Latest / The Unexamined Life / Episode One: Begin Here
Transcript
- Laurel Solé: Hi, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to the unwritten life. I'm playing with that title. Might also be the unexamined life, but this is at any rate Laurel Soleil, and I am here with episode one. What if your story didn't begin with you? So a bit of an exploration of these stories that we inherit. Go more into that as we explore this work together. But this work is really steeped and stemmed deeply in Family Constellations work. I am 18 years into a private practice of psychotherapy and psychospiritual work. And at the end of this 18 years, what I've really come to realize is the most profound work that I've done personally. And done with clients professionally is the family constellations work. And I actually do believe it is a spiritual practice in and of itself. So there is this idea that there are stories that we inherit and the relationships that we repeat and the lives we have lived are often being informed from a larger field, a larger context than just our own. biographical lived experience. So I've been thinking a lot lately about these stories that we tell ourselves. And as a psychotherapist, I would also say that my job is to listen to the story that my clients are telling. Because a weekly coaching session or therapy session is not just a coaching or therapy session. There's always a story. It's the story of somebody's life. It's the progressive and ever-evolving unfolding of a human being's life. I am not sure that there's anything more precious than that. And I also don't know if there's anything more privileged than being able to bear witness to that. The stories that we tell about our childhoods, our parents, our marriages, our successes, our failures. These stories that we tell about why we are the way we are, they're real. They're actual lived biographical stories. They're all just as important as anybody else's. Perhaps more interesting to me than anything is that the stories we don't even realize that sometimes we're telling our own story. We don't contextualize it in that way. There's this sort of Feeling removed to that or this objective relationship we're in to our own story without even realizing that that is our story. So there's stories in our biography, the ones that have become so familiar, so woven into the fabric of our lives, that we rarely think to really question them. And that's kind of what I mean about this. We remain objective to them. But not subjective to them in a way that they could really be affecting us as they do. So why do I always end up in this kind of relationship? These are questions that pertain to stories that we are not in full relationship with. Why do I feel responsible for everyone else's happiness? Why is it so difficult to disappoint my mother? Why do I feel guilty when things are going? Well for me. Why, despite all therapy, all the books, all the self-awareness, all the retreats, all the personal growth, all the yoga, all the things, why do I sometimes find myself right back where I started? And these are the kinds of questions that have fascinated me for years. Because in those questions, there is a story that goes far, far, far, far, far beyond. Just that human in front of me. If I ask myself about my own marriage, about my own relationship troubles, about my own challenges with my mother, about my relationship to finances, inside of that question is a story. It didn't start with me. It goes way back. And there's a long story there to be explored about family history, about family relationships, about family dynamics. So I find myself wondering. Whether we're asking ourselves something from too narrow of a perspective? Because what if some of the stories we're living really, really did not actually begin with us? What if they began with our mothers, our grandmothers, our fathers, or with people whose names we barely even know? So what if The ways we understood love and loyalty and belonging and sacrifice and even happiness have been shaped by generations of people who lived entirely, entirely different lives from our own in an entirely different time. And what if when we begin to see these stories, what happens? That's what I'm really curious. So that's why I've created this podcast or this body of work to explore this idea of the unwritten life or the unexamined life. And I'm really glad you're here and I appreciate you listening. So just part one, a little bit about me. I I'm a psychotherapist, or I like to call myself a psycho-spiritual coach. my approach to therapy is really under this practice of therapeutic life coaching, where I'm interweaving the two disciplines of therapy and coaching. I'm someone who has spent nearly two decades sitting with people as they try to make sense of their lives. And much of that time my work has involved relationships. I've seen people in marriages that have become lonely. Families that have become complicated and layered, people who love one another but cannot seem to understand each other well enough to make it one more year. People who have spent years trying to make something work, only to discover that they feel lost and they really don't even understand who they are. And one of the things that I've right really come to appreciate is just honestly how complicated. Human beings are. We are rarely as rational as we imagine ourselves to be. We can understand a situation perfectly well and still find ourselves unable to change it. We can recognize that a relationship is no longer fulfilling and continue participating in it for years, for decades. We can know that we need boundaries and feel almost physically uncomfortable when we attempt to establish them. We can spend a lifetime trying not to become our parents only to discover that we have repeated some of their most familiar patterns. And sometimes the explanations that we have for our behavior, they don't seem to account for the depth of our attachment to it. Over the years, my interests have increasingly moved beyond just individual