Saturn Returns with Caggie - 5.8 Family Dynamics with Julia Samuel

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Julia Samuel, the psychotherapist and best-selling author, joins Caggie to discuss how our Saturn Return might affect our familial and romantic relationships. Julia and Caggie also discuss the process of individuation (when we form a stable personality and sense of self, away from our parents), attachment styles, as well as touching on epigenetics and trauma.  --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. What you don't face, you can't fix. And so until you begin to face that this is your operating system and it isn't your fault, but only you can sort this out. And it's never as simple as fix. It's adapt and shift and change, isn't it? Today, I am rejoined by the wonderful Julia Samuel, the British psychotherapist and bestselling author who I last spoke to all the way back in season two, and we covered the topic of grief. Today, as her new book, Every Family Has a Story is all about

family dynamics we are discussing how relationships within our family, friends and romantic partners changes during our Saturn return. This is such an important conversation because of course everybody has a family and everyone has different dynamics going on and during our Saturn return they are often brought into the focus and we don't really have the tools to know how to navigate these challenging situations as they shift and change. So having the privilege and opportunity to speak to Julie about this was so amazing so I think you guys are going to love this conversation. Before we get into any of this though let's hear from our astrological guide, Nora.

Most astrological schools of thought interchangeably associate strong disciplinarian and father figures in our lives with Saturn and the Sun. And those that represent a prominent feminine influence and matriarchal energies with the moon and Venus. Then Mercury and Mars are usually associated with siblings or sibling-like figures such as long-term friends or even childhood friends, depending on the individual time of birth and birth chart dynamics as a whole. By understanding these placements of these planetary energies in our birth chart, we get to learn not only more about ourselves and how we function, so that we may optimally use this information to grow and guide our conscious mind and decision to our benefit holistically. But by knowing these placements, we also understand where we've come

from and how our family dynamics and relationships inform all of our future relationships and in many ways a lot of our life choices. Understanding and analyzing this through astrology or psychology is empowering because we found the answer behind the why. Why don't I feel safe opening up emotionally? Why don't I assert my authority more at the workplace? Why do I lack a competitive streak in my life? They're all associated with the moon and Venus for the first question, Saturn or the sun for the second question, or Mercury and Mars for the third question. And depending on how they're placed in the chart

and how they all interact with either Saturn or Pluto usually. So you see, in astrology, everything can be traced back to how certain energies are placed and affected and what they represent, because we can't see if they represent a mother, in which case, okay, let's dissect your relationship with the mother. Do they represent a father or an uncle or a teacher? Let's look into that. Does it represent a sibling or a difficult early relationship with friends and peers? Let's unpack that. Carl Jung used both astrology, esoteric knowledge and psychology to understand the human subconscious mind and how it affects our life choices, inner knots and ultimately the universally known phenomena we humans call fate.

Saturn return and Saturn or even Pluto transits remind us of our free will as humans and they bring forth external events that helps us make sense of our inner world so that we may start to reshape our lives and belief system in favor of our chosen values, our preferred love language, and even our chosen life vision. We're inspired to remember that it is we who dictate our fate. For the stars incline us, yes, but they do not bind us. us welcome back who'd have thought it's so lovely to feel like i know you and we have never physically met i know and but i feel like i mean that is the you know social media and virtual worlds get a lot of negativity but you and i have a connection thanks to the virtual world and thanks to you inviting me onto your brilliant podcast so I am delighted to be back that's a really good point so I also

I find myself often kind of critiquing the world of social media and living living life digitally but actually it has it's kind of saved us over the last couple of years, hasn't it? It has definitely saved us. You know, that sense of isolation, which is just about one of the worst things for your mental health, has been protected and connection enabled, thanks to the virtual world. Yeah. I'm having to sort of remind myself now that I don't need to be living a pandemic lifestyle because I can continue to you know with doing the podcast and everything obviously aside from doing the tour recently which was in real life but um yeah it's actually good for me to get out and be around other people a bit more we are wired to hug and

flirt and dance and have sex and play and laugh and sit beside each other and feel each other's emotions transmitted through our physical bodies you know that is how well made and I mean how was the tour how was it seeing people and people being pleased to see you who you've only kind of known through dms and yeah well that's exactly it I realized how much those human connections mean to me in terms of actually getting to speak my favorite part is after the show when I get to talk with everyone and hug them and they tell me their personal story. And there's something so heartening and it sort of kindles our humanity that when we share stories like you do on the podcast or I do, you know, in my books, that we connect with each other and that there's a human universal connection that means that we feel safer and more kind of alive in particularly in a world where we often

