Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns (And How to Finally Break Free) | Kati Morton - EP 781

25:49Right? So if I just try to curb that behavior where I'm like, don't do everything just perfectly, turn it in, Katie, send it, send the email. But that doesn't actually undo the main reason why I feel that urge, if that makes sense. It's like, I need to pull it out from the root. And if we understand that blueprint, that's like seeing the root, seeing where it grew from so that we can actually dig down and we can rip it out. I don't know if that makes sense or if that's too, It makes complete sense. So my father was very much like your father. He grew up in a very poor home in Detroit. And I remember him telling me stories that the first car he bought, it actually made me think of Fred Flintstone, didn't even have a floor in it.

26:30He went to the hardware store back in the day and bought plywood. And that's what he ended up fastening to his car. So his car would actually have a floor. But when I was growing up, my dad probably traveled 250 50 days out of the year. And I remember there were long periods of time when I didn't get to see him. So when he would show up for high school events, it was really a treat to see him there. Same for me. I'd be so excited if my dad got to come. And he'd always say he could come, but then work would hold him over and he wouldn't be able to fly home. And it's tricky when your parents are away.

27:01In this chapter, you bring up that you eventually went to see a therapist because you started to see a repeated relationship pattern that you experienced with your father, where you were choosing men who didn't show up and it became predictably familiar. How often do you see that pattern happen to the people that you work with? All the time, in so many different ways too. That's why it's important for us to realize what our blueprint is and what things happened in our life. I also think it's helpful, or for me, I should say, it was helpful to look at my grandmother and my mother and how the women interacted in my family too, because that shows the way that women's behavior was modeled for me.

27:40And all of that, whether people want to admit it or not, there's a reason a lot of us say, oh my God, I sound just like my father or my mother, or I'm doing the same thing because we keep acting out in that same way. We have that blueprint and we go out into the world and we look for somebody else who feels very comfortable. Notice I didn't say healthy, but they feel comfortable because it's what we're used to. And so even as uncomfortable as it was growing up, having my dad not there, that became familiar. That became what I was used to. I knew what it was like to have someone let me down and to say they were going to show up and not.

28:15And so unfortunately, yeah, I dated a lot of guys who would be like, yeah, I'll be there. And then they wouldn't. And I would get so pissed and be so frustrated. But as my therapist said, it's mainly with myself because I picked a partner who couldn't show up for me again because that's what I grew up with. Katie, I was talking months ago to a friend of mine, Lori Santos, who teaches at Yale. And we were talking about this course that she teaches, which has become the most popular course in Yale's history. But she created this course because she kept looking at the students on campus. And at the time, she had the privilege of actually living on campus, and she described them to me as ducks.

28:50You could see them walk around campus, but underneath the water, their feet were just going so fast. And she was saying that this was a result of perfectionism. They were having to perform all the time because they were trying to earn their worth, which is something that you write about in chapter two. Why is inconsistent attention or approval so tied to how children learn love and how it must be deserved through compliance, excellence, achievement, etc.? And the truth about it is we, as adults, we look back on our childhood with all of this intelligence, all of this experience, and all of that is something the only time could teach, right?

29:33We didn't know that when we were younger. And it's hard for us to remember what it was like to be six, seven, eight years old. And the reason I bring that up is because when we're young and And we have a parent who is inconsistent like my dad and your dad. They worked away from home. They'd come back. We'd be so excited. I remember running out to my dad's truck being like, he's home. Oh, my God. I was so excited. I wanted him there all the time. My little kid brain didn't understand that my dad had no say over his work schedule. He signed up for this job. He didn't want to lose his job. I also didn't understand the fact that he believed it was his biggest role to provide, right?

30:16I didn't understand that either. And so what children do is when we don't understand why the love or the attention is inconsistent, we make up our own story with the information that we have, which is usually about ourselves. So even if our parents are around, but they have a stressful job, so they're not really present with us, we don't understand work stress. We don't understand all the things that adults have to manage. All we know is its impact on us. And we take that information and we try to fill in the spots in our story with what we do know, which is our role. And that's why children blame themselves for divorce a lot.

