtue but they're actually taking from you that tends to happen in the dynamic with a covert type of abuser they they always paint themselves like at the beginning to be incredibly generous and paying attention to you and then setting up this expectation that little by little you start sacrificing yourself for them and then you eventually realize that was all a lie and that they just pulled you into that so i think every situation is different and also depending where you're at on the healing process and your recovery process will tell you where that balance is and ultimately you're going to know right and that's where you have to have the responsibility of checking in with yourself with your needs with your self-worth you know i don't feel good right now why is that well yesterday i just spent the day trying to rescue my friend who's an alcoholic or you know whatever the problem is right and so you have to check in with yourself and don't beat yourself up for missing that balance right come back to that balance and recognize where was the point where was the choice and the decision that you made to sacrifice yourself in that moment and you know maybe that was the point where instead of rushing over there or spending three hours on the phone with them you should have said i'm sorry but i have things to do right now you know we can talk tomorrow or maybe it gets to the point where you realize this is not a healthy friendship for you you need to tell this person they need to get professional help you're sorry you wish you could make it better but you can't and you know you have to take care of yourself first and that means setting that boundary and not spending all of your energy and getting pulled into the self-destruction of alcoholism for example yeah awesome thank you and i'm glad you mentioned the kind of covert behavior also in the world of a toxic relationship i have um some personal experience with that um from years and years ago and it is it can be very like enticing and believable and and yet yes coming into the awareness of oh wait a second actually they're not as as altruistic as i thought they were oh okay i get it now and so yeah that's an interesting thing to um become aware of in relationships and and right break free from that what whatever that looks like for everybody so i appreciate you mentioning that because i think so many people right see the toxic and they're like oh it's very overt and obvious and all those kinds of things but there's a lot more beneath the surface would be like someone forces you to do something right like that that's very overt they forced to do it the covert way that someone will go about doing that could be their weaponizing guilt tripping and shaming in order to create some kind of coercive consent from you in order to participate in that so it's like they're still forcing you but it's much more creative and hidden the way that they're doing that yeah absolutely um so going back to the transgenerational toxic relationships could you talk a little bit about like common or key patterns that you see of transgenerational toxic relationships so i would like to give people three key parameters so if you're questioning a relationship in your life you're questioning the toxicity of a certain dynamic in your life if you look at these three simple parameters this is going to help weed out a lot of answers for you and the first thing that we already talked about is the self-sacrifice so if you and or the other person are self-sacrificing in order to maintain that relationship that's a toxic relationship the second one is responsibility so if you and or the other person are not taking self-responsibility for your stuff you're projecting it on to the other that's going to lead to a toxic relationship and the third one would be forcing so if you and or the other person are either forcing each other into something or being forced into something against your will against your values against what you want and what's okay for you that's definitely going to lead to something toxic got it awesome thank you um so like what what do you see in your work with people like if people don't deal with these patterns right of toxic relationships how does this manifest in their in their life and obviously the generations of their families and all that so typically what happens is we have a trauma and then a victim is caused by the trauma right and then there's kind of three options there so the first option which is the best one is recovery and that's where we deal with the trauma we do that hard in our work we process all that stuff we do the grieving work rebuild self-worth sense of self and all of that the second option if we don't do that or we just don't know that's an option yet because quite often that's what it is this is all unconscious unaware people are unaware of these patterns and so we just don't know recovery is an option so the second option is victimhood so that becomes the repetitive toxicity where we start repeating the same dynamics with other people as adults as happened in childhood with us and so we become serial victims over and over again and not understanding why we keep feeling victimized by these situations and the third option is more of like a compensatory toxicity where the person becomes an abuser they start you know using other people manipulating other people in order to deal with their trauma so essentially what ends up happening collectively speaking let's say as humanity not not just on the individual level and on the familial level is we are sacrificing the future for the past so if we as humanity don't start clearing up our individual traumas we're keep perpetuating these collective traumas that can take so many different forms racism could be one form of that even you know so we keep repeating these patterns unless we deal with it and i think that the mistake is to look at the collective and be like okay so we have to go out there and fix something out there but it all starts inside and so it's the same principle of recovery that we have on the individual level we have to start with self-responsibility that's the threshold into empowerment that's the threshold into doing the deeper inner work of self-care that leads to our recovery and so what happens is as each one of us