Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns | Terri Cole – EP 832

Terri Cole, psychotherapist, relationship expert, podcast host, and author of "Father Wound," explains how childhood experiences can shape our self-worth, relationships, and drive to succeed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck. What happens when the behaviors that protected you as a child become the behaviors the adult world rewards? You become the overachiever, the caretaker, the person everyone can depend on, the one who never needs anything. And because those behaviors worked, you keep doing them. But what if the very behaviors that helped you survive are now keeping you from truly living? Terry Cole and I went deep into that connection and what it takes to recognize when the patterns that once protected us are shaping the lives we're living today. Take a listen.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Here's the thing. They become maladaptive. And that part is just a miracle that we somehow figured it out in childhood psychologically ourselves. Nobody even told us how to do it. We just did it. But we don't get the memo that we're no longer in that kind of danger or that we're no longer in that situation. So we just think we are. So we just keep functioning that way. What ends up happening though is that something's going to stop you. Sooner or later, it might be health. My friend Chris Carr would always ask, "What's your shit pickle?" Quote unquote.

• 1:21John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome to episode 832 of Passion Struck.

• 2:06John R. Miles?

  Last week, I introduced The Mattering Effect, my new book about the forces that shape our sense of worth, significance, and belonging, and what happens when we begin to measure our value by what we produce, how much we accomplish, and how much we do for others. Throughout the week, I explored those ideas from different angles. McHunt and I examined the beliefs underneath achievement and success. Shawn Acor and I went deeper into how our beliefs shape what we see as possible and why our hunger for meaning, purpose, and mattering remain so fundamental to being human. Today, we're turning toward another important question.

• 2:50John R. Miles?

  Where do some of the patterns that shape our adult lives begin? My guest is Terry Cole, a psychotherapist, relationship expert, and bestselling author known for her work on boundaries, codependency, and the family dynamics that influence our relationships. Her new book, Father Wound: How Childhood Wounds Shape Worth Relationships in the Life We Build examines how early experiences can influence our sense of worth, the roles we take on, and the relationships we create. Terry and I explored how achievement can become a way of proving our worth, how caretaking can become a way of securing our place in other people's lives, and how the roles that

• 3:32John R. Miles?

  once helped us navigate childhood can follow us into adulthood. We also talked about something especially important. The difference between being driven by old wounds and being driven by choice. Because the patterns we develop early in life can become deeply ingrained, they can even be rewarded by the world around us. The overachiever gets promoted. The caretaker becomes indispensable. The person who never asks for help gets praised for being strong. Over time, those patterns can become so familiar that we lose sight of the choices available to us. And that's where Terry's work connects with The Mattering Effect and our broader conversation about agency.

• 4:16John R. Miles?

  Understanding what has shaped us so we can decide how we want to live. Please share today's episode with a friend or family member. And don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or Spotify so you never miss an episode. Here's my conversation with Terry Cole. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back my friend Terry Cole. Terry, so great to see you.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back, John.

• 4:54John R. Miles?

  I like that you and I are getting to see each other more and more often.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Right, because you just did my show because of your new book.

• 5:03John R. Miles?

  Yes, and as I was reading your book, Father Wound: How Childhood Wounds Shape Worth Relationships in the Life We Build, I found that there were a number of core areas that our works are overlapping, which I think the universe is telling us something when thinkers start to produce similar spot patterns. So I was really happy to see that we're both attacking a problem from our own unique perspectives. What caused you to think that now was the right time for this book?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Well, I think that I knew that I needed to write the book. The two books I wrote previous to this, Boundary Boss and Too Much, one about boundaries, one about high functioning codependency, these are two massive symptoms of having an unhealed father wound. And because this book was the most personal for me, I think I partly saved it for last, this series of books that I've been writing, because it was the most painful, honestly, to write, revisiting all the things I did and didn't experience with my own father growing up and having to just deal with what the truth was about my life. That was hard, even though I had done all the work, but it was like you're going back to the scene of the crime.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And then, looking at my therapy clients and my mastermind groups and all the stuff that I do, I saw father wounded women everywhere. And even women who have good dads, because this doesn't mean you had a bad dad. Fathers just failed us in every way, shape, and form. That didn't make them bad people, so we're not talking about that. But women were all raised in a patriarchy. So you also, if we look at who is the original bad daddy, at least for women, it's definitely the patriarchy, for sure. So even if you had a decent father, you still internalized the limiting beliefs about women in our society, for sure. You can never age. You can never, you have to only be thin.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  You need to make everyone happy. You need to be sacrificing for the greater good endlessly. Be sexy, but not too sexy. It's like the messaging, when you're a woman, you just cannot get it right according to society. So anyway, all of those things, and especially what's happened politically and in this country in the last 10 years, there's a lot of sort of going backwards in respect to equality. And so it just felt like this, this was the right time. And it took me writing those other books to be able to have the courage, I think, to write it.