30:55that's why I thought that if I just worked harder if I was first in band if I got the lead in the play if I was on varsity team at soccer or softball or basketball all the sports I played I thought that then my dad would come home because it'd be so attractive to him I even this is I haven't thought about this in a long time but I actually told my dad John that I was going to try to I'm going to try out for the football team because my dad loved football so much I was like I'll be the kicker kickers just come out and go back no one's going to hit me I'll be fine. He was all tickled about it. And I actually thought in my little kid brain that I'm the kicker for the football team.

31:31My dad won't want to miss any of those games. And so I use it as an example because we as kids fill it in with what we have control over and what we know, which is ourselves. And so that's why we often believe that this inconsistent attention is our fault. And what we can do to get it back is to work harder, is to be the perfect perfect child, to do everything in a certain way. And that's why I said it shows up all sorts of different ways, depending on how we were raised and what we internalized. And so it's important for us to maybe try, if you can, it helps to have a picture of yourself as a little kid.

32:09Think back to what it was like then, like how did he or she think and what did you expect or what were you bummed about? And is that why you think you have to do it perfectly? What were you hoping to gain by being a perfect child, consider those thought processes because that's the why behind it is because we didn't have all that information. We didn't understand why our parent wasn't there all the time. We just filled it in with what we knew. And unfortunately, that usually means we make it our fault. It's our fault and we have to do something to change it. When I think about worth, I think about motivation, especially intrinsic motivation, because I think the two are linked.

32:46And to me, self-determination theory by Richard Ryan and Edward Deasy probably is the best science that there is out there that looks at intrinsic motivation. And they really look at three things, autonomy, mastery, and then relatedness. I want to ask you a question about autonomy. When you think back to the child that you were and the child that so many of us get influenced into becoming, how does that shape our autonomy and our ability to make the choices that we do? It shapes a lot of it. I guess I would say that when we're children, we going back to that blueprint, we have certain beliefs early on, as we were learning along the way about what it means to be another person in our family.

33:29We also learn what it means to, to be like on our own as we reach our teen years is when we try to push back against our family and become more independent. And depending on how our family reacts to that or supports that, that can affect our ability to act on our own, to be autonomous, to feel like we can do things outside of that. And there's so many factors here, but just depending on the way that we were raised, if it was okay or not okay to do something on your own or to push back against your family, maybe do something that's different, depending on how much support or lack of we received, that can definitely affect our ability to think on our own and make decisions on our own.

34:13I even share, I think it stayed in the book, some of the stories got pulled by my editor, but one of the stories I share from my community is that she was raised in a very tight-knit, enmeshed family. And so she didn't really believe that she could go on her own and do her own things. She felt like she needed the support of her family and her mom and parents never really wanted her or her sisters to move away. and the one that did they talked trash on she doesn't know what family means I can't believe she'd move away and that really affected this member of my community as she shared because she never really she doesn't even feel like she could take a big trip to Europe because her parents wouldn't want her to and she never went away for college even though she really wanted to make that choice and do that and I think in general a lot of the ways that our family interacts with us and the messages we receive either overtly or inadvertently, we internalize that and it shapes a lot of our independence and autonomy and how able we feel to make the best decision for ourselves.

35:13One of the reasons I'm asking this is that as I went through my life, and it sounds like you and I had very similar upbringings, I discovered that the more visible my achievement became, the more the architecture of my life began to mask a sense of authorship. And what I mean by this was the primary mechanism of this drift is this concept of the next logical step. Success presents a sequence of choices that appear optimal to the people who are observing your life from the outside, while it remains fundamentally unchosen by the participant. And that's where I was going with my question. Your answer was fine as well, but I really think this is the paradox of autonomy.

