EFR 893: The Motherhood Myth - Why Modern Moms Feel Like They’re Failing (and what to do about it) with Vanessa Bennett

00:00 - Chase (Host)

The following is an Operation Podcast production Vanessa. Why do moms in the West feel like they're failing, even when they're doing everything? Quote right.

00:09 - Vanessa (Guest)

I guess there's two things that come up for me when you ask that question. So I would say the first thing is it's by design right. So the more we feel like we're failing, the harder we're gonna try to hustle for our belonging, to convince ourselves that we're worthy to convince ourselves that we're lovable, that we're worthy to convince ourselves that we're lovable, that we're enough right, and so we're going to try harder and harder and we're going to keep trying harder and harder.

00:30 - Chase (Host)

Is the nuclear family model actually hurting moms nowadays more than we might think?

00:34 - Vanessa (Guest)

I believe it is 100%. I mean, first of all it's created. The nuclear family is not actually how our species was meant to survive or raise children. It was invented in the 50s anyway as a way again to isolate and control and get as many factory workers kind of in and out of the suburbs and the cities as possible. Right, we're meant to raise children in a group, in a collective.

00:55 - Chase (Host)

Someone might not think that the world of sexuality and your sex life in general, but also just your sexual connection to your partner, has as much of a role in your parenting style and your psyche, I think, as you write about. So can you kind of briefly talk to us about sexual disconnection from one's partner, and what does this typically look like? And, more importantly, why does it matter to not let it go unchecked?

01:22 - Vanessa (Guest)

So I'm Vanessa Bennett. I'm a licensed depth psychotherapist and the author of the new book the Motherhood Myth, and today I'm here to bust all the myths on motherhood, sex and relationships.

01:33 - Chase (Host)

Hey guys, my guest today, Vanessa Bennett, is here to talk about her amazing new book, the Motherhood Myth, a depth therapist guide to redefining parenting, reimagine intimacy and reclaim the self. If you want to check out the book, I have it linked for you, as always, like everything in the show notes today under episode resources. But maybe listening is more your jam and maybe free sounds good to you as well. Well, why not get the free audio book version? Head to audibletrialcom, slash ever forward, Sign up today. We get a free 30 day trial of my favorite, my go to audio book app. It's so easy to use. It's packed by Amazon. In fact, if you're a prime member, you not only get one credit but you get two Good to select any premium selection you want. You can get this book for free and after that it's just a low monthly fee. You can cancel anytime you want. So if you like free and if you like learning and if you like what Vanessa has to say, then check out her book or any other book on your wish list by heading to audibletrialcom slash ever forward to sign up for that free 30 day trial and get that free credit today, Linked for you, as always, in the show notes under episode resources. But that's A-U-D-I-B-L-E-T-R-I-A-Lcom slash ever forward.

03:00

You were first on the show almost exactly three years ago, September 2022. 2022,. You and John sat down at episode 636. And now here we are, just you and me, to talk about this incredible new book, which I'm so excited to dive into because sorry audience you're going to have to go along the journey of me being a new father and you know what adds value to my life, but ultimately what moves me forward and my multifacetedness in every area of my well being, and hopefully you will get something out of this as well. So with that, Vanessa Bennett, welcome back to the show.

03:27 - Vanessa (Guest)

So glad to be here.

03:29 - Chase (Host)

You wrote, quote motherhood is not a burden to be endured but a transformative journey. What does that transformation look like really for most women?

03:42 - Vanessa (Guest)

I guess it's hard to answer right Because it is so individual.

03:45

obviously, what I can tell you it's not supposed to look like is what so many women, myself included, but so many clients I've worked with are coming in and explaining to me this is my reality. Is this what it's supposed to be like? Right, and I'm here to say no, that's not actually what it was intended to be like. So I think it's actually easier say no, that's not actually what it was intended to be like. So I think it's actually easier for me, anyway to say this is what it shouldn't look like than what it should.

04:11 - Chase (Host)

Do you think is that something that is just the nature of every generation? As society advances and we become more industrialized and more technologically advanced, are we not just kind of saying the same thing every generation is? It's like running in parallel of advancement in society and then the woes that come with it, and then we look back at to as to what we had, our parents had, our grandparents had, like, oh, I wish, I wish we had that or that was easier then. This is more difficult now. Is that just the nature of the game? Are humans always going to be subject to this every generation?

04:42 - Vanessa (Guest)

I mean partly, sure I. I I definitely disagree with the fact of oh, I wish we had that.

04:47 - Chase (Host)

Why.

04:48 - Vanessa (Guest)

Because I don't know about you, but the idea of, like my grandmother's, generation and twilight births where they would literally completely knock you out and when you would wake up you'd have a baby in your hands, but the cocktail, okay. You know that image that we all know of the doctor holding the baby upside down and then smacking his ass.

05:08

That image actually came from that era because the cocktail of drugs that they would give women to give birth because it was easier for the doctors was such a highly toxic combination of sedatives, of hallucinogens, that so often those babies would come out not breathing. They were catatonic. They had so much drug in their system that the doctor would actually have to essentially wake them up.

05:34 - Chase (Host)

So was that the first lie of parenting we've been sold is just needing to smack our baby to get the lungs kicking to breathe. And it's actually no, because the doc was just a lazy guy and he was just drugged out of his mind.

05:48 - Vanessa (Guest)

Because this is what was the standard back then. But but the women you know of that generation, we didn't. We couldn't question right, we weren't taught to question. This is just what the medical profession which, by the way, was completely run by men at that time has told me that I'm supposed to do, or what birth is supposed to look like Right. Meanwhile, there's documentation from nurses during that time period of the absolute horrific trauma that was happening with these women when they were in this twilight experience. Because, again, this cocktail of drugs was, it was not a good cocktail, and so they were having psychosis, they were self-harming, and then they would wake up with all this body stored trauma and have no memory of it. And then it's like here you go, here's a baby.

06:31 - Chase (Host)

Jeez, here's this thing that you've never been trained on how to, how to navigate. Um, I mean again, just my own relation to being a new parent is just there's no owner's manual. No, they literally give you your baby and two days later I'm out of the hospital at home Like don't die, wow.

06:44 - Vanessa (Guest)

So to answer your question no, I don't actually want what they had. I have a lot of empathy and a lot of compassion actually for the generations prior to us and some might say, sure, they were simpler times, they were this, they were that, but I don't want to go back. Actually, I think there's really only one way forward.

07:05 - Chase (Host)

And shouldn't that be the point with everything we do in life is to learn from past generations, learn from human mistakes, societal mistakes and, of course, put you know your own belief on it and whatever's best for you and your community and unit, and you know, then build forward, move forward with that. But um, yeah, I'm still hearing we got quite a, quite a bit of room for improvement there.

07:24 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, we do yeah damn.

07:25 - Chase (Host)

All right. Well, starting off on a warm and fuzzy note here already. All right, everybody. If you've ever suffered from jet lag, then listen up, because I have the cure for jet lag. Ever since discovering Flykit years ago. I travel one hour, or all the hours I'm going across the country, or a couple of time zones, or even international travel. I am not traveling without fly kit. But even if you're not going all over the globe, see, most people think jet lag only matters on long haul flights, but here's the truth Even a two or three hour time shift can quietly wreck your circadian rhythm, mess with your muscle recovery and just throw off your mental focus for days. If you've been on a plane for hours, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

08:07

It is not just another one size fit all solution, promising wonderful things and then fall short. No see, it uses personal health goals, your personal health goals, your travel schedule and an AI driven protocol and they're easy to navigate and set up app to give you precise guidance on key supplementation that they provide Also things like meal timing and sleep strategies before, during and after your trip. If you want to save 15%, make sure to head to flykitcom, scoop up your kit or refill and at checkout use code Chase. That's my name, c-h-a-s-e. You're going to save 15% off of each and every kit that's F-L-Y-K-I-T-Tcom. Check out code C-H-A-S-E Chase for 15% off and travel like your biology depends on it now because it does. Can you explain the concept of quote child mothers and why is it so central to your work now?

