Doing It Guilty: How Inherited Trauma Shapes Entrepreneurs and What It Takes to Break the Cycle with Dr. Pauline Yeghnazar Peck

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.

Susan Sly: 00:00

Well, what is up? I want to acknowledge you for being here. This is your friend, Susan, and I am very excited about this episode, because it is for you. If you have parents, a parent, even if they passed. My guest today and I are going to talk about inherited generational trauma and how it affects us as entrepreneurs. And it's a big show. There's a lot to process, and I can promise you, on the other side of really unpacking how this shows up for us, with anxiety, with feeling stuck in our business, micromanaging, that there is liberation, and we're going to talk about the tools to do just that.

And before we get into the show, I just want to share with you. You know, I have been traveling a ton. I've been out there talking about my new company, The Pause, and it's just been a huge blessing, because the more conversations I have, not just with women, 40 plus, but with men, there is such a need for a tool that can help women 24/7 to be able to be a companion, to be able to be a coach in a pocket, to be able to get answers, to be able to help give the insights that are very personalized and also outcomes and, and so that's what Dr. Mia Chorney and I created with The Pause.

And so if you have a woman in your life who is 40 plus, who is struggling with whether it is issues in terms of feeling stuck, as we talk about, or is struggling with physical issues with her body. Maybe she's gaining weight, maybe she's got brain fog, maybe she's exhausted. I would invite you to share www.thepause.ai.

We have an app. It is available in the App Store, in the Play Store. We are a female founded company focused on solving women's health. So check it out at www.thepause.ai. Or download the app in the App Store, in the Play Store, and we have a very special price for the whole year. You can lock in the app. The price will be going up, so depending on when you're listening to the show. But check it out in the App Store and the Play Store. Would love to have more and more women join this movement and be liberated and reclaim their power.

So my guest today is a first generation Iranian American trauma informed psychologist who got her PhD at Arizona State University. She's absolutely amazing, and she specializes in working with the children of immigrants and intercultural couples. She's the founder of the dynamic group practice Noor Therapy and Wellness, which specializes in providing culturally informed care, and she also provides coaching. She is a speaker. She is groundbreaking in terms of this work, and I had the privilege of seeing her speak at the Finger Lake Summit, there were 150 of us venture capitalists, startup founders, and it was, it was amazing. And I said to her, I'd love to have you on the show, because her work so resonated with me.

Susan Sly: 03:33

And I thought I want to share this with our audience all over the world. And in this episode, we are going to talk about inherited trauma. We're going to talk about guilt. We're going to talk about how to be able to successfully unburden ourselves. And it doesn't matter if your parents are immigrants or you're an immigrant, or wherever it is you grew up, you will relate to this in some way, shape or form. So I'm so excited for you to jump into this episode with my guest, Dr. Pauline Yegnazar Peck.

Voiceover: 04:15

This is Raw and Real Entrepreneurship, the show that brings the no nonsense, truth of what is required to start, grow and scale your business. I am your host. Susan Sly.

Susan Sly: 04:29

Okay, Pauline, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna jump in. We're gonna talk about doing it guilty. And for the listeners all over the world who are like, oh, what kind of show is this today? This. No, we're not talking about that guilty. We're talking about being the child of an immigrant. We're talking about being raised differently. We're talking about the real numbers, at least here in the United States, where 45% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants, and one of the three self made millionaires in the US is an immigrant and so Pauline, this area, for me, is so fascinating, being an immigrant kid and also feeling at times like an outlier, and you've spoken about on your social media videos about doing it guilty. Can you unpack that for people listening?

Dr. Pauline: 05:21

Yeah, absolutely. So I talk about there being so many different sources of guilt. Guilt can come when you've inherited some level of guilt that hasn't been worked through. So there can be an emotional intergenerational inheritance of guilt. The immigrant experience is often leaving familiarity, leaving family itself, leaving security and starting over again. And immigrant parents who don't work through that guilt can often place that guilt onto their children. So some of this might be guilt that's not even yours, but now needs to be worked through. Guilt is also a byproduct of trauma, right? Feeling like you've done something wrong or bad or shame, which is, "I'm bad". All of that can be a byproduct of trauma, which immigration can be a traumatic process, coming to a new country and not having the security. I mean, currently we're having this conversation while immigrants are again under attack. I mean, I think the various systems and not having the place be welcoming to you. I mean, all of those can be various traumas.

