Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler explore how family dynamics shape our adult lives. Joe explains that from ages zero to seven, children are primarily in theta brain waves — the same state as hypnosis — which programs their understanding of love, money, power, and reality. These early experiences become the templates we unconsciously recreate in romantic relationships, friendships, and workplaces. A child who learned that love means enduring hardship will find partners who reinforce that belief. Someone whose parents were authority figures will project that dynamic onto bosses.
The conversation extends to the workplace, where Joe describes how boss-employee relationships often mirror parent-child dynamics. He offers a practical structural solution: make teams accountable to each other rather than to a single authority figure. He also discusses how people in relationships find partners whose traumas are “complementarily matched” — creating perfect conditions for mutual growth, if they choose to do the work rather than assign blame.
Joe emphasizes that while understanding family dynamics intellectually is useful, it’s not sufficient for transformation. The real shift happens on three levels: intellectual recognition of patterns, emotional processing of the feelings the pattern taught you not to feel, and nervous system awareness of when you’re in your trauma. He shares a pivotal personal moment when he told a colleague, “I can’t trust my thoughts right now” — recognizing he was acting from trauma and needed to regulate before making decisions.
Key Concepts
- Theta programming shapes adult reality
- Partners are perfectly matched to trigger you
- Authority issues are not seeing humans
- Feeling through a pattern ends it
- Knowing patterns doesn’t free you
- Survival mechanisms deserve honor
- Trace triggers to their origin
Key Quotes
“Our brains from zero to seven are in theta brain waves — the same brain waves as hypnosis. We’re being programmed for what reality is.”
“If you’re three years old and you’re scared and you run to mom and she’s like ‘it’s time for you to be strong,’ that’s what you’re going to learn.”
“You don’t have a boss. You have a client. Unfortunately you’re not diversified — you only have one.”
“When they realize ‘oh, it’s perfectly matched — there’s no one to blame here, I’m holding my side, you’re holding your side’ — that’s a great moment. It loosens the whole thing.”
“I can’t trust anything I think right now. My brain isn’t in a place where I can trust my thoughts. So I’m going to go get my brain into place and my body into a place where I can trust my thoughts.”
“Can you love these patterns? Can you respect them for what they tried to give you? Can you just help them find new ways of doing it more effectively?”
Transcript
Isn’t in a place where I can trust my thoughts so I’m going to go get my brain into place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts where I’m out of my trauma so that I can think clearly because if I’m acting out of the trauma I will recreate it over and over and over and over again welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson yeah so wow that was quite an opening q a yeah art of accomplishment is on yeah holy holy crap yeah people went there oh my gosh unlike any start of anything I’ve been in there’s amazing how vulnerable it got how quickly it was it was really cool yeah I remember like last year the first the first q a after the first week of work went really really deep and we were all blown away but this one was just like the orientation like you’re going through a bunch of PowerPoint slides and it was like oh man I can bet half of the people here are probably bored to tears and then like before you know it a couple questions come through and it’s straight to the core straight to it yeah yeah Sarah was saying to me she said oh I was scared at a minute like last year we got lightning in a bottle and it might not happen again she goes that fear is completely gone she’s just like I first thing she said when I called she goes I miss AOA calls this is great yeah it was awesome yeah yeah so something I wanted to talk about today is something that I saw today in this call so many of the things that we do in this work so many of the times that I see you work with people it often boils down to some form of family Dynamic and we’ve talked about this before that we have these projections that we carry from our childhood people who are caretakers or parents or family members but also projections of society uh projections of money but in particular these there’s something to this concept of family dynamics that just continually comes up and I’