(00:00) being a mother is the coolest job in the world and the most meaningful hi and welcome back to Reclamation radio I am Dr Kelly Brogan and today’s guest is Erica Komisar who is a psychoanalyst in New York City who wrote the book being there why prioritizing motherhood in the first three years matters I certainly wish I had read this book 15 years ago and it is never too late to experience the exhale that ultimately comes with resolving the many many a gas light we are delivered as women and specifically as career women and specifically as
(00:43) career women who are also mothers so we cover why feeling bored by your infant is a sign of intergenerational trauma and loss why there is no such thing as so-called work family balance for women and the root cause of our attachment issues AKA our Myriad dysfunctional relationship experiences in society at large and why we as women have an extraordinarily powerful opportunity to change the course of human history once we have access to information like this that allows us to reconnect to our instincts and our intuition
(01:31) enjoy welcome Erica to the show I’m so so so excited as I was mentioning offline excited and also have some degree of trepidation around the delivery of this essential message when I uh finished your book I thought I’m going to get her on Reclamation radio and this is going to be one of the most important conversations that I have because of the potential that your work has to change the course of not only a woman’s life uh but a family and potentially even an intergenerational Legacy and it certainly falls into the category as I mentioned to you of you
(02:11) know information that allows you to know better and do better right so there’s just some things that we get exposed to at just the perfect timing and it expands what I refer to as the permission field to exist and behave as a woman in ways that we didn’t imagine we had permission to to previously so I know this can be challenging to listen to and I’m super sensitive to this empathically so uh to any M who have older kids specifically career women and I also know that this will land in many many uh receptive you know hands and I am yeah
(02:51) really delighted that that you’re here thank you thank you for having me so I want to dive into the dend with you and then we will unpack it a bit I want to know what is your current perspective on whether women can have it all because I know that I absolutely was a poster child for a feminist uh who believed that I could do what men could do bleeding and not only can I do that but I can also juggle you know 10,000 different uh tasks and rolls and hats and I can do it more efficiently and more effectively and I can also make sure to check all of
(03:32) the boxes of the needs of everyone around me and make sure that I go to sleep feeling like a good productive girl and I lived this life for many many many years until I started to recognize what I now call the dupe you know and the dupe that is the promise of a lot of feminist programming and the promise of you can be a career woman and also a wife and a mother and it’s no problem you’re going to experence all of the the freedom and the independence and the entitlements that you were you know that you were told were coming your way now you have them enjoy your life and of
(04:09) course I am surrounded by an experience my own version of the unfulfillment the kind of glass wall functional freeze living that is being on autopilot and not actually dropping in you know through the intimate connections that are in my midst right like just sort of being in this doing mode and I also have experienced kind of bereft nature of achievement and success and you know productivity as a woman and I look back on those early years with my kids when I prioritized my career I was back to work at believe it or not and I know you will uh six weeks uh back in my medical fellowship and then three weeks in my
(04:53) second uh three because I was in private practice I thought oh just scoot out to the office so I no longer believe that you can have it all I no longer believe that that promise is uh anything but a glittery object we will chase forever more and never actually grasp so I wonder you know how you might how you might enter the conversation on women being able to balance it’s my favorite term for it euphemistically work and and family and how possible is that really well I mean first thank you for teeing all of this up by by using the word sensitive so I’m going to as sensitive
(05:31) as I as I can be while still being direct because I’m a pretty direct person but I’m also a therapist and a psychoanalyst so I also can be very sensitive so I’m going to talk about it as sensitively as I can the feminist movement was not about was not a communal movement it was an individualistic movement it was not a movement about children it was a movement about women as individuals because women had been deprived of consideration as individuals they were only seen as wives and mothers and they were then seen as individuals
(06:11) let’s say that so there was a very important component which allowed women to individuate and say well I am a wife and a mother but I’m more than that I’m also a doctor or a lawyer or a therapist or a teacher right but the problem is that it did tell women you can do everything you know we call the me movement me me me me me you can do everything and so technically if what you mean by doing everything is you can work full-time be powerful be famous be high powerered and and and make a lot of money and still