And then another big source that I see is when you are living straddling multiple cultural worlds. You're, you have an expanded mindset in terms of expanded perspective, I should say, in terms of the various expectations, rules and norms of one versus the other. And I think guilt can be the sense that, okay, I'm doing what is right by my family, but then I feel guilty because I'm not doing this other thing that I'm told I should be doing using the other cultural lens, and vice versa. And that's just two cultures. There's so many people who are multicultural and have multitudes of codes and standards and norms to adhere by. So sometimes guilt can just be that you're doing something very different than another cultural mold, and when you're the first, when you're the only, which is very much the first gen or second gen experience, sometimes guilt can just come up as a byproduct of doing something different that you haven't had a lot of models showing you. This is a path you can follow. You haven't had the trailblazer. You are the trailblazer. So that difference can be encoded as guilt, because guilt, in some ways, wants to get you back to safety. Every emotion is useful and adaptive and functional to some degree. So it wants to say, "Hey, you're veering very far outside of where you should be based on what norms we know come back to safety, you're guilty." So do it guilty says we have to explore and unpack our guilt. We have to really think, is this guilt that is mine? Is this guilt that I want? Is this guilt that is most useful for me? We have to engage with it in this very dynamic way and build a relationship with it, and often the only way to do that is by doing the thing guilty anyway. Obviously if it's not harming anybody. Moving away to college, studying some something that your family has never deemed an appropriate or safe career, starting a business, being the first entrepreneur, and having everybody say, "This is crazy. What are you doing?" You might have a sense of guilt because you're letting your parents down, or your community doesn't have a model for this, and you have to do it guilty in order to be able to actually build that emotional muscle memory and learn the skill set to discern what is just different, that I can let go of the guilt and continue doubling down on where can I be more bold? Because I am being that trailblazer that I never got. So that's, that's kind of a condensed way of unpacking some of what do it guilty encompasses.

Susan Sly: 08:53

I love what you said about this concept of safety, because until I saw you speak in, for all the listeners, Paulina and I met at the Finger Lake Summit in upstate New York, and then there were 150 people there, and I was just sitting there taking all of these notes, because when in talking about this concept of safety and inheriting the guilt, and I've had people on the show who've been immigrants, and we talk about, like, when I grew up, my dad being Asian, there were only four careers you're allowed to have.

And when I do my talks, I'll say, okay, for my Asian friends in the room, like, what are the four careers? No one shouts out—doctor, engineer, attorney, account. And they were like, yeah, anything beyond the four, right? And it wasn't until—it was very healing when you spoke—because I had never thought of that as because that's what that generation thought was safe.

Dr. Pauline: 09:55

Yeah.

Susan Sly: 09:55

And I have a question I have for you—does, learning question as part of that, do you see with certain cultures that the parents will use guilt as a tool for control?

Dr. Pauline: 10:10

Yeah, absolutely. And again, you can see that the intention would be to have safety. At a biological level, parents are hard-wired to want to protect the safety of their offspring, and that happens on a psychological level too.

What will other people think of us is—we need each other and to band together in a community, because sometimes literal resources. Before people could get bank loans, they put into a pool of money with their local community, usually within an ethnic or a religious—religiously homogeneous—community.

So saying, "What will other people think?" In some ways, using that guilt as control says, "We've got to stay close to the tribe in order to have the resources we need to be safe, to survive."

If you choose these careers, these are careers that are usually stable and necessary and have a certain level of security. And so yes, guilt is being used as a form of control. And yet, the intention is often to have security for that child, to have them connected to a community, to be in good standing with that community, and to have means to livelihood that would be stable, secure, and sustainable for them.

And yet, safety is one metric of success, and another is thriving—is doing work you love, is innovation. And many of our immigrant parents didn't have the privilege or the resource to be able to dream like that. They had to make decisions based on what would give them that security, what would minimize the punishments. I always say, minimize the punishments and maximize the goodies. And usually it was survival-based.

And so I always say, I help people move past survival into thriving. And that's where the guilt is going to come up—both internally, as well as what was modeled for you, which is a lot of guilting. Because guilt can be a very powerful tool for guiding and keeping—another way of saying that is control.

Yeah, immigrant parents will use—anybody who feels their back up against a wall and in a survival mode might use guilt as a way in trying to influence another's behavior to keep them in line with what they think is going to be most useful, or minimize those punishments and increase those goodies.

Susan Sly: 12:29

Yeah, the thinking about the—for me growing up, right? It was like, the other thing, like being an Asian kid, was like, oh, piano, right? Just piano in the morning, practice piano after school, get straight A's.

I remember I came home, Pauline, once with all A's and one B.

Dr. Pauline: 12:48

Oh, gosh.

Susan Sly: 12:49

And my dad's like, why did you get the B? And I'm like, Dad, it's in phys ed, and I was a really heavy kid. And he's like, I don't care.

And I was just crying, and I ripped up my report card. And the next day, I said to my teacher, do you know how much trouble I got in for getting a B? What do I need to do to get an A?

