00:00 

Hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 310, "Understanding Our Adaptive Child," from the book "Us" by Terrence Reel. Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:25 

Well, hey there. Welcome to the podcast today. So, glad to have you here. Today we are going to be talking about understanding our adaptive child. This is a concept from the book "Us" by the author Terrence Reel. He is a counselor, a therapist. Several months ago I read this book and it has risen to be one of my favorite relationship books. It helped to solidify some ideas that I had already been working with and it also helped me to expand and understand some ideas more deeply and heavily. One of these ideas is the idea of the adaptive child. I want to talk to you about this today. In this book he shares a lot of examples of couples he has done counseling with, which first of all makes for an engaging read and makes it easier to understand the concepts. I am going to be sharing with you today many parts from the book. A lot of it will be direct quotes but I won't necessarily be noting that as I share this information. But please know that almost everything today will be coming from this book and not really my own thoughts. I will share some things but most of it is going to be coming from ideas directly from his book. Just such a powerful read and I would absolutely suggest that if this is your kind of stuff that this is a book that you get and that you read. 

01:52 

So, one of the things that I loved is that he introduced me to this idea of our adaptive child and how that impacts our interactions in our relationships. So Terry Reel introduces the concept of the adaptive child by talking about trauma that most of us have experienced as children. Now I've heard trauma talked about in terms of little t trauma and big T trauma. I don't know if that's something that you've heard of before, but big T trauma would be very large experience, such as violent abuse, serious neglect, a sexual abuse, something like that. Little t trauma would be more things like being dismissed a thousand times over the course of our childhood, being called stupid multiple times a day for as long as you can remember being in your parents' home. These little small things that in and of themselves are not a huge deal, but added up over and over and over and over, they become traumatic for us. Little t traumas are things that aren't necessarily traumatic at the time, but over time they break us down. And we learn to adapt to these little t traumas in ways that help us to survive at the time. They're very helpful, but that are often very unhelpful as we grow into adulthood. In some big T trauma circumstances, the person may not remember the trauma necessarily when something happens, but they will actually relive it. So it's not like they go, "oh, I remember that that happened." It's that their body actually responds in such a way that they're reliving it. 

03:28 

So the example that Terry Will gives is a combat vet who hears a car backfire and automatically he is reliving a combat situation from his past. And the past superimposes itself onto the present, fundamentally confusing the mind is how he describes it. Little t traumas can kind of do the same thing. I mean, obviously they are not as big as something like a combat vet would go through, but Terry continues the discussion by saying this: most of us do not reenact the experience of the trauma itself. Instead, we act out the coping strategy that we evolve to deal with it. You were emotionally abandoned throughout your childhood. And so you've grown into a charming seducer, expert at securing others' attention, or you were intruded upon as a child and now you operate behind walls. You are adept at keeping people out. So Terry refers to this part of us as the adaptive child, the you that you cobbled together in the absence of healthy parenting. This is an emotionally immature part of us that creates dysfunctional relationships now. And these coping mechanisms, these adaptive behaviors, can actually work actively to destroy the relationships that we have now. So though these behaviors were very helpful to us when we are young because they helped us to survive, as an adult, they actually are destructive to our relationships. 

05:03 

So, in contrast to the adaptive child, he introduces the wise adult part of us, which he refers to as the mature part of us, the one who is present in the here and now. And this is the part that cares about us, that is able to see the situation clearly. This is the emotionally mature part of us that can develop and sustain healthy relationships. And we do go back and forth between the wise adult and the adaptive child. But when things happen that trigger that adaptive child, we will behave in ways that are not even cognitively clear to us at the time. They seem protective to our primitive brain, but the wise adult is not really seeing what's happening, right? So the wise adult kind of checks out while the adaptive child takes over. 

05:53 

So here are some of the differences between the adaptive child and the wise adult that Terry identifies. The adaptive child will often see things in black and white. The wise adult will be able to see more nuanced ideas about what's going on. An adaptive child works in a perfectionist mindset, whereas a wise adult will be more realistic. The adaptive child will be relentless and rigid and harsh and even hard. The wise adult will be forgiving, flexible, warm, and yielding. An adaptive child will be certain and a wise adult will be humble. An adaptive child will be tight in their body. I would imagine that, you know, some anxiety, that kind of stuff, whereas a wise adult will be more relaxed in their body. 