feel under threat yeah yeah and we kind of touched on this before we started recording but this idea and this notion of imposter syndrome because I'm sure you've experienced it as a writer, because I feel like it's just a rite of passage when you do a book that you suddenly start thinking, you know, is this going to resonate with people? Are they going to connect with it? And I think almost the more vulnerable and the more authentic you are and the more raw and real the more resistance you face and yet that's those are the very essence like that's the part of it that connects with people and that people it becomes their story as well in a way you know I do really believe that the most personal is the most universal and as much as you know I would say my primary kind of role is as a therapist you know so I would always say I'm a therapist that writes rather than that although actually now a few

years down the line I do say psychotherapist and author and the author bit doesn't feel quite so fake but as in it doesn't feel as fake as it did before? No. Because you've been really doing it now? Yeah. Or tinny. I think not fake, tinny. Sort of like, oh, am I really allowed to say that? So British and so female. How many books have you written now three yeah I think I think you're able to and also not just any old books they've been hugely successful yeah they're best-selling books making me feel uncomfortable you've got the best laugh Kagi I want that laugh in my phone and if I feel a bit mused I'm just going to turn Kagi on and have your laugh and that phone. And if I feel a bit mused, I'm just going to turn Kagi

on and have your laugh and that will cheer me up. Well, you should get me and my brother together because that, we sort of set each other off. It's quite like a pack of hyenas, Dunlop cackle. That must be so nice. Well, talking about brothers and siblings. So, I mean, the thing that I wanted from my book and all of my books is that these intimate stories that I am kind of privileged to receive as a therapist. I believe that because of confidentiality, there is so much universal knowledge and understanding that hasn't gone out into the world. and understanding that hasn't gone out into the world. And I actually, you talk about your brother, I think one of the topics that isn't nearly talked enough about is our sibling relationships and how that forms our patterns of relationship with our partners,

that you can have sibling rivalry with your partner. You're competing with each other like you did your brother. I mean, there's just so much here to get into especially because interestingly off the back of the tour and the live events I've done there's been so much conversation around family dynamics because of course like you say people don't really talk about them but everybody has them and everyone has their own strange they think it's strange anyway story or something a bit you know that's just unique to them and yet they're such relatable themes

and it's often during I think during one's Saturn return where they where you can either start to like look at that from a different vantage point and addressing some of those things because otherwise you know we can sometimes carry carry sort of toxicity with us through life if we're not really kind of looking at things from a different perspective. And also not just echoing the voices that we grew up with, you know, of the ways of doing things of how we're supposed to live our life, how we're going to parent, it's a real opportunity to kind of reframe that and have more autonomy over it. You know, obviously, I agree. And, you know, what you were saying about examining ourselves and kind of rather than just carrying on with the patterns and the behaviors that we've

learned as children and inherited from maybe our grandparents, that when we stop and first of all, acknowledge, you know, maybe this didn't start with me that, you know, maybe I feel like I'm failing or I'm bad at this or I'm bad at that, or there's something wrong with me. Maybe don't start with that question of what's wrong with me, but begin to look at where you have come from and look up and look up at your parents' generation and your grandparents' generation and examine, you know, the untold stories, the pain from traumas that hasn't been allowed and begin to see what patterns have been passed down to you. And then when you have that lens, it changes

the lens that you look at yourself because you have a kind of much broader context. It's not that you're always frightened, like I'm someone who's too frightened. It's like, oh, I see. I came from a family where the parent died by suicide and that was never talked about and it was full of shame. And so my grandfather was always super hyper alert. And so my dad is super hyper alert and, and that changes your relationship with yourself and you can feel entirely different in relation to your life. Yeah. And also I think what's important to add here as a caveat is to also view it through a lens of compassion. Because what I've noticed in myself and in conversations with other people is, you know, our parents are such godlike figures when we're young. They can do no wrong, no harm. We go to them for everything. Well, I did anyway.

And I'm talking about from a very, very young age. well I did anyway and I'm talking about from a very very young age and then of course as we go through different stages in adolescence and we kind of establish our own authority and autonomy and kind of rubbing up against the boundaries of things and there's that friction can I pause you if we do that some people don't ever individuate and separate but if you do proper growing up yeah that's something I would love to actually talk about because, okay, let's make a mental note to come back to that. And let's bring it back to the theme at hand of Saturn Returns is when people go through that, that sort of God-like version of their parents has shifted. And it has done over the last probably a decade in different ways. And then there is a tendency, and correct me if I'm wrong,