And then I developed an eating disorder because I didn't fit in with my family. Everyone was skinny. I wasn't. I'd been abused by my mom, which I've spoken about on the show. And so there I am, living in this very homogenous town with very few immigrant kids. I'm the fat one, I'm smart, but I'm not smart enough. I like—I'm on the fringe of everything, and not feeling like I fit in anywhere.

And that for me—and being raised in that environment. So I have never played the piano since, right? Like, there, there—the guilt was definitively a tool that was used to—for the control, for the safety, but also for the social status.

Because a lot of immigrant parents, from friends of mine who are from India or, you know, in parts of the Middle East—parents don't say, "I'm proud of you," because the ideology—if anyone's ever read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom—it makes your child weak. So I wasn't told that. My dad didn't tell me he was proud of me until I was in my late 40s.

Dr. Pauline: 14:24

Yeah, and it's the expectation. Like, why would I be proud of something that you're just expected to be doing? You're expected to get all of those straight A's.

Mine was—I would get straight A's, and then it would say, "Talks too much." So it'd always be like an A, E, and then U—like, unsatisfactory, "Talks too much," because I was such a social butterfly in class.

And so that was the big thing. Like, keep your mouth shut, you know, like, just do your work and just be there. I'm like, I get my work done, but I want to talk. I want to be social.

And that became the thing. So it wasn't the grades—it was that unsatisfactory because I talked and was social in class. Or asked a lot of questions. And sometimes that was seen as being rebellious or disobedient or whatever it might have been.

And I think that what you also said about not playing piano since is that when you are guilted into something, it really disconnects you from your own discernment about whether you like something or not. It just loads it with so much resentment.

And there are different people that, when guilted, might break inside. Others, that might get rebellious inside. Each of us is built differently, and the response is going to be different to that—the reaction is going to be different.

But it can be such a bitter taste that then you go opposite, or you just drop it altogether, or you do it, but with such resentment that it robs it of any joy.

And part of "do it guilty" is—can you reconnect to the internal—

Dr. Pauline: 15:47

—baseline of what success feels like? What feels good to me? What am I interested in?

Like, these are really difficult things when you have been given such a strong external marker of what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, how you should show up. There's been so much of that control externally, which really just makes us more reactive to that.

We don't like that, but it also robs us of being able to, internally, make those decisions about what does and doesn't feel good.

And that's why I say you've got to do it guilty. Because you won't know if there is enjoyment on top of the guilt if you've never gone that far to actually experiment with what is coming up, because it just wasn't culturally allowed or permissible.

Susan Sly: 16:28

So what is something—you've had this incredible journey and became incredibly self-actualized, to the point where you will probably spend the rest of your life really serving others. And there are so many of us immigrant kids who are very messed up. What is something that you've done guilty? Maybe something people might be surprised about?

Dr. Pauline: 16:54

Oh my gosh. I dated young.

Dr. Pauline: 16:58

I had sex young like, I'll just say that, like, I remember a big fight I got with in with my mom, who there was this blue bag, and I would take it to my boyfriend's house, and I would spend the night, and one day, she just straight said to me, and you sleep with them. I could have died in that moment. I just burst out laughing, because I had never, ever talked about sex with my mom.

And I think part of it was just being unabashedly okay with seeking pleasure as a girl. That was just such a dangerous, dangerous thing. So I was rebellious. I wouldn't even say it was promiscuous, but I was interested in pleasure, right? Going out with friends, being with people like that, for my family, religious-wise, culturally, was such a dangerous and shameful thing. And I did it guilty, right?

I still took that blue bag and I spent the night, and I got in those fights with my mom, and that—yeah, it's hard to even really think about that energy that that took. And I would say back then, I was just coming from a rebellious place. It was like, she is saying no, and I'm gonna say yes altogether. And that wasn't always the best way for me to be in relationship to pleasure.

You can do all sorts of things that are pleasurable but also potentially harmful or not even what you want. And so whether it's sex, whether it's food, whether it's going out, whatever it might be. You know, I had to move away from it being pure rebellion to saying, what is my relationship with pleasure? And how do I want to be not a good girl or a bad girl, but to be just a human that is able to explore all aspects of my identity?

That was really something that was hard for me to break out of. I did not have that model. I had a very religious upbringing, and that was constant, like guilt and shame, and there was the added sinfulness level of it, like this is objectively wrong or bad, and the silence around that and hiding that—that was a huge struggle in my young adulthood, as I was still either living at home or spending long periods of time out of school and home.

That I really did guilty, was really to be very boldly exploring all aspects of my identity.

I also did it with religion, right? My pat—my—I always say my parents were pastors. I grew up very, very religious, very Christian, and right around adolescence, I started asking certain questions that my family couldn't answer, and I just wanted to explore other religions, and that was so wrong and bad.