35:52It's a state kind of where we're most busy when we feel less free. And I know when I was feeling exhausted, that's exactly how I was feeling. Does that relate to you as well? Yes. I've felt a lot of my life as an autopilot. And I know that sounds maybe crazy to people from the outside. Like you said, it looks like, oh, but this trajectory is good. And I even have friends that are like, well, you're so successful. That's so great. And I'm like, but did I really choose to do that thing? it just was the thing that was presented and logically it makes sense but it might not be the thing that I really wanted it's like that there's a huge disconnect sometimes between what we really feel like if we took the time because I don't even know if I took the time to decide whether or not that was what I wanted to do versus is that just what's presented I even have friends and I don't know if this resonates with you John but I have a lot of friends that'll say I don't know how I ended up in HR, but I got that my first job.

36:50And then I just stayed there because I just kept getting promoted and I was making a decent living. And a lot of us can do that almost live by default. I had a video I put out a couple of months ago about how not making decisions is a decision. It's like you're living by default, just whatever the next thing is, if this is okay, you want me to okay, sure. And we life just happens to us versus what I think we all desire, or at least I desire, is a more empowered place, operating in my life from a more empowered place where I'm able to make choices that best align with what I want versus feeling like, well, that's the next best thing.

37:27That's what people expect of you. That is the next logical step in this path that you're on. And yeah, I think that deciding to be an active participant in our life versus being a little bit more autopiloty is how we curate the life we love versus waking up at least and thinking, where'd the time go? What is this? What am I doing? Katie, you don't know this, but I wrote a whole book on it. So the first chapter of the book, I call The Mission Angler. I live here in Tampa Bay and I have a lot of friends who fish. And the people who love to go out there and do deep sea fishing, which is kind of funny because here in Tampa, you can go out 40 miles and the water is probably only 40 feet deep.

38:08But typically, they're planning for days, if not weeks in advance. They're looking at tidal shifts, what fish are in season, where they want to go, etc. But how many of us apply that same discipline to our lives? Not many. And that kind of gets into self-discrepancy theory, where people end up living the life that they feel they could. And that gets into self-discrepancy theory, where people end up living the life that they feel they should instead of the ideal life that they could build. And I think most of us live in this gap between those two things. The way I refer to this in my book, Passion Struck, is that when most people hear the word autopilot, we think we're pointing the plane in the right direction.

38:51It's taking us to where we want to go, but I prefer to use the analogy that more of us are living what I call a pinball life. Because I think what so many of us are doing, instead of learning how to play the game of pinball and taking control, is that we become the pinball in the game. And we're just bouncing through life aimlessly, as it sends us all these different distractions and signals, never taking control of our trajectory. And so we stay, as you say, in the state of should. And that's what happened to me. And I think we're best positioned to serve the people that we once were. And that's exactly what happened.

39:24It came out of a stint working for Arthur Anderson. The company collapsed because of Enron. And I really wanted to go back and get my PhD at that point in behavior science. And unfortunately, I was at a point where we just had a child and I felt I had to support modeling my father's behavior. So I kept going down this track, went back into industry. But the whole time, even though I was successful at what I did, I really didn't have a sense of meaning towards it. And so it really took some time for me to make some very intentional choices to go down the path of what I'm doing now, which is completely different.

40:01But I think what stopped so many of us and what was stopping me is you kind of see this life that you want, but it's as if you're standing on the top of Mount Everest and you see Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance and you have no idea how do I get from point A Everest to point B Kilimanjaro. Do you think that's the main stumbling point? Yes, 100%. Because some, I feel like 90 % of the time, it feels easier just to stay where you are, right? You're already at Everest. Why do I need to go to Kilimanjaro? I really would like to, and I think it's where I'm meant to be. But that's a lot of work. That's a lot of effort.

40:37And I'm not saying that all of us are like effort adverse. Both you and I are saying we overwork ourselves and we do a lot of things. But I think sometimes we're so pulled out, we're looking down on this big change. Okay, if I have to get all the way over there, that could take years. Oh, and we preemptively snuff it out versus thinking, which is something that I've been practicing myself is that instead of looking out at like, this is this big goal that I have, I have to get all the way over there. How in the world am I going to do that? And oh my God, it's so scary. and this could take so long, instead of psyching myself up and out of it, I think, okay, well, what would be the one step I could take to move me in that direction?