do that right imagine what would happen if most people did that if most people took responsibility of their lives and the personal traumas that they've been through wouldn't we eventually arrive maybe 60 70 at some kind of herd immunity right where you know those of us who are taking responsibility we can kind of shelter those who aren't ready to yet who can't do that for themselves yet and how much would this world be changing if we were taking responsibility for ourselves hugely absolutely hugely yeah i'm so glad like i always love your message of responsibility because i think that's often a um concept lost in when we talk about a lot of like toxic relationships and things like that and and just a place that people can really get stuck you know in that victimhood if they don't right learn to take responsibility in that way um so like you mentioned the third the third route someone could take as like they become like more of an abuser or abusive kind of person can you talk a little bit more about that i think you know so for people who are maybe recognizing that in themselves maybe like wow like i really take my my own lack of self-worth out on my partner or i'm i tend to be toxic towards my partner or something like that like any any helpful thoughts for those people who are recognizing um that kind of of hurting within them so i think probably the rationalization process that takes place inside of that person who makes that choice which could be an unconscious decision or it could be a conscious decision i think that that process is something about their looking for justice but they're confusing justice with wanting someone else to feel the pain that they're feeling and so that's really what abuse i think comes down to is they're hurting inside they don't want to deal with that they don't even maybe know how to deal with that or they just don't want to own that and take responsibility for it so what you'll see sometimes is like a parent will even say to their child well i had to sacrifice this childhood so you know now it's your turn and so instead of thinking gee i could provide a different life for my daughter than you know i was provided for me or my son they just pass on that pain to the next generation so we can see that in our adult relationships too where the person becomes the abuser maybe because they observed that dynamic growing up and they learned well mommy or daddy passed all their pain on to me so that's just what i'm gonna do to somebody else i'm gonna hurt them because i'm angry or like rage for example rage what that really is i mean it's a form of anger but really what it is it's a sense of powerlessness so a rage can come from ptsd you know or it can come from a person who's abusive so the person with ptsd may or may not want to be hurting somebody intentionally they just may lose control of that rage feel so im feel so disempowered and powerless in the moment that they end up destroying somebody else they can also turn that inward and that could become a self-destructive pattern that can turn into addiction or cutting or some sort of self-abuse or they can project it outward on somebody else or both even sometimes people will go back and forth with that got it awesome thank you i love that that was a beautiful answer so um i also would love to dive into self-worth a little bit you know obviously it seems like right if we all learned to write work on ourselves and and recognize how how worthy and special and unique we are it would be hard to right be taking out any kind of pain onto other people so like any suggestions for people on how to increase their self-worth if they're not feeling too great about themselves i think the best way to rebuild your self-worth is to start by taking a good look at what your values are so what matters to you what's important to you really take an inventory of those quite often we don't articulate to ourselves what really are our values like we kind of have a sense of what matters to us but we don't really articulate that so i recommend that people actually write this down and i have a whole course dedicated to this it's actually a short course that i did live with the mental ninjas last year and i'm offering your listeners a 15 discount so you'll share the link with them for that but it'll walk people through this process so first i have an inventory of 20 pillars of self-worth so people can evaluate themselves where they are right now on a scale let's say one to ten in terms of those those 20 pillars of self-worth so that gives you an idea of where the holes are where you need to start working on the next i take people through this journey of identifying their values and then setting up standards that honor those values and then boundaries that protect those standards and values so the thing is we can learn about boundaries we can decide to set new boundaries but when those moments come of testing which are always going to come you know through interpersonal relationships of some sort where we have to make the decision like we have the boundary in our mind we've set the boundary but then we have to enforce it in the moment and remember okay i need to set this boundary to protect my self-worth because this protects my value so if you notice that you're compromising your boundaries or you feel like it's selfish to set a boundary instead of sacrificing yourself or someone else then you need to focus on rebuilding the self-worth that's the foundation of so much as we're going through the recovery process beautiful awesome thank you and and everyone watching there is a link below a couple links below one of them leading over to your your program so thank you much so much for offering that and um while we're at it why don't you share a little bit about your free gift also so i have a pdf for you guys to download it's on this topic on transgenerational toxic relationships and ending the legacy of trauma so i'm going to give people some notes on what i talked about today and then some self-exploration exercises that they could do kind of like we were talking about earlier how to identify these transgenerational patterns within ourselves and then how to start breaking those cycles so that little guide is going to kind of give people a quick start on their process awesome thank