And so I was going to mosques. I was, you know, doing Shabbat dinners with my Jewish friends. I was doing all sorts of explorations. And I eventually left the church, and now I would identify as a very spiritual person, but I am the only person on my dad's entire side of the family that is not a born again Christian.

And so that—I am still doing it guilty, right? Like that's—that's still something that is a narrative or a dialog that can come up when it's Sunday, and I'm not going to church, and I'm not raising my children with a specific religion. Like, that guilt narrative—I really want to be clear with people—it's not going to go away.

If you were socialized with it, especially early on, and it has an inherited form, and it was tied to survival, it's not going to go away. I think people think like, even when you said, like, self-actualize, as if I'm not going to have the guilt come up anymore?

No, it still comes up. And I can still be guilted at times with something I'm still kind of thinking through, because I still think through, how do I raise my children to be spiritual, but not a specific religious dogma? And so if my dad makes a comment about that, it can still strike up that dialog within myself, but now I have tools to be able to be in a different relationship with it.

But it really was me venturing into places that were not deemed okay and were even deemed dangerous for women, both in leadership, as well as in relationship and in the religious realm—not following in my family's footsteps and, quote-on-quote, bringing a lot of shame to the family.

Even now, every once in a while, I'll meet someone that's part of my dad's kind of larger church network or missionary network, and they'll be like, oh, so you're the other daughter. They call me the other daughter because my sister is also a pastor. You're Pauline, you're the other daughter. Like, I'm the—I'm the, like, bad one that went out and they don't know.

And I still get that tinge, and I've worked through that. I don't feel badly about it anymore, but again, that dialog is still there.

Susan Sly: 21:31

That's such an important piece, because for people who haven't done work on themselves or aren't working with someone like yourself, that whole guilt—especially, you know, in—there's a lot of entrepreneurial guilt. There's a lot of entrepreneurial guilt, you know, amongst entrepreneurs who are parents, who maybe are dealing with aging parents, who have a whole host of life going on.

And you think that, oh, because I have guilt, there's something wrong with me. And what you're saying is, no, you have guilt, there's something right with you. It doesn't mean that the guilt has to go away—that it's just knowing how to be able to navigate it.

And the—the thing you said is really thinking about, too—you did a lot of healing on your relationship with your mom because of that perspective, to the point of even stepping into who she was at your age now, and why she said the things she said, and why she made the decisions she made. Can you talk about that process?

Dr. Pauline: 22:43

Yeah, and the most interesting part about my relationship with my mom—always conflicted. We were very, very different in a lot of different ways, and constantly missing one another. And she died when I was 24, so 17 years ago this year.

And I've done more work in healing my relationship with her for her death than I did when I was in relationship with her physical form. And so I—you know, some people come to me and they're like, well, my parent is dead, and I'm still really angry at them.

It's like, you can have a dynamic relationship with someone who's dead. Yes, you can have a very static relationship with someone who's alive. And so I just want to kind of put that out there, because I think it's—it's interesting to think about.

It forced me very early on, because of her death and the grief that just kind of broke me open, and the way it really just disrupted and impacted my family dynamics afterwards—my dad falling ill, me kind of jumping in as a caregiver, me and my sister almost, like, being raised up to matriarchs, but we're still in our early 20s and don't really know left from right.

It just—it threw a lot of things into disarray that I wouldn't even say have ever gone back. That disarray has just turned into more flexibility over time.

The grief broke me open to have to look at how I had been shaped, how I had been parented, how I had been impacted. And it brought up a ton of anger that I had to work through—righteous anger, anger that I was not allowed to feel, because again, good girls don't get angry. So you have to suppress that. You have to disown that.

So that, whether I wanted to or not, it almost forced me to look at a lot of things that I may not have looked at until very later on. And in the weirdest way possible—which I've heard a lot of people say from traumas that they've gone through—it was a blessing, because that was the catalyst to then looking at why would my mom do that, and how was she parented, and really looking at some of those threads.

That now I do with people—that is such an essential part of the process. It brought compassion, even with the increased anger. And that might seem contradictory, but those two things can go side by side.

And I had to become spacious enough to hold missing my mom, grieving her, being angry at her. I can't believe she impacted me in these ways. The grief over—it's not gonna get better. It was what it was. And now I'm just gonna have to do the work of acceptance, forgiveness, if I want.

And then I had my relationship with my dad, where he was the one that stayed. And I so desperately wanted to just, like, cut that off and be free. And yet I felt like, this is my last living parent.

And again, feeling like, oh, I've lost one to death, I'm not going to lose one by choice. And it must be—again, forced. I say forced because it was a choice—begrudgingly at first. How am I going to make it work with him? How am I going to learn to understand what he's saying, even though that's not the way I would want? How am I going to make sense of this man so that he and I can forge a path forward?