• 7:35John R. Miles?

  Well, I want to give a confession before we get further into this. A ton of my listeners have heard me talk about the mosquito principle on my show. And there would be no mosquito principle if there wasn't a Terry Cole, because my whole concept of the bloodsucker is really based upon the foundation of your boundary destroyer. And I really learned a lot doing research on your work that really influenced my work in Passion Struck, also on the boundary magnifiers. So thank you, Terry, for being such a great influence.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  You're welcome, and thanks for saying so.

• 8:13John R. Miles?

  I remember I did this episode on the show a couple of years ago to go into what you were just talking about, and I don't want to give out the guest's name. But today, she's a high-profile attorney in Texas, and she told this story about what drove much of her behaviors over the next two decades of her life. She, growing up, had been a tennis player, and she and her sister were both great tennis players. And for that family, tennis was the identity that she grew up in.

• 8:53John R. Miles?

  And how well you played on the court really influenced how much love you received back from her parents. But she talked about this one situation where she asked her dad a question, and it related to her appearance. And his response was, "Well, you're not the beautiful one, but your sister certainly is." And I think we don't realize how much those words, especially from people who mirror the world that we grow into have on us.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:30John R. Miles?

  Why is some, is a parent saying that to their child? Not only so devastating, but why did it take her 25 years to escape that line that her father delivered when she was 13 or 14?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Because you have to want to escape it. And you have to, how do we do that? You have to raise your awareness of what original injuries might still be running the show of your life. Why do I call a father wound an invisible wound? Because it's exactly what you're describing, John. There is so much that's happening unconsciously. So for that lawyer, she put this in her mind, right? It was, this happened to her. It was indelibly inked in her brain that she is not the pretty one. Right? So what does that inspire? And listen, I could tell you 15 other stories and I could tell you my own story. Right? Of something that inspires

• 10:34Speaker 01

  achievement as a way of being worthy and you're only as worthy as your last achievement, right? So it's a trap, obviously. I was always very successful at all the things that I did. Part of it, why? Because I was trying to prove to my father, who I believed wished he had a son instead of me and was very uninterested in me and my three older sisters, that I was trying to prove my worthiness. It's like I had this chip on my shoulder that I would be more successful than any stupid son he could have had. So it's an invisible wound, a father wound, because many highly ambitious women who are highly successful, highly capable, are walking around father wounded.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And what that looks like is from the outside, it looks like you have it all together. It looks like you're a successful lawyer. What could the problem be? The question is, what is happening in your internal life? Right? You'll be just as successful when you get on the other side of healing this wound. When you do the work, when you excavate, when you go into the basement, as I walk you through in the book. But instead of being driven by fear,

• 11:45Speaker 01

  you can be driven by choice, by what you're interested in, by your passions, rather than being afraid of being rejected. I remember I was talking to my therapist, Bev. She was asking me about, was I always ambitious? I was like, absolutely. Because at that point, I was still no, I think I was already, I had become a therapist, but I had a whole career as a talent agent negotiating contracts for supermodels and celebrities prior to becoming a therapist. And I said, no, I've just always been like this. It doesn't, it doesn't matter what it is. And she said, but can you make the distinction? Do you think, because I was saying, I was like leaping up the Hollywood ladder, basically. And she was like,

• 12:29Speaker 01

  it sounds like you're running and the question is, could you make the distinction if you were running towards something? Or is it perhaps possible that you're running away from something? And I was like, oh, my God. I'm definitely running away from my fear that I'm not worthy of love, consideration and attention. So I'm proving it with accolades to say, see? See how smart I am, see how much money I can make, see how I can make people famous, see what I can do. That's not the same, though, as being driven by your passions, which you would know all about.

• 13:09John R. Miles?

  And it sounds like what you're saying here is the father wound is very much connected to what I call the mattering gap, which becomes this distance between what we need to thrive and what our environments are actually giving to us. And when we sit in that gap for too long, we start paying the mattering tax. I think is exactly what you were just describing.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:32John R. Miles?

  Good way to think about it?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I feel like that is accurate. Right? Because again, what it looks like from the outside does not conclusively dictate what it actually is from the inside.

• 13:46John R. Miles?