41:23What would be something that I could do that's honestly, some of it's very low lift. Maybe it means I send an email. Maybe it means that I start practicing or I take a little online course about this thing that I want to learn and see if I'm interested. We often get so overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what we want that we get scared. Again, going back to our earlier conversation about fear and what am I afraid of? I think a lot of us get afraid of what if I fail, right? What if it doesn't work out? But if we move our eyes away from the horizon onto Mount Kilimanjaro and we look back down at our own feet and we're like, hey, you know what I could do though?

42:01I could take two steps in that direction. And that actually is not so overwhelming. Maybe I sit down and think about it for a little bit. Maybe I catch my breath and keep going. It's those little steps, but we get so overwhelmed with the big picture thinking we have to make these drastic changes. That's the interesting thing when you learn about the nervous system, that when we try to make drastic changes, it's like New Year's resolutions, why they always fail is they're too intense. And our nervous system is wired to constantly be seeking, looking in our environment for any threat to our nervous system.

42:31Is it a threat physically? Is there a threat emotionally? When something's too scary, too overwhelming, guess what? We want to shut down. We want to freeze. We want to revert back. So us looking at Mount Kilimanjaro all the way over there is too scary. It's too much. Our nervous system is like, oh, we go into freeze or it pulls us back, right? We retreat back to our old behavior. However, if we take small steps, little things that aren't huge commitments, these aren't drastic changes, it doesn't get overwhelmed. We don't freeze. It doesn't feel because we're not making a big decision yet. We're just testing the water.

43:09It's like putting your little tippy toe just to see how cold is the ocean today. Is it warm? Could I walk a little? I could get in a little bit more, right? We're just seeing how it goes. And so if anybody out there is feeling like I have been wanting this big life or I've been wanting these things, but oh my God, I just don't think I can. It's going to take so much work and so many years and pause, breathe. Is that something that you want and you want to maybe think about it? Give yourself an opportunity to think about it and do the least resistant small little thing first, because no one says that you have to end up making all those decisions.

43:44No one says you have to go to Mount Kilimanjaro, but at least for now, we want to entertain the idea without letting ourselves freak out, essentially. If there's one thing I've learned from doing a lot of study on behavior science, it's the power of micro choices. I think so many people think that there are these large events in our life that shape their future. And they don't realize everything happens in the 10 ,000 decisions you make a day. And the more that you can subconsciously start pointing yourself in a direction that you want your life to go, the more micro choices you start making, orienting and compounding in a way that starts closing the gap.

44:21But I think we fall into this trap of thinking we need to make big change or it's never gonna happen. That's why so many New Year's resolutions fail weeks after we get into the new year. They're done by February 1st. It's too overwhelming. It's too scary. It's too much. It's not sustainable, right? I always tell my audience in general, even in the month of January, I did this little workshop on my Patreon about these small habit shifts. and I encourage them to pick the easiest thing. I was like, I want you to not pick something that you're excited to tell people about. Oh my God, I stopped drinking soda or I don't do this anymore.

44:55I don't want you to even feel any kind of ego about it. I want it to be really easy. I want you to be like, why is it even on this list? This is so simple because those small things do add up and it also builds motivation and we feel good about ourselves versus what can happen is we set these huge lofty goals and I think it has to be this one big jump. and then we feel bad about the fact that we couldn't quite make that jump. But let's build some stairs as we build our way toward that, you know? Absolutely. Katie, I want to ask you about why we can't calm down until everyone is happy. And this is a question that I myself am really interested in.

45:31A few weeks ago, I had Ingrid Clayton on the show who has a new book on fawning. And this is something that you really cover in the book as well. And for many in my audience, if you didn't catch that episode, I didn't know what fawning was. I think it's the least known trauma responses that there is out there. But in the book, you talk about a woman named Yvette, who was the strong one who never asked for help. And I was hoping maybe you could use her story as a way to explain this. Yes. Just so everybody knows what fawning is before we start talking about it in a bigger way. It's essentially what I would call an extreme form of people pleasing.

