Bill: Well, hello again, Marty, Dr. Martin Kettelhut, PhD. Hi, Bill. Oh, here we go again, another episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching Podcast. And today, we're going to talk about adult children. And maybe we should start by talking about why are we talking about adult children and what does that have to do with leadership My initial thoughts about that are, first of all, when we talk about adult children, what we're referring to is adults, obviously, who, when they were children, grew up in the way I refer to it as in dysfunctional environments.

Bill: There is a 12 step program. That's been around since the late 70s, early 80s that's based on the original 12 step programs, adult children of alcoholics. And then later on, they changed it to adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. And there's a big history there that anybody that's interested can learn about, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

Bill: I want to talk about The laundry list.

Marty: Before you do. I think it's helpful. Why the term adult children what that's referring to is those conversations, those behaviors that got stuck when we were children and now here we are as adults still acting and thinking from those same patterns that were established as a child.

Marty: We have, there are areas in which we haven't grown and so we're adults acting from childhood traumas.

Bill: Right. Strategies that we formed in childhood to be able to cope with and survive are dysfunctional environments.

Marty: Right.

Bill: I believe that the 12 step group got its name, though, because a group of allotenes aged out and they weren't ready to be done with the community that they had formed to support each other.

Bill: And allotine is somebody that's a teenager of some in a family where there's an alcoholic present. And usually, so there was AA. Was, there still is, Alcoholics Anonymous, then there's Al Anon, people that love alcoholics and then Alateen, teenagers that are in families where there's an alcoholic, whether they're still drinking or still alive or still or sober or not.

Bill: So, children of alcoholics were in Alateen. Now, adult children, there wasn't a program for that, so they created and called it adult children. But as you say, it makes perfectly good sense still that we would refer to them as adult children because they're adults. But responding from strategies formed in childhood.

Marty: There's so much to say about this. I would think that to a certain extent, I have, IFS would have to acknowledge we're all adult children.

Bill: Yeah, yeah, exactly. No doubt about it, which is why internal family systems is really taken off in the 12 step recovery meetings, especially ACA or ACOA, it's also referred to as.

Bill: Sometimes in codependence anonyms too.

Marty: I got a little taste for this last comment on adults, children in a transformational program I did many years ago, where we did, we created an autobiography and so there was a page for each year of your life. And there were certain things you wanted to capture, like a picture of yourself from that year, things that you knew you were saying at that time, et cetera major events.

Marty: And you started to see like how certain things I do now like they started when I was five like that's a five year old conversation, right? So you can date the child like parts of you, you can date them like, yeah, that reaction that I have to authority.

Marty: That's a 3 year old conversation, right? So, In that sense, we can see and explain that we are adults doing living as children.

Bill: Which takes us right to the laundry list. In the early years when they were trying to say, okay, so who we are, who are we now? We're no longer teenagers, and most of us aren't even living at home anymore.

Bill: We're adults living our adult lives and noticing that we have some problems. We're having some problems adulting. And they found that they had a lot of things in common. So they began to capture what are the common things that we're talking about, the struggles that we have. In life as adults having been raised in an alcoholic families and we're not talking again I just want to point out that we're not talking just about alcoholic families where there's dysfunction for any reason Right and to some degree like you pointed out with ifs We all did to some degree grow up in dysfunctional environments simply because we live In the societies that we live in at the time that we live.

Bill: There's a whole lot of dysfunction going on

Marty: Well, and I think just by way of information, the second most common cause of dysfunction families besides alcoholism is mental illness.

Bill: Is that right? I didn't know that. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense.

Marty: Nobody knows what to do with it and so dysfunction arises.

Bill: Well and mental illness and then there's physical illness when there's chronic illness in a family that creates a ton of dysfunction or where members of the family don't feel like they even have a right to have feelings

Bill: and be for their friends who have freedom and don't have to take care of, let's say, a sick parent, or live in families where there's one child who needs special care because they're a sick person, and the child that doesn't need that special care now feels left out and, you know, feels guilty about wanting more attention than they're getting and feels put upon or resentful because they're expected to take care of the special needs child who they secretly resent as you say, there's a lot of dysfunction that goes on and maybe it circles right back around to mental illness, which includes, I would say addiction and adaptation for trauma and probably for a response to this kind of dysfunction that we're talking about right now. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also a lot of mental illness. There's a lot. I understand that there's a lot of mental illness that is physiological, at its core, expert in that area by any means.

Bill: But there's also. Some crossover and mix of adaptation. I thought we could take a look at some of these. Now, what does this have to do with leadership? This is not your typical leadership coaching. This is a very atypical conversation if you're talking about leadership.