  Terry, I want to jump into the book a little bit. You open it up with a story about meeting someone named Vic, someone who is emotionally present, kind, available, genuinely interested in you. And your reaction was essentially, Vic's a great guy, he's just not for me. Why didn't healthy love at that point register as attractive to you?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Honestly, I had not done my father wound healing work yet. So there's a way that if you're unhealed, right? And you're father wounded, that you're walking around and your vision is distorted. So for me, I had always been with more difficult men. I had been with people who were unavailable, people who lived on other continents. I certainly made it really hard.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  But Vic being someone who was present and available and accomplished in his own right and already a father and widowed, there was all of these things that went along with him. It didn't register to my nervous system as exciting

• 14:58Speaker 01

  or sexy, because my nervous system associated this up and downness, this intermittent reinforcement, this someone who is all in and then maybe not, right? The push pull of unstable relationships is what I was used to. So consistency wasn't something that was familiar to me. And so I didn't think he was for me.

• 15:25John R. Miles?

  Yes, because you were drawn toward intensity, unavailability and unpredictability, because they felt familiar. While that healthy connection felt boring and felt unfamiliar.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:37John R. Miles?

  Well, three years later, I'll fast forward, you saw the exact same man completely differently. And you write that healing had changed my vision. What does closing that gap mean psychologically?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Well, it meant a lot of going back to the scene of the crime, a lot of going back to the family of origin work, a lot of going back in therapy to unpack what I'd experienced. Where did these limiting beliefs about my worthiness get planted? And once you start bringing it up from the basement, I call it, right? Your unconscious mind into the main part of the house, you can start to look at it and challenge it and go, my father's limitations do not dictate my value. I'm not blaming him. I'm just saying, they don't. He couldn't see what was right in front of him. But that doesn't mean that what was right in front of him, which was me,

• 16:36Speaker 01

  was not worthy of his attention and his affection and his consideration.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Right? So it was a lot of going back to go forward and slowly but surely making different choices. And what did that really look like in my life? It meant learning how to set healthy boundaries, becoming fluent in the language of boundaries, understanding where I was highly codependent, which was literally all of my relationships. I'd be codependent with you, John, right now, if I had not done this work. It didn't matter. It could be like my mail carrier and I'm all involved in Phil's love life. Like, I was a nightmare. I didn't know how to have a relationship with people without enmeshing myself with them. So I needed to learn what all of that looked like. And I got to a point in my healing where I was able to

• 17:27Speaker 01

  really recognize the truth about how I felt about getting married, which is that I didn't want to. I didn't need to. I didn't have pressure in my family system to do it. And I was like, I'm going to stop dating men who want me to be smaller and different and curse less. And all of this feedback that I'd gotten from people, be less funny, don't be so raunchy, whatever. I'm good the way that I am. And I built this really beautiful life, very successful careers, multiple careers, the same friends since Nixon was in office, very close with my sisters, very close with my mother, traveling the world. I wasn't in a position of needing to be married.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  So when the three years later that you reference came around and I ended up seeing Vic again, after trying to fix him up with all kinds of other people in the three years previous, every time I had a single friend, I was like, oh, I know this guy. He lives in Jersey, but he's really cute and he's really talented. He's like a war artist. He goes to war. He's a political artist. He's amazing. And they're like, why don't you want to date him? I'm like, no, we're just friends, but maybe you would want to. So that night, when I was finally seeing Vic again, I actually had invited a friend who I thought she might like him because he was 10 years older than me and so was she. And the guy who introduced us, our friend, came as well. And when he passed that plate glass window,

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I am not lying, John, I did not recognize him. I was like, who the hell is that? And he walks in and he sits down and I'm like, if it was a cartoon, my eyes would have gone, or I was just like, who are you? We end up going outside to smoke. Okay, people, it was the 90s, everybody smoked. I'm just saying, just don't yell at me. And he said to me, can I say something? He's like, whatever you're doing, it's really agreeing with you. I was like, oh, my God, I was going to say the same thing to you. And he was like, do you want to go see some jazz? Let's get rid of these two after dinner. And like, want to go see some jazz? And I was like, yeah, even though I hate jazz, but I didn't care because I was like, but you I like. And that was almost 30 years ago.

• 19:41John R. Miles?

  Incredible story. Thank you for bringing both of the bookmarkers up on that because I think it's an important example from your own life. So people understand what the wound can cause and then how it can be closed.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So yes, I want to say one more thing about that. Another thing, how that happened, though. So after doing the work, when Vic and I were on a date after that night, he said to my face, what do you want? In a relationship, honestly, Terry, what do you really want? And that was the pivot moment of where do I perform as I had done so many times in the past? Say what I think he wants to hear, be an easy breezy cool chick. I don't need anything, blah, blah, blah. Or will I just say? The truth. And since I had decided I wasn't interested in any more unexamined minds,

• 20:37Speaker 01

  and it was okay if I never got married, I didn't need that. I just decided, I'm just gonna say it. And I just said every single thing sincerely and honestly, which I'd never done in my life before. I want someone who has a funded retirement account. I want someone who owns their own home. I want someone who knows how to get tickets to the opera. I want someone who can teach me something. Because I'm always the one in relationships, creating and reinventing the wheel all the time. And when I was done, I want someone who wants to think about buying a second home. I had a lot of things. I want someone who had 20 years of therapy. I had a whole list. And I shared this in the book. And when I got to the end of that list, and this is our second date, I said, right, well, that

• 21:21Speaker 01

  was a lot. But how's that sound? And he's just his dreamy Pisces way, he said, sounds good. I was like, okay, I guess date three can happen. And we were together every day since that point.