46:06When we talk about our stress response, we often talk about fight flight. I'm going to run away or I'm going to fight back. But especially when we're younger and littler, we can't do those things. We're not strong enough to fight. We aren't fast enough to run. And so we opt for another way. And that is to try to make the person so happy that they won't harm us. So I'm going to try to keep you happy so that I don't feel like I'm under threat. And I think in general, a lot of us do some form of, we call it people pleasing, like a lighter form, but fawning is very much the same. I would use them interchangeably in this case because we're so concerned.

46:47Again, what am I afraid of? I'm so afraid that someone could be upset with me, or I'm so afraid that I could lose connection, that is scarier to me than me lighting myself on fire to keep you warm. Meaning I'll just do everything in my power to make sure you're happy, to make sure that those things work for you and that you're okay. Because once you're calmed, I know I'm not under threat anymore. I can be calm. And I forget Yvette's story perfectly. I'd have to pull it up out of my book. If you want me to directly connect it, I definitely can. She was 48 years old, but she was the strong one who never asked for help.

47:29She was praised for being reliable, but could never. Oh, and then she didn't, she swing to the complete opposite. Yeah. Okay. I can tie into that. When you said that, I'm like, Oh, I don't remember. It's hard to recall. Also their names. I had to change them. So I'm like, which one is a vet? Okay. Oh, I can connect that. When it comes to a vet story, the interesting thing there is that she used to take pride in the fact that everyone could count on her, right? She would do everything people asked, essentially like lighting herself on fire to keep them warm, this extreme fawning. But instead of being able to figure out where that's coming from and find a healthy balance, because we should be reliable, right?

48:05We do want people to count on us for some things as we would want to count on them. But instead of finding that healthy middle ground, she swung to the complete opposite, where she would just say no to everything. She didn't even show up for things with her family that were really important to them. And then she almost felt even worse. Oh my God, now I'm really letting them down. It was like we're just pendulum swinging from extreme to extreme. And I think that a lot of us don't really know how to live in the middle because it's uncomfortable for us to sit with that potential conflict, right? We'd rather just people please.

48:43And instead of trying to figure out how we can keep ourselves happy and keep them happy, which is this, I would say it's like a dance that we have to do. Instead of trying to learn that new dance, we'd rather just slam the door shut, say no to everything and go to the complete opposite. And that's that story is that she really couldn't figure out how to do it healthily. She felt like it was either all or nothing. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. This fond response is something that I've really started to pay a lot more attention to because I think it's often misunderstood, although it's a pretty simple concept.

49:18Once you understand the mechanics behind it, like you said, and I think one of the biggest things people need to understand is when you're doing it, you're really causing yourself self-erasure. Yes, because you aren't showing up as authentically you. You're so busy considering what would make them happy? What would they like? How are they feeling? I've always used to call it my superpower. I can walk in the room and just read how things are. Is someone upset? Is somebody happy with this? How is this going? Oh, they're not getting along. And it is a superpower. But if I don't know how to manage it, again, finding that healthy middle, if I don't know how to manage it and recognize their emotional experience is not my responsibility, I can be aware, but I don't have to act in a certain way until I can handle that healthily.

50:04It was just exhausting to me to try to always be tippy-toeing, making sure everybody's happy, all because it felt too uncomfortable for me to be around a situation where I thought someone was unhappy. It's like, I don't even exist in that moment because I'm so busy looking outward, right? I'm not even checking in with myself in any of this. I'm just making sure that they're happy first. I don't know if that resonates with anybody else, but it's like, yeah, and it's all throughout my life too. And the way it pops up, you think you get one, it's like whack-a-mole, another one pops up. What do you think is the hidden cost showing up over time when you work with people who have a fine response?