you are there any last insights on your your programs your work how people can learn more about you or just anything related to this topic that you want to talk about before we finish up you know i just want to see the incredible amount of responsibility that we all have right now as we are going through this collective trauma like it is not just happening to one group of people it's happening around the world to everyone and so we have an enormous amount of responsibility it's it's not our fault that it's happening and it is our responsibility to to take care of our process of recovery to not spread this to the next generations because what i see right now is a whole generation of children growing up afraid of one another feeling hostile to one another terrified in general about things and so what's going to happen when they become adults and then they have children and we're going to see very severe patterns of transgenerational trauma getting passed on so i think for every one of us as individuals we really need to be taking a look at what we need to do to take responsibility for our lives right now the best as possible people who are parenting or going to parent people going to parent children in the in the future really really take a look at this responsibility that we have not to pass on our own trauma that again it's just starting we're only six months into this and so we're only just starting to see the effects of this so to keep that in mind as time progresses and you know people who have children to really really focus on taking care of yourself so that you're not passing on this fear and this trauma to them and helping them to deal with the trauma that they're going to have to be processing so that they can have as best of a life moving forward as possible and the thing about trauma is it's scary it's awful it's destructive it's so many things and at the same time there's also like the seed of awakening this seed of growth the seed of we can change things in some way to make something better so let's also look at this as an opportunity for that beautiful thank you i love that that was just such a beautiful message and so so needed right now so thank you for for sharing that meredith thank you and thank you for doing this thanks for saying yes and and being a part of this again we always love to have you thank you i love participating in your events and thank you everyone who's watching or listening right now we would not be doing this without you so thank you so much for showing up for yourself and and being willing to go on this journey and we'll see you again real soon take care everybody hey everyone thank you so much for joining us for this latest class with meredith miller who talked about transgenerational toxic relationships ending the legacy of trauma first off i just want to make a note that i absolutely love meredith i think she is so authentic and really does a great job of breaking this stuff down for us and i really loved her conversation today and how she we took a much bigger look at collective trauma collective toxic relationships especially given what's going on in our world today i think it's a really important thing for all of us to be aware of and you know she talked about some of the common or key patterns of these transgenerational toxic relationships and she named three major ones which were self-sacrifice right obviously this is not valuing yourself enough to give yourself self-worth in order to give yourself self-care really take care of yourself sacrificing yourself for others also as a way to write be noble and be good enough and those kinds of messages that we've perhaps received through generations right so self-sacrifice being one another one being not taking responsibility right so i really love the that meredith every time i talk to her she stresses responsibility which i think is so key and she she also differentiates between right it is not your fault if you experienced you know horrible things in your childhood or you experience the toxic relationship and were mistreated and it is your responsibility now to do the work on yourself in order to not repeat that cycle in order to get into a healthy relationship in order to start practicing self-care all of those things so really really key is that taking responsibility factor and then the third one was forcing right and i also wanted to to make a note of just self-worth as a whole being like such a crucial crucial probably the number one most important thing you can do is start to be feel worthy to start to love yourself to start to care for yourself and treat yourself the way you would want to be treated by other people because it all starts with you so take a look at what you could do to start practicing self-care to start really re-parenting yourself if that's something that you need to do start talking to yourself in a loving compassionate way as if you were your own parent as if the right that voice you may have never received when you were a kid or maybe not to to your liking right be that voice for yourself be that inner compassionate loving voice for yourself in order to build your self-worth because it all starts with you so thank you so much for tuning in everyone and we'll see you again soon take care avaya has changed my life avaya has made me the woman i am today avaya is my home avaya is personal freedom avaya is the reason my life continuously improves let everyone in your life know about avaya everyone needs to know about this amazing company thank you avaya for appearing in my inbox what ike allen and andy anderson have created at avaya is what the world needs

Channel: iKE Allen

Views: 465

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: narcissism, narcissist, narcissistic personality disorder, emotional abuse, dysfunction, boundaries, abuse prevention, domestic violence, violence, verbal abuse, controlling, npd, Antisocial Personality Disorder, aspd, Psychopath, Sociopath, self esteem, insecurity, victim, abusive, abusive relationships, divorce, break ups, iKE ALLEN, Ande Anderson, bullying, love, romance, true love, marriage, Toxic Relationships, dating, singles, gas lighting, love bombing, toxic parents

Id: oSiN90fM4-g

Length: 34min 27sec (2067 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020