psychology. I become fascinated by biography, mythology, family constellations, as I mentioned before. I'm interested in the way a person's life unfolds over time. I'm not simply just interested in what happened to them, but the themes that emerge, the patterns that they can identify, the relationships that they choose, and the roles that they inhabit. The experiences that seem to repeat are the most interesting to me. The decisions that change the course of their lives. The same decisions that get made again and again. So these experiences for people, these moments when something seems once inevitable suddenly becomes open to question. I find that there is a level of unconsciousness that we walk through in our lives until we realize that we can shed light on that and we can question it. We can have an invitation to ourselves. To question our life. I also find myself drawn to the lives of the people who came before us. And I want to say more about this because this is really important. What did our grandparents believe about marriage? What did our mothers learn about being a woman? What was considered acceptable in our families? What secrets were known but never talked about? What secrets were never known? What could be spoken about? openly in what was never discussed. Who was expected to sacrifice? Who was allowed to leave? Who was permitted to be ambitious, independent, angry, or unhappy? These questions have become so central to the way that I think about the human experience. And they're a large part of why I've decided to begin this podcast. So not because I have all the answers, because believe me, I am the first people to say, I do not. Quite the opposite. Because the longer I do this work, the more interested I become in two questions in particular. And I'll get into those questions. The first one is If it didn't start with me, how far back does it go? And the second one is: if I can find where it is, how free can I become to live in my own life? So there are invisible rules of family life. Every family has a culture. We tend to think about culture in terms of nationality or religion or language or geography, but families. Definitely, definitely have cultures too. And they have rules, expectations, they have ways that they manage conflict. They have ways that they express affection. unspoken policy about handling money and definitions that are covert around understanding success. And some of the most influential family rules are the ones that nobody ever says out loud. In one family, the rule might be that you never discuss difficult things. You never bring anything up that has conflict. In another, you never leave a marriage. In another, that children are responsible for their parents' emotional well-being. In another, that money is dangerous and success makes you selfish. Or independence means abandoning the people you love. These beliefs don't. necessarily arrive in s as instructions in the overt sense. They're absorbed through observation and most significantly through the way we watched others live their lives and through the stories that we were told or the stories that we overheard. So through the behavior that's rewarded and the behavior that's discouraged, we learned a lot about how we should live our own life. And how we lived our own life becomes the story that we are living. And it's all through the emotional atmosphere of the household. So a child doesn't need to be told that anger is unacceptable. If every expression of anger results in withdrawal or punishment, the message is clear. She doesn't need to be told that women are responsible for maintaining relationships. If she watches her mother spend decades doing precisely that, the message is clear. And she doesn't need to be told that leaving is shameful if every woman who has left the family system is spoken about with judgment. The message is clear. So over time, these experiences become part of our understanding. They become our understanding of how the world works. They become familiar. And familiarity has a very peculiar power. We don't always choose what makes us happy. Sometimes we choose what feels recognizable. So even when what's recognizable is painful, we still will choose it. Now I want to be really careful here because not every relationship difficulty can be traced to an inherited family pattern. And not every family story is a burden. We inherit tremendous strengths as well, resilience and humor and Creativity and generosity and courage, the capacity to love and endure and understand. But we may also inherit expectations that made sense in another generation and no longer make sense in our own. And I think there's something extraordinary about the moment we begin to distinguish and differentiate between the two. So there are women who came before us, and there are men that lived lives before us. So just imagine for a moment someone born, a woman born in 1920. Think about the choices available to her. Depending on where she lived, her social position, her circumstances. She may have had very, very, very limited financial independence or even a limited voice. Marriage may have represent represented security or even, I like to believe, safety. Divorce may have carried enormous social consequences. Motherhood may have been less a conscious decision than an expectation. So perhaps she married a man she didn't particularly love. Perhaps she loved him deeply but lived with disappointment. And if you can hear a little chirping in the background, that's one of my three little backyard chickens out there making a very sweet noise. perhaps she had ambitions she never spoke about. Perhaps she stayed because leaving was absolutely unimaginable. And now imagine her dog. She grows up watching this marriage. She absorbs ideas about what it means to be a good wife, a good mother, a respectable woman. Perhaps she promises herself that her life will be different. And perhaps it is. Maybe she gets an education, maybe she works, she earns her own money, but she may still carry some of the same beliefs