• 21:35John R. Miles?

  Let me pause here for just a moment. If you're recognizing some of these patterns in your own life, Terry's new book, Father Wound, explores how childhood experiences can shape our worth, relationships, and the lives we build. And in The Mattering Effect, I examine how the environments around us reinforce or undermine our sense of significance and belonging. Look for both books wherever you get your books. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 22:14John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Terry Cole. For the listeners who don't know Terry's background, she used to be one of the leading talent agents in the world. And I had an interesting question for you. I interviewed another talent agent who worked with some of the biggest A-level stars you can think of. And when I talked to her about it, she said that some of them were the most wounded people she knew. Did you find anything similar in your work?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  The same way I find wounded people everywhere, long before I was a therapist, because I was always a super empath, right? It's, I wouldn't say more. I would say, why it's striking is that the perception, the illusion, is that if someone is a big star and they're making $20 million a movie, and they're doing all of this, that they have no problems. That everything is great in their life. And the truth is that money and success don't touch the internal work we have to do. And in fact, they can often complicate the crap out of it. Because we can, a lot of times, what I've seen with, I've had so

• 23:42Speaker 01

  many high-profile clients in my life, that it's almost like money can be this distraction from the work that you need to do. And if you're dealing with people who are highly visible people, they're also used to everyone around them falling in line. So then you, if you're a coach or a therapist, you have to be the one who's like, yeah, okay, but no, like, I'm not drinking your Kool-Aid, and you shouldn't be drinking it either, because you're just like everyone else. You just happen to have a lot of money and power. So I don't think it's more, honestly, John. I think it's the same amount of damaged people out there. It's just that there's an expectation that if you're successful, everything is great. And people think that about rich people, too, even if they're not

• 24:25Speaker 01

  famous, right? They're like, obviously, you've got an easy life. No, you have the same exact hard life that we all have, because this is life school. And no matter how much money you have in the bank, what is required of us is, are we going to evolve in life school or not? It's a choice. Some people, the answer is no. I hope. I write books, because I would like the answer for everyone to be yes. Let's do life school together. Let's evolve. Let's be happier. Let's be in flow. Let's have satisfying, joyful life experiences. It's such a privilege to be in this incarnation on planet Earth at this

• 25:06Speaker 01

  moment in time. Let's not just phone it in. Let's be here now. Let's do the work. Let's do great things. Let's help people.

• 25:17John R. Miles?

  Thank you for sharing that. And I recently had Josh Demille on the show. And not sure if you've ever met Josh, but man, he was one of the most down-to-earth guests I've ever had. And he said he had come to this realization that he himself was always wanting more. And so he ended up buying this cabin up in Minnesota, because he realized that at the end of the day, what matters most was how his kids were going to remember him. And he wanted to give them the peace and tranquility of, you know, living up in either

• 25:55John R. Miles?

  Minnesota or North Dakota away from Los Angeles, and having a father who, while he was there, not doing shoots, was present with them and fully tuned in, which was a great message to hear for how he had overcome his own wounds, and now was trying to change the pattern, which I think is what your book is really trying to illustrate. So you described the Father Wound Blueprint earlier as this unconscious instruction manual for how we end up approaching relationships, work, what we believe we're worth, and what we believe we deserve. I

• 26:35John R. Miles?

  wanted to ask you a question. How do you distinguish, when you look at that, personality from adaptation?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I don't know that you necessarily need to, right? Because they're both. You have how you naturally adapted to your circumstances in your young life, and how I naturally did it. Nobody sends us a memo on how to survive our circumstances. Our little brains, we are very clever. We figure out, how can I minimize the pain that this experience is potentially going to be? What do I need to do? And we are naturally adaptive. Where your personality comes in is how you do it. Personally, I'm naturally extroverted. That's

• 27:21Speaker 01

  my personality, and has been since birth. Right? So how my adaptation comes out would be, I was the hero child in my family's system. Right? Because I was externally focused. I was achieving things. So the whole family could agree. We couldn't agree on lots of other things, but they could all agree that I was a winner. And that created cohesion within the family system. We all organized around a father we were afraid of, and I know you did, too. So what does that do to us? Right? It teaches us, that adaptation now, especially for women, teaches us to focus on other people. We are, we become hypervigilant,