So the relationship with my mom, and looking at that, actually opened up me doing that work with my dad. And it's what I help people do—is figure out a path, if they want, to understanding and connecting to their parents in whatever way is possible, which is work of grief and accepting.

If they had it to give you, they would have given it to you by now. Accepting who they are. Drawing boundaries where necessary. Understanding doesn't mean you don't have protection, but navigating the nuances of all of that.

Because I say—we cannot dehumanize the people that brought us into the world and re-humanize ourself. So I believe you cannot fully get to a place of being wholly you, which includes parts of where you came from, who you came from. You can't fully heal without healing that flow of life, which comes through your lineage and through your parents in particular.

And I was kind of thrust into that earlier than I would have wanted to through my mom's death. And now have been able to really feel like, yes, who I am today is really embodying both of the skill sets and strengths of my parents and elders and other ancestors that I wouldn't have been in good blessing with, because I would have been in such tension with them, right?

If you hate your family, you always hate a part of yourself.

Susan Sly: 27:01

Yes, yes. And if you have children, and that, that translation too, and that the healing piece you said after someone passes. So, you know, when my mom passed there, we had been estranged for several years. She was an addict, and so she had, you know, I had facilitated for her to be in a care home, and then she checked herself out, and then she disappeared, and so on and so forth.

And I was raised anyway by my dad, but the deep, deep healing, even though I did a lot of work while she was still alive, the deep, deep healing and perspective took place after she died, because that way I could really have perspective and not being triggered by the behavior that was happening that I ultimately couldn't control. The only way I could control it was to step into compassion, as you—you talked about Pauline—and say, okay, you know, I was physically in her body. And there's a part of me that is her. I can choose the good parts of her if I choose to see them. It's all a choice.

You said something in the Finger Lakes, which was like, you know, I get it from a biological perspective, but the way you contextualized it was that, you know, when, when a woman is a, you know, essentially a fetus, she's got all her eggs at five weeks that she's ever gonna have. So we were in our mother's body, and we were also in our grandmother's body. And I went, oh my gosh, wow. Can you talk about inheriting trauma?

Dr. Pauline: 28:53

Yeah. I mean, what happened to your grandma? What she was living through—the stress hormones and all the signals that were happening in this dyadic, at that point almost triadic, relationship—impacts you.

Genes don't change, DNA doesn't change, but the genetic expression does change, and certain things can be activated or deactivated based on whether you have safe and loving environment, connectedness, and all sorts of different markers. And what doesn't get healed in one generation can pass on, both on an epigenetic level, as well as in the modeling.

If you were bitten by a dog and afraid of dogs, your child would feel it every time you squeeze their hand really tightly when there's a dog around. With the tension that's in your body when there's a dog, when the admonishments come of “Don't go so close to that dog”—those are also transmissible ways, through modeling and through direct, implicit messaging and instructing.

That trauma also passes on this belief system that dogs are scary because of the life experience of that parent. So there are epigenetic factors, as well as social and relational factors, that can pass on trauma.

So then you are living with certain belief systems and certain automatic reactions to things that are actually not even based in your life experience, and also are not based in your environment, and whether that would be most helpful or beneficial at that time.

Many of our legacy burdens, as I talked about—many of our inherited traumas—they helped us survive, but long ago. They're not helpful right now, and they actually get in the way right now of things that you want. And it's usually people come to see me when what they want is more meaningful than the pain of changing to have it. I hope that that makes sense. It's like, they're motivated by how much it's getting in the way.

They're like, I keep doing this thing—like you're managing people—because I have that guilty and that control that has served my people, but it's not serving me right now. It's keeping me burned out. It's keeping me not in my zone of genius. It's keeping me so in the day-to-day of things. My anxiety is so high.

I have to let go of this in order to have the thing I want, which is a thriving business. And then we look at—because nothing can be changed if you're in tension with it, you're judging it, you're criticizing it. The easiest and best way to change things in your life is with self-compassion.

When you lose the judgment. When you can say, that was useful at another time—maybe in my life, maybe in my mom's life, maybe in my grandma's life—it was useful at another time. It's not now.

It reduces the shame and allows you to actually learn. Because when we are judgmental about something, we're criticizing—“Why am I like this? I micromanage everything. I'm so messed up. What's wrong with me?”—when we're in that place, it does two things.

Either it activates us into a panic mode and makes us anxious. Then we see it everywhere. It irritates us. We dislike that about ourselves. So we get into a place of hypervigilance.

Or it makes us depressed. “I've been like this for 45 years. My dad is like this. I can't change this.” And it makes us go into a depressive collapse.

In order to learn, you have to be regulated. And being compassionate—and when you understand something, compassion is a—is a counter-product of that.