(06:49) raise children the answer is yes you can do that the consequences of it however were not talked about which is that there are going to be consequences and so now we’re seeing the consequences because you can do it all but you cannot do it all all at the same time and do it well something has to give and for the feminist movement what had to give was children had to give family had to give the problem is that children are not like vases or cars or you know an object that you can treat like an an animate object they are human beings with
(07:37) irreducible developmental needs and we didn’t take that into consideration when we talked about the individuality of women the answer is you can do it all just not all at the same time you can be a career woman you can be powerful and Rich and Famous if you want to be and all of those things but you can’t do that at the same time that you’re raising young children if you want those young children to grow up to be healthy children and adults and that’s what we didn’t tell women because if the feminist movement had said there are going to be consequences and your
(08:18) children will suffer but you’d taken one for the team many women would have gone out and done it anyway and many would have said you know what let me wait till my kids are a little older and that way I can still be independent and be individual and have more of aspects of my identity but I don’t have to do it exactly at the same time that I’m raising little ones so there was a whole Omission there so if you want to say they omitted a big piece of this puzzle and now we’re seeing the results of that which is for three or almost four generations women believe that they can
(08:54) you know be out in the world all the time and that quality time with children is just going to be enough and you know my book was meant to say it’s not that you can’t just have to be there you have to be there physically and you have to be there emotionally because infants are born completely neurologically emotionally and physically fragile and so what they require for their irreducible needs is they require something called attachment security which is informed in the first few days or weeks or months it takes years takes three years for a child to
(09:33) feel safe so and what you do by being as present as possible is that you reinforce the initial bonding which you know initially a child can bond with their mother in the hospital or at home or for the first week or few weeks sometimes bonding even takes a little time so I have mothers that write me and say you know my child I’m not bonding I said well it’s not too late I’m going to teach how to do it but the idea is that the bonding process is not the attachment process the attachment security process the process by which a child feels safe in the world feel
(10:09) secure that their environment which is you will meet their needs uh will provide for them will protect them will create a feeling of enduring security and safety for the future that is the foundation of that child’s personality and their future mental health and that that’s what we’ve omitted from telling women we’ve really lied to women we’ve gaslighted women in order to get more of them into the workforce faster so what I said is you can have everything in life and do it well just not all at the same time you can have a brilliant career before you have children and then you can even take
(10:50) a little time off and Ratchet down — you could go back to work but ratchet it down so much that your children are the priority and the time with them and your mind on them is the priority rather than your work so what that means as women is we have to give up our vanity we have to give up our fear for trust so we exchange trust for the fear that we have that will become insignificant and lose value because we’re not working out in the world the most valuable and significant work you will ever do is creating the foundation of your children’s mental health because you can’t get that back I recorded solo cast
(11:31) I don’t know maybe it was six months ago or so called choosing motherhood and in that I describe this you know epipal moment in my life my daughters are teenagers now where I recognize that as much as I absolutely adore my daughters and always have um as much as I have been deeply invested in their physical well-being and I have had the honor and privilege of having my family my parents very involved in their care so I’ve not ever paid for care I recognize that I have never put my role as mother first right because it’s felt like I’ve put my kids first a lot of the time okay
(12:19) but it’s my role as mother that I never ever uh in their whole lives had put first and I am very interested in root causes right so when I track back the to to the root of that anguish that started to surface within me I found that my careerism and you could even go so far as to say workaholism and all of in my case the woundology that was driving that right my need to feel seen and validated and powerful and important and all of these what I would refer to as masculine drives that fueled my career from its Inception that I allowed those
(12:58) to to dominate the field of drives in my in my LIF Escape I sometimes wonder you know if I had a woman whispering in my ear you know back when I first decided uh to have because I made the choice to have my my eldest daughter if I had a woman Whispering or maybe you whispering in my ear would I have been able to hear it right like would I have been able to hold these fears that you’re talking about that I wouldn’t be able I would like it’s like a fomo right it’s like I wouldn’t be able to like get back in the game or I’d miss out on something essential or this like churning you know
(13:35) hamster wheel would somehow take off without me and I would Fade Into irrelevance but the real sort of factor I think that supported my rushing back to work was something that you talk about in in your work which is this normalized sense that that it’s okay to to just need adult contact to get back into your cerebral Arena of expertise and you know I was so inspired and stimulated by my work and my patients at the time that I would have been bored right that’s the that’s the The Narrative anyway I might have been bored if I stayed home or I might have like oh