09:07 - Vanessa (Guest)

So my background is in depth psychology, right? So what does that mean? Right, it's a form of Jungian psychology, it's kind of an umbrella term, and depth psychology is called the psychology of the soul, and that's important to understand, because so much of my work is through the lens of depth psychology, right, which really is focused on the language of the unconscious image, metaphor, dreams, right? So the unconscious does not speak to us the way that the conscious speaks to us, right, and so many of us live neck up, we're completely unaware of what's actually happening in the unconscious. So the reason why I set up the depth psychology explanation is because this concept of the child mother comes from Clarissa Pingola Estes' work and what she talks about in her phenomenal book, which every woman should read, women who Run With the Wolves is this idea that we all develop. We all go from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, right? You don't need to have had any kind of psychologically sound experiences for that to happen.

10:11

However, in a society that has cut us off from initiations, it's cut us off from the rituals that used to kind of contain us and help us make sense of what we're going through during these huge transitions in our life, which I call ego explosions, ego deaths, so motherhood being one of those. So for many women, okay, you just become a mother, but there's no understanding of what just happened, there's no reckoning with what's just happened to my ego. I am no longer who I was. That person is gone, right. But because I'm not being held in this transition, I'm just thrust into motherhood and essentially, what Pingala Estes calls it is the child mother. So essentially, yeah, you're a mom, but energetically, psychologically, you're still a child yourself. You haven't actually integrated any of the lessons that we hope to learn during those huge transitions in your life.

11:06 - Chase (Host)

Like Carl Jung, I'll quote another great thinker of our generation I'm not yet a woman. No, no, no, I'm not a girl, but not yet a woman. You know? Yeah, there you go. Good quote. Sorry to derail a very serious conversation. But also justice for Brittany.

11:27 - Vanessa (Guest)

Justice for Brittany.

11:28 - Chase (Host)

You also talk about birth as a both. Excuse me, I'm sorry. You talk about birth as both a psychological and spiritual initiation, which I thought initiation was such a really unique word. I don't think many people really kind of put those two together. What happens when that initiation is unsupported or even denied?

11:47 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, so motherhood is just one experience in our life. Right, when we go through these huge transitions that I was talking about this concept of this ego death, right, I mean it can happen when we lose a job, lose a loved one, right Like something massive, lose our house right In the fires when something massive happens in your life, there is a state of transition. Again, I'm not who I was right, but I'm possibly in this liminal space of I'm not yet who I will be, and so there's a really ripe opportunity there for this initiation process right For us to sit in community, be witnessed, be seen, make sense of what's happened to me, that I am in this liminal space so that when I step into this next phase of life again, I'm integrated. Right, the lessons have become integrated.

12:36

The problem is is that in our society, because we've lost this right, most of us are just kind of walking through life uninitiated. Right, most of us are just kind of walking through life uninitiated, and so we are going through these huge moments, these huge transitions, motherhood being one of them, and we don't have any grounding right. And so if you look at other countries right now, today, this is not times gone by, this is still current, many cultures in Asia, many cultures in Africa, south America. They hold a woman in this initiatory experience of becoming a mother. So the community rallies around her. The women of the village come in, they take that baby from her and they support her in the actual experience of becoming a caregiver. They nurture the woman, nurture the woman. They want to make sure that spiritually, emotionally, not just physically she's able to heal and transition, because they realize that if they don't do that, you are going to have issues on the other side. That's where this child mother concept comes into play.

13:36 - Chase (Host)

It's of course, I think, more obvious when we hear of these other cultures that you're talking about doing this.

13:43

I personally don't know of any here in the United States, because immediately when you were talking about initiation, it came to mind for me of being a much more active experience. We think initiation, like you are initiated, someone initiates you into a secret society, into a fraternity, sorority, into a club, into an organization, into a brotherhood, a sisterhood. Where do you think right now, in the US specifically, do we have the most semblance of this initiative crew, you know, or is it up to moms now just to be more passively initiated, having to take on a lot of this responsibility, learning, shedding, grieving and stepping into and even kind of building this, if it's even possible, on their own?

14:25 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, I mean initiation ritual takes active participation, so it's not actually something that you can just be like well, I've been initiated.

14:34 - Chase (Host)

There has to actually be enough time or it's been enough hardship there has to be an honoring.

14:39 - Vanessa (Guest)

There has to be something of reverence, right, like we have to actually be witnessed and be held in this experience. There are some sanctioned initiations left in our culture, you know, depending on religion. You know, you've got the quinceanera at 16, you've got bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, even weddings and funerals are kind of some semblance of initiatory experience, right but for sure. The transitions in our lives, like we're talking about motherhood, parenthood we've really lost those. I don't see it as being passive. I think that what you're actually seeing at least I'm seeing in some of like the healing communities is that there are these groups of women that are getting together and they are attempting to recreate this right. So there's this whole movement online of women that I've seen who are doing these rituals, and actually it's been going on in South America for, I think, generations, but they're doing these rituals here in the States.

15:30

I've been seeing it more and more when a girl has her first period, really, and so they gather her community around her, her friends, all the mothers of her friends, come together, they say words about her, they talk about what it means to become a mother or become a woman, excuse me and so they're honoring this, they're honoring this child because she's no longer a child, right. And so what it does is it helps our psyche. Our psyche actually needs ritual to integrate, to move forward on this path of initiation. Now again, I can become an adult from an adolescent right without it physically. I actually did my grad school thesis on this concept and I called it trauma as initiation. So the research that I did in my grad school thesis showed that our psyche needs initiation, and if we do not give it to our psyche in these sanctioned kind of ritualized ways, the psyche will seek it out.

16:29 - Chase (Host)

No, really.

16:31 - Vanessa (Guest)

And sometimes it will actually seek it out through chaos or through variations of traumatic experience.

16:36 - Chase (Host)

Are we talking like self-sabotage kind of stuff here?

16:39 - Vanessa (Guest)

I called it psychically co-created trauma. Wow, co-created trauma. Wow, because there's something that happens during a traumatic experience, right? Where, again, it's like you're standing on a precipice and you get pushed off a ledge, right? So okay, if you're not going to come into this experience of initiation on your own, I'm going to give it to you. And so the psyche craves it, it craves initiation, so much so that it will seek it out.

17:05 - Chase (Host)

I'm wondering how many people are kind of like scratching their heads right now or yelling at their monitor or AirPods, just going oh my God, this makes so much sense. You know, like, why did I do this? Why did I do that? Now? There might be other reasons, but if you haven't had this initiation or if you haven't had this, you know significant major life event that you know actively or passively initiated. You maybe ask yourself why do I have some self-sabotaging behaviors? Why do I seek this out? Why is chaos so frequent in my life when I'm trying to run the opposite direction?

17:36 - Vanessa (Guest)

So, on point I mean, one would argue that potentially, your psyche is seeking the chaos out because it's attempting to initiate itself. It's attempting to make sense of where you're at in your life. Right, it wants you to let go of who you were in order to become who you can be. But you can't do that unless you've let go of that first.

17:56 - Chase (Host)

It makes me think also of so many Native American and even, you know, viking cultures that would have these spirit journeys, that's right, and, you know, going into the wilderness, or plant medicine or some kind of actual, very physical, physically demanding war experience that everybody went through.

18:16 - Vanessa (Guest)

Where boys would be initiated into men and they would come back to the village as men. Yeah Right, it was part of that. It was like let's take your psyche, that warrior archetype.