• 28:04Speaker 01

  right? We become very attuned to other people's moods, micro facial expressions, changes in vibration. We're like, oh, something happened there. I see it. And why are we like that? Because as in childhood, for many of us, we needed to be dialed in that way, because that was how we were going to figure out our next move. We were always. So the hypervigilance, even though you grow up, you may be living in your own apartment, you may be perfectly safe, you may have your own family, but your antennas still go all the way up to Mars, because it's what you did naturally. So what I like to say about the adaptations and about all of these special skills that many of us who are highly sensitive

• 28:49Speaker 01

  people have, is that when you get on the other side of healing, you're, you don't lose your skills, right? You still have the same amazing arsenal of skills that you have. It's just that you're now driven by desire, by your Dharma, by what you're creating, instead of being driven by these unhealed childhood wounds. You're driven either way, right? So you might as well do the healing, so that you're driven by choice. Because what we create is different when we do it by choice.

• 29:27John R. Miles?

  Why, absolutely. And I just wanted to give the listeners a little bit more information about the book, because you described the hero role. But in the book, you also have roles like the lost child, the caretaker, the good girl, lone wolf, rebel, chameleon. And what I liked about all those descriptions is, we do become very good at playing roles. And when we do, we become so good of losing touch with who we are underneath that role. One of the things that really coincides with my work is your argument that success can actually hide a father wound. Why can a woman turn pain into achievement, rather than dysfunction?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  It can go either way, right? But for many of us, we were raised to be good girls. And we were raised, right? Our messaging was, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Turn that frown around. Be a good girl, right? We knew what would get us positive feedback, which would, in essence, keep us safe. So achieving, for many of us, was a safe place, right? It was a place that even if, let's say, I didn't get my father's attention, but if I excelled in school, I got my teacher's attention, maybe I got my mother's attention, the positive, because being raised and being trained, right?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  We are indoctrinated into the cult of niceness, as in childhood, that it makes sense that it's achievement out of control, right? Because if we're burning ourselves out, which I certainly was when I was a talent agent, But it makes sense that it's that way for family systems. So people who maybe were more like the scapegoat, let's say, in the family system, because there's a whole section of the book on that, too. They may act out in the way that you're talking about. It can be more in a going against the grain, because that's what they're used to. If the system has chosen you as the scapegoat, you didn't choose it. I love that people are like, oh,

• 31:39Speaker 01

  yeah, my sister was the difficult one. I was like, really? What she was really doing? Well, she was chosen by the family system to be the scapegoat, which is a very thankless role, by the way. And they're all thankless, though. Right? People think the hero child is great. It's not. It's exhausting. And there's so much payment. And there's so much that's required of you in any one of the family roles. So I don't feel like anyone necessarily had it better than others. But with scapegoats, often, they will be the first one to tell the truth about the family system and be like, what the hell? There's something wrong here. They may be the first one to get therapy, because they're so used to being on the outside, because they're being rejected so often. So anyway, a long way around the barn. Did I answer the question? I can't tell if I did.

• 32:23John R. Miles?

  Well, I'm gonna ask a follow on to it, because here's something Terry I found really fascinating. What happens when the behaviors that protect us in childhood become the behaviors that the adult world rewards, such as the overachiever gets promoted, the caretaker becomes indispensable, the good girl becomes dependable, the lone wolf gets called strong? Do you think those adaptations that helped you survive become the engine of your success? And then, on the flip side of that, could they also take you farther and farther away from who you really are and be causing your demise?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Because here's the thing. They become maladaptive. And that part is just a miracle that we somehow figured it out in childhood psychologically, ourselves. Nobody even told us how to do it. We just did it. But we don't get the memo that we're no longer in that kind of danger, or that we're no longer in that situation. So we just think we are. So we just keep functioning that way. What ends up happening, though, is that something's going to stop you. Sooner or later, it might be health. It could be my friend Chris Carr would always ask, what's your shit pickle, quote unquote, right? Everyone has it.

• 33:41John R. Miles?

  I love her. Love her.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  You do. She is like one of my best friends for literally 35 years. When I was a talent agent, she was an actor and I represented her a million years ago. She used to be an actor. Anyway, so the question is, what is your, what is the thing that's happening in your life? So even if it looks good on the outside, your success is not dependent on that over-functioning, because you're smart enough to function normally and still be successful, right? I don't want people thinking that it's their dysfunctional behaviors, because I do think that there's a lot of people that feel like, if I get happy, my husband being one of them, right? If, I think he was worried, he would no longer be able

• 34:25Speaker 01

  to draw or be an artist, because we had found love and happiness. And I'm like, you don't need to suffer for art, babe. Trust me. Your talent is your talent. And this feels the same way, where it's like, we don't need to be proving something to our fathers, many of whom have already passed on, right? But it doesn't change what is happening inside of us. So the real question is, what are we willing to change to have a healthier relationship with ourselves and then outwardly in our relationship? Because these are relational patterns. So much of what we're talking about in the book are all dysfunctional relational patterns.