because you're going to have far more experience than this, but to villainize our parents and to pin all our shortcomings on them. And I imagine that people spend a huge amount of time in therapy discussing these things and where their parents have fucked them up basically and I understand it in certain parts but then I'm also like that's not very liberating or empowering and I think what lacks in that is the lens of compassion to actually realize that our parents are just programmed through their own stories and their own upbringing and you know like you say through their parents and their grandparents and passed down we kind of step into a victim role often i'm really nodding silently here i agree i mean i think we it's a bit like any

process of adaptation of change is that we i think often we first need to well first be aware of what's going on and then have lots of different feelings and it might be rage and fury and contempt and you need to blame and you need to kind of thrash around and because in some ways that anger is part of the individuation is that anger is an energy a force of separation it's like the you know the fire in your engine to go you know you're wrong I'm right but as you mature and I you know I would argue that particularly in the last few generations that we are not fully mature until between 25 and 28 and so parents may be looking at their children and going, well, hang on, when I was your age, I was married or had kids or I was in the career that I'm in 35 years later. But actually,

because of our society has changed, and we've been much more parented and more protected, and we go to university for longer, and there's much more psychological intelligence, we're not kind of thrust and cut out of the world we are much more bound would you say that that's prematurely prematurely as in in the past people were sort of thrust out of the nest perhaps before ready yes i mean so i'm 62 so i'm old enough to be your mum at least aren't i and my generation of my I mean, I left home at 16 and I never went back. And my siblings were sort of 17, 16, 17. And it wasn't that my parents didn't love us, but parenting wasn't even an adverb at that time.

You know, it was you bring your children children up you feed them and you love them but you don't parent them whereas now it's in a way we've kind of I feel gone too far and like not not in alignment with our nature and there's just this sort of obsessiveness over how to parent yeah I'm do and people do talk about over parenting and kind of holding on tight so it's an incredibly that path to take of loving enough that the child feels supported and secure and loved and protected enough but they're not over parented that they don't have agency to make their own mistakes and their own choices and individuate and step into adulthood. And it's a, it's a back and forth balance. It's a really tricky balance. And you know, I've got adult

children, and I'm still negotiating that. So I'm not saying that it's easy. But you recalibrate your relationship as an adult parent to an adult child, which is very different. It is more mutual. I mean, I think the adult parent always, the parent of the adult child always has more power than they often recognize. What do you mean by that? So in my experience, say the partner doesn't get on with the mother-in-law, you know, I would say that mother-in-law has a lot of power to repair and restore and make that relationship work. And it's their responsibility. And chooses not to. And chooses not to. And a lot of people listening and nodding being like yeah that's my mother-in-law

um because you hold more influence over your adult child yeah i what's really interesting about that is i think that also requires the parents journey of sort of i don't know whether this is necessarily the right word but like emancipation from their parents and for maturity to be reached in order to have that understanding of self and what's important to acknowledge is that not all parents do and therefore they might not realize the power or the importance that they have in their child's life and what I mean to kind of add a personal thing, I have always like looked up to my, I mean, I look up to both my parents and I'm incredibly close to my mum and we've definitely gone through that shift. And both of us experienced our Saturn return at the same time. So it was like,

this interesting thing is as the roles change and it's difficult for both parties, especially, as the roles change and it's difficult for both parties, especially, you know, as a parent, when that is so much of your identity. But with my, with my father, I definitely feel that I look up to him a lot. And I always think that, I don't know, I think because he's a man and I expect that he thinks or feels a certain way. And so often I'm proved that I'm totally wrong. And in a really like humbling way, because I think he cares so deeply what I think of him, but I'm so from a place of wanting, you know, still got that child thing of wanting to please and impress him

that I cannot even make space to acknowledge that actually he wants, you know, that he values my opinion and cares what I think or the role that he plays in my life. And so that's kind of, yeah, that's been really a really interesting thing to observe, especially over the last couple of years. I wrote him a letter when I was um I think I was 28 and it was a very you know my dad's very British and we don't always talk about like feelings that much and he's his his family sent him off to boarding school when he was seven so there's all that kind of trauma really I think of abandonment and I wrote him this very open like loving letter. And I don't think he knew how to kind of process it and kind of forgot about it.

I wasn't like upset by his response. It was something more cathartic, I think, for me. And anyway, he sent me a message like two days ago with a screenshot of the card that he'd obviously kept and was like, I was just rereading the letter that you sent and how humbling and lovely it was. And I know that that's not easy for him to say. And it's just those kind of like beautiful moments of like, we all have our own reality.