06:48 

So notice the stark differences between how the adaptive child shows up and how the wise adult in us shows up. The adaptive child is very harsh, very "my way or no way," while the wise adult has the capacity to offer grace, to be flexible, to see others' points of view. A really important point that is brought up in the book is that the adaptive child part of us has very good reasons for behaving this way. These types of behaviors protected us as children. They helped us survive and possibly even thrive in what were often very difficult situations when we were younger, because none of us grew up in a perfect childhood. None of us had perfect parents. All of our parents failed us in some way. That is what parents do. And so we all developed some of these maladaptive behaviors. And so learning to figure them out. So we do get to say, "thank you, brain, for figuring out how to be okay in some tough circumstances when I didn't have adult support to teach me." 

07:54 

However, these same behaviors are no longer serving us as adults. In fact, they are often very detrimental and destructive in our relationships. And yet, because we are most often unaware of these maladaptive behaviors, they are showing up and running the show and we don't even see it. We are prone in these situations to always blame the other person or see what the other person is doing without saying our own because in our brain, these behaviors make a lot of sense. 

08:28 

So in the book, Terry also clarifies that just because the adaptive child part of you is rigid does not mean it is always outwardly aggressive. You can have an overly accommodating, people-pleasing adaptive child. He continues on, your adaptive child can tend toward superiority, it can tend toward inferiority, or it can bounce back and forth, but whether it is more dominating or withdrawn, it will react pretty much the same way whenever you're triggered. This set-point reaction is your relational stance, the thing you will do over and over again when you are stressed. So, the point that I see Terry making here is that this adaptive child is just doing what it feels it needs to do to survive. It's a pattern that has worked in the past and it continues to employ these tactics in the present without thought for whether they are still working for us or not. And very often they are not still working for us. 

09:34 

So this is the space of grace that I love talking about that says, of course you behave that way. It has served you very well in the past, it has protected you. Let's create a lot of grace for the past you who needed these tactics to survive a tough situation. And let's also recognize that these patterns may actually be doing more harm than good at this point in your life. So first though, we need to see what the adaptive child is up to. At some level, the acquired behaviors helped us to preserve ourselves, to protect ourselves. They helped us to psychologically survive. Ways that we may have learned how to respond and react to a controlling parent or to a neglectful, dismissive parent will often then show up in our marriages, those same kinds of responses. And it may look like rebellion, ignoring, or being dismissive to our spouse, or it could look like perfectionist tendencies trying to keep the peace or people pleasing in our marriages. There is a good reason that we have maladaptive behaviors, because they worked in the past and they protected us at some level. It's just important that now we start seeing these behaviors for what they are in our present adult life. They are currently destructive behaviors, things that are tearing down the intimacy and the connection that we want in our relationships. 

11:04 

 So here's another quote from Terry. He says, "one of the telltale characteristics of the you and me adaptive child is that it is automatic, a knee-jerk response. It's the whoosh, the visceral reaction that comes up from the feet like a wave washing over your body. I speak of it as our first consciousness and I divide it into three reactions: fight, flight, or fix." Continuing on, he says, "we all know what fight looks like. As for flight, just a reminder that someone could sit inches away from another person and still flee, they just do so internally, and we call that stonewalling. Or a fleer will often run away from the relationship by lying, omitting, and evading, and they will often move into compliance and passive resistance as well. They avoid the fight, but do so by engaging in behaviors that are destructive to the core of the relationship." Continuing on, Terry says, "the knee-jerk response of fixing is not the same as a mature, considered wish to work on the relationship. Adaptive child fixers are fueled by an anxious, driven need to take anyone's tension away from them as quickly as possible. Their motto is: I am upset until you are not." 

12:27 

Okay, are you seeing some of this go on, either in yourself or in a spouse or in other people? Okay, so all of these types of behaviors can be so automatic that we are unaware of them happening. We may even see the fallout of them, but our brain is not making the connection between our behaviors and that fallout. So again, our brain still sees these behaviors that we're engaging in as good, and even doesn't see them at all, because they've always been there, and we haven't had a reason to question them. Sometimes you can come to this awareness on your own through means like a podcast or a book, and sometimes you need some outside eyes looking at your situation to help you see the behaviors, like a coach or a counselor. 