Bill: I wonder if we can tie these together. Why is it important that we acknowledge and recognize that many of us are walking around as adults, but responding to life as if we're children. What does that have to do with leadership? What are your first thoughts about that?

Marty: Well, my 1st thought about it is that, leadership is a kind of relationship. It's 1 in which we get empowered just to put it in the simplest way I can think of, it could be like the Christ child is born in Bethlehem, and we're all empowered like that. A child will lead them right?

Marty: That's an example. The relationship that we have to the baby Jesus, or it could be on a soccer team that somebody sees that the defense is weak down in the left hand end of the field. And so shoots the ball down there as a leader gets the ball into that area. If the person who's in a position to lead or the people in position to lead are caught up in these childhood conversations, then they're not going to see the way forward. They're going to be stuck in the, in resolving these personal issues

Bill: and

Marty: not focused on the group's future.

Bill: Well said. I often will say caught up in solving problems that no longer even exist.

Bill: Yeah, because they're from the past. I always am oriented to the internal family systems, of course. And one of the terminal terms that we use in IFS is self leadership. And so what this laundry list and what the adaptations from dysfunctional environments growing up in dysfunctional environments has to do for me with leadership is that the best leaders.

Bill: I believe are the ones who have developed the ability to lead themselves from the inside out, and then therefore have the acuity and the capacity to be able to lead others from that same source of resourceful wisdom from all of those resources that are only available to us when we can tap into who are, who we truly are.

Bill: Through authentic self, rather than those adaptive children or those parts of ourselves that are still burdened and incomplete with the past, which is why IFS can be so powerful for leadership coaching. So I thought we could take a look at some of these. I'm looking over here to my left at my split screen, and I'm looking on the ACA website, adultchildren. org, under literature, there's a link for the laundry list, 14 traits of an adult child of, it says of an alcoholic, again, it goes on to say, and dysfunctional families. So number one is we became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures. This is what early on. They all agreed. Yeah, those of us that are in this ACA program, adult children of alcoholics, have this in common.

Bill: It's most of us are isolated. We have a tendency to isolate and we do so because we're afraid of people and we're afraid of authority figures. And when it comes to leadership, if that's still alive in someone, how in the world could they possibly lead? It'd be too risky.

Marty: I could tell a good story.

Marty: I was, This is like, 10 years ago. I was working with a business partner to fill a group coaching program. Or a series of them and we hired a woman to basically do the marketing for these programs and to kind of manage us. So we could focus on the content, the curriculum, you know, being with the clients and this woman that we hired to do the marketing. She was very authoritative. Right? She knew her stuff. She had all this experience. She was very self confident and everything. And I got intimidated. I got concerned actually wasn't when I started, I sat her down to tell her about this so that I could complete it in front of her and not carry it into our future together.

Marty: And when I did, as I was talking, I realized, you know, I'm actually afraid of you that like other people that have. In my childhood, who were the authority figures that you're going to let me down. That you're not going to see what I need. You're not going to hear me and you're going to do random things that, you know, not having listened to my needs.

Marty: Right. And so she was like, wow, that's really interesting. But just to, you know, that gave us the ability that then she was able to share her vulnerability. She was actually whipping up the authoritativeness because she was

Bill: intimidated by us coaches. I see, right? She's trying to level the playing field by bringing her area of expertise.

Marty: So we were both being children. She's being in her five year old competitiveness and I'm in my two year old fear of dad. So we, but we were able to talk it out and we became, we realized like we really just need to get to know each other better. You're off there in your marketing silo.

Marty: I'm off here in my coaching silo. That was a bad assumption. So we came together and learned more about each other and we went on to work successfully together.

Bill: You acknowledged recently I wrote a, an article and included a list of seven steps to take to repair relationship rupture. So in your story, I hear that you implemented and used a lot of those steps that I identified and one of them is acknowledged that there's a problem acknowledged. There's, there's a rupture here. There's, there's something going on. There's a problem in this relationship. The second one is to tell the truth about what you're experiencing. Maybe not the second one, but one of the things that I just heard you say is you told the truth about what you were experiencing.

Bill: And when you did that, in order to do that, you had to be vulnerable. You had to tell the truth to someone who intimidated you. Took a lot of courage to do that.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: And when you do that, did that, it invited her to respond in kind. One of the things that we say in IFS is that self, our true authentic self, with all the resources, Responds and reacts to self and another person.