We all have our own truth. And it's about having the ability to hold space for both, you know. And that's, I mean, that's such an important aspect to acknowledge. you know. And that's, I mean, that's such an important aspect to acknowledge. So, you know, what I've understood from you, and certainly what I've understood through the stories in my book, and there was a particular family, the Thompson family, where the 18-year-old daughter was going off to university, and I worked with the grandmother, her mother, and the 18-year-old, is that we need to support our children to step off the mothership if you like or the parentship and create their own ship and what you're talking about in your relationship

with your father is a recalibration through the dance of moving in and moving out and letting yourself kind of step away test test things out for yourself. You know, him not chasing after you to kind of hold on to you, but him to respect and trust that you can do that for yourself. And then very naturally in that recalibration, you come back together and are reorganized as two adults, but also always the dad and the daughter who deeply love each other. Yeah. You touched on something a moment ago about how some people don't ever individuate and what that might look like. Part of a child's development when they become

teenagers and up to 28, as I was saying, the sense of individuation isn't that we, you know, in the past, everyone thought about sort of ending, cut and end, and you kind of move out and you, you know, like in grief, it was forget and move on. And actually, what I think we understand now by individuation is that it does need a kind of force to step away and an intention to step away so that you test things out and you look at what do I believe? What are my values? What kind of relationships do I want? Do I want to experiment? You know, 20s are for experimentation, try things out. But I think the individuation is having basic trust that we're loved from our

parents so we can step away knowing that we can always come back and that we're interdependent, that we affect each other. But the fundamental kind of predictor of our capacity to be in relationship with ourselves and with the world is love. Love is at the center, that it's secure, reliable, predictable love. And then you have a child who then grows into a teenager and an adult who has what's called in the business secure attachment so that they have a fundamental trust in themselves that they're of worth innately for just being alive, not conditional to perform or be good or succeed but they have innate right to be loved to be on this planet and to participate in the planet because they were born yeah when we do go through this

transition and this this change and dynamic in this dance i love the way that you put it sometimes when that fractures or that breaks and people pull away from each other how can they come back together with people we love most we are most invested in and we are then most at risk of hating being hurt by yeah and making our deepest mistakes yeah yeah and the key is recognizing, which comes up a lot in my book, is rupture and repair. I did this thing called 12 Touchstones for the Well-Being of Family at the end of the book, which is, you know, things that can help build good relationships with your family. And one of them was to fight productively. And that was recognizing that, of course, you're going to fight because you affect each other and you hurt each other, sometimes intentionally because you're just pissed off and in a really bad mood and often unintentionally.

But the key in functioning families is that you wait till the fire in your belly is turned down. It might take a day or a couple of days or a few hours. And then you go back and you look and examine what the fight was really about. And through that, you have a deepening love and understanding because it wasn't about the bins or not emptying the dishwasher. It was because of lots of different things or it's because I felt like you weren't giving me attention or I felt insecure or whatever the reason is yeah and I also when we're um it's funny when we're older I was sort of like this analogy of Christmas time or not an analogy it's actually yeah when we're at Christmas time how doesn't matter what's going on in your life how successful you are

you know how adored you are by your friends and what's going on but you go back to the family home and you're having you know one of your parents is carving the turkey and you're telling them about your latest accolades or acknowledgements and they sort of like I don't know barely acknowledge it or say pass pass the roast potatoes and you're suddenly 12 years old again. And I think that's such a relatable thing, but what's rarely, what we're rarely able to do is create the separation between who we are now and the child that is being triggered. Cause we always carry that with us. And something that I've had to practice is creating enough separation of going, oh, this is triggering me and it's unmeasured to the situation. And one of my favorite teachers and friends, Mark Groves, always says, if it's hysterical, it's historical.

And it's like, if you're having that kind of nervous system overload, it's because it's taking you back to a version of yourself when you were younger and something that destabilized you. And I think it's really amazing work to be able to go back there and heal it. Our memory of place and smell is our strongest, most wired aspect of our memory. We have place cells so that they store our oldest memories. So when you're sitting around your kitchen table eating roast potatoes in the same kitchen that you did when you were six, that smell of those roast potatoes and the white sauce and the turkey will throw you.