13:19 

But once we start seeing the adaptive child behavior, then how do we start to move beyond it? Okay, so this is what Terry Reel has to say is the next step for this. He says, "we shift from the automatic, thoughtless response, your adaptive child, to something new, something more relational, more connected, more mature. You call on your non-triggered us consciousness, which is your wise adult." Continuing on in his quote, he says, "the great spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishna Murti once said that 'true liberation is freedom from our own automatic responses.'" Okay, I just have to stop there because I think that's such a great concept. True freedom is when we are free from our automatic responses, when we can start to respond intentionally. In our culture, our relationship to relationships tends to be passive. We get what we get and then we react to it. Most of us try to get more of what we want from our partners by complaining when they don't get it right. That's got to be about the worst behavioral modification program I've ever heard of. This reactive approach to relationships is inherently individualistic. We have moved out of our wise adult into our adaptive child parts. The present-based, most mature part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, has lost connection with the older, fast brain, the subcortal limbic system, which we often hear called the primitive brain. Without that connection, you lose a pause between what you feel and what you do. 

15:06 

Continuing on, I know this is a long one, he says, "But my message is that in our reactions, we are not simple passengers. Over time, with training and practice, we can change our responses. We can shift from being reactive individuals to being proactive teammates who, in cooperation with our partner, intentionally shape the transaction between us. This everyday practice is called relational mindfulness, stopping for a brief moment and centering ourselves, observing just as in all forms of mindfulness, the thoughts, feelings, and impulses that arise, and choosing something different." So I know that was long, but I love his reminder that we don't have to subject ourselves to a lifetime of dysfunctional and destructive behaviors. It does, however, require some effort on our part. 

16:00 

Tying this in with the work that I do and the thought model that we talk about so much, we may not get to choose the circumstances of our lives, but we do get to choose our response. Now, the adaptive child responds generally without much conscious awareness, but we can learn to become aware of the behaviors the adaptive child puts into play. We can learn to slow down and engage with our brain, with our feelings, and then choose to act in a way that is in alignment with the kind of person that we really want to be. 

16:33 

So, as a quick thought model refresher: circumstances happen, they are neutral, and then we get to have thoughts about them. When our thought is a triggered thought of needing to protect ourselves, we will feel something like fear, and then the action becomes the dysfunctional behavior that we have engaged in for so many years. That fear creates that action. We have behaved from our adaptive child. We have had that adaptive child thought without conscious awareness. But, we do have the option to slow the process down a bit. A circumstance can happen and we may have a triggered thought from our adaptive child that then creates fear. And then, what we can do is we can start to learn to notice the fear. We can learn to tune ourselves into recognizing it when it appears in our body. Where is it? Is it in your gut? Your chest? Your shoulders? Your neck? Your head? Find it in your body? And then what does it feel like? Consider things such as weight. Is it heavy? Is it light? Is it big and pressure or is it constricting? Is there a temperature? Is there a texture? Is there a vibration? Like, does it have a buzz or does it have a pulse, right? Things like that. So, you want to be able to find it and identify it in your body. 

17:55 

Then when we are in a situation and we notice that emotion come up, we can go, "oh, whoa, wait a minute, there's that emotion." And we can breathe and think, "is this fear justified? Or is this my adaptive child showing up?" And then we don't have to act from that fear. We've put a pause in between the feeling line and the action line. We don't have to act just because we feel. 

18:25 

So I have been working for a lot of years, probably five or six years, on my resistance to acknowledge difficult emotions and allow them. So that is one of my maladaptive child responses, is just to skirt over or brush aside difficult emotions like anger and pretend that they don't exist. So I was always afraid that if I felt anger, then I would engage in angry behavior, maybe belittling others or name calling or yelling or hurting others, either through my words or maybe hitting or something, right? And then one time I was working on this struggle that I have of really stepping into feeling the more difficult emotions, working with my own coach. And she reminded me that I could feel anger and put that pause in place and not have that anger transfer into my behaviors. I could feel the emotion, be honest with myself about my experience and say, "oh, this is making me angry," but also choose not to be a hurtful and an unkind person. The actions don't have to come from my emotion. I get to choose not to do that. So this was a revelation to me. I could pause and choose to behave differently while still allowing myself to feel the anger. So this is what Terry Reel is talking about. 