(14:19) I just don’t really like playing with kids I’m not like that kind of a mom uh so I’ll make sure you know that they have pumped breast milk and I’ll make sure that they have you know the best Loving Hands taking care of them and I’ll just scoot off back to work because that’s where I I feel most at home right so this I now know uh is coupled with whether it’s conscious or not a sense of guilt right so you talk about how when we normalize that guilt and we normalize what it is to ju just need adult contact and stimulus and like get back into the
(14:53) the swing of things with with work we are unable to perceive and a appreciate these consequences you’re describing as relevant right like especially comparatively relevant because it just feels like oh this is just how it is right it’s you feel a little guilty and you know you you already have a career so you’re going to head back to do it and it feels good and you’re just going to do the best you can to make sure your your baby is like well cared for but what you’re talking about in terms of these consequences I just want to put neon lights around because any woman who has been in a relationship ship okay
(15:30) like romantically knows that we are in an attachment crisis that is multiple Generations deep okay the relational dysfunction that fuels the therapeutic industry is not just part and parcel of human of The Human Experience right I would I would argue that what you’re exposing is the ultimate root cause of our attachment issues of our dysfunctional relationships of even divorce epidemics of the this idea that we don’t know how to feel seen and understood to feel autonomous and connected in relationship okay like
(16:07) where does that start is that just a part of being a human no it starts with absent mothers right and and absent mothers starts with prioritizing career over the family or imagining that these are like it’s interchangeable hands right like it just doesn’t really matter whose warm hands it is like the dads or the grandma’s or you know a loving nanny or or you know daycare worker and what you’re saying is no mothers matter and it’s specifically mothers that matter so I’d love for you to talk a little bit about first maybe this idea
(16:45) of mothers who get bored right mothers who get bored home alone with their infants or maybe not even alone but just in the primary care of their infants is that just a person ity trait you’re either like a mom who loves babies or you’re a mom who’s just kind of like not a baby kind of a mom uh or is there more to it well our instincts dictate that we don’t attach to strangers babies unless we are in the field I attach to people’s babies I don’t really but I’m I’m attracted to people’s babies because I’m in the field
(17:24) like Nursery School teachers therapists um infant observation people people who are in the field I would say feel something for strangers babies right but instinctually a healthy Mother healthy woman is not necessarily going to feel for other children’s babies but when she can’t feel empathically or maternally preoccupied with her own baby we say something happened to those instincts so mammals are born with instincts that are ingrained in us but have to be turned on like epigenetics turns on bad genes instincts have to be turned
(18:10) on they’re there but they have to be turned on by the environment so what happens when you’re born is that maternal care that interest in you over everything and everyone that sensitive empathic nurturing that skin skin contact that love that eye contact that soothing tone of voice you know that turns on the instincts in the baby for later on right so when they’re mothers that gets turned on right so we call generational expression so basically the instincts are in us to be good good enough mothers as beheim said good enough mothers but they have to be
(18:58) turned on and so the original title of my book was the Lost Instinct and I liked that because really that’s what’s happened generations of it not being turned on means that when women have babies they can’t feel for their babies now again we say that there is underlying deep depression you know we think of postpartum depression is you can’t get out of bed or you want to kill your baby or you know we think of it as something more psychotic when in fact I wrote an article for the Washington Post on how
(19:33) boredom with your own baby not someone else’s baby that might be considered normal boredom with your own baby is a sign of deep postpartum depression now what do I mean generational losses where that Gene was not turned on and over the generations that that instinct gets buried and buried and buried till you can barely find it at all and that instinct is what has allowed us as a species to survive for millennium right that instinct is what allows other mammals to survive for millennium and what we’re doing as human
(20:13) beings is we are trying to erase instincts which are you know you’d say the decline of a civilization happens not 0 to 63 seconds it’s like mold it grows and is insidious and happens rather slowly like watching the grass grow you know I remember an old boyfriend used to say to me watching baseball is wonderful but it’s a little like watching the grass grow so is raising a baby like watching the grass grow but so is watching the decline of the civilization like watching the grass grow it happens over time and it happens slowly the dampening down of instincts