It's not a trigger. It will send you across the years to being a six-year-old self. So it's not because you had a traumatic experience and you're being triggered. It is because our memory operates like that. And the important thing is the awareness of it, that you suddenly find yourself being a bit squeaky or you feel small, or you feel the feelings that you had where you were six. And the capacity to have that sentence like hysterical is historical or something that you can say to yourself so then you can take a breath and step back and go oh hello hello six-year-old

you what do you need do you need to kind of go outside and take a little bit of a breath do you need a hug should I hold you internally you know do you what what's going on what what's happening and then in acknowledging that you can come back and hold the child within you the small you and then respond from your kind of more adult perspective which isn't hysterical and meeting your parents or your sibling where they are at and not causing a whole blow-up. Also, for people listening that might not think they have any family issues and they're like, oh, well, you know, it's all fine, I'm living my life, the piece you spoke about in terms of attachment style

and how those relationships inform our romantic relationships so much is something that's 100% worth delving into because I am someone that is working through my own anxious attachment. I have a lot of thoughts around attachment theory. Sometimes I'm like, I totally get it, and sometimes I think it's too binary. But from a therapist perspective would you be able to explain in case anyone isn't familiar with the term about what it means where it comes from and how it kind of impacts you later in life yes there's anxious attachment there's avoidant attachment and there is a kind of dissociated attachment. And it's by John Bowlby from the 50s and 60s who was, you know, they tended to be much more binary then than we are now.

Now we know that we understand about how we operate in the world much more interrelatedly than in a black and white way. in a black and white way. But what I think what's useful is like for you recognizing that you had anxious attachment is that it's a useful way of recognizing why you are behaving in a particular way so that when your partner is later than he says or he isn't giving you the kiss that you need right now or something's going on you you can use that like oh I feel a bit nervous I feel like he isn't loving me and you can look at what's going on in your head what is the messages that are coming you know what I call your shitty your head. What is the messages that are coming? You know, what I call your shitty committee. What are you saying to yourself?

And are you playing an old trope of, you know, I'm not seen as I am. I'm not good enough. I'm not loved enough. He's going to leave me. He likes somebody else. You can never kind of get rid of those early injuries, but you can hold both that I have this feeling of anxiety and that I'm not good enough, that something is missing. And also that I kind of know that he does love me. He's actually just made a cup of coffee. It's not

that he's not talking to me. He's just come come back from work and that you can hold both things and then you can name them rather than become super anxious in your relationship and spin out yeah and spin out you can say it's so funny I'm just aware that I'm you know what I'm saying to myself is that you're avoiding me or whatever it is. Tell me what is going on for you. Do you want a bit of space? What's happening? Yeah, it's I mean, it's definitely been a lesson for me in what's been the most challenging and the most difficult, but the most rewarding in the relationship I'm in now in terms of how we manage to navigate conflict. And I think before, historically, I've always viewed a successful relationship as one that didn't have conflict when I realized it's so not true. And actually it's how you navigate it. And so we navigate conflict really, really well. That's amazing.

For when, yeah, for when those things come up for either of us we bring it to the table and it's one of those things to just yeah exactly and you have to own these things and own them about yourself and it's that balancing act between owning what's yours but then also being vulnerable enough to be like this is something that I might need and I'm going to give a personal example here of something that's happened quite recently for me in that I'm very tactile as a person that's my way of knowing that I feel safe that's my way of expressing love if people are into the concept of love languages mine is most definitely touch and so is my partners and you know it means that we are very expressive in that way with one another but

then when we're in social situations with other people of course naturally that kind of stops a bit because I don't know whether naturally is the white word but because of other people and you your attention shifts from each other to others yeah and a different sort of awareness and of course like the way couples behave in private is very different to the way they are in public a lot of the time. And what I realized with me is that, and I didn't really acknowledge it, but we had a situation recently where that happened. And I was less familiar with the people we were with. I guess I felt a little bit unsafe. And my partner had said, he was like afterwards, and I had no idea at the time that anything had happened. But afterwards, he was like afterwards and I had no idea at the time that anything had happened

but afterwards he was like I felt like you were a bit over familiar with someone else and I kind of was thinking like what that was not what I was trying to do at all and as we kind of worked through it I actually realized that when I'm feeling and it's something that I've always done but I've never realized when I'm with my partner and I'm feeling unsafe in those social situations I will then try and establish like a connection with someone else and it's not a romantic thing or anything like that but it's to give me a feeling of belonging and safety being wanted yeah that I'm not able to express to my partner at the time because I don't feel that I can express those needs because I see it as a weakness I see my I guess social anxiety or shyness as a weakness and so I overcompensate by being extra outgoing and like forming a quick connection with someone else and it's so it's such a like

default setting of mine it's not a conscious thing that I'm thinking about it's just something I've always done. And so for us to be able to have a conversation about it that was, you know, we both had heightened feelings around it. For me to actually say, actually, in those situations, I need perhaps a little bit more reassurance and like touch occasionally to know that I'm safe and that we're still as we are. And that was really hard for me to say because I felt like, yeah, I could feel the emotion coming up as I spoke it because it's something that obviously I didn't feel okay with about myself and to kind of own that. And then also, you know, for him to own his part. And so it was like a really interesting,