19:50 

Take a minute to notice the thought and the emotion and then choose to behave differently, create greater awareness around these adaptive behaviors that we have from our childhood. When we engage with our adaptive child responses in this way, when we choose to behave in a more wise adult manner, then we are beginning the work of healing the little t trauma that created the behavior in the first place. When people say that relationships take work, this is the real work. It's figuring out all of the adaptive child responses that we have and learning to heal the hurt child behind them and choosing to step into the emotional maturity of our wise adult. We are learning to take these triggered adaptive child behaviors and and approach them differently. Not allow them to take over, but instead use our wise adult brain to do that. And it's important to realize that the wise adult part of us wants intimacy and connection, but our adaptive child behaviors will choose self protection over the vulnerability of connection every single time. So if we want the connected intimate relationships that most of us get married to have, we have to learn to see and engage with our adaptive child and address hers or his destructive beliefs and step into our wise adult instead. 

21:33 

Okay, so I think that that's a pretty good overview and I hope that that helps you understand the concept better. So now I want to share with you some of the examples that Terry gives in the book so that you can see it better. And all three of these examples just happen to be of men, but they could just as easily be women. It's not a gender thing at all. We all have adaptive child responses and the goal here is to just share some examples that may help you understand what some of your adaptive child responses might be. Okay, so I want you to be looking at yourself here, not at your spouse and saying, "oh my gosh, look how messed up they are." This is only work that you can do on you. You can't do this for your spouse. Okay, so I'm just gonna be reading these straight from the book and I'll do my best to make it clear like when, because it's conversational style, so I'll do my best to make that easy for you to understand what's going on. 

22:27 

So this first one: Ernesto, Latino and 56, was a rager. He wasn't a physical rager, thank goodness, but he was a screamer, demeanor, a get-in-your-face-and-say-nasty-things verbal abuser. "It just comes over me too fast," he tells me, about three quarters of the way through a 90 minute one-shot consultation with him and his wife Maddie, also Latina, and a few years younger. Ernesto sounds like many abusive clients I have listened to over the years. After meandering around for the better part of an hour, I finally asked him a question that hits pay dirt. Who taught you how to be nasty and mean? "You mean like family?" he stutters. "Well, my mother died when I was eight and my father remarried. Yeah, I guess my stepmother." What was she like? Ernesto smiles, shakes his head. "Oh, she was the meanest, worst, most horrible." "So she's the one," I say.  "Yes." "She taught you how to be this nasty?" "Yes, I guess she did." 

23:28 

"And what's it like to see that?" I try to catch his eye as he looks down at the floor. Sitting across from him, I can feel his shame, a flush of warmth up his face. "Ernesto," I ask softly, he doesn't speak. "Where are you now?" I ask after a time, "what's going on?" "Oh," he says, not smiling, "I'm embarrassed. For someone to see me the way I see her..." he shakes his head looking beyond me. I wonder what he's seeing, remembering. "I feel mortified," he tells me. "That embarrassment is what we call healthy guilt or remorse. If you had felt that up front, it would have stopped you. Makes sense?" He nods, head down. "Do you have a picture of your stepmother?" "What, on me?" "No. Can you get one?" "Sure," he says, "yeah, I can." "Good, here's what I want you to do. You can rage at your wife, I can't stop you. But the next time you're about to blow, before you do, I want you to take out the picture of your stepmother, look her in the eye and say, 'I know I'm about to do harm, but right now, being like you is more important to me than my wife is.' Say that, and then go ahead and rage if you have to." Ernesto's head snaps up and he looks at me. "That's not true. That would stop me in my tracks. She's not more important than my wife is." He falls silent, reaches out his hand, and places it palm up on Maddie's lap. She takes his hand and they gaze at each other. That was almost 14 years ago. Ernesto has not raged since. 

25:09 

Okay, so I love this example because I think when he didn't realize that he was behaving in a way that had been modeled for him as a child, the idea that this is how adults behave, he was just doing it really unconsciously. And once Terry Reel was able to help him see that and see that he was behaving in the way that that his stepmother had, someone that he detested, then it really shook him at the core. Okay, so very very fascinating stuff. 