18:24 - Chase (Host)

Yeah, right, it was part of that. It was like let's take your psyche, that's right, interesting man, fascinating, okay. So you also have this concept of weird parenting and a great acronym, by the way. Spoiler alert I have a couple of questions around this weird parenting models that I wanted to dive into. The first is you challenge a lot of our normalized parenting behaviors as weird, western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. What are some of the biggest misconceptions we've accomplished as, quote, normal that are actually or, excuse me, that we've accepted as normal, that are actually really unique and quite unique to modern Western culture?

18:57 - Vanessa (Guest)

So, first of all, I did not coin that term. I want to give credit where it's due. There's been a couple of psychologists who have done the research there, and I first heard about weir parenting in Michaelene Ducliffe's book. Hunt Gather Parent blew my mind and so I did further digging into it. Right, I would say. I guess if I'm talking about I mean, the list could go on and on, but if I'm going to talk about it from a parenting perspective, the way that we parent in the West is so different compared to almost anywhere else in the world, right? And so it was through that weird research that they came up with this research. I said the 96% of psychological research of European descent. That's where that stat actually comes from. Because they started realizing why do we do the things that we do, um, and then sell it to the rest of the world as if it's the norm, right, when we're such a small percentage of the population? So, for example, babies sleeping in other rooms.

19:51 - Chase (Host)

Yes.

19:52 - Vanessa (Guest)

That's considered air quote, weird, right? If we're talking about this acronym. Now, mine did. I'm not here to shame A lot of the things that are considered weird in hindsight. I have a five-year-old. I did a lot of those things Sleep training, right. I also did that. And listen again, no shame. Like my mental health was suffering. I had to do something and we're isolated in a nuclear family. Sure, I would ideally have loved not to sleep train my child when I had 15 aunties and cousins and friends that could take that baby and help me through the night. But we don't right, and so we're left to come up with these kinds of fixes to issues that we've created to create a new system to solve a problem that we created.

20:31 - Chase (Host)

That's right, that wasn't even a problem to begin with.

20:33

That's right man, All right fellas. Let's talk about something that most guys might ignore until it's too late your hair If you're starting to notice a little more hair in the drain or your barber's being extra quiet back there, don't wait, Do something about it now. That's where my partners today over at Caldera Lab come in with their hair care system. See, it's designed specifically for men. This isn't just your average shampoo and go routine. No, it's a high performance three-step system built to support thicker, stronger, healthier hair as we age. Let me put you on the cleanse. This is their nutrient-rich shampoo that removes buildup and product while strengthening your hair from root to tip.

21:15

Step two conditioner Ultra-hydrating packed with botanicals to soften and restore. Let's not pretend like we don't love a good conditioner, guys. Let's stay clean, stay refreshed, but also treat treat yourself. There's nothing wrong with a little conditioner game in the shower. And then step three the scalp serum. This is the money. This is the game changer right here. It energizes your scalp, promotes thicker looking hair and helps you fight back against thinning.

21:39

The best part, every one of the products from caldera lab are powered by science-backed ingredients no harsh chemicals. Not to mention it smells amazing. It's like a fresh mountain morning. Seriously, I love taking showers now. I love this product. So if you care about your hair now and want to keep it looking sharp well into your 30s, 40s and beyond, then caldera labs hair care system is a no-brainer. The best part is you can try it for 20% off as a partner of the show. They're hooking it up. Head to calderalabcom. Check out their hair care system or any one of their other amazing men's grooming and skincare products. Then at checkout, use code EVERFORWARD to save 20% off of your entire first purchase. That's C-A-L-D-E-R-A-L-A-Bcom. Calderalabcom. Check out code EVERFORWARD for 20% off your entire first purchase. Your future self and your hairline will thank you. That kind of stings.

22:38 - Vanessa (Guest)

It does. It does, and this is why I do think you know, going back to what you were saying about oh, was it easier then. I mean, what is then right? Maybe pre what we're talking about, of like this isolation, pre the enclosures, pre bringing women inside, maybe, but I don't know that. I want to go back. I'm seeing women now and people now not just women, men too coming together and saying enough is enough, Like we need to start changing some of the ways we've been parenting and living.

23:06 - Chase (Host)

We've even had very similar conversations, my wife and I, when we transitioned out of and we did a lot of co-sleeping and I even now I like actually that's the first time I've like said it publicly there there's a lot of mixed feelings about everybody's got an opinion, everybody does, but we co-slept my daughter also slept on her stomach.

23:27 - Vanessa (Guest)

So you know, come for me. It's what she wanted, it's the best, that's the way she's like.

23:32 - Chase (Host)

Oh, you can't sleep on your stomach until they can fully roll over. And all these rules and things and like, on one hand, I can understand you know we have a lot of maybe we'll say clinical evidence or supposed scientific evidence but also who's really saying this and why that's right. One thing, one thing personally I have learned my wife and I have learned is so much of what we need to do with our child, so much of what we want to do we instinctively and instinctually, that's right. No, that's right. And if I believe you just pay attention long enough, they will tell you, they will show you. It can be pretty. It can not be pretty, but we have learned so much by just being present, independently, together and then with him.

24:15 - Vanessa (Guest)

So on point.

24:16 - Chase (Host)

So we co-slept a lot and then when we transitioned we did sleep training. We didn't do the whole cry it out. You know we had a very I'd say very G rated. You know, sleep training experience. It was like three, four minutes, maybe 10 minutes tops, kind of like in and out, but I say all that to. Then we transitioned from our bedroom to his room in a crib and we're laying in bed. We're like why is he in a different room?

24:40 - Vanessa (Guest)

I know we miss him. Yeah, you know, he's sleeping.

24:44 - Chase (Host)

You know he can be in a crib in our room and doing this thing, but, like they told us, put them in a crib in a separate room and I'm just like why? I mean, I definitely am not mad about the sleep, but I feel confident that we could get there also with him in the room.

24:59 - Vanessa (Guest)

Maybe, maybe not More than before, less than currently, because again, this is me saying no shame, I'm a really light sleeper and I need my sleep. I am not one of those people that can go on less than like seven is pushing it for me and I've been like that my whole life. My daughter still comes into our bedroom and so John and I do this thing where, when she comes in, we take turns. The other person goes into her room and sleeps in her bed alone. We cannot sleep all in the bed together. I don't sleep. And so, again, if I was living in community where that baby or that toddler is waking up and we were passing her off, and it would be very different.

25:37

You know, I have this, this part in the book where I talk about all the different versions of parenting and how we talk about attachment parenting, right, and I I say something I'm going to paraphrase myself because I remember exactly how I wrote it, but I say something like attachment parenting is just parenting. That's it. It's what you're talking about. It's the intuitive way to parent. Babies want to be worn we wear them. Babies want to sleep with you we sleep with that. Babies want to be fed we feed them right. Attachment parenting is just parenting. However, attachment parenting in a detached society is exhausting.

26:12 - Chase (Host)

That's so well said.

26:14 - Vanessa (Guest)

And we shame ourselves Again. I shamed myself forever about sleep training, why I need to sleep, and I don't have a village around me. What else am I going to do? I'm going to let my mental health suffer, which will ultimately impact her because of. I want to live up to this ideal of attachment, parenting, but I don't have a village All right, I got to find me a village.

26:38 - Chase (Host)

That's the bottom line. You write that in some indigenous and non-Western cultures, biological mothers only do about 20 to 30 percent of child care. What do you think we can learn most from these communal models and how might they help relive burnout? Or, excuse me, and how might they help relieve burnout using Western moms?