• 35:05John R. Miles?

  Something that you just said just struck a memory. A couple of months ago, a very well-known band came into town, and I happened to be friends with their lead singer, who has written the vast majority of their big hits that people would very well know. And we were having lunch, and he confessed to me that since he got married about three years ago, he hasn't been able to write a single song. And he said it's causing him to have a ton of personal issues, because he has never not been creative, whether he was writing songs for his own solo projects, or writing songs for the band he's in. And

• 35:48John R. Miles?

  he has just said, he doesn't know what it is about the relationship, but he's just become very disconnected from his creative self. What is that potentially a sign of?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I think there's a limiting belief in there. If he associates, in his unconscious mind, if he associates his best writing being with his most painful times in life, let's just say, if that was the most fruitful songwriting, he's now told himself a story that his happiness, he can't have both. He can't be happy personally, and also be a productive songwriter. And I think that you got to get those limiting beliefs up and out and change that. So you start planting the unconscious seeds of being grateful that you're in, that every day you wake up and you feel inspiration, and that you notice

• 36:43Speaker 01

  how often you feel inspired to write things down. Doesn't have to call it songwriting. Just getting back into rejecting the notion that being in a loving relationship will kill your dreams. Reject it. He heard it somewhere. So there's a reason he feels that way. And I think it would be helpful to know what that is. But it's just a belief, right? It's like, I remember, I had some woman at my gym one time, this is just an example. She was just talking out loud, saying that every time she hits her golf ball, it goes into the water. Every time she hits the golf ball, it goes into the water. And I was super into manifesting at the time. Yeah, just like John's golf game. So I didn't even barely

• 37:28Speaker 01

  know her. I just turned around. I said, hey, do me a favor. Today, tonight, before you go to bed, I want you to just visualize yourself hitting the golf ball over the water. It gets on the green, right near the hole. Hitting the golf ball over the water, gets on the green, right by the hole. I said it again. They're done. I didn't even know that lady. Two days later, I see her. She goes, oh, my God, I did what you said. My ball has not gone in the water since, and I've golfed three times. So we have to sometimes, what are we doing? We talk about visualizing and manifesting. Why do these athletes, right, go through the whole game in their mind? Why? Because your body and your mind don't

• 38:13Speaker 01

  know the difference. So why not have your friend visualize himself writing the number one hit of his life in this relationship? But you have to be willing to not just accept, oh, this is how it is. Hey, babe, it is however you fucking say it is. It is how you say it is. So be mindful. Your words have wings. They actually matter. So he's got to get those limiting beliefs from his unconscious mind to his conscious mind, and then be willing to fight for his ability to write songs.

• 38:51John R. Miles?

  Thank you for sharing that. And as I was talking to him, it took me all the way back to my time in the Navy. Because when you're performing, like he does, 150 to 200 days a year on the road, it's almost like being on deployments. And so not only does he have to think about the songwriting, but it's like he has to come back off a tour and get to know his partner over again, almost from scratch, given what's transpired for both their lives and the gap in between. Well, Terry, something I talk about, and I think I talked about it with you on your podcast, is what I call the slow fade. And

• 39:35John R. Miles?