25:46 

Okay, so here is another one. Okay, so again, these are all just happened to be male, but he also has in the book lots of examples of females, but these ones just are this. So here we go. Paul, white and 48, crosses his ankle on top of his knee and drums his fingers absently on his horizontal leg. His wife Cheryl, also Caucasian, 55, has had it with him. He is too closed off, too unintimate. She needs more. And yet, Paul assures me, he came from a normal, happy childhood. No one screamed at him or hit him or bullied him. 

26:21 

He tells me, "I've heard this before," and at this early point in the session, it's difficult to ascertain whether Paul grew up in an unloving home or just a quiet one. I ask, "so who did you turn to for comfort or reassurance when you were hurt or scared?" "Why," he muses, "I don't recall turning to anyone. I relied on myself." "From what age?" "Pardon?" "How young were you when you first learned to take care of it yourself?" "I don't know," he says, "as long as I can remember." "Right," I tell him. "You shut the door on filling so long ago, you don't remember. But you didn't come out that way. Further back than your memory stretches, you did reach out to your parents once or twice for solace, and their response led you to conclude that depending on them, emotionally, was a bad idea." Paul shifts in his chair listening. "With no one there to help modulate your feelings, you did a very smart thing as that little boy. You shut them down, closed the door on them." 

27:22 

Paul is a type one love avoidant, someone who in today's psychological parlance would be classed as having an avoidant dismissive attachment style. Paul lives behind walls because he grew up in a family where everyone lived behind walls. So what's the problem? Being emotionally shut down is normal to Paul, and if he lived alone, he'd be fine, but he isn't alone. He has a wife and a bunch of kids, all whom need him. The problem for Paul is that we humans cannot be surgical with our feelings. If you open up one feeling, they all come. Cheryl is knocking hard on Paul's door. But opening up his heart to her means reopening the door he firmly closed as a child. He is routinely subject to emotions, but he doesn't have the tools to identify them. 

28:09 

"You left your feelings," I tell him in a later session, "they never left you. They've been percolating the whole time. You just need help connecting to them again and naming them." I have to teach Paul how to have emotions. He needs them to share with his wife. For some time she's been feeling bored with their marriage, she confesses later in the session. Paul needs to share his emotional life with Cheryl and he needs to become interested in Cheryl's emotional life as well. All this requires help because when little Paul fell from his bicycle, the adults looked away or stared at him without expression. 

28:53 

Okay, so here we have Paul, who was treated with neglect with anything that he needed, so he learned as a child, his adaptive response was to take care of himself, to shut down his emotions, to not need anyone. As a child, that protected him, but as an adult in a marriage relationship, it's destructive. It does the exact opposite of what we get married to do. 

29:18 

Okay, let me share one more with you. Let's see, this one starts off with: "it's like when Joey gets aggressive, I just, I want to go away," Linda tells me. We're sitting together, the three of us, in a one session only demonstration interview in front of a room filled with therapists. Linda has described herself to the group as Native American Cherokee Nation. She is 33. "Aggressive? What does that mean? What does he look like?" "All Joey wants to do is talk about it," she goes on, ignoring my question, "but I'm like, leave me alone. I lock myself in the bedroom and he's pounding away, yelling, but I am gone." "You're behind a wall," I say. "Big wall," she agrees. "Like, you can pack your bags, get out, get hit by a car in the street. I don't care what you do. Did I get it?" "That's right." "That's a pretty hefty wall you got there." "Yes, it is," she says. Her back straight, her hands in her lap, she is looking at her husband, Joey, a big man with a large afro squished down by a leather cap. 

30:21 

After a moment, I ask her, "so how does it end? When does the wall come down? When do we make up?" "Yes. Well, when Joey softens up, when his tone changes and his body language gets more gentle, then..." I turn to Joey, who's black and younger than his wife at 27. He affirms Linda's story. Yes, when he gets aggressive, she pulls away, but the thing she leaves out, according to Joey, is that he often gets aggressive because she's already pulled away. "But what Linda says does work?" I ask, keeping him on track, "when you gentle up and soften up, she comes out from behind her wall." "Yes, that does work," he says. "When it works, it works"." And how long until?" "Couple, three days," he shares, as if that were normal. 