about responsibility and sacrifice and what women owe. To the people that they love. So now imagine the granddaughter. She has freedoms that neither of the women before her could have imagined. And yet she finds herself in a relationship that leaves her profoundly lonely. She is financially capable of leaving. She's self-sufficient. She knows she's unhappy. Okay. She has friends who would support her. Great. Some of the social consequences are not so significant anymore. But still, the thought of leaving fills her with guilt. Not simply just fear, like guilt. As though choosing something different would represent a betrayal. So, this is where the idea of invisible loyalty becomes so interesting to me. Within family systems and family constellation work, we explore the possibility that people may remain loyal to family expectations or rules without fully recognizing how these loyalties influence them. And it doesn't mean that an ancestor is mysteriously controlling our choices. Like that's not. This is an energy. This is something that exists within the field of the family genealogy. It means that belonging is powerful. And sometimes our understanding of belonging becomes entangled with repetition. If the woman before me endured, what does it mean if I refuse to endure? If my mother sacrificed everything for her family, what does it mean if I prioritize myself? If my grandmother had no choice, am I somehow dishonoring her by exercising mine? These questions aren't always conscious, and that's really key here. But exploring them can be illuminating, and perhaps the most interesting possibility. Is that we get to honor the people who came before us without living exactly as they did. We can appreciate their sacrifices without making the same sacrifices. We can understand their choices without repeating them. We can belong without becoming identical. I find that idea enormously liberating. And if you're listening to this and any of this is resonating, if you can feel in your body a sense of peace or calm or reassurance at the thought of that liberation, then just take a deep breath into that for a minute. So I want to move into this question now within the podcast of so why do we stay? Why do we stay in jobs and marriages, homes, geographic locations, friendships? Why do we stay? One of the subjects I want to explore regularly on this podcast is why women remain in relationships that no longer fulfill them. And that can be relationships to all things, not necessarily just. your partner. And I want to approach this with curiosity and no judgment. Because believe me, and you'll get to know me more and I do share. But I have not lived the happiest marriage and relationships have been my greatest source of pain. And I've chosen to work with people for the last 18 years intimately in one-to-one practice because relationships are the greatest source of pain. And I'm only here to support that through my own knowing, through my professional study, through my presence and through my love and understanding. Because I think the question, why doesn't she leave? is one of the least interesting questions that we can ask. It assumes that relationships are simply rational arc arrangements, that if the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, a person should be able to walk away. But human attachment does not work like a balance sheet at all. Relationships are connected to identity, security, safety, hope, history, and sometimes survival. There may be children involved, financial realities, shared communities. Love that still exists alongside disappointment and that is huge. Love that exists alongside disappointment. There may also be fear, coercion, or abuse, which require us to understand the very real barriers to leaving rather than reducing them to psychological patterns. But there are also women who have considerable freedom and still feel unable to make a change. And that's the territory that I'm really, really, really particularly interested in exploring. So, what does it mean when a woman has become so accustomed to accommodating another person that she starts to struggle to recognize her own desires? And what happens when keeping a relationship intact has become central to her identity? What if being the understanding one, the patient one, the forgiving one? The accommodating one, the one that says yes all the time, has become the role through which she experiences her own goodness, her own self-worth, her own value. And what if changing that role feels like someone, feels like becoming someone she doesn't recognize? Sometimes we think that we are afraid of losing a relationship. And I want to say that maybe sometimes perhaps we're also afraid of losing the version of ourselves that we've spent years constructing within it. The good wife, the dependable partner, the responsible woman, the woman that holds everything together, the woman that knows everything, the woman that got really good at managing the family, the woman who never gives up, the woman who endures. Who are we if we stop playing those roles? That's a really confusing question. And who might we become? That's even a more confusing question because who we are is all we've ever been. And so who we could become is almost scary to think for many women. And I don't believe every unfulfilling relationship needs to end. I really don't. Sometimes relationships can change profoundly. When the people within them begin relating different, relating differently to one another and relating differently to themselves, and relating differently to the histories and the family genealogy that we come from. And sometimes they cannot, and that's just honest. But I do believe that there's value in understanding the stories that shape our participation in them. So we can. How do I say this? This is not blaming our parents or our grandparents. That's not what this is fodder for. This is not so we can assign responsibility for every difficulty to our ancestors. That to me is not taking personal accountability, and that's not what this work