Giraffes on Ice, Part 3: Struggle Well

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they're made to do. There was a scholar, and I forget his name, but he studied stories from all over the world. And he was trying to analyze to decide, like, how many different kinds of stories are there? And he he came up with seven types. There's only seven stories that have ever been told in the in the history of the world. They're told over and over again. And I can't list them all, but you'll catch on. Man's struggle against nature. Man's struggle against himself. Man's struggle against man. Man's struggle for love. Like, what's the common word? Struggle. Struggle. Right? And so the idea that it's all the same all over the world, the human experience is struggle. It's not winning. Right? And so left we're real I mean, the Bible is clear about this. Like, the name of God's people is wrestles with God, struggle with God. He named his people Israel. Right? And so for us to kinda get this idea that parenting is about us struggling with ourselves, us struggling with God, us struggling with our children. And it's really about how to struggle well. And the thing that mostly keeps us from struggling well is things in our own story that we're trying to ignore. Things from my past that I don't wanna name. Things from my childhood experience or my adolescent experience or my adult reality that I don't wanna deal with. That's the number one thing that keeps us from struggling. Because human beings are born knowing how to struggle. What's a baby do to get out of the womb is struggle. Right? And when it when it starts to make a noise the first time, it's not a coo. It's a scream. And it reaches and it grasps and it sucks and it fights and it wants to live. It's struggling. And you ever watch Chip talks about watching little kids play. You ever watch like a like a little boy or girl play? Like, they don't quit. Like, it's just all in. They're getting in it and building stuff and knocking. And when the blocks fall over, they don't quit. They might cry for a second. Alright. Then what do they do? They go right back in to stack up the blocks. I watched her watching our daughter. She's very, cerebral. Watched her trying to fit when she was about 18, a round little biscuit thing into a square hole, like metaphor. Duh. But, really, like, she she did this, and she looked at it, and she stuck her finger in the hole, and then she turned it and did this. And, like, she got mad at it, and she tried harder. Like, little bitty kid who doesn't have, like, a lot of frontal lobe, a lot of figuring skills, but she was gonna struggle to get that thing in there. Right? And somewhere along the way, we learn all of us learn not to struggle. We learn to perform. We learn to perform. We learn to hide. We learn to please. We learn to lie. We learn to smile. Remember, I led a group for a long time, and there's a woman in the group from China. And she didn't come to America until she was in her, like, mid to late twenties. She grew up in China. And she was talking in the group about her relationship with her mother and her relationship with her father. And she kept saying y'all aren't y'all gonna understand. Because in China and this woman said, girl, if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Right? This is a girl from Mississippi saying this to a girl in China. It was the same thing. Right? And this woman from China learned to perform and excel and achieve in order to get her parents love. That's not unique to China. That's the same thing that happens in America. And so if we don't deal with our stories, if we don't finish our business, we we can't engage our children in the struggle of their life. And parenting is not a zero birth to 22 or birth to 18 or birth to 18 or birth to 24 endeavor. It takes a lifetime to raise a child. Right? And it and and even when a parent if a parent is fortunate enough to die the right way, which is to die before their child dies, that child still needs their parent after they die. Because that child doesn't know how to be 70. Right? Like, it takes a lifetime to raise a kid. It also takes a lifetime to learn how to how to live. So we're learning and growing, and our children are learning and growing. But I can't give my kids what I don't have. So if I've got a bunch of stuff back here I've not dealt with, guess what I'm gonna not do with my kids? Alright. I'm gonna try to make sure that they don't encounter anything that's gonna evoke that stuff in me. And every family, especially if you're a southern Christian family, is not real good at telling the truth. Just not. That's just part of our culture. Because we're really good at, like, making people feel good. We're really good at bringing dinners when people are sick in the hospital. And we're awesome at that. We're really good at, like, sending people on mission trips and caring for people. These are all wonderful things. Wonderful, wonderful things. Really good at building beautiful schools to educate children in and caring about their hearts in the process and not just like, you know, feeding their brains. But one thing us southern Christians are not real good at is, like, telling the truth about how hard it is being relationship with each other. You know? Because if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Right? Like, that's that's one of our phrases. Well, that's true all over the place. So if you're gonna parent with heart and you're gonna have the kind of relationship that last your child's whole life and your whole life, where you have something to offer them, you've got to deal with the things that you've told yourself you're not gonna deal with. The things that broke your heart, robs your innocence, brought shame upon you, that you said, I'm not gonna look at that again. And I promise if you do, if you begin to unearth that material and begin to address it and name it, it's gonna force you to be in better relationship with God. It's gonna force you to be in better relationship with other people. It's also gonna give you the equipment to know how to engage your child's heart in a way that you weren't engaged. Because even if you came from a great family, you had human parents. And you know what human parents are really good at doing? Stabbing each other in the back. Like, stabbing little kids. And I remember my, dad,

like, emotionally. Yeah. My dad Yeah. And by the way, I think Yankees mess up too. Yankees. And California. I know it's okay. Yeah. Just go smoke the pot. It's alright. It's sex. You know how to do it. Yeah. It's okay. I mean, so you can't go anywhere and find a and find a, like, a truly great parent. But there are good enough parents everywhere. My dad came in for Christmas several years ago. And I so have chased his approval in ways my whole life. I really love my dad and he really loves me. And we have a difficult relationship. You know? And and we're we are continually working on that in our own ways. But he came over a few years ago for Christmas, and I, got my children to play guitars, sing Christmas carols, tell stories, read poems. Like, I I put on a Christmas pageant for my father. And and my daughter looked at me at one point. She goes, why are we doing this for granddad? Literally, I leaned against the wall and slid down the wall. It was like, oh, god. And and I said, dad, like, what do you think? He's like, he's, why are we doing that? I said, let's go eat some turkey. Because I need because I need, dad. Because there's stuff I've not dealt with in my past, you know. And I'm a therapist. I've done thousands of hours of personal therapy. And it's still my dad goes over Christmas, and I become this little teenage boy who's trying to get my children to prance around like Pinocchio on puppet strings to make something happen. It's not gonna happen. Right? So if you're like me, and as Chip said, we're 99.9% the same. So you are like me. You've got those stories. You know? You've got those events. And if you love your child, it requires that you deal with your loss. And what's amazing is that if you're not like Steve I don't mean carbon copy by any means.

But if you don't face that you're made like Steve or me or Scott or Beth, you're in denial, you're sick, you're dissociated from how God made you, or you're delusional. We as parents have to be working on what's called finishing our business so we can live in the present while we're raising our children. And that is a very difficult, thing to do. Very difficult thing to face because we are in denial and we are dissociated. We're being dissociated means that we've removed ourselves from associating with our pain. That's what dissociation is. And delusion is believing you can fix life if you try hard enough. That's a form of psychosis. That you can make your life better if you try hard enough and figure it out. And it's just not gonna work that way.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sometimes in life, we get stuck or blocked or reach an impasse. At times like these, an intensive short term therapy can help you overcome what's keeping you from the growth and change keeping you from the growth and changes you desire. At Sage Hill Counseling, we offer therapeutic incentives to help couples gain new momentum in their recovery process. If you wanna find out more, please visit sagehillcounseling.com.