“Oh, I can understand why my parents did that. I don't want to do that to my kids, but I can understand.” Already, you have some compassion. You're not othering them. You're seeing them as just like every parent wanting the best for their child—even though what they gave you is not useful and you don't want to pass on.

The understanding opens room for compassion, which makes change possible. And so many of us are using shame and judgment, which we've gotten a lot of times from our communities, from our parents. We're using that, and it's not a sustainable source for change.

So when you can understand it—say, wow, these things were set into motion even before I was born. Wow. These things kept me and my people safe.

You can have some understanding. You can have some compassion. Maybe even appreciation—that's a far jump, but many people get there—“Wow. I can appreciate that. But I don't have to carry it forward.”

It's like, oh, okay. This—no thank you. Versus, “I don't want that,” and it constantly creates a tension and even more of an attachment with the things that you're wanting to change.

Susan Sly: 33:32

What are some tells, right? So think about a person who's listening to this now or watching us on YouTube, and they're like, oh my gosh, Pauline's talking about me. Like, I'm stuck as an entrepreneur. I'm in my head. I have anxiety. I'm nauseous. I've, like, got all this stuff going on.

And what I'm hearing from you, Pauline, is, wait a minute. I need to take a breath. And, you know, maybe some of this is inherited. And maybe—just maybe—I don't have to carry this.

How does a person, when they begin to have that realization—that is, maybe they're carrying a burden that's not theirs—how do they begin to heal? And I know that's the work you do with your clients, but for the person listening, I want you to know there's hope that you can heal. But how do they begin? What are some first steps they can take?

Dr. Pauline: 34:26

Yeah, I think a curiosity about the family stories is really essential. Because I think especially in our very hyper-individualistic society, it can feel like it all starts with you. It's all on you. You're the only one that matters. It's your mindset. It's your—it's very myopic.

And just that—the curiosity and the openness to say, I came from a place. And not just of literal DNA and family, but family stories, family belief systems.

And you might ask as an entrepreneur, like, what's my familial story around money? What was I told around money?

I do this with people when they're doing premarital counseling. For years, I said, "Look at the marriages in each of your family lines, and what were the things that you've learned?"

And, you know, you hear, "Oh, I constantly heard men are not to be trusted," or, "Men will be men," or, "Women will only want you for your money." Whoa, I didn't realize.

When you begin to have curiosity about it, you start bringing awareness to things that you're unaware about that are actually impacting you on a daily basis.

And it is the pain points that you can almost use as a clue to go backwards. A lot of people take the pain point and want to move as quickly as possible forward.

"Oh, I micromanage. What's the next step I have to do not to do that anymore?" Look forward.

And I'm saying, do the exact opposite. Use the pain point and go backward.

What did you learn about managing others? What did you learn about people? Are people to be trusted? Are people dependable?

Maybe you're micromanaging because the belief was you cannot depend on anybody. But you—people have heard that. Your friends will fail you. Family is the only one. You can only depend on yourself.

Whoa, I didn't realize that that's where my micromanagement is coming from, versus somebody else micromanaging for a very different reason.

If you move forward too quickly, you're actually missing what's going to impact you, and it's going to show up in another way. The micromanagement could be solved, and it's going to turn into doing something else from that same place of not trusting people, not letting partners in, sabotaging partner relationships—because you have this embedded belief that people are untrustworthy.

So use your triggers, which can be so painful to people that they want to run away from them, fix them, pretend they didn't happen.

"Oh, that was just a moment. Usually I'm really good with people."

No. Use that trigger as a gift and look back with curiosity. What are the family stories?

Even just from your childhood—some people say, "I don't have the longer history." Okay, look up the place your parents were born. Find out some history—not from your particular family. Maybe there's nobody alive. Maybe people won't share stories with you. Or maybe the stories were hidden because of some shameful past. That's okay.

Do some general research on that place. What was happening at that time? How do you imagine that that influenced people?

Just having that will bring so many more things into awareness. And once it's in awareness, it brings it into a place where you can have some conscious choice around it. Like, okay, if I'm micromanaging from this place, I actually need to change my relationship with how I think people are going to show up.

Maybe I need to build trusting, loving relationships with people in my personal life, because that corrective emotional experience will build trust in people that will then generalize into me seeing my workers in a different way—the people at my company in a different way.

So the path forward will be illuminated by what meaning it has from the past and why something is coming up in such an intense way.

So use your triggers. Use your overreactions, which is how I started our talk. Like, when's the last time you overreacted? Can you go backwards, rewind, and see how far you can take that?

It will be so wild—all the connections you will make from that exploration. And that's the one place—just beginning with that curiosity and openness, rather than looking forward—is going to be so essential for beginning to see where you might need some professional support, and where, through books or even just time with family, you can make some of those links that then open up new choices and possibilities.