27:02 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to exactly what I was just saying about the sleep as an example, right. So that statistic when I first read that statistic and again that that I went deeper into the research, but that also came from Ducliffe my mind was blown Right now. First of all, I felt guilty, because there was a part of me that was like oh my God, that sounds amazing, right, and I have very publicly spoken about the fact that I love my child. I don't love parenting. The older she gets, actually, the more I'm enjoying it, and I think that's okay to admit.

27:36

I think a lot of women come to me and they're like, yeah, me too, but nobody wants to talk about it because we feel embarrassed, we feel ashamed, we think we're going to be judged, which we are. And so I think that, first of all, we've got to really start to just be honest. We have to start being honest about this stuff. But this 30% of the parenting I'm going to say something here that I know all the attachment people are going to freak out about, okay, but as a therapist, I am very fascinated by our culture's obsession with attachment, attachment, styles, attachment, parenting, attachment, attachment, attachment. We as a species are not meant to only attach to one or maybe two caregivers. We are meant to have multiple, secure, attachment figures. That is how our species survived, right? There's no way our species would have survived if one, maybe two people were responsible for raising a child, that's that makes perfect sense.

28:35

We wouldn't have survived. There's no way, right? The only way that we survived. Look at how apes do it. It's the same thing. You've got 10 people taking care of one infant right. Pass it off, I gotta go hunt, I gotta go pick this food. You gotta take the baby right. The the older children started taking care of the younger children, like there was all of these ways that we did this, and so we've really got to understand. Again. Going back to weird, we've set ourselves up to burn out. We've set our and we haven't done it. Society has done it, but we've got ourselves into this situation where burnout is almost inevitable. I think that I don't know the number, but I think it's right now in the West, the, the biological mom, does like 90 something percent of the caregiving. Wow, I could be wrong, it could be 80 something, but on average, I would.

29:20 - Chase (Host)

I would believe it's really high Right.

29:23 - Vanessa (Guest)

So again, 30 versus like 90. And then we're telling women I talk about this idea of like super woman or super mom is not a compliment, and I hate when people use that as a compliment, because it there's no such thing. That means you're over-functioning, you're over-performing, you're trying to be perfect, you're trying to get that external validation, you're trying to do it all. For what? What are you trying to prove Right and who are you trying to prove it to yourself, probably.

29:51 - Chase (Host)

We're trying to just say a nice thing about a really uncomfortable, unfair situation. It's unfair and trying to pad and make it seem like it's a compliment.

30:00 - Vanessa (Guest)

That's right, and I don't. I don't want to back, I don't want a backdoor compliment. I want somebody to say to me stop trying to be super mom. How can we figure it out so that you don't have to keep pretending to be super mom?

30:18 - Chase (Host)

I think I'm good on the weird. Actually, one more on the weird stuff.

30:22 - Vanessa (Guest)

One more on the weird.

30:23 - Chase (Host)

One more on the weird Love getting weird. On the show you draw a really powerful line between capitalism, patriarchy and the breakdown of community support and parenting. How do you think, specifically, did these systems help create the modern motherhood struggle as we now know it?

30:40 - Vanessa (Guest)

Mm-hmm. So the motherhood struggle as we now know it. So the motherhood myth. There was many myths that went into this book, but the overarching myth is essentially that if motherhood relationships, romantic relationships, are not inherently easy or they don't fulfill you in every way, there's something wrong with you, right? So that is the myth that all of us have inherited, especially women, especially mothers, and so we spend a lifetime in this shame cycle of no one can know that it's hard and that I'm not completely fulfilled Right, because if they do, I'll be judged, I'll be ostracized. Right, and so that myth in and of itself keeps these dominator systems going.

31:25

Because if women and mothers are so consumed with their shame that they're constantly performing for their belonging, right, they're constantly outsourcing their validation. We're too exhausted and we're too busy, honestly, to question the systems, to look at each other and go this is bullshit. Why are we doing this? Right, because we're so busy trying to put food on the table first of all. Right, talk about late stage capitalism. What's that that's done to us as parents? But we're just too damn busy trying to prove our worth and our value.

31:59 - Chase (Host)

This leads me right into um, you're kind of just hitting on it. A few questions I had around this myth of motherhood and how it should suppose, you know, supposedly come easy and naturally you know where does that come from and I feel like we, we kind of satisfied that. But why do you believe that so many women feel that they are failing as mothers or partners? Is this why, or is there something left unsaid?

32:22 - Vanessa (Guest)

I mean, I think that's a big part of it. But I also think it's because, again, in order to prop up this myth, patriarchy not just patriarchy, I would just say systems of dominance in general. So we're talking about colonialism, we're talking about white supremacy, we're talking about misogyny, any system that says it's somebody's above somebody else, or humans are above animals, right or above earth, anything that there's a dominator structure. So, propping up a lot of these dominator structures, is this like perfection myth. It's this martyr myth that I call it.

32:52

So in every chapter I use either a myth, so a fairy tale, or a myth, or an archetypal feminine form or figure to kind of bring home whatever it is in that chapter I'm talking about. There's a chapter that I call martyrdom is not motherhood and the figure that I use in that chapter is Mother Mary. And I know this chapter is going to this myth in particular is going to piss a lot of people off. But I go into the history of how the figure, the archetype of Mary, was kind of created and pieced together over the over the centuries, right Um, and how she's come to be this figure of um. You know, constantly giving the martyr right, constantly giving, uh, no sense of self. It's more about the other.

33:41 - Chase (Host)

And happy to give.

33:42 - Vanessa (Guest)

Happy, happy to sacrifice, right, sacrifice, with, with, like a smile. It's like what you do as a woman, right, and how a lot of the characteristics piety, purity, um, you know again, martyrdom, all of these characteristics of Mary have essentially become conflated with womanhood, and motherhood in particular. Again, as a way to say, this is what it looks like to be a good mother or a good woman or a good wife, and if you step outside of that there'll be consequences, you'll be shamed. It keeps it all afloat.

34:16 - Chase (Host)

I have. Um, this kind of makes me think about a theory I've had on parenting. I guess you could call it a theory. So I'm a in a interracial marriage and you're in an interracial coupling marriage now, by the way.

34:29 - Vanessa (Guest)

Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, wow, all right.

34:33 - Chase (Host)

Um, so I personally think, besides having conversations like this and I think this generation is doing a great job, a better job of having higher self-awareness, emotional intelligence, having conversations and working on self so much more, uh, at least publicly, than our parents and their parents Uh, and then when you do that independently and then we do it with a partnership and marriage, and then you know you're ushering in the next generation. I think like that's what I'm most excited for. But I also have a theory around interracial couples. I think is really kind of like this really unique special sauce, because we're blending not only all of this awareness and conversation and EQ, but really unique, culturally unique and distinct histories, epigenetics, rituals, initiations and just you know, personally speaking, I can't go through a life event without being met with this other side of what that life event looks like for this other culture, this other religion.

35:32

My wife is not only a different ethnicity than me, but a different religion, comes from different backgrounds. She's a first generation American. I, my family, has been here for multiple. We came over. I'm predominantly Welsh. We all came over from, you know, northern England. She came over from the middle East and so, like you, there's no denying that that is going to not cause well, maybe cause friction, but um, it's just room to think.

35:56 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah.

35:57 - Chase (Host)

And I'm so excited I have this theory that I think interracial relationships, therefore interracial children, I think, are really going to hold so much promise on top of the other work that the parents are doing for changing so much of what we're talking about and just getting out of these past narratives and people not feeling confident or not feeling like they can speak their mind because of public shame and ridicule. And you know immediately, you know you're supposed to be thinking this way when you're a parent or you know insert any kind of societal norm here.

36:31 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah.

36:31 - Chase (Host)

Would you, would you agree with your take on this kind of?