  this is where someone doesn't necessarily have any type of dramatic breakdown. Their life actually looks pretty good. But little by little, they become more and more disconnected from themselves. They become successful, responsible, productive, but at the end, less alive. Do you see that in women with father wounds?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  I do, which is why it's so incredibly important that we actually do the work. And you've got to be willing to do the work and be energized because how do we not fall into a rut? This can happen to anyone, right? That we get very habituated. It's very rote. Even things that should be very exciting can become rote, right? There can be like another book launch, another whatever. This is like the dream of your life and you're somehow treating it like it's unimportant. I think staying awake, like I think that one of the, besides doing the healing work, of course, that's important.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  And believing that you deserve a life where you feel invigorated and enlivened and psyched to be alive every day. Right? That's a different way of looking at life. So yes, you do the healing work, but how do we stay enlivened? How do we stay energized with our life force energy, right? Our chi, our prana moving through us. We've got to do different things. We've got to go a different way to work. We've got to be willing to hop in a truck and have an adventure. We've got to be willing to say yes to things we would normally say no to. Put ourselves in situations that make us feel, oh, this is like a little scary. We're not sure if it's going to work out, but I think it's going to be great. There are so many things that we can do. I also think it's very important that we stay physically active.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yes, to meditation, of course, I do that. But I also move my body every single day. I jump on a trampoline. I stretch. I walk. I hike my dog with my husband. I do all of these things to, Chris would call this your god pod, right? To take care of my god pod because it's the only one I got. And it's so easy. So the disconnect that you're talking about, how we can become disconnected from ourselves. But we also become disconnected from our bodies. And you cannot be, because this is one thing. Your mind, your body, this is one god pod. This is one machine. And we need to be paying attention to all of it.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  And people are like, I'm too busy to work out. No, you're not actually. So you need to, even if, because you can do it for 10 minutes a day. I'm not talking about, we don't need to be going to the gym for three hours. But prioritizing how you feel, caring, thinking about what energizes me and what depletes me. And then stop doing the stuff that depletes you, right? If you're watching Netflix till two in the morning every night, that is an energy suck, right? That is an energy leak. Actually, my friend Deb Curran calls it, which is true. We can look at activities and go, what leaves me feeling like crap? Oh, when I eat this type of food. Okay, so maybe limit how much you eat that type of food.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Or when I spend time with this and this person, I feel exhausted. I feel guilty. I feel depleted. Okay, let's rethink those relationships. And I'm not saying cut everyone off. I'm just saying maybe you need better boundaries in those relationships. But all of this, John, requires us to pay attention. We've got to be awake and care about what we're experiencing.

• 43:13John R. Miles?

  Terry, I just want to go a little bit deeper into that word, no. Why can saying no feel so emotionally dangerous to someone who intellectually knows they're allowed to say no?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Because it kicks up the childhood experience. For many of us, saying no in childhood wasn't an option, right? We were expected to be compliant, to do what the authorities in our life thought that we should do. And there's also a visceral and biological element to this, which is saying no can unconsciously leave a fear of being excommunicated from the tribe, from the crew, from the group. And when you think about this from a physiological point of view, if we go all the back, all the way back to cave people time, being excommunicated from the group, you would probably die.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  So inside of us, it can feel as scary as life and death, even though intellectually we go, but it's not. What helps is as we heal these childhood wounds through this process that I give you in the book, you are much less being thrown into that time machine unwittingly and going back to childhood. Right? That happens when we have a lot of unhealed stuff. It's called having a transference, right? Where we suddenly feel like, oh, I feel so threatened by saying no to this person. When you do the work, the grown up you is always present and you can still go. I just had to say no to someone who I like very much about doing something that they wanted me to do,

• 44:52Speaker 01

  that it just isn't aligned with me and I couldn't do it. And I really labored over it. But the difference is when you do the work, you can say no. You realize it's okay. It's still uncomfortable. You still might feel bad, but you don't self abandon to avoid those feelings. Hey, my relationships are not that fragile and I am sure as hell not that fragile. It's okay.

• 45:20John R. Miles?

  Terry, one of the phrases that caught my eye in the book was this one. Mourning the dream. What exactly are we mourning? Are we mourning the father we had or the father we kept hoping, or mother they would eventually become?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  We're really mourning the father we wished we had, the father that we wanted to have. So mourning the dream is where, because as little kids, we keep that dream alive. We've got no good evidence that this shit is ever going to turn around, but we still hold that hope that it might. And I remember talking to my therapist when I was in college about my father. And she was, I was already knowing that this was going to be like a long protracted experience, healing in it. And I said to her, she was like, Terry, listen, if you continue to want your father to be like a daddy's little girl type of father, my father was very emotionally shut down and never talked, barely ever talked.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I'm telling you, I'm not exaggerating. My parents got divorced when I was 13. I might've exchanged 50 words with him between zero and 13. And she was like, if you're expecting, you keep wanting him to be this warm and fuzzy daddy's little girl father. It's like you're just slamming your head up against this stone wall, right? But her question was, could I feel loved by the way that my father was capable? The brand of love that my father had, could I feel loved by that? But before we could do that, she had me mourn what I wished. What were all the sad things for me when my friends had their dads at the daddy daughter dance and mine wouldn't go, right?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  What are those things? So I was able to, when we mourn and honor what our young selves wanted and the experiences we had and the peak bad experiences too, of like, what did we actually experience? Whether it was cruelty, whether it was neglect, whether it was ridicule from our fathers. You're mourning the compassionate, present, attuned father you didn't have. But it also opens up this space to be able to eventually feel loved by what your father was capable of doing. And listen, that isn't accurate for everyone, especially if there was extreme abuse and if that's all it was.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  But generally speaking, I was able to. So I came in the next week. My assignment was write a list of the things that your father did for you that could potentially make you feel loved. And I said, I think I had four things on the list. He paid for my undergraduate work, so I had no loans, which was very nice. He fixed my teeth. He bought me a used car. And when I used to leave him after my parents got divorced and I would drive away from his house, he would always say strap in. Those were the four things that I had on the list. And she said, can you feel loved by those things? And I thought, I can try.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I can at least look at them as a way, to my father, duty was his love language. He didn't have another love language. He was not capable of doing it better than he did. But he didn't fully abandon us because fiscally he was pretty responsible and didn't have to be. So I look at that and go, okay, he considered us. He thought about us, me and my sisters, and saved money for our weddings, even though he didn't think we should, none of us should spend it on weddings. But he was like, actually, I think you should invest it, but do what you want. And those are, that, that was his form. So anyway, back to why we mourn.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  We mourn so we can create space to either potentially create something different now. If your father is alive and you want to, or to just be in acceptance of what was, rather than staying in that childlike mind of, we just write stories of how like, maybe it's going to turn around. But what ends up happening is we end up playing it out in our relationships where we're like, oh, this time it'll be different. Even though I'm with another unavailable man, but this time it's like the little kid is, I'm going to get a different outcome this time. And here's the thing, if there isn't some kind of psychological intervention, it's unlikely that you're going to have a different outcome this time.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  So let's do the work so that your outcome possibilities are endless.