Susan Sly: 38:35

When you did your talk, I created—one of the action items I created was that—getting a Zoom together with my cousins. And so I have 11 cousins on my dad's side, and the—we were all kind of raised like in our family culture, like, your cousins are like your siblings.

And every summer, Pauline, we'd have this big family reunion, and we'd all do all this stuff together.

And so I was thinking about it for the first time when you did your talk. I have never thought about this.

So of the 11 cousins, only two ever got married. Basically everyone else—I have to think about it—like, everyone who got married, with the exception of one, got divorced. Right?

And thinking about, what are those—why is that? Because that's not even average. Average right now is 50% of people get divorced. Like, our family is not average. The—most of the men in our family never get married.

Dr. Pauline: 39:38

Yeah.

Susan Sly: 39:38

And so it's so interesting, and to really think about that, or what is that family relationship with money?

And I was spending some time with one of my cousins I hadn't seen in a very long time earlier this year, and we started to talk about how we were raised and just even some of the differences. But even as we were talking about our differences, there were a lot of similarities that came out.

And my grandmother was in an arranged marriage. So you mentioned the church. So they were immigrants to Canada. They were Presbyterian, and one minister sent a letter to another minister and said, “We have a single Chinese girl. Do you have any single Chinese men?” They said, “Well, we have one single Chinese man,” and that's how they were brought together.

And so my grandfather ended up committing suicide. My grandmother was left to raise the kids, run the family business. And so I think—I thought about that in your talk. And so one of those pieces about getting all my cousins together is, why are—you know, what have we inherited?

And yeah, and I think to your point, how often do we go to those family reunions and we have those superficial conversations?

“Oh, you've been at Intel for 10 years,” you know, like—have the deeper conversations. Figure it out.

If someone’s—the work you do now, making an impact, especially for your clients who are entrepreneurs, I would love to hear what are some of the outcomes that you've had in doing the work with your clients, in terms of them going from maybe being stuck or being anxious, or as you said, they're like micromanaging to the point maybe they're making themselves sick.

What are some of the—what are some of the great things you've seen with people as they begin to unburden themselves?

Dr. Pauline: 41:35

Yeah, I think that they gain a new framework for how to deal with whatever else is coming up. So it's like the opposite of a dependency model.

They learn that anything that comes their way, they can think, what purpose is this serving? Where does this come from? They can ask some of those questions and be in a different relationship with it.

And that brings a kind of a state of confidence. That's the word I'm looking for. It brings a confidence that is truly based on, whatever comes up, I know I'll be able to navigate through it.

That kind of faith in oneself is one of the major things that I've seen, as well as an acceptance that we're not meant to be perfect. And like, some wiggle room. We're not. We're not.

Dr. Pauline: 42:25

Yeah, no, oh my gosh—

Dr. Pauline: 42:27

I'm sorry. Like, no.

But there's less distress over the things that do come up, and that already softens everything else. It's like, “There I go, doing it again.” Just a lightness around these things.

Rather than—when people first come in, there's this tension. “Get rid of it. I don't want to be like this. I want to change. I want to get rid of it,” versus, “I'm okay. There it is again.”

It's softened. But it comes up in times of stress. No wonder it does. It's based in my survival. What other tools do I have?

This openness—that means that not everything is so tense and constricted all the time.

I see people's literal bodies shift and change. People being able to actually relax on vacation. People being able to have fun again—all the things that, in some ways, you imagine your business will give to you. And yet, if you don't do the work of uncovering these things, no matter how much you have, you will never be able to enjoy it.

And that's the sad part. If you don't break these cycles, you will find yourself victim to them again and again and again, no matter how much you started your business to get out of them.

I worked with this very, very wealthy man my first year of college, and the biggest fight I ever saw him get into with his wife, who he was usually very loving with, was why she bought organic blueberries at the farmer's market.

This man was a millionaire with a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, and he was fighting with his wife. And I just asked, I said, you know, “Hey, what was the thing about blueberries?” And he told me about being a poor boy with no shoes, and blueberries being that ultimate treat that he thought, when you're rich, you'll be able to have them.

And here he was in this gorgeous house with so much money, so much help—he didn't even need my help. I was like, writing emails so that he could just walk around and dictate. I was like the previous AI dictation service, getting paid very, very well—above what minimum wage was at that time—and he was beside himself over the farmer market blueberries.

So no matter how much money, status, success, legitimacy, external validation you get, if you don't have the tools internally, you won't be able to enjoy it.

So I can see people actually enjoy and see where—what they have right now in their lives, versus always being on the “Once I get to that place, then I will be able to,” and then, “then” never comes.

I see increased confidence, ease in their bodies, and the ability to actually savor and have meaning in the things that matter the most, which is another values priority, right? It's like a reprioritization of those values.