36:33 - Vanessa (Guest)

approach. Yeah, I mean, what it reminds me of when you're saying this is do you remember? Forever ago there was that article in um was it national geographic? Where they talked about like by 20, oh God, I remember it was like by 2050 or something and they gave a percentage of the number of of multi-racial children right In the world Caucasians were going to be the minority right.

36:52

Like the jump right, um, what's kind of reminding me of and and I think, what's what's beautiful about this, to your point, you're blending cultures, you're blending histories, um, you're blending experiences, you're blending views, and ultimately what that does is it kind of takes away this like us versus them mentality, right, this like tribal mentality that some could argue is part of our species. It is like, kind of, how we survived? Oh, they are different than me, so they must be dangerous, right, um, but that's not the world we live in anymore. And we're still seeing the tribal mentality playing itself out today. Right, and how that is being used for war and being used for dominance. Still, right, is that? Tending to my corner of the globe, to use a Jack Kornfield saying, looks like, well, in my family we don't have an us versus them. We have a blended way of approaching the world, right, and how does that kind of then ripple out?

37:52 - Chase (Host)

I suppose you know from my children my child but ripple out to the world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Another section of the book is around rage, shame and the role of anger, and you speak pretty candidly about a lot of these things. Someone maybe who is really connecting to those key words right now. How do you think we can begin to channel this rage into personal and collective transformation?

38:20 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, I mean In the number of women and mothers and couples that I've worked with over the years. I would venture to say it's a very tiny percentage of the women that didn't have some kind of simmering rage right beneath the surface.

38:39 - Chase (Host)

This is the quote mom rage you talk about there's mom rage.

38:42 - Vanessa (Guest)

There's just women. Rage right. Rage right, I mean mom rage is actually the title of a book that I found. When I was doing research to write this book, I realized that most of the books that I was finding were kind of falling into two camps. They were either in the like written by therapists, written by psychologists a lot of great tips, how to set boundaries, how to do self-care but they had a very like distant feeling to them and they also had a feeling that it's the mom's responsibility to do things like set boundaries and make community and make her life better.

39:11 - Chase (Host)

How many of them, I'm curious, were also actual moms.

39:15 - Vanessa (Guest)

They were moms but they were most of them were white.

39:17

Okay, Most of them were, you know, psychologists, therapists of a certain socioeconomic status right Again, going back to the weird concept. And then you had, on the other side of the spectrum, books like mom rage, which are important books. There's a couple of them that I would say are in that category that I loved and they stoked that fire in me. I mean, they got me to the point where I was like fuck the patriarchy, right, they like ah, but I didn't feel like I got running into the room yelling at John Like I hate you.

39:44 - Chase (Host)

He was like what did I do? It's all your fault.

39:47 - Vanessa (Guest)

Exactly what did I do? But that's exactly it. It was like it didn't give me anything tangible to then do with my rage, Right Cause the rage is normal, especially when you're an oppressed. You're the oppressed within a system, Right? So I mean, I'm very aware that I'm a cis, hetero, white woman, but I'm a woman, so in our system I'm I'm definitely one down. So when you're an oppressed and in an oppressive system, there's going to be rage, right? The thing is is that rage is dangerous, so we shame it, keep it under wraps. It doesn't mean it goes away.

40:21

Improperly channeled improperly channeled, right, it comes out somehow. And so a lot of those books felt like they tapped into the rage, but they didn't give me like OK, now, what do I do with the rage? How do I, how do I transmute this into action, right? So I felt like that was where I tried to do with this book was like how do I meet in the middle of those two polar of anger, being a secondary emotion, right? So anger is usually the emotion that we feel because it's safer than feeling vulnerability, hurt, dismissed, overlooked, not listened to, not seen, like all these other things that bring up this feeling of anger in us. Right?

41:03

But anger is so important. It's so important because it leads to action, if we know, again, how to transmute it. Anger tells us when a boundary has been crossed. Anger tells us about our internal compass and, like this doesn't sit well with me, this goes against my moral compass, right? But for so many of us, again, we've been shamed out of feeling it that we kind of squash it and then we don't get that forward. Momentum in action.

41:32 - Chase (Host)

Where do you think moms right now are experiencing the most rage but they have not yet defined it as that. Where is it maybe something else showing up in their life? You know as a new mom or many years in mom when do you think rage is showing up in their life that they just haven't put their pulse on it yet?

41:53 - Vanessa (Guest)

I haven't, so I haven't answered this question, but I guess the caveat is I don't know that they haven't put their finger on it yet. I think it's happening now and I would say that I'm seeing it in this packaged idea of motherhood and partnership. I think there's a lot of rage out there that we've been duped, as women Like the whole thing, the whole thing, the whole thing, the structure.

42:17

Right Now. I'm not saying motherhood in and of itself, I'm not saying partnering with somebody. I'm saying the way it's been packaged and sold to us. Right Again, you should be happy that you're in this relationship. You should be happy that you know you caught a good guy. The man can't, you know, wash his own underwear, but at least you have a good man, right? That's the kind of shit that I'm starting to see the rage about where women I mean I see this all the time again in my therapy practice but in, like, the online communities I'm in where women are saying we're not doing this anymore. This is bullshit. Right, we've been, we've gotten a short stick. Um, I had a conversation with John recently but me, don me, john and Denae, or Denae kind of got a little like with John where she said I think what's really important for this generation of men to understand is that and she's like and I'm saying this with love we don't need you.

43:10

If she's here, it's because she wants to be not because she has to be, and understanding that that should color the way you show up in your relationship every day. Yeah, because if somebody needs you, you're going to act one way. If somebody wants to be there out of choice, you're going to act one way. If somebody wants to be there out of choice, you're going to act a very different way, and I think that's what we're starting to see. Women putting their finger on the pulse is like I actually don't need this, and so it's either going to be that I'm partnered and I'm becoming a mother because it's justified, or I'm just not going to do it.

43:45 - Chase (Host)

Yeah, um, it's kind of timely. My wife and I were commenting on this recently we were watching. There's this new show on Netflix. Uh, the four seasons.

43:54 - Vanessa (Guest)

Love it. Tina Fey, CP Rowe. We watched it. It's so good.

43:57 - Chase (Host)

It reminds us a lot of. You know we have this core group of six of us. You know we love to travel and start our family that we chose Right. So it's this show all about these seasons over the years of this group of six people, three couples that just like do life together, they travel and reconnect and, not to have like a spoiler alert, but one of the couples, they really kind of paint Will Forte's character as just this, like hopeless, helpless husband, just dopey guy, which that's my wife's favorite word to use for men she's like just big dope.

44:28

And we've been kind of like looking at a lot of pop culture and TV and movies. I feel like this is getting woven in a lot more. I don't know if it's just, I don't know if it's male writers, female writers or just you know kind of the narrative that's begun to change. We're shifting, we're noticing this. Our family unit is noticing this shift and what we see on screen and on movies and in TV and in books of this narrative is getting flipped, that the women are really taking the power back and it's really through the lens of I don't need you, I want to be here. So if you're not going to not be a dopey man, then like I have no need for you.

45:04 - Vanessa (Guest)

I'm going to be a partner, right? Yes.

45:06 - Chase (Host)

Yeah, and so it was just so interesting to see because unless you're really paying attention, like I think we typically would just see you know partners in these stereotypical standard roles especially in a family unit, uh, as a married couple and with children of how you're supposed to navigate that, and in Hollywood at least, I'm seeing that change.

45:26 - Vanessa (Guest)

I agree. I think that our generation growing up with the TV that we grew up with, I would say it's probably the last generation actually where that was like the norm right? I'm thinking of like King of Queens.

45:36 - Chase (Host)

I remember that show I'm thinking of like Family Guy.

