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Transcript

What We Refuse to Pass On · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

• 0:00
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• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Infinite Threads.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: This week, Today, I want to talk about something that moves between all of us.
• 0:38
  [music]
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: What gets passed on?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean money, and I don't mean family possessions.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the things that people hand one another without realizing it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: We've touched on it, we've talked about it in various other episodes.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Anger can move that way.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Fear can too.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So can the way that we learn to see other people.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: A child grows up hearing that certain people cannot be trusted.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe nobody ever sits them down and says, here is the prejudice I am passing on to you.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have to.
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  SPEAKER_00: Children watch.
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  SPEAKER_00: They listen.
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  SPEAKER_00: They notice who adults speak warmly about and who gets talked about with contempt.
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  SPEAKER_00: And little by little, somebody else's fear can become theirs.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: That happens with smaller things too, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone humiliates us and years later we find ourselves getting defensive
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  SPEAKER_00: before anyone has actually attacked us.
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  SPEAKER_00: A parent never apologized so maybe apologizing feels unnatural to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone taught us that anger was how you keep control or how you kept control
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  SPEAKER_00: and eventually anger becomes the language that we speak When we're frightened.
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  SPEAKER_00: A lot can travel through a human life, can't it?
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of it should.
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  SPEAKER_00: Love should, for sure.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Humor should.
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  SPEAKER_00: The kindness someone showed us when we needed it, well, it ought to keep moving, right?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But not everything we inherit deserves another generation.
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  SPEAKER_00: That, that is where choice enters.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the most powerful sentences a person can ever say is,
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  SPEAKER_00: This reached me, but it doesn't have to go any further.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean what happened stops mattering.
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  SPEAKER_00: If somebody hurt us, pretending it didn't hurt is not healing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the wound needs attention for a long time.
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  SPEAKER_00: But there is a difference between carrying a wound and handing it to somebody else.
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  SPEAKER_00: We see this in families all the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: A person grows up around constant criticism and promises
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  SPEAKER_00: that they will never treat their own children that way, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they succeed.
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  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, years later, they hear the same words coming out of their own mouths.
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  SPEAKER_00: That can be a painful moment,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it can also be an important one because now, now they can see the thread.
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  SPEAKER_00: They know where it came from.
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  SPEAKER_00: And once we can see something moving through us,
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  SPEAKER_00: we have a better chance of deciding whether it gets to continue.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that it's easy and I don't pretend that it's easy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Patterns become familiar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Familiar can feel normal even when it isn't healthy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we don't recognize what we inherited from others
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  SPEAKER_00: until somebody we love points it out to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that can be uncomfortable.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody enjoys discovering that the thing we hated being done to us is something
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  SPEAKER_00: that we've begun doing To others ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that recognition is not failure.
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  SPEAKER_00: It may be the beginning of repair.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this goes beyond families.
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  SPEAKER_00: Whole communities can pass fear forward.
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  SPEAKER_00: So can generations.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something happens between groups of people and the memory of it becomes part of
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  SPEAKER_00: the next generation's story.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes those memories need to remain.
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  SPEAKER_00: History does matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: But remembering harm and continuing harm are not the same thing, obviously.
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  SPEAKER_00: At some point,
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  SPEAKER_00: somebody has to decide whether pain is going to remain a warning or become
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  SPEAKER_00: an instruction.
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  SPEAKER_00: That distinction matters to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because when somebody hurts us, revenge can feel almost like balance.
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  SPEAKER_00: The balancing of the scales, right?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's justice.
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  SPEAKER_00: You made me hurt.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now you should hurt too.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a very, very human logic to that.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that pain rarely stays neatly contained between two people.
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  SPEAKER_00: It spills.
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  SPEAKER_00: The person we punish becomes angrier.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their family feels it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody who had nothing to do with the original hurt gets pulled into the next round.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before long, nobody remembers exactly where the first wound began.