is about. This work is about so we can become more conscious of the choices available to us. So Another subject that I want to bring in here and into these conversations is mythology. And I've always been interested in myths because they speak to something larger than individual experience. So across cultures and centuries, human beings have told stories about love, betrayal, exile, sacrifice, transformation, death, rebirth, belonging, loss. Hell and heaven and all the spaces in between. The circumstances change and the costumes change and the landscapes change. Just think about like any amazing fairy tale or epic like the Odyssey, if you've seen it. But certain human dilemmas remain remarkably familiar, and this is what fascinates me. So just consider the Greek myth of Persephone. A young woman is taken into the underworld, and her mother. Demeter searches for her in grief, absolute heart-wrenching, gutted grief. There's so many ways to interpret this myth. It can be read as a story about separation and maternal attachment, the changing seasons, the loss of influence, or the movement between different worlds. So, what really interests me is not deciding which interpretation is correct, it's what happens when a woman encounters a myth. And recognizes something of her own experience within it. Perhaps she recognizes the difficulty of separating from her own mother. Or I can share a time when I had with my eldest daughter, who is now 22, and doing great and lives in England and has a fabulous life. But she, her father and I separated when she was one. And there was massive custody battles where she was separated from me. And I felt that I could recognize myself in this myth. That was a period of her life and my life and this the the characters in this myth. That was a time that felt like a descent into the deepest darkness. So perhaps we can relate to this story in the way that the woman recognizes the tension between belonging to her family and becoming an individual. This can show up a lot of times for mothers when their last child leaves the nest. Myths give us another language for experience that can be difficult to articulate, but on some deep level, we resonate with. And they remind us that our personal struggles often touch upon questions that human beings have been wrestling with for thousands of years. These questions like, who am I apart from my family? Who am I without this marriage? Who am I when my children leave? Who am I without this job? Who am I without my health? What must I relinquish in order to change? What do I owe the people I love? What happens when the life I've known no longer fits? These aren't just merely psychological questions, they're human questions. And I think mythology can help us approach them with deep, deep imagination rather than simply a diagnosis that she's sad or she's unhappy in her marriage, or this is just a phase. So, another thing I'd like to introduce in this podcast, as this is the first podcast of my endeavor, as something that has become increasingly important in my own work, like I mentioned before, and that's family constellation work. If you're unfamiliar with family constellation work, it's an experiential approach to exploring family relationships and patterns. In a group setting, participants may use like other people as representative. Of their family members or aspects of a situation. And then in an individual format or one-to-one format, objects or other symbolic representations are typically used, and it can be anything, and people can get very creative and sweet around it. The process really invites this deep participation to observe relationships, positions, emotional responses, and possible. Dynamics from a different perspective. And they often say when we change our perspective, what we're looking at starts to look different. What I find compelling is that there's this opportunity to step outside the familiar narrative of our lives. We spend so much time telling our stories from inside them. I was the responsible child, for example. My mother was emotionally unavailable. Maybe it was that my father was absent, or maybe my marriage has always been difficult. Or like you heard me say earlier in the podcast when I said relationships have always been my pain point. These stories may contain really important truths, but they are also just perspectives. And sometimes exploring a family system symbolically allows us to notice something that we hadn't really previously considered. So perhaps we begin to understand a parent's limitations in the context of their own history. Perhaps we recognize a family role we've continued to inhabit long, long after it has stopped serving us. Or perhaps we begin to question an obligation we've never consciously agreed to. So I just want to emphasize that family constellations is an exploratory practice. Not a scientifically valid method for uncovering hidden family events or proving ancestral causes of present difficulties. Let's like get out of that needing this to be scientific thing. For me, its value lies in the questions, the perspectives, the reframes that it can open rather than in treating everything that emerges as a literal truth. And I really believe that that distinction matters. So I'll say it again. Its value lies in the questions it can open rather than in treating everything that emerges as a literal truth. Because the purpose of this work isn't to construct another like rigid, compartmentalized, categorized explanation of who we are. This is not about black and white. This is about the nuance. It's about becoming more curious, more discerning, and perhaps a little freer from within your own experience of yourself in your life. There's this particular moment in life that I find really fascinating. And it's a moment or many moments on repeat when something that has been tolerable becomes intolerable. Nothing dramatic necessarily happens. There may not be an affair or financial infidelity, no enormous arguments, no sudden catastrophe. A woman might just simply be sitting at her