45:39 - Vanessa (Guest)

I'm thinking of. You know where it was that it was that kind of standard model of like. Again, the dopey, usually overweight, you know, can't fold his own underwear, like I was just saying. Man with the wife, that was hotter than him yeah, yeah, right everybody loves raymond. Another good example, like all these sitcoms that we we you know saw growing up. I think we're the last generation. I don't think I'm seeing that as the norm. I think you're right anymore um, which shows something oh, it shows a lot of something.

46:05

I mean john's technically a gen x and I remember him saying something where he was like gen z is doing amazing things in the world. Like I shows a lot of something. I mean John's technically a Gen X and I remember him saying something where he was like Gen Z is doing amazing things in the world. Like I have a lot of. I have a lot of faith actually. I know people should talk them a lot, but I have a lot of faith in Gen Z.

46:18

I used to manage them when I was still in corporate and of course, there's issues Every generation has their issues but I them and Gen Alpha, which is our kids. I'm like you guys are gonna save the world. But he was like I say that he's like. And also millennials, he's like y'all are out there fucking flipping tables. And I was like you're right, he's like gen x, like yeah, we talk about it being bullshit and whatever he's like, but you guys are the ones that are literally flipping tables and being like we're done, no more, and he's and I have a lot of respect for that Like he's like you guys get a lot of shit for it, but you do it anyway.

46:51 - Chase (Host)

And I'm like, yeah, all right, all right, yeah, also, no shade to Will Forte.

46:59 - Vanessa (Guest)

So brilliantly written though.

47:01 - Chase (Host)

Another section in your book you talk about the myths of sex, intimacy and womanhood. Why, or excuse me, what is the quote mother wound, and how does it shape our adult relationships and self-perception?

47:14 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, this is a meaty one. So I I've done multiple workshops actually on the mother wound. So the mother wound is what I call, kind of one peg, if you will, of what I call the Trinity wound. So the Trinity wound is made up of the witch wound, the sister wound and the mother wound. So, kind of succinctly, the witch wound is. We're talking about epigenetics earlier. Right, we have, we have studies now, we have proof now that show that trauma is imprinted on our DNA, right?

47:43 - Chase (Host)

Up to two generations.

47:44 - Vanessa (Guest)

Up to two generations. So we've seen this in, you know, black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. We've seen this in, you know, black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. We've seen this in people who have family who lived through the Holocaust, right, yeah, so we would stand to reason that there is a epigenetic lineage of trauma that's been passed down from the culturally and religiously sanctioned murders of women that happened for close to 350 years but also is still happening, actually, in certain places of the world. It's also not just those of us who have European descent.

48:17

There's this misconception that the witch trials were just in Europe. They weren't. They were in parts of Asia. They were in parts of Africa. They're still in parts of Africa. They're still in parts of Asia. They were in South America. They impacted the native population in the North American regions. So tell me how many women have been impacted by either their ancestors themselves being murdered, right, losing family members and that trauma, having sisters, mothers, friends rat out and turn in the women in their lives, right? And and, by the way, what the men in their lives standing and watching it happen, doing nothing, yeah, and potentially even being a catalyst.

48:58 - Chase (Host)

Yeah.

48:59 - Vanessa (Guest)

Right. So this is the witch wound, and what the witch wound tells us, as women, is don't stand out, don't take up too much space, don't get too much attention, don't be different, right, because all of those things would have meant certain death. Right, don't stand out, don't take up too much space, don't get too much attention, don't be different, right, because all of those things would have meant certain death, right. Then you have the sister wound, which is really this idea that it's women against women. It's the competition that women have. Right, we tear women down, we don't lift them up.

49:23

It's really on the base, on the back rather, of capitalism, which tells us that there's only so much pie to go around and in order to be successful, you've got to climb on top of others, right, and it's very insidious, from women to women. And then you have the mother wound, and so the mother wound is again generationally passed down trauma, typically through the matrilineal line, which, again, this is, with all the compassion in the world, it was, was and is done in a survival kind of way, um, but in many ways it's, it's what props up patriarchy. And I say often and I get a lot of flack for this, but I think women, women and mothers are actually some of the biggest upholders of patriarchy that there are.

50:07 - Chase (Host)

Really.

50:08 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah. So how so Women not holding men accountable? Mothers competing with their daughters, mothers being jealous of their daughters as their daughters come of age and become beautiful and sexual mothers treating their daughters like confidants and friends and giving them way too much information, adult information too soon instead, of just being mother, or majority mother that's right now.

50:38

Again, I'm not, I'm not blaming, right. We've got generations of this being passed down, um, but. But this trauma, in a way, is is passed down generation to generation and it impacts not only those daughters, but it also impacts those sons. Right, it's women expecting more from their daughters than they do from their sons. It's women continuing to tell their daughters to marry a rich man, find a good husband, right, lock it down quickly. We see the way all of these kind of messages continue to show up, and it's the women that are teaching it so often.

51:16

But again, it's what kept them safe. So in my core, I want to keep my daughter safe, I want to keep my son safe, and so I want to uphold these systems that I know have kept them safe, right, and so it's this passing down, and so I want to uphold these systems that I know have kept them safe, right, and so it's. It's this passing down. And again, going back to our generation, I think this is where you're seeing that rupture, where we're going. We look at the boomer generation and we're like, oh hell, no, hell, no, I'm not doing that.

51:41 - Chase (Host)

And that's gotta be so difficult. Now, as I think about, my number one priority as a new dad is just keeping my son safe and safety. I think anyone who has a child, safety always is the number one concern. That's right. And so I mean, you think about that and what safety looks like and what it feels like for you, for your family, for your household, for that immediate community. It's going to be very. Certain things are obvious. It's going to be very active, but what you're talking about, there's so much passiveness to this concept of safety that our subconscious is probably just like thriving off of.

52:21

You know, we're bringing all of these preconceived notions and family, old family belief systems and our past traumatic events and our past childhood, and what we saw, what we liked and what we didn't, and so much of that is running in the background of our coding, of our operating system, without us even having to go. I'm choosing this method, I'm choosing this safety protocol. I'm not choosing that, it's just it's there and I think, thanks to work like yours and conversations like this, hopefully we're going to be able to just think differently about that. What am I doing, actively and passively, in the world of safety for my family unit?

52:57

for my children um that I'm aware of, that I'm unaware of.

53:00 - Vanessa (Guest)

That's right, and everything I talk about in the book too. This work is heavy lifting. But you know, even when we get into like the codependency stuff, where it's like the relationship stuff, everything I talk about comes back to this concept of personal responsibility. And I've been told many times oh, you're victim blaming, they're just acting out of their trauma. And I'm like yes, and it's always a yes and right, what's that line? Right, you're not responsible for the trauma that happened to you, but you're responsible for what you do with it.

53:33 - Chase (Host)

Yeah, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility, that's right, it's kind of like that concept.

53:38 - Vanessa (Guest)

So you might not have known the ways that you're kind of subtly maintaining these systems of oppression and dominance, right. But if you wake up and you go, holy shit, I do that thing. Okay, there's no shame in that. You only know what you know. Now you have a choice. Now you get to choose differently. You get to do the work personally so that that like trickles out to your children, right.

54:03 - Chase (Host)

Um, someone might not think that, uh, the world of sexuality and your, your, your sex life in general, but also just your sexual connection to your partner, has as much of a role in your parenting style and your psyche, I think, as you write about. So can you kind of briefly talk to us about sexual disconnection from one's partner, and what does this typically look like? And, more importantly, why does it matter to not let it go unchecked?