50:46Quite a few costs. The main one I think is lack of true intimacy, meaning that their relationships almost always have issues or they end up in a relationship where the person doesn't know them at all. I had a member of my community just yesterday share with me that her husband doesn't know she's in therapy. He doesn't know she ever struggled with any eating disorder behaviors or even has depression. He doesn't even know she's on medication. He doesn't know anything about that part of her. We were on a live stream and I mentioned, could you share something with him? And she did not feel like it was okay.

51:15She was afraid it would upset him. I don't want to share that. And so if we don't show up authentically in our relationships, there's no real connection. It's almost like inadvertently, the thing that we're trying to prevent, right? We want to keep people around. We want to keep them happy. We're trying to ensure that connection is maintained in this self-erasure, in this self-abandonment, we inadvertently end up disconnecting because they don't really know who we are. We don't have any safety in that relationship because we don't feel like if we did show up that they would stay. Like that member of my community, I'm afraid it would really upset him.

51:52I don't know if he could handle it. And so we lose intimacy in our relationships. I think we can also lose our identity. I can't tell you the number of patients I've seen over the years that will tell me they'll get out of a relationship, like they'll divorce after, let's say, 25, 30 years. And they're like, I don't know who I am anymore. And that's because they didn't really exist in that relationship fully. I know we can still have these, like, well, if I'm not married to them, my life has shifted and there's going to be changes. But this is a deeper identity problem where it's like, I'm not sure what food I like.

52:24I'm not sure what movies I want to watch. Simple things that other people might take for granted. If we've been abandoning ourselves for years, we have lost touch with who we are and it can take us some time to get back connected. Like I talk about in the book, like taking yourself on a date, go out. What do we do? How do we get to know people? We spend time with them. So you have to spend time with yourself and get reconnected. Katie, I personally tried to do that every morning, but I start the day with about an hour long walk. I walk between four to five miles and I spend the first 30 minutes of it in complete silence, just meditating and reflecting on the previous day and how I want to live out the day ahead of me.

53:01And I do affirmations and other things. It has really changed my self-esteem in so many ways doing that. So Katie, I want to come full circle. You admit in the book that letting go once sounded terrifying to you, like irresponsibility. What helped you redefine what safety actually means to you? Letting go is hard for me. I talk about it a lot that I still struggle and I'll still find myself trying to like tightly clench onto something. I had to, as I talk about in the book, redefine what letting go meant that if I let go of something, let go of an outcome, it wasn't because I didn't care. It wasn't because it wasn't important in any way to me.

53:41I realized that letting go meant I'm not going to waste my energy and my brain space on something that I don't have control over anyways and easier said than done. And so what I really had to do is instead of, again, instead of jump going to Mount Kilimanjaro, I have to go all this way. I have to just let go, let go and let God, as people say. I instead realized that it's a bunch of tiny, again, those micro choices that in this moment, maybe I don't have to follow up on that right now. Maybe I can wait another day. Or maybe instead of me letting myself spiral out about something, I meditate or I take a breather or I go for a walk.

54:30I love to walk also. I think having movement with mindfulness is really healing for me too. So there's, I think it's those micro movements, the micro habits, the little steps in that direction versus that all or nothing. I've always been very curious and I haven't done research on it, but I have my own hypotheses as to why our brain loves all or nothing thinking like black or white. We like to think I'm either letting go or I'm completely held onto something. It wants to do one or the other, like to Yvette's story. It either wants to be completely fawning, people pleasing, or the other. I would assume it's because our brain loves certainty and those are very clear and direct paths, but it's finding that gray for us.

55:12For me, at least in the letting go, I had to redefine what it meant. I had to change the way I talk to myself about it. And then I had to make little micro shifts instead of swinging to the complete opposite. Katie, as we come to a close, one of the things that really stays with me from the book is the idea that habits weren't mistakes throughout our lives. They were protection. And maybe the real work isn't fixing ourselves. It's learning how to feel safe without armor. There's a listener out there who took nothing but one thing away from today's conversation, where's the gentlest place for them to begin?