it was a really interesting conversation. And yeah. I mean, it sounds incredibly powerful because in being able to communicate and being heard without someone kind of jumping in with a judgment or a position like, no, that's not what you did but allowing you to explain your understanding of what was going on for you and to have the space

together for him to have the honesty and say well this is what happened to me this is what I felt when I saw that and so when you could fully understand each other's perspectives, something shifts because you're not thrown into your old trope of I'm being abandoned. It's like, oh, this is what was happening. So when I'm at the party, I'm feeling a bit insecure because we don't touch each other. Now you kind of update your database as a couple that he can come and give you a little hug or, you know, come and say hi. Or that it's safe for me to go and hug him. Or go and hug him or whatever. And in some ways, that is a perfect example of what happened in these multi-generation families that I work with in my new book, because everybody had the story that they were telling themselves about what was going on, but they had never fully heard each other's stories. By hearing each other's perspectives, understandings, a bigger picture, a different narrative came where there was so much more compassion, the word that you used before, there was a compassionate lens. Oh, that's what it is. You know, it wasn't that you were angry because da da da, but

that was your pain. And so then there was more trust and also more capacity for missteps. Because before there had been very brittle. And so when someone was cross with each other, it was quite frazzled and the of electric, like, ouch. And now it was like, okay, there was a bigger base and security of attachment, really, and trust. Yeah. You know, it's lovely, this idea of kind of building up that trust muscle. it's lovely this idea of kind of building up that trust muscle and it does come through each time we navigate those conversations and we have more evidence that we can you know repair like you say fracture and then repair and then I think that that is a way that we can also sort of redefine

our attachment style because we we lean into a more secure and it's not something that's going to happen after one conversation it's going to be lots of of little moments just you know that give us a bit of a reprogramming you know from the audience of the podcast and stuff when they talk to me about their relationships I think this is something that they struggle with because and it's not you know it's not their fault but men often view sort of vulnerability as synonymous with weakness and therefore these conversations they um they don't have the conversations that women have together do you know what I mean right when we're in private we are each other's therapists men don't really have that luxury some men. But, you know, when you talked about languages of love, I think

languages of love is a very useful one to look at when you look at men and women. And one of the things, you know, again, in my book, there was a gay couple who were adopting a child. who were adopting a child. We make assumptions about men that are kind of very gender-oriented and we make assumptions about parents that are very gender-oriented. And they found, you know, the research shows that when a male gay couple adopts a child, their oxytocin levels increase and their sensitivity to the child crying and the noise increases when they are the primary carer so it equals those of women so their biology changes yeah i i find that this really fascinating because i i spoke to someone recently about it how um nurture or culture or society

informs our biology and so actually you know it kind of echoes what you just mentioned about how these rigid ideas of what men and women are like are more just to do with the societal programming of what we think they should be versus yeah i agree and you know genetics gives us a blueprint but the propensity and the outcome of that blueprint is very influenced by the environment we're born into um and i think we understand that more and more now and so one of the things that we looked at was epigenetics and trauma being transferred from generation to generation through the genetics, through the womb. And we do know that for two generations, if someone has had a very extreme traumatic

experience like the Holocaust or 9-11 or being in a war or, you know, those terrible events, that their children have higher levels of cortisol. But that isn't a predictor of the outcome because it will depend on their environment and how that plays out, whether they are more wired to be on code red or not, depending on the type of parenting and the environment they're in so nothing is for sure nothing is one and one equals two yeah okay well to go into that a little bit because it's something that i'm very fascinated by because i think a lot of people are in this constant state of fight or flight and it's kind of become normalized in society because we live in such a busy, fast paced world and people just have a coffee and just keep going. But it manifests in the body, in insomnia and all these ways.

And what has your experience been on people that have like unresolved trauma that's either their own or you know passed down through through their family because it's obviously not always something that can be figured out in a traditional therapy sense and by that I mean I don't know if it can always be talked through because like we said before if it's stored in the body and there's a lot of resistance there and it's not actually fully acknowledged how can people how can people navigate that well i mean the treatment that i use for that is attachment informed emdr eye movement desensitization reprocessing okay that's actually something that i've only just learned about in the last i don't know two months i wasn't familiar with it before but now that I'm learning a bit more about trauma and understanding that, and for people that don't know, would you be able to