54:29 - Vanessa (Guest)

And what does this typically look like? And, more importantly, why does it matter to not let it go unchecked? So, sexual disconnection I'll talk about this in the framework of specifically, I would say, early parenting, but that can mean a lot of things for different people. So let's say, maybe the first five years of parenting. This is when I see the most couples come in, whether I'm seeing them individually or that I'm seeing them together. This is when I see the most couples come in with sexual disconnection.

54:53 - Chase (Host)

And your therapist work and my therapist work.

54:55 - Vanessa (Guest)

So I would say it's one of two times. It's either early parenthood right or it's like later in life when we've been together for 20 years. It's usually one of those two areas. So if we focus it on this kind of early parenthood time what I see happen very often, especially in the transition from two to three, so from just the couple to the addition of the first child- oh, not two to three years old, but Two to three, as in two people to three people, right.

55:19

This is when I see it kind of kick up. What happens is we go from. We are each other's everything. You're the sun that I kind of orbit around, right, the sun orbits around me, rather. And then we've got this other planet that gets put into the mix, right. And then suddenly now the woman is now orbiting around this other planet, and what I see happen very often is there's this competitive energy that comes into the relationship.

55:43 - Chase (Host)

Oh, wow, yeah.

55:45 - Vanessa (Guest)

Where the other, the non-birthing partner, cause I don't even think this is heteronormative. Honestly, I've seen this in same-sex couples as well the non-birthing partner or the partner who would be considered, maybe not the primary partner or a parent. Rather, there's a competition that starts to happen. You're spending all of your time, all of your energy, all of your love, everything is going to this new being and I'm kind of left over here in the cold.

56:09 - Chase (Host)

Yeah.

56:09 - Vanessa (Guest)

Right, and what I've seen happen in my personal relationship, but also in the couples that I've worked with, is talk about rage. It elicits a kind of rage in the birthing partner that is hard for them to articulate, because what it elicits is I'm over here doing my best to keep this thing alive, right, I barely exist. I'm a shell of myself. Those first few years as a mother, you're like a shell of yourself, right, you don't have time for your needs. Are you kidding me? You're physically keeping a being alive with your own body, right? You're physically keeping a being alive with your own body, right. And then another grown person comes in and says but what about me and my needs? You're like, but what about you and your needs, are you?

56:59 - Chase (Host)

kidding me right now, right.

57:01 - Vanessa (Guest)

That is what I get. So often, where I get these, the birthing partners are like it's another child. I have another child to take care of who wants to be seen and wants to be validated and wants to be heard and wants to be loved. I'm too busy Like, do it yourself, right, um, and so that energy competition, I think, is one of the I guess less less spoken about and maybe one of the I guess less least spoken about and maybe one of the earliest ones that I see that leads to that sexual disconnection, because so often than the birthing partner starts to look at that other partner, um, as a child, there's, like a child parent energy that enters into the dynamic and then, once a parental dynamic enters into the relationship, forget it.

57:46

There the arrows is out the window. It's not that it can't be regained, but it takes work. I mean, I think it's Esther Perel that talks about the fact that as a species, we're hardwired, actually biologically, to not have sex with our offspring it's how our species survived or vice versa with our parents. And so the second, a parental energy, enters into a romantic relationship. The body actually shuts down the desire to procreate or to have sex with that other person.

58:16 - Chase (Host)

I've heard is this are you talking about, um, right after birth? I don't know the term here, but it's basically once a woman gets pregnant, married, unmarried, whatever I've heard a woman gets pregnant, married, unmarried, whatever. I've heard there's this like biological, biochemical change in their like actual desire for that partner, because it's evolutionary speaking, like I got what I needed from you, like I'm here to procreate, we procreated, I have my child, like it's developing and or I gave birth, so that kind of creates this whole new do I need you anymore Kind of thing.

58:53 - Vanessa (Guest)

I mean, that's, that's really interesting. I haven't heard that before, but that would track with some of the research I've seen around. Again, we, we didn't use to be in these pair bonds for life, right, it was created to be this way. And so, um, there's some cultures, even now where you know China I mean, that's not now, but generations ago they used to have these things called walk around marriages, where it was the men that would go to the women, like the women would base, or the women rather, excuse me, flip that around. The women would be the ones that would go around to the different husbands. It wasn't the patriarchal notion that we have, where it's one man with multiple wives. It was actually flipped. Um. But there is some research or some studies that say the woman would sleep with multiple men and the men never knew really who their actual children were. You weren't really meant to. It was more just like your body as a woman. Your ultimate thing was to get pregnant.

59:42

We're just here to procreate, and so how do you?

59:44 - Chase (Host)

do that by any means necessary, any means necessary.

59:46 - Vanessa (Guest)

You're not just going to only have sex with one person over and over again. You're going to try to procreate. It's how we survived and as a community, we all raise each other's children, so it didn't actually matter. Wow, there was no ownership. What we have now Right, so that's what you're saying is that's what reminds me of. I haven't actually read any research specifically on what you're saying, but that's it tracks.

01:00:12 - Chase (Host)

Well, I think it's even measurable in terms of looking at estrogen levels, testosterone levels. Just, you know, hormone levels the things that are are our sex drive in a big, big way. You know, even on the other side of it, for the guy during pregnancy, uh, for most men, uh, your testosterone drops like crazy because it's like oh, I'm with this unit, we got pregnant.

01:00:26 - Vanessa (Guest)

The nesting, yeah Right, the drive, basically yeah, yeah.

01:00:31 - Chase (Host)

Do you think that model could realistically work nowadays of, let's say, the woman goes through as many men as possible in their community to procreate and then the man doesn't know if it's really their child or not, but they're all on board with. Our job is to procreate and secondary to, to grow this community by any means necessary. Could that actually work today?

01:00:53 - Vanessa (Guest)

I mean that's a good question. I would venture to say we've kind of gotten too far from that to go back to that, if that is in fact. I mean, there's just studies that they don't. They don't know for sure. But I think we might be a little too. We've kind of swum too far past right for that.

01:01:06 - Chase (Host)

Yeah, I just see men getting probably so territorial, probably both in different ways of like is it my kid, Is it not? Is she my woman? Is he my man?

01:01:17 - Vanessa (Guest)

But territorial. To me, that feels like that was created Again. We live now. I mean, this is just how relationships are. They're very ownership. We have an ownership model of relationships, and that's not just a romantic. That's in all of our relationships. I love you, you love me, and so because of that, you owe me this. You owe me meet my needs, only fantasize about me for the rest of your life. Make sure that I'm safe, make sure that I'm attached, make sure that like it's your job, because I now own you, like we have this ownership way of looking and we do it to friends, we do it to family members. I mean so to me that feels kind of created. You know, I talk a lot about this concept of us being a codependent society. That doesn't feel like actually how our species originated. It feels like that's been created.

01:02:09 - Chase (Host)

Are we talking like referencing, like monogamy here, or just in terms of best efforts for procreation?

01:02:14 - Vanessa (Guest)

It could be monogamy, um. I mean, there's even some studies around that where they question is monogamy created or or kind of man man-made, Right? Um, but also, do we need to procreate? No matter what, I'm pretty sure our species is really overpopulated, so I don't even know.

01:02:29 - Chase (Host)

Maybe use a little break.

01:02:31 - Vanessa (Guest)

I think the earth would say can you take a break please?

01:02:33 - Chase (Host)

Interesting, so interesting. Kind of getting towards the end here, I want to ask some questions around. You know just this lens of healing through what you do, and you know psychology and, of course, a new book. Do you think therapy can serve as a modern?

01:02:52 - Vanessa (Guest)

initiatory space, like we were talking about earlier.

01:02:53 - Chase (Host)

I do, I do, and what would that look like?