31:09 

We fall silent a long minute or so. I don't know, Joey. I say it last, but I imagine what I make up, as we say, "is that on the other side of Linda's wall, there's a little boy inside of you, and he feels quite alone and abandoned and overwhelmed?" Joey nods vigorously. Bingo. "Bingo," I say to his averted face. "Tell me." And then out of nowhere, he opens up about something he rarely thinks of, let alone speaks about. "You see," he interrupts me, "I was abused as a child." "You mean sexually?" He looks down at his feet, "by my aunt." "You were...?" "Seven," he says. No one knew, I didn't tell anybody. this big man begins to cry. He balls his hands into fists and cries into them. "I'm sorry," I tell Joey. "I'm so sorry." After a time, I add, "so that little boy outside Linda's door." Joey tells me still tearful, "it's like no one's there. There's no one home, no one to tell. No one cares about my story." 

32:14 

Listen to the way Joey describes his feelings when Linda shuts him out. There's like no one to tell, like no one cares about my story. His inner child feels the aloneness of that boy of seven must have felt in his family. If he hadn't felt so alone, he would have told someone about his aunt. And indeed, Joey later describes his mother as a prescription drug addict while his father was out with a succession of girlfriends. A therapist might quite legitimately focus on the one incident of sexual abuse, and that did not need to be tended to. But what caught my interest was the aloneness of that little boy. His aunt abused him once. His parents abandoned him 365 days a year. This is relational trauma. Trauma meted out every day of your childhood. Notice that in his relationship with Linda, it isn't Joey's feelings of being used or suffocated, feelings he had associated with his aunt's incest that get activated. It's his far more damaging feelings of abandonment, relational trauma wounds, and it wounds deeply and early in one's development. When Joey stood outside Linda's door, he was that seven-year-old again. He didn't recall his emotion. He became it. 

33:39 

Okay, so three really great examples of how our adaptive child shows up in our adult relationships, how it takes over the wise adult part of our brain that can think and process and see these things clearly. And so as we start to look at our maladaptive behaviors, the ones that are breaking down, where are you acting and be showing up in your relationship in a way that in your more clear moments, when you're in your wise adult, you look at those moments and you go, "that's just weird. What is that about? I shouldn't get that upset about that." These may be some things that we want to start looking at as this is a maladaptive behavior. And I don't think we always know where these maladaptive behaviors come from. We just get to recognize that they are maladaptive, that this adaptive child is showing up in a way that was protective and kind to us when we were children. But those behaviors are destroying our relationships now. And so as we can learn to identify these and see these and address them and see how that child is showing up, we can do something different. We can step in  between the feeling and the action line and we can choose to show up different. We can choose to disengage, let our prefrontal cortex come back online and then step back in from the wise adult place. 

35:15 

Now, if you wanna understand more about this concept, I would absolutely suggest this book, "Us," by Terence Reel. It's a really quick read because of all of the experiences that he shares in there like that. And just so much valuable information, so much I just can't even get into it. But like I said, it has become one of my favorite books as of late as I just, the concepts really just solidified pieces for me coming together and helped to expand my understanding of so much of what I already teach about. 

35:49 

So that is gonna do it for today. I hope you enjoyed of this. I know a lot of it was just straight from the book, but I just think it's such valuable information that is going to help us understand ourselves better and understand our relationships better and maybe understand your spouse better in a way that you can create greater compassion for them and give them the space to be an adult who is working through their stuff and figuring things out, because we all are. We all need the grace from people in our lives who understand that we don't always see it. We don't always get it. And yet we want to be good people. We want to be engaged. We want these deeply connected intimate relationships. We just don't know how to get there. And we oftentimes act as though we don't want them, but that's just our adaptive child stepping up to do what thinks is gonna be helpful. Such a fascinating. way to approach all of this work we do. So that's going to do it for me. 

36:55 

If you have not left me a review, will you get on, I think iTunes and Spotify are the ones that you can leave a review on. And it only takes a very, very short amount of time. It's super, super easy. On your iTunes I know you can just open up my podcast, scroll down, and at the bottom it will say, "oh look at. Here's how many stars we have." And you can give me stars and you can just type in a review really quick and it doesn't take long at all. And it helps other people to find this content and to find this podcast so that they can hear this kind of amazing information as well. And piece by piece we can start putting our lives back together. And this is the brilliance of growing up, is that piece by piece, we see things more clearly. We have the experiences to draw from that help us to make sense of the world that we're in. Okay, that's gonna do it for me, my friends. I hope you have an awesome, awesome week and I will see you next time, bye. 

37:59 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.