Bill: If you show up authentically and openly with me. I feel safe to do the same thing with you. However, if I were to come at you with defensiveness or blame or some sort of adaptive survival strategy, I'm going to invite those parts of you to respond in like kind.

Marty: Sure.

Bill: Exactly. Yeah.

Marty: And so just to get back to the leadership piece, she wasn't leading.

Marty: She was showing off. I wasn't leading. I was scared to death. There was no leadership between the two of us. There was no leadership going on. We were both, we were just like spinning in our little worlds. It wasn't until after we cleared all of this out that we could get on the same page and work for the same goal.

Bill: That's a beautiful story. Great, great example, both of the problem with not addressing this characteristic that common, that is common to adult children, and then how to address it, both showed up in your example. That's perfect. We've got time for maybe one or two more of these 14, and I just recommend that this is interesting to the listener of this podcast, That you go to adultchildren.

Bill: org, look under literature and find this laundry list and go through it and maybe do a self test on it and so this, let's just go to the second one here and see what comes up. We became approval seekers and lost our identity. In the process. I love that. That's I love that because it is so true.

Bill: The adaptive survival strategy of getting your approval in whatever way that I possibly can.

Marty: And how is it that you lose your identity

Bill: in the process? I can tell a story. The first thing that pops into my mind, it's not a well thought out story, but I can recollect being, you know, playing this out in my life.

Bill: I was 19 years old, and I had just graduated from high school, was in the grocery business. Having decided not to go to college because my girlfriend lived in the town where I lived, and I was going to have to live in a different town if I was going to go to college. Even though I had been accepted and was going to go, I fell in love.

Bill: So I stayed and went full time in the grocery business and was hanging out with a bunch of guys that were two, three, four years older than I was. All of these guys had dramatically different lifestyles, values than I did. But because I was around them for those 40 hours a week, plus then we started going out to the bars in Montana at that time, the drinking age was 18.

Bill: So I was able at 19 years old to go out to the bar, shoot, pull, dance, drink, do all the things that they were doing. I pretty much became a part of their culture. So my beliefs changed. My attitudes toward others towards women towards gender All of it changed according to their belief system because I wanted to be included and so I noticed that when I began to talk the way they talked, do the things that they did enjoy the things that they enjoyed water skiing was one of them I was scared to death of the water.

Bill: I was scared to death that I would drown. So I never went into the water, but they water skied. So I became a water skier to get their approval. And yes, I absolutely lost my identity in the process. Not that I had it before. I think I'd already lost it before I met these guys, but I didn't know who I was.

Bill: And this is when it really brought it to my attention. I have five sisters, three still surviving, but one of them said to me one day, You are just like Tom. What do you mean I'm just like Tom? I was offended by that, of course, the offense or the defense that I experienced now I understand to be, Oh, no, I'm giving away my secret.

Bill: She's actually able to see right through my act here. And I said, what do you mean? She said, you, you laugh exactly like him. And I knew immediately that she was right. I felt caught.

Marty: Well, I can also see. If what person is up to is seeking approval of others, by nature, they're following, there's no leadership in that.

Marty: That's a following action, not a leading action.

Bill: You gotta admit, there's a lot of leaders out there are, that are leading with maybe it's a hidden agenda of getting approval. Totally. Totally. Directors. Of the stockholders of their supervisor of whoever they're answering to.

Marty: Sure. I mean, that's we've seen this with the speaker of the house getting caught up and trying to please all these different factions and then losing the job because he doesn't have the votes, and that there's that's and I stand by what I said that's not leadership.

Marty: It's following it's followership instead.

Bill: Yeah, so the it's the popular opinion that leads in that case. Yeah, not the principles, not the values, not the precisely the overall objective of whatever leadership position is responsible to accomplish.

Marty: Right.

Bill: Well, that's, that's about all we have time for. We started a little late today.

Bill: We both have cut off times here. This is going to be a fairly short episode, but I hope that I've enjoyed it. And I think that we could probably go a couple more hours. If we had the time just to go through this laundry list, I don't know. We always say this. Maybe we'll pick it up again later, but I doubt it, but I just want to encourage the reader to, to go check out the laundry list.

Bill: And if you notice that you are an adult who's having, struggling a bit with adulting. of course, I would enjoy having a conversation with you, but know that there is a 12 step program that is organized around helping people like you and me to recover from, uh, living our lives as the adaptive children, as Terry Reel, the author of the book, Us, would say.

Bill: We live our lives as the adaptive children that we used to be. Rather than the authentic wise adults that we are. Beautiful. I hesitate to say anything more after that as always. Marty enjoyed our conversation. And until next time, take care.