01:02:55 - Vanessa (Guest)

Um, so an initiation right, a ritual. In essence, it does a few things. So, first off, it honors the kind of archetypal pattern of death, darkness, rebirth and during that darkness, right Again, it holds that like kind of platform, that container for you to be in the liminal space. So, again, liminal space. Right, I'm not who I was, I'm not yet who I will be, I'm in the in-between.

01:03:23

This is the struggle, this is the darkness, right, this is where the pain is, this is where the the, the suffering is, this is where the like you got to go out and slay your dragons, right? So what I've experienced and what I do believe is that, again, we don't have very many sanctioned initiations. So if I come to my therapist which is really when people come to therapy, many times, right, they're in that thrashing about period, they're struggling and they don't know how to make sense of it. So if that therapist can hold the space for you to thrash about and give that platform for you to be witnessed and for you to be heard and for you to integrate these learnings and these lessons you're going through, then, yes, it can really act as an initiatory container.

01:04:11 - Chase (Host)

So do you think to kind of really dumb it down? Not to, I'm a firm believer in therapy and have a therapist and all the things, but just let's say, if we take therapy, that term, out of it, is it just about we're lacking the space, the actual physical or metaphorical space, for that gray area for us to kind of like be initiated?

01:04:35 - Vanessa (Guest)

Sure, that's definitely a big part of it. I mean, we're very linear thinkers now, right, like we are linear thinkers now, again, we're very neck up, um, in a lot of ways. As we've become more modern, more industrialized, we've lost our connection as a species to what Jung would call the numinous, that which cannot be named right. Jung would say that we have human, all human beings have what he would call a religious function of the psyche. I would venture to say, if he was alive now, he would call it the spiritual function of the psyche. But as a species, it's inherently baked into us to want to relate to something bigger than ourselves, to have these existential questions, and so we've really lost that as we've become more and more modern and more and more tech driven Right and I think that's a big missing piece in this concept of initiation is like it's not just like okay, here's the steps through which we heal, here's the steps through which we grow, that's what we want, right, that's what we all want Like what's the pill?

01:05:40 - Chase (Host)

Give me the solution, give me the ABC. Give me the seven minute abs. Give me the, give me the GLP one.

01:05:46 - Vanessa (Guest)

Yeah, and I would say as a depth therapist in particular, for me the biggest indicator of like EQ, of emotional intelligence, of resiliency, is somebody's capacity to hold that gray, to hold the tension of the opposites, to challenge black and white thinking, to challenge dichotomy, to get out of the linear way of being and be more comfortable with nuance and chaos and the unknown and change right. That, to me, is actually one of the biggest indicators of somebody having high EQ.

01:06:19 - Chase (Host)

Could not agree more and, honestly, my wife's favorite compliment that I give her is when I talk to her about her capacity, the capacity for all the things that you just said. I think that's an area of whether it's in a romantic partnership or just in our life in general. When we are in suffering, whether in our imagination or, like Seneca says, more in our imagination than in reality, or actual, real suffering it's we are lacking this area of capacity.

01:06:48

I agree, and if we can learn how to step into that more, I think one. It takes an immediate load off of our shoulders of expectations, of old belief systems, of coulda shoulda woulda, and just allows this kind of ambiguity to exist. But out of that ambiguity comes where I should say rather we find again, get reconnected to our most authentic true self that's right.

01:07:15 - Vanessa (Guest)

I mean, you can do that with yourself, but also with a partner like yeah, that's the best. That's where the clarity comes, that's where the direction comes from right. It's not a logical process, it's an intuitive process. But we can't be neck up if we want to connect to intuition and we want to connect to something larger than ourselves not all the time.

01:07:32 - Chase (Host)

There's a place. I'm in a place for neck up, that's for sure.

01:07:34 - Vanessa (Guest)

There's a time and a place, for sure, I mean, there's survival in that right, but unfortunately, we are there all the time now as a species, all the time, and and you can see it in the way we treat each other, the planet, animals, animals, like we're killing ourselves, and most of that is because we're completely disconnected from anything other than logic.

01:07:55 - Chase (Host)

Well, before I get to my last question, I want to ask you to kind of like summarize, wrap it all up to just one liner or a clear, concise thought. If you could offer one message to mothers right now who feel lost, overwhelmed or even ashamed, what would it be?

01:08:13 - Vanessa (Guest)

Nothing is wrong with you. You're actually acting completely normal within a messed up system. So look at the system right. That's the best way, I think, to alleviate the shame that we're working with is to say, oh, this isn't a me thing, this is a system thing, and so once you're out of that mindset, then we can actually fix the system Right. But the system wants us to stay in shape, so we've got to fight that.

01:08:44 - Chase (Host)

Ever forward. I asked you this, you and John, years ago, but I want to get a fresh interpretation. Those two words right now, in 2025, as someone who is navigating, changing their entire daily life from losing everything here in the fires earlier in LA and living on a different continent and just parenting in totally different ways. Those two words, what do they mean to you? If I were to say, vanessa, how do you live a life ever forward? What does that mean to you now?

01:09:13 - Vanessa (Guest)

Ever forward. To me, what's interesting is that, like your logo is a is a forward arrow right, but when I think of ever forward, the image that comes up for me now is is more of a circle right, and so it's like I'm moving forward, but then I'm regrounding and I'm integrating into who I am now, and then I'm moving forward and then I'm regrounding and I'm integrating, so I don't think again it's not a straight line, right, and if we don't make space for like the coming home it it, I think it loses everything, it loses its meaning, it loses the point. So for me, right now, one of the biggest lessons has been to continue to come back to myself, continue to ground.

01:09:57 - Chase (Host)

I really love that answer. I agree with it a lot. I wonder if there's a way I can find to change the logo to be less linear and more, you know, fluidity and time and space and um, over the years.

01:10:10

you know, when I first started this show I don't know if I shared this with you last time, but ever forward was this mantra of my father my late father and, um, you know, as a young man, as a 19 year old who loses their dad, and you hear this phrase, you think one thing, because that's what you need.

01:10:25

You know, I needed to just go forward. I needed to just, you know, put the past behind me. Um, but for the last couple of years now, the best way I have found to move forward in life is is to, like, literally be as present and here and still as possible, and the more that I can stack those moments and days and weeks, like I'm I'm looking back and going, holy shit, I've moved forward in ways that I don't even know if I could have done, if I actually planned, just only thinking linear.

01:10:54

It's eternity lives right here and right now in the present moment, and so the more I can just wrap my head around that I'm so much happier in my life, and then it just, I think, finds the best way possible for me to help translate that in episodes and in other, you know, pieces of content and just my life, and so I love that interpretation. Any graphic designers that can turn this arrow into a circle somehow with an F, let me know.

01:11:19 - Vanessa (Guest)

But here's the thing, though, chase. What I will say is that we need the masculine. The masculine is structure and it is order and it is, you know, container, and that's just as important as the feminine, which is the circular and it is the fluidity, right, but they work together. We can't have one without the other. So I say, keep the logo.

01:11:39 - Chase (Host)

All right. All right, We'll keep it. It's eight years in. You know I don't want to go changing things on people too much. Vanessa, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I will have her first episode with her amazing husband, uh, linked in the show notes and video description. With you guys, Uh, where can I go forever?

01:12:00 - Vanessa (Guest)

ago, three years Wow it was like an eternity. Where can they go to get the book to connect with you? Um, yeah, what's the best place? Everything's on my website, vanessabenettcom. Um, you know, I'm on social Instagram Tik TOK, all the things, but you can get all that right there Again, links in the show notes and in the video description.

01:12:12 - Chase (Host)

Video description there we go. Use your words Um, thank you. Thank you so much. All right For more information on everything you just heard. Make sure to check this episode show notes or head to ever forwardradiocom.