explain what EMDR is? So it stands for eye movement desensitization reprocessing. And it works on the, that our operating system is to integrate and process and adapt, that we are naturally adaptive, but a traumatic event or traumatic epigenetic experience in our bodies or traumatic childhood of massive sort of insecurity is stored in the neural networks of our amygdala. And so that switches on our autonomic nervous system, our sympathetic and parasympathetic to code red, so that we're on a high alert, as you talked about, you know, all of the time, so anything can really kind of ignite it. And when, of course, when you're in code red, your neofrontal cortex, your capacity to think and

cognate and reflect and make sense and have a narrative goes offline. Trauma trumps logic and it has no sense of time. So what EMDR does through the eye movement, through the bilateral movement of someone's eyes. So when I did it yesterday, I do it by moving my hands left to right and they follow them with their eyes or on zoom I do it with tapping where you cross your arms and you tap is it connects the right brain with the left brain so the distress is released from the body and the left brain can start cognating thinking like I was in danger then, but it was in the past. And this is what happened to me. And you through it have a full narrative.

And so it doesn't, you can never take away what happened, but it releases you from the high alert traumatic response to what happened. And that can happen over a number, you know, a large number of sessions or in some simple event, you know, no trauma is simple, but a single event trauma. I've worked with people in three sessions and they no longer wake at night. They're no longer ignited. One of my kind of things that I think is important is the language that we use. So I think there can be a tendency to pathologize feelings. So my concern, and sometimes with some of the language around

trauma, around triggering, around depression, anxiety, is that people use those terms to describe high levels of feeling. So, you know, if you feel very worried, you may then say that you have an anxiety disorder. This is a very important acknowledgement to make, yeah. And that if you are really scared, you say that you're traumatized. And there is a very big difference between a traumatic experience or, you know, very big difference between a traumatic experience or, you know, an adverse child experiences that you have trauma to being very worried about things. Yeah. I actually, last summer, I mean, or maybe it was the summer before, a group of, you know, my closest girlfriends and we're all, we're all very into this space and this stuff and there's three

of us that are like you know might take off if we didn't if we didn't have someone to pull us back down to earth and then the fourth is a bit more grounded and anyway we were all sort of staying in this house over the course of a week and the fourth one eventually was just like right the word trigger is banned from this household she was like not allowed to use it anymore because it does and I do think we are sort of like hypersensitized as a society at the moment and there's there's so much progression in these conversations but it can also go a little bit too far and you see that spilling out into social media and stuff when people are like, you can't say this, you can't say that. And also, like you just said, to acknowledge that actually, when we're just

having an intense emotional experience, not to liken it to trauma, but then also... Because can I just add why? Also for yourself is that if you start telling yourself you're traumatized, you keep, you ramp up the emotion that you're feeling. That neural pathway. That neural pathway and your anxiety levels increase. If you tell yourself I'm traumatized, you kind of reverberate and become, you know, out of control. Whereas if you say to yourself, I've had a horrible conversation with my boss. I'm really upset. And I'm also really furious.

And so emotions are transmitters of information. So you name your emotions. You voice them. You express them. You release them. And then as you do that, they subside. express them you release them and then as you do that they subside because if you keep feeding them you're just throwing yourself into the fire you know you're putting oil on the problem so to go back to when you if someone's having a heightened emotional experience and let's say

they are in a state of fight or flight that's become their sort of natural disposition. What, and then they're trying to unearth or like figure these things out and then think that there might be trauma there. How are they able to better manage that or actually know what the trauma is? Because of course, if it is something that's generational, like you might not know. I mean, that's an enormous question. So I think, you know, the first step is to, with a friend or with a therapist, to look back at their history, and kind of even do a timeline of what were the significant events in my life? What was the impact on me of those significant events? When do I first remember feeling kind of really scared or out of control or threatened? And also, as I, you know, I say

in the book is to look up and see, you know, what, you know, what one of the things of transgenerational trauma is understanding that what isn't the pain that isn't processed and allowed in one generation passes down to the next generation until someone's prepared to feel the pain. So do a genogram, find out the stories, who died by suicide, or was there a baby that died? Or was there a huge family rift about the chest of drawers? You know, what happened? And so the more information you have, then you begin to have a narrative for yourself. you know this idea of elaine aaron is you know highly sensitive people hsps that some of us have just born with a thinner layer of skin than others and that that is a gift as well it is by no means all bad because you have more sensitivity you pick up more you take in more you often have deeper relationships you're you know there's a lot of gifts that it brings but if you are born sensitive or that you have this thing where you you kind of ignite very easily doing the behaviors that