(20:52) one generation at a time when a mother is disinterested in or bored with her own baby it’s a sign of deep postpartum depression and experiencing deeply unconscious losses generationally so do all mothers like to play with their babies some mothers are just characterologically more playful than others and S of just constitutionally more playful than others you know you you must had playful friends and less playful friends but and mothers were assign the task to the task instinctually of nurturing which is sensitive and empathic nurturing tuning
(21:31) into baby distress making them feel safe comforting them when they’re in distress this is a mother’s role a father’s role was to play even in nature if you see like uh baby lions will crawl all over there uh they’ll crawl on their mothers but then they’ll go to their fathers and they’ll really crawl and the fathers would slap them and bears you know uh Bears a little bit too but bears are isolated with their mothers but the idea is that there’s a kind of playfulness in mammals with their father chimpanzees you know they’ll go to their fathers and grandfathers and their fathers will SWAT them and they’ll chase
(22:05) the fathers up the tree there’s more of a what we call playful tactile stimulation with fathers so fathers are very important mothers play with babies in a different way than fathers do so fathers are more physical into physical play they’re more into competitive play aggressive play mothers don’t do the aggressive competitive physical play as well what they can do is sitting on the floor and doing what we as therapists call Floor time which is introducing that baby to the world an exploration every time a baby picks up a ball or a
(22:42) Rattle and puts it in their mouth that’s play that is playing with that object that is PE the peek-aboo game is play and mothers do that and what that does is it helps that child to learn about the world first they learn about it with their mouth and they learn about it with their movement their body movements and getting out and crawling around that’s considered plet and again it has to do with Fascination right so you say you were fascinated with with your work outside the home as a doctor so being fascinated with your work is no
(23:14) different than being fascinated with a baby when you look at a baby and you go wow 10 fingers as we used to say 10 fingers and 10 toes that little person came from me and my husband and if you believe in God or some you know that little person is a mix of cells and carbon and it’s amazing like just like look at their brain grow every that Fascination is instinctually applied to babies we call it maternal preoccupation but if it’s not applied to your own baby then we say there’s some deep-seated loss where your own mother couldn’t look at you and be fascinated
(23:54) by you be in awe of you and your grandmother couldn’t look at your mother and be in awe of her so again it grows like mold on and on and my concern and the reason I wrote the book is a society which marginalizes the needs of children and is blind empathically blind and impaired to the pain of children is a society that’s in Decline so I’m calling all of my overachieving under receiving ladies who have been giving it their all girl bossing wifing mothering and somehow instead of feeling happy content fulfilled and grateful feel bitter overwhelmed numb and resentful so
(24:41) I’d love to give you some of my hot takes and quick tips to end this overwhelm to shift your nervous system into a state of receiving so that you can have and hold more and so that you can handle what comes at you with more grace and ease and relaxation because a relaxed woman is a powerful woman so I’d love to invite you to Exhale my free Master Class where I will share reframes to disrupt your burnout patterns I’ll be offering my signature solution as well as a free gift so register at Kelly brogen md.com exhale or at the linkoln show notes I’ll
(25:20) see you there Beauty so one of the elements of this decline as far as I can see and I know many women are observing the same is the prioritization of Freedom over caretaking right and over the responsibility yeah the currency of care uh especially in the home and so if we see care as an obstacle to Freedom then we and and we have um devalued it right like we don’t appreciate its vital role in the fabric of society and all of the relationships that make up Society then it’s easy to Outsource it institutionalize it and and
(26:07) depersonalize it right so obviously we we have daycare springing up and subsidized daycare and this idea that children you know they they need to be hanging out with other kids and socializing at 18 months so and that also benefits me because then I get to be at work for longer hours but you talk about how these institutionalized caretaking uh resources have different priorities right and and so if these are riskmanagement oriented priorities right like for a company let’s say that is a daycare company versus a mother or an
(26:42) individual even in the family then there are uh different outcomes from that kind of caregiving than there would be if a mother’s uh instincts were intact and she were able to appreciate her vital role as caretaker and I know I wonder if if there are women listening who also feel a degree of relief when you help us to remember that fathers are principally charged with with that kind of play that looks like play because you know accessing the caretaking nurturing Instinct as you’re suggesting isn’t that
(27:19) hard in a context and culture that expects that that normalizes that it is hard when we uh imagine that we can find fulfillment elsewhere and that this is like replaceable right like it doesn’t really matter who’s delivering this so what do you see as being some of the the consequences of Outsourcing this care especially within the first three years and that’s what I think is such an important aspect of your research and your work is to delimit this like primary responsibility to some extent right to to that threeyear window right