kitchen table one morning drinking her coffee when she starts to have this experience within her body that she cannot continue living in quite the same way. And perhaps she's had the same conversation with her partner a hundred times. With her friends every happy hour. Perhaps she spent hours on the phone with her mother. Perhaps she spent years postponing something. Perhaps she's exhausted by a role she's played for so long, she no longer remembers choosing it. But then there is this gradual shift. And it's not necessarily in her circumstances, but in her willingness to continue participating in them. In mythology, we might recognize this as a threshold. Like a moment between one way of being and another. And thresholds are rarely comfortable, and they always involve uncertainty. And they ask us to question things that have provided identity, safety, security, and stability. They bring with them grief, even when the change we desire is welcome. Because to have something new. We have to give something up. We've held on to that something for a long time for some really valid reason. We don't simply just move towards something new. We often have to acknowledge what is ending: a belief, a role, a desire, an expectation, an imagined future, a version of ourselves. And I think that this is. where the exploration of biography, ancestry, mythology, and psychology becomes particularly meaningful. Because when we understand from all different, many different lenses more about how we arrived where we are, and when we begin to contextualize that arrival in a different framework, we may find ourselves better equipped to really consider where we want to go. And then we go into that direction or make that change or decision from a place. confidence and understanding. So my intention in this podcast moving forward is that you can expect from the content I bring that this is a place for curiosity, a place where we can explore the relationship between personal biography and family history, where we can look at the stories we inherit about marriage. Motherhood, money, ambition, loyalty, and belonging, where my words start to allow for mythology to become a way of thinking about human experience rather than something confined to the Grimm's fairy tale stories or some ancient books that are not relevant to your life at all. A place where we can explore these concepts of Family constellations, psycho-spirituality, and the fascinating ways that our relationships shape us. I want to talk about the women who came before us and the men, the choices they made, the choices that they couldn't make, the secret families, the children's lost, the bankruptcies, the ones that had it all and lost it all, the roles we assumed, the things we repeat, the moments we begin. To imagine that maybe there's something else I'm here for. So there may be conversations with other practitioners and storytellers and people whose experience brings these subjects to life. I don't really know. This is all new for me. This has taken a long time for me to get here. This is me choosing something different. That's my vulnerable share. I have not been happy in my own life for a long time. I wake up with an immense sense of dread. I'm forty nine. Almost all three of my children are out of the house. I've done the same thing every day for decades, and I'm trying to do something different. There will be questions and reflections within this podcast and probably a fair amount of uncertainty because I do not believe the goal of examining our histories is to arrive like at one definitive explanation for everything. I think the goal is to become more thoughtful about the stories that we live. And more intentional about the ones we continue, and more conscious and aware of who we are in our life, and more tuned in to actually what our life story is becoming and has been. So before we finish, I want to leave you with a small exercise, nothing complicated, just a question to sit with. Just think about a relationship pattern in your life that feels particularly familiar. It doesn't have to be dramatic. Perhaps you're always the one who apologizes. Perhaps you find it difficult to ask for what you need. Perhaps you feel responsible for keeping up keeping everyone connected. Perhaps you stay longer than you want to at events. Perhaps you always say yes, or you struggle to allow yourself to be loved without earning, without feeling like to earn it. Just think about the people who came before you. Your mother, your father, your grandparents, the relationships that you witnessed growing up. What did you learn about love? What did you learn about loyalty? What did you learn about what it means to be a good woman, a good partner, a good mother, a good daughter? And perhaps maybe most importantly, which of these lessons, if we want to call them that, still feel most true to you? And which might you be ready to reconsider? And you don't have to answer those questions today to yourself. In fact, I'd encourage you not to rush it. Just notice what comes up. Because sometimes the beginning of change isn't a dramatic decision. Honestly, sometimes it's a question we've never thought to ask ourselves before. I have spent many, many years listening to people's stories. And the longer I do, the more convinced I am that there is something remarkable about looking at a life not simply as a collection of problems to solve, but as a story worth understanding. Your story and my story and everyone's story is shaped by the people who came before us. That story has carried us to this moment. And that story is still unfolding. Thank you for spending this time with me. I look forward to exploring all of this together. Until next time, just stay curious about the stories you inherited. And also remember that there are still chapters of your life that you have. And I am here. Write me a question, leave a comment, send me an email. and if I get questions, I will always answer them on the next podcast. Thank you so much for being here with all my appreciation. Till next time.