• 50:00John R. Miles?

  Terry, I want to end on this question. If you could go back and you could speak to the little girl who believed she had to become someone else to be worthy of love, what would you want her to know about who she already was and who she never needed to become?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I would really want her to know that she was inherently worthy. And that she didn't need to do anything to be lovable. And that her father's limitations never ever dictated her worth. That was squarely on his side of the street. And that she and every single person listening is right now and was born inherently worthy of love, attention, affection, protection, all of those things. And if you didn't get it, like I didn't, you can create it in your adult life when you heal this invisible wound.

• 51:05John R. Miles?

  Terry, you're widely searchable, but where are the best places people can go to learn more about your great podcast, your books, and everything else that you're doing?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  For the book, people can preorder at fatherwoundbook.com. And then, once you order, come back and sign up. I'm doing a free virtual retreat, which is going to be on October 24th, where we're going to be unpacking your Father Wound Blueprint. I'm going to have some guests. It's a four-hour virtual retreat, so it's about a $300 value that people are going to get for free just for pre-ordering the book. So I'm excited about that. And then the book actually comes out on the 27th. So fatherwoundbook.com. And then terrycole.com also is, everything is there. And also, like you said, I've got a Substack, I've got a podcast, I've got a YouTube

• 51:55Speaker 01

  channel that has 850 free videos on there for you. So there's a part of the work that I do that I feel like is my sort of dharma in life, is evening the playing field a little bit, because I feel like it shouldn't just be people with money who should have access to mental health resources that will change your life. I feel like everyone should have that. And so I've had a podcast for 11 years, and I've been putting out tons of incredibly valuable, free resources, because I want everyone to heal. If you want to heal, I am your gal.

• 52:32John R. Miles?

  Terry, I always love having you on the show, and thank you for what you're doing for the world. And thank you for being so passion struck.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, John. I always appreciate it.

• 52:43John R. Miles?

  Terry's story reminds us that the roles we learn early in life can shape the people we become. The drive to achieve, the instinct to take care of everyone, the habit of keeping our own needs hidden, these patterns can follow us into adulthood, influencing our relationships, our sense of worth, and the choices we make. The work begins when we recognize those patterns and create enough space to decide how we want to live. We can honor what helped us survive, while giving ourselves permission to grow beyond it. And that brings us to the next conversation in our current series, The Architecture of Agency. Because understanding where our patterns come from is one part of the journey. Learning how to meet ourselves with compassion

• 53:26John R. Miles?

  is another. My next guest is Dr. Kristin Neff, a pioneering researcher whose work has transformed how we understand self-compassion. In our conversation, she shares a powerful practice for the moments when we're struggling: placing your hands on your body, offering yourself kindness, and saying, "I'm here for you." She also shares the word she returns to most often: "I will not abandon you." It's a moving conversation about self-compassion, belonging, and how learning to stay present with ourselves can change the way we move through life. I hope you'll join me.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  One of the most direct ways to feel safe is to put your hands on your body, activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and say some words of kindness and support to yourself. Even something like, "I'm here for you." My favorite self-compassion phrase that I use most often, that's most powerful, that lands, "I will not abandon you. I am here for you. I care. I will not abandon you."

• 54:28John R. Miles?

  Until next time, I'm John Miles. Stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.