(27:58) like you’re obviously a woman who has a career and has enjoyed the Fulfillment that you know such a service oriented career can offer and you you didn’t prioritize that during the first three years of your children’s lives and somehow worked out for you right like way it worked out for me although I did and am unpacking the the consequences of that emotionally and otherwise for myself at least at this point so if you’re talking about these three years right and prioritizing your role as mother in these three years and you’re suggesting that swapping in another
(28:36) caretaking resource is not the same what are your primary concerns about more institutionalized care you know that is usually called daycare so I’m going to say that institutions are not great for mothers or babies and I’m going to Define what I mean by that you work as as a as a physician you worked in an institution setting which most doctors are forced to work doctors actually have it some of the worst when I wrote my book I interviewed a lot of different women from different backgrounds and professions and and the the doctors would come up to me you know in at
(29:11) various points and say please write about the fact that we are treated the worst as mothers we’re treated in a robotic way even though we’re pediatricians and OBGYNs and people in the mental health field psychiatrists you know that we care for others bodies and minds but we can’t care for our own because they won’t let us and so institutions are not good so when a doctor can say screw you institution I’m going to work very part-time in the early years and increase it and I’m going to have my own practice I’m going
(29:47) to get together with two other three other women who are doctors we’re going to open our own thing I’m going to choose a kind of medicine where I don’t need to have a hospital affiliation maybe being a ser surgeon isn’t a great field for a woman who wants children because you have to have an Institutional affiliation you know unless you have a surgical center so now women are saying let’s invest in surgical centers and be entrepreneurs and that way we don’t have to report to men we don’t have to report to women who think like men we can actually make our
(30:19) own thing I can take a year off and take care of my baby and go back part time two hours a day to a practice of my own making I won’t make a bazillion dollars for a few years but as my children get older and older I can make a little more and a little and when I’m empty nest I can make a lot of money and be very successful okay I’m a good example as I said we can have it all just not all at the same time I had a 38h hour a week practice before I had children when I had children I stopped and then as my children uh you
(30:58) know got little little bit older and a little bit older I went back an hour and a half a day that was 2 45 minute sessions sometimes up to two hours a day so by the time my kids were a year old I was working an hour and a half a day so I had to have a babysitter it was just enough to cover the babysitter because eventually I had three kids so it was my husband worked hard you know and and so the babysitter and I uh her name was Alba she was wonderful we together together parented those kids right but I
(31:31) couldn’t do it alone there were three of them and so yeah I’d go for an hour and a half a day and I’d come back and spend the rest of the day with my kids but that kept my toe in my profession but you would say in those years I had a very very very very small profession it was the least the least large and least important part of my life as my kids got older now they’re adults I was able to ratchet it up and write books and speak publicly and travel and for my work but that didn’t happen until I was in my 50s so and there are many stories like this
(32:10) so if women can exchange fear for trust if they can exchange their terrible fears that they’ll become irrelevant we’ve made women feel that mothering is irrelevant work if we can give them the courage to say mothering is the most relevant work and then whatever you did before or maybe you won’t choose to do what you did or maybe you’ll do something completely transformatively different becoming a mother changes you entirely lots of my patients who are hardcore corporate attorneys or you know people who worked in the corporate world say I don’t want to go back to that I
(32:51) love the freedom freedom is flexibility freedom is control over your life Freedom isn’t going to a corporate job or working for an institution run mostly by men who tell you that you know to compete in their world you have to be just like them that’s not freedom freedom is entrepreneurship freedom is control freedom is flexibility right that’s freedom but I want to I want to talk about that idea of responsibility versus freedom because this is become a conflict in society in modern society and why is is that so you know that idea that was spread in the
(33:32) 60s of the me movement right said you can be an individual you can be free of your responsibilities to the family and the home and what I forgot to tell you is that it wasn’t all bad there was some pleasure in giving that giving actually um there’s lots of research some of it out of Harvard um a lot of it out of a lot of the Le schools with the biggest research at a Harvard on how giving stimulates the parts of the brain the pleasure centers of the brain mostly giving personally caring for others giving to others volunteering this all stimulates the reward centers of the brain Just Like Cocaine