55:51I always want to encourage people to just start being curious through journaling. I know a lot of times we feel like we have to make changes. We have to do things, action. We like to take action. It gives us a sense of agency over our life, right? It makes us feel like we're in control. However, I think the gentlest way to actually learn about yourself and your experience and figure out how, to your point, John, we can feel safer in our life without all of these defense mechanisms, all this armor on is through being curious about our experience and what's coming up for us. Just start tapping in.

56:31I find when we're really struggling, we're the most disconnected from self. We talked about autopilot or I'm just letting other people make choices for me. I'm not participating actively. and journaling for me has been life changing. And if you don't know what to write, I encourage you, first of all, you don't have to read it back. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to be spelled properly. It doesn't have to be legible. I'm left-handed. My penmanship is terrible. It doesn't matter. But we're gonna just jot down at least two or three things you're grateful for. It could be the breath in your lungs.

57:05It could be a roof over your head. Make them different every time you journal. But then just start writing or even tell me what you're excited about. What are you looking forward to? Is there a goal that you have? Let's pretend it's already happening and let's get in there. I think starting to open up a conversation with ourselves in writing is the gentlest way to learn about yourself, to get back in touch with who you are and to then, if you feel so inclined, to then decide what those micro steps are, those little habits that you want to maybe shift or change. But first we have to get to know ourselves.

57:40and be a little curious, not judgmental about who we are and where we're at. And then lastly, Katie, what does it mean for you to be passion struck? Ooh, first of all, I just love the phrase passion struck. I think for me to be passion struck means that I'm living in alignment with my values in a place of excitement and enjoyment for life. It's honestly what I strive to be all the time, struck by passion. What a great way to live your life. Love it, Katie. If people want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go? I'm on YouTube. All of my social media is just Katie Morton, K-A-T-I-M-O-R-T-O-N.

58:16I have a podcast called Ask Katie Anything that comes out on Thursdays as well. And I have three books. They're sold wherever you find your books. Are You Okay is my first book. Traumatized is my second. And my third that we talked about today, Why Do I Keep Doing This is available, again, wherever you purchase your books. Katie, thank you so much for joining us on Passion Struck. It was a real honor to have you. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Katie Morton. What I hope stays with you is the realization that many of the behaviors we criticize in ourselves once served an important purpose.

58:51Perfectionism may have been an attempt to earn attention. People-pleasing may have been an attempt to preserve connection. Overworking may have been an attempt to prove our worth. The challenge is that adaptations that helped us survive childhood can quietly limit us in adulthood when they continue operating unchecked. Next time on Passion Struck, we'll continue this journey with attachment expert, Adam Lane Smith. If Katie helped us understand the emotional blueprint, Adam will help us understand the attachment system operating beneath it. We'll explore why relationship chaos is rarely random, how attachment patterns become embedded in our nervous systems, and why so many people unknowingly recreate the same relationship dynamics throughout their lives.

59:34Our family of origin maps out how we are going to function. So our caregivers train us to understand, are people going to care about us and meet our needs? Or are we not worthy of that? Or are we not in a system where people have the capacity to care for each other? And there's different ways that we can split from that. I think it was the novel, Anna Karenina, where she said at the beginning, the author says, happy families are all exactly the same, but each unhappy family is unhappy and unique in their own similar, in their own special way. And that's what we're finding is you can have a lot of dysregulated families that map out to a lot of dysregulation, but there's only really one healthy pathway with variants, but one healthy pathway towards secure families that build real lasting connection.

1:00:16If today's conversation resonated with you, please share it with someone who may be wrestling with similar patterns in their own life. And if you haven't already, leaving a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts is one of the most impactful ways you can help others discover the show. You can find today's companion workbook and additional resources at the ignitedlife.net and be sure to subscribe on YouTube as we continue the Connection Crisis series. Until next time, remember that awareness isn't the finish line, it's the beginning of change. I'm John Miles and you've been PassionStruck.

1:00:58Thank you.