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  SPEAKER_00: They only know whose turn it is to give one back.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's how threads become chains.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think love asks us to tolerate harm.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've said that many, many times because it matters, guys.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the loving thing is to stop somebody.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's to leave.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then sometimes it's to protect someone who cannot protect themselves.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: But stopping harm and continuing hatred are two different choices, and they're choices, guys.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're choices.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can refuse what somebody did to us without becoming shaped entirely by it.
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  SPEAKER_00: That may be one of the hardest freedoms that there is to say, you affected me.
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  SPEAKER_00: You may have wounded me, but you don't get to decide what I become next.
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  SPEAKER_00: And guess what, guys?
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  SPEAKER_00: There is power in that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there is responsibility too.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because all of us will pass something on.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody moves through life without affecting people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The question is what we want.
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  SPEAKER_00: The question is what we want traveling beyond us.
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  SPEAKER_00: If I receive fear, do I automatically hand out fear?
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  SPEAKER_00: If someone treats me with contempt,
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  SPEAKER_00: do I begin looking for somebody safer to treat with contempt also?
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  SPEAKER_00: Or can I interrupt it somewhere?
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  SPEAKER_00: Not perfectly, because we are human.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the bad day just follows us home.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we say the thing that we promised ourselves we would never say.
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  SPEAKER_00: What matters is whether we notice, whether we repair, whether we keep learning.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think that's why self-awareness matters so much.
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  SPEAKER_00: You cannot stop passing something on if you don't know you're carrying it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And compassion matters because understanding where something came from Helps us deal
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  SPEAKER_00: with it without pretending it belongs there forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody taught us fear because fear was what they knew.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody was harsh because harshness was what they had survived.
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  SPEAKER_00: Understanding that can create empathy for them.
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  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't require us to keep the pattern.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can love the person who handed us something and still refuse the thing that they handed us.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's an important distinction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe your parents did the best they could and still got some things wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe someone you love carried wounds that they never learned how to handle.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings can be both loved And unfinished at the same time.
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  SPEAKER_00: So can we.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's where I think hope enters this.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're not simply the end result of everything that happened to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: We also get choices.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not unlimited choices.
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  SPEAKER_00: Life leaves real marks.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we can decide what we strengthen.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can notice What hurts other people and work on it.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's our choice.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have the power.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can keep the parts of our inheritance that made us kinder and let some of
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  SPEAKER_00: the rest stop with us.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's how the weave changes, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because everybody suddenly becomes perfect,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because one person notices a harmful thread and refuses to tie it
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  SPEAKER_00: to somebody else.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then another person does the same.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And something that had been moving for years finally loses momentum.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think about that when I look at the world right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is plenty of anger available,
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  SPEAKER_00: plenty of fear,
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  SPEAKER_00: plenty of people encouraging us to believe that somebody else is
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  SPEAKER_00: the reason everything is wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to accept every emotion that we're handed.
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  SPEAKER_00: We can examine it first.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is this mine?
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  SPEAKER_00: Is it true?
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  SPEAKER_00: Does it deserve to keep moving?
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  SPEAKER_00: Those are useful questions.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then you stop and you ask yourself some questions like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then you make a decision.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because one of the human things is that we influence one another, guys.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can become dangerous.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: But you can also become beautiful.
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  SPEAKER_00: The same way fear travels, courage can travel.
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  SPEAKER_00: The same way contempt travels, respect can.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone shows us another way to respond, and suddenly we know another way exists.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is what we owe the people who come after us.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not a perfect world, just fewer wounds passed down without question.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we'll finish the human things by coming back to the larger idea underneath
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  SPEAKER_00: the whole week.
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  SPEAKER_00: We still belong to one another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because we agree,
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  SPEAKER_00: and not because every relationship is safe either,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because every life is part of a human story bigger than itself.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get there, maybe today, We can ask one question about what has reached us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Does this need to continue?
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  SPEAKER_00: If the answer is no, then perhaps this is where it stops with us.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: I love you very, very, very much.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do, right?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Go out there and pass that on, okay?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.
• 13:39
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