(34:18) does just like drugs do just like alcohol you know it stimulates something in the brain just like uh gambling and pornography and all the those things that are bad for you giving does the same thing when you go to volunteer my I remember my son’s my whole family volunteers at a at a homeless shelter in our Temple uh we’re Jewish and there’s a homeless shelter 12 men sleep in our Temple every night all my family volunteered there but my two sons did have done the most there spent a lot of time one of my sons cooked for the men
(34:51) every other week for four years open the shelter cooked for them cleaned up after so it’s it’s part of our DNA because we taught them that that giving is pleasurable that responsibility makes you feel good caring for others makes you feel good because it makes you feel in a way valued and valuable in a way like nothing else does when we feel needed by other human beings it creates it stimulates the reward center okay and reduces stress so whenever we stimulate that part of the brain this the cortisol comes down right so we forgot to tell
(35:29) women that that running from the home and from caregiving their children and their parents yes it’s it’s also hard and it’s also challenging and tiring and but that while you’re also challenged in something it’s like running I’m a runner I go out and run nobody puts a gun to my head to run I go out and run because it feels it’s hard it’s really hard particularly on a day when I’m tired but I go because it makes me feel good both while I’m doing it it gives me a high and afterwards for quite some time it gives me a high and that’s the best kind
(36:07) of high so when we when we avoid hardship and we avoid everything that’s work we sometimes lose the benefits right so in trying to be free from the family what got left behind is the pleasure in caring others and giving and putting someone else before yourself because there’s something very relieving something very burdensome in being self-occupied it is very burdensome in a society that’s Fallen prey to terrible narcissistic disorders and they’ve replaced other kinds of disorders in the mental health
(36:47) field but there is a pleasure in putting aside our narcissism and our self-centeredness and and allowing ourselves to get pleasure focusing on another right so one of the things as therapists we do is we try to redirect our patients to care for someone or something other than themselves get a an emotional support animal who you have to care for go volunteer in a homeless shelter go tutor for a school get the pleasure get your brain going so you you remember there’s the Instinct that gets dampened down it is our Instinct as mammals not only to be self-focused but
(37:27) to care care about the pack to care about the tribe to care about the group The Pride right and so we have perverted the message of what Freedom means and what responsibility means we made it binary we said all responsibility for others sucks and all freedom is great and so now we have a whole population of young people three generations in not so young anymore who bought this Hook Line and Sinker that believed that individualism narcissism self-centeredness me me me is going to make them is going to fill them up and
(38:11) make them feel an enduring sense of pleasure and it doesn’t endure and it’s led to loneliness and depression and isolation and Detachment and inability to form connections with others and this is where we are now I would suggest even I don’t know maybe a layer to that otherwise binary focus on others focus on self quandry which is at least in my case this is actually and has always been my priority and my value but I took the bait of programming and I allowed myself to be colonized by you know these masculine values such that I told myself that my my fulfillment lies in my
(38:59) achievement my productivity and my contribution because it’s almost stickier when you’re in a service oriented field right you’re doing something meaningful it’s not like you know I’m uh working for some hedge fund and it’s hard to even tell like whether it’s good for Humanity right so so I actually told myself my career is where my fulfillment lies and that was never the case I see now the case was always that my fulfillment lies in my primary relationships and specifically my relationships with my children which many would argue right is is the opportunity for intimacy that we are
(39:39) offered as mothers in a lifetime like there will be no no more sacred container where the two individuals are equally invested in a beautiful connected outcome than a mother child diad and you you’re given this opportunity to experience what intimate actually is and at least in my case I was led to believe that the Fulfillment of my heart and soul as a woman could be found in my in measures of success and the many accolades you know that I’ve enjoyed right and that there’s ever such a destination right and it and it took me building up a very successful business and having all these credentials and all
(40:22) these successes and New York Times bestseller and this and that to finally get to this place where I could wake up out of the anesthesia and recognize no actually this whole time my priority has been my relationship with my children right so it’s not even just serving other it’s not even just serving my children perhaps to the exclusion of my own needs this is actually the way to meet my needs was to prioritize this role that I elected you know to to take on right so it’s also aligning with your own choices you don’t have to have a kid
(40:55) you don’t have to get married if you get married be a wife if you have kids be a mom right and and somehow we are led to believe that those are you know quasi commitments we can maintain while we pursue the promise of you know of of careerism and you know I think about like at the end of my life will I be reflecting on that blog that I wrote or this episode or you know will I be reflecting on you know some award I won you know as a a clinician or will I be evaluating the depth to which I took my relationship with my own children right I mean it’s it’s obvious