Sometimes we think our value is family, and then you look at the decisions you make, you look at how much you give at work, that you come home and you're irritated and not present, you're like, “Whoa. Am I actually embodying that value?”

I see people's actions more aligned with their value, and that already makes them feel so much more fulfilled in their lives.

Susan Sly: 45:20

I love that. And there's so much—like when you were talking about, like, allowing yourself to enjoy, right?

Even if someone isn't the child of an immigrant, like, thinking about how you were raised, what the expectations were.

Someone asked me, Pauline, recently—what is some—I was doing, I was on someone's show, and they were like, “What's something you've learned from your children?” And I said, “How to chill.”

Like I remember I was doing a speaking event with Tony Robbins, and, you know, he was asked the same thing, and he said, “I had to learn how to chill from Jairek,” his son. And I had to learn how to chill from my kids.

But I'm still really not good at it, because it goes back to that inherited piece around survival. And then, you know, if you're doing quote-unquote nothing, you're lazy, right?

I remember my dad saying, you know—I said, “I'm bored,” and he's like, “Only stupid people get bored.”

And so my—my pattern was like, “Oh, I'm not—I can't be stupid, so I can't ever be bored,” right?

And so I want to—like, for everyone listening, we will put the link to Pauline's Kajabi in the show notes, and you can schedule time with her, workshops, book her to speak. This is such important work.

And the thing I have seen time and again with entrepreneurs is, if you don't do the work, whatever is suppressed becomes expressed, and it will be expressed in your physical health, your relationships, in your finances—whatever it is, it ultimately has to be dealt with.

And so, my sister—I just love you, and—

Dr. Pauline: 47:06

I love you too. This is so wonderful. And that—what a gift to be able to, you know, have people listen to this and begin sparking their own curiosity about the stories that have shaped them, the survival techniques that they've inherited.

It's letting—giving people the permission to appreciate previous versions of themselves and their ancestors that had to become who they had to become in order to get by, and to be able to do differently so they don't have to just get by, but they can thrive. They can redefine. They can push the boundaries.

The things that are so important for entrepreneurs in particular—and yet, if you don't do that work, then all the stuff that is unconscious will just repeat itself.

And so this is the path to freedom. And I've had people describe that: “I feel free now.” Not because I'm perfect, not because I've gotten to some place where I'll never be triggered again. Because I know, oh, if I'm triggered, I can go back. I can ask these questions. I can have self-compassion.

I know how to take care of my body. I know what my nervous system does. I have these resources and tools for even naming my emotions. We think of these things as so commonplace, but one generation ago, two generations ago, these were not skills that people were taught, right?

And so I think it's so valuable to do this work—to be able to realize not just the goals you have for your business, but to be in that ultimate purpose with your life.

The part that I'll take with me is when you said you've done this work on yourself and you'll probably spend the rest of your life serving others. Like, oh, that just hit me to the core, because that's where we can all get to—a place of true service, not from perfection, but from self-compassion and love for ourselves that then turns into love for the oneness of humanity. And that is what's most meaningful.

Like, what if your business could be that pathway to freedom and ultimate service? What if you didn't have to keep doing from a wounded place and could do it from a place that were beyond your wildest dreams—and your ancestors' wildest dreams?

Like that, for me, would be the best kind of life lived, and that's what I want for people. I truly want that for people. And I know in order to get that, we've got to look at the dark stuff, because that's what's going to catapult you into the beautiful stuff.

Susan Sly: 49:24

Not doing it from a place of wounded. I love that.

Well, Pauline, I am so grateful for our time. And for everyone listening—if this show has resonated for you, share on social. Tag us. All of Pauline's social will be in the show notes. And we would love a five-star review.

Like, this is—these are the important conversations, because at the end of the day, success is not something that we chase, because we actually will never catch it. Success is something we live, and then all of the results come to us.

So Pauline, thank you so much for being on the show.

Dr. Pauline: 50:02

Thank you for having me, Susan. Appreciate it.

Susan Sly: 50:05

All right, to all the listeners, wherever you are in the world, I send you much love. Go rock your day, and I will see you in the next episode.

Voiceover: 50:13

Hey, this is Susan, and thanks so much for listening to this episode on Raw and Real Entrepreneurship.

If this episode—or any episode—has been helpful to you, you've gotten at least one solid tip from myself or my guest, I would love it if you would leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts.

After you leave your review, go ahead and email reviews@susansly.com. Let us know where you left the review. And if I read your review on air, you could get a $50 Amazon gift card, and we would so appreciate it, because reviews do help boost the show and get this message all over the world.

If you're interested in any of the resources we discussed on the show, go to susansly.com—that's where all the show notes live.

And with that—go out there. Rock your day. God bless, and I will see you in the next episode.

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.