wind your system down that you know when i talk with plants i talk about you know bring the gears down circuit break your your cycle to go higher and higher and more and more panicked of physiological exercise yoga breathing journaling feeling safe in your body having a hug sitting around the kitchen table cooking yourself food buying yourself flowers doing things that intentionally soothe you kind of being aware of drinking eight cups of coffee a day and five biscuits because you know i i need comfort but that way it'll just make you feel much worse or self-medicating with alcohol drugs sex you know all of the things so allowing the feelings to come through i think journaling is really helpful and then you know if you really i would see a therapist and find out if you had

adverse childhood experiences in my at the end of my book there's a adverse childhood experience questionnaire there's 10 questions and you mark one and if you you know if you have a number of those that give you a number you're very likely to have had childhood trauma. And then I would personally, I would get EMDR. EMDR. Yeah, I'm hearing great things about it at the moment. And just before we go, there was something that I wanted to ask you about in terms of going back to the relationship we have with our parents, because especially going through a Saturn return, when someone, it's often a moment when someone acknowledges that perhaps they played more of a parent role when they parented their parents

very common yes when they had like a sort of caretaker role and it was sort of thrust upon them and and then they have that sort of reaction to it like we mentioned before about blaming or feeling that anger which is a necessary thing but. But I would love to touch on that because I think that that's something our listeners would find very useful because I know a couple of people have messaged me about it. When we've parented our parents, the balance of power is obviously tipped in the wrong way. And so that influences our relationship with power. And again, in my touchstones, I talk about power dynamics.

You will always have power dynamics in the relationship. But if you have been the one who has had to be over mature and take responsibility, like sort your mother out, calm her down or your father. And you're likely to carry that into your work relationships, your friendships and your partner relationships, because that will be the only operating system that you know. You have. So that means that psychologically there's quite, so the first step is always

awareness am I always fixing everybody else's problem and then somehow I'm unbelievably pissed off because when I need help nobody is helping me at all and that could be a very good kind of question to yourself is that what happens to me am I really bad at asking for help? Am I really bad at naming what my needs are and getting my needs met? Do I self-soothe by always sorting everybody else's problems? You know, in Every Family Has a Story, one of my big messages, what you don't face, you can't fix. And so until you begin to face that this is your operating system and it isn't your fault but only you can sort this out there's nobody else who can do this for you you may want your parents to fix you or friends to fix you but actually and you and it's never as simple as fix

it's adapt and shift and change isn't it um so that would be my first message that's fascinating and what about for when it goes the other way when you've been over parented well then you have codependence often and not interdependence and it's very hard to separate often and you may not be very robust because if your parent has jumped in and done your homework when you've been scared or talked to your teacher for you or they always organize all your travel or pay off your debt or whatever they do then when those things happen you don't have the kind of tools inside your body of I know how to do that you go oh oh help and you turn back to your parent it's like so you haven't really got again an operating system that allows you to you know life is difficult we are always going to face challenges you know where you have

people you have difficulty where you're going to get shited at where you're going to lose your job or you know we've all lived through two years of a pandemic it's been very complex so in some ways if our parents over protect us and over parent us they don't give us the sense of agency and an innate sense of robustness that I can handle this. I can manage this. Yeah. And it sends, not intentionally, but it does also sort of send a message to the child they're not capable. They're not equipped to handle the world. Yeah. And resilience. I mean, we have no control over the first arrow of what happens to us. We have no control over the first arrow of what happens to us. But the thing that predicts our outcome of whatever happens to us is our response to what happens to us.

And so if through over parenting, we have never dealt with what happens to us, it's always been taken away from us and done for us. We have no way of dealing with these things. And we need those experiences. We do. To know that you can pick yourself up, unfortunately. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. Julia, thank you so much.

If there's anything else you want to add for our listeners? Well, I'd love them to find me on Instagram. I'd love them to look at my book, Every Family Has a Story, How We Inherit Love and Loss. It is on Amazon. It's in all the independent bookshops. Well, thank you so much for joining us again. It's been a pleasure to have you back.

I hope you will join us again in the future. I most certainly will, Kagi. Thank you for a really, really lovely conversation. I always love having conversations with Juliet. I think that she is so wonderful. And you know, it's so important to actually consider that even though our family members are just perhaps mum, dad, brother, sister, whatever it might be, they have their own story and their own history. or whatever it might be, they have their own story and their own history. And so I think it's a really important way of kind of reframing our perspective on family dynamics. If you would like to find out more about Julia, you can head to her Instagram at Julia Samuel MBE.

She also has an app, just search for Griefworks. And of course, her new book, Every Family Has a Story, is out now, and I highly suggest getting it. Saturn Returns is a Feast Collective production. This episode was produced by Laura Gallop, and the exec producer is Kate Taylor. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, you are not alone goodbye