(41:36) to most of us how relativizing uh things can be when we’re asked to clarify you know our our our priorities but even Legacy got redefined so you’re talking about Aristotle’s idea of the deathbed question and Legacy yes exactly and so Legacy was again gas gaslighting I think is the the word we like to use that Legacy is about your your professional Identity or your professional success or how much money you leave behind that is not legacy having your name on a building uh being famous Andy Warhol said you get 15 minutes even if you’re really a a super celebrity it’s it’s fleeting it’s not lasting what is
(42:20) lasting is um you know in Judaism we say when someone passes May their memory be blessing that’s what we say sometimes you hear that on TV now and I say oh that’s either a Jew or someone who’s Jewish who told them to say that okay but it’s the concept is will your memory be a blessing to the generations to come will your attachment style which is healthy and and loving and and secure will that be passed on generationally for generations to come will you have a emotionally mentally uh and relationally
(43:01) happy and healthy grandchildren great grandchildren great great great great great grandchildren that’s your legacy your legacy is did you pass on mentally healthy children to the next and the next and the next Generation did you pass on loving children your legacy is not uh how much money you made or how many promotions you got or how famous you are trust me that is a fleeting thing you are only as famous as the remark you made yesterday on Twitter fam is not is not what it is what it is cut out to be and we have idealized it we’ve idealized again narcissistic grandiosity
(43:45) we have become a society that is at its root rotten really at its root rotten and that isn’t to say I’m hopeless I’m very hopeful because I mean I have so many Instagram followers who write me and say you know this makes sense no one says this so then I get hopeful and I say there’s a chance to turn this around not for everyone and I will say that some people will hear this and they’ll get angry and defensive and say she’s wrong and none of this makes sense and I feel that that is it’s not everyone will
(44:19) be able to hear this message and that is realistic because you’d say defenses are protective they protect vulnerability and if the defenses are too strong then the vulnerability which is something that you need to feel to feel for others the only way you can care for others be of service to others and your own your children is so you feel for them and you feel for their vulnerability if your own vulnerability is so deeply buried inside of yourself you cannot connect with the vulnerability of a child the emotional
(44:59) maturity and availability that you describe as the ultimate Legacy I mean I I certainly couldn’t agree more and I want to get a bit granular before we wrap up because this really struck me when I was reading your book and I have uh learned about these Concepts through the study of emotionally immature parents which is that we often tend to prioritize the physical wellbeing of our children over the emotional well-being right so you know our kids are eating organic and have their pumped breast milk but we are unavailable for their Tantrums or unavailable for the boredom
(45:44) that might set in when we’re you know having a moment with them that feels otherwise emotionally intolerable to us on some level you talk about how even going to you know a yoga class or something right the kind of like I’ll just pop in and out and I am a huge proponent of self-care for women uh so I think that this is an important Nuance because you suggest it’s not only about career right so if if we’ve made the case which I hope we have that heading back to your even part-time and and I want to talk
(46:19) about what you think the ideal is in a moment but let alone full-time let alone more than full-time which was my case you know if we’re not talking about career but we’re still talking about you know if if your your two or three-month-old baby is at home again in in carrying hands and arms while you run off to yoga class and then you’re finally going to get that haircut and you know it’s time to treat yourself to a massage and you’re gone for six hours that that also registers to this child in a way that we I’m not sure we can
(46:50) debate right again you can assess the consequences as you’d like yeah it doesn’t matter why you’re gone they don’t they don’t care why you’re gone I mean you know you may have a very good reason you know mothers will say but I had to go and so you’re making me feel guilty and I’m like I know you had to go but that doesn’t mean your child experienced it any differently you see um I think when they get older they do understand the subtlety and the Nuance children of when parents are trying to feed them and keep the rent payments
(47:21) going when a single mother they but they don’t understand that when they’re a baby when they’re a baby they don’t know difference so This Is Us projecting onto children like well I had to take care of myself so I had to do it isn’t that what Society tells us so the answer is yes you must care for yourself otherwise you’ll develop something that mothers in the other parts of the world develop something called maternal depletion syndrome so we don’t want to not sleep not eat not get fresh air not exercise
(47:51) not Fai right not have contact with other people and isolate ourselves we need to care for our El it’s about intensity and degree because your baby doesn’t distinguish if you are at work for 6 hours or if you goone on to the gym for 6 hours it’s still 6 hours to your baby so the idea is incremental caring how much caring do you actually need to do for yourself in a day so it might mean you spend an hour on going to the gym that’s your time to care for yourself that day maybe you the next day instead of going to the gym you go to a yoga class right but you know the idea
(48:29) that you go to a yoga class and go to a massage and that Society tells you oh it’s okay it’s self care it’s like it’s it’s it’s about perspective I feel like people have lost perspective so the idea is incremental amounts of time babies can hold their breath and wait for you but then they have to breathe and if they breathe and you’re not in the air that they breathe they go into a state of really a state of it’s like a traumatizing state for a baby because you are the center of their universe and if as a mammal your smell isn’t there uh the sight of you isn’t there your touch
(49:11) isn’t there and they do distinguish their primary attachment figure from anybody else so that is false that just anybody will do and so yes of course you can take care of yourself and you must take care of yourself and of course you can even work but the fact that you’re mindful that babies can only hold their frustration tolerance so long before they collapse and each baby is individual so people will write me after your show and say how many hours and I’m like look at your baby if you read my book it shows you the signs that your baby is it’s too much for them that
(49:50) they’re too stressed by it the word is stressed when you see a baby that’s under stress you go oh maybe I spent a little too much time away maybe next time I come back 15 minutes earlier and see if that’s less stressed for the baby right so I think um yeah I think that we we’re a very self-centered society and there’s just no doubt about it and we did this to women and we did this to children and we did this to families and we did this 70 70 years ago we did this we did this and what are the implications of this reality that a mother’s presence
(50:27) is a biologically emotionally stabilizing aspect of an infant and babies development what are the implications for you know for for divorced parents uh for surrogate parents for you know um gay men who adopt baby like what are the implications of that mother right because then you get yourself into all sorts of weeds in terms of stepping on many different agendas if you dare to comment on this subject the research shows that adoptive mothers can produce oxytocin they obviously are not going to breastfeed but they can produce oxytocin
(51:10) when they singularly love that baby as their own when that baby is handed to them if they’re healthy enough and they have as I said not too many losses in their own past they can it can turn on that instinct in them where they want to nurture that baby and they become the primary attachment figure now there’s all kinds of issues with adoption later on which society doesn’t want to talk about or confront because we don’t want people to stop adopting children it’s really important that people adopt children but that adoption comes with a particular set of issues that we don’t
(51:46) want to talk about in society okay but that’s later on so initially if that baby is adopted at Birth and that baby yes that baby loses the smell and the biological connection to its mother but if that surrogate mother who then becomes the primary attachment figure who’s sensitive empathic and can tune into that baby’s and Soo that baby’s distress that that person can become the primary attachment figure so that’s really important can men become mothers well when a gay couple comes to me the first thing I’ll say is which one of you
(52:20) is going to be the mother and they look at me and they say this child doesn’t have a mother you don’t need to have a mother and I’m like no no you do you need to have a mother it may not be a woman in this case but you need to have a mother so which one of you is going to play that role and I’m going to teach you how to be a mother because men don’t naturally play that role men hormonally play a different role so if you are going to play that role we’ve got to uh alter the way you instinctually would
(52:46) respond to that baby but you can be a mother right so but let’s say as John bulby said the primary attachment figure is the person who spends the majority of time throughout the day with that baby soothing them from distress from moment to moment in the first three years and I want everyone who’s listening to this to think about whether they’re actually the primary attachment figure yeah no that’s that’s so powerful and I so so so appreciate everything that you have brought to this conversation and the foundational research that has informed
(53:21) your your perspective and I wonder if we could close Erica with just one sentiment that you might offer a friend a loved one or a woman who is listening who is perhaps pregnant herself or planning a pregnancy just so that she can Orient around these uh instinctual priorities better one that being a mother is the coolest job in the world and the most meaningful two that more is more the more you are physically and emotionally present for your child in the first three years the greater the chance that that child will be mentally healthy in the future and
(54:01) three be courageous don’t be afraid to step off the path because being a mother is not a linear path if you had a wonderful career don’t be afraid to step off of that path knowing that when you step back on you’ll be in a transformative State probably not quite the same woman you were when you stepped off and your goals might be different but that doesn’t mean you won’t have goals as my trainer says my physical trainer says we got goals women can have goals they just can do everything all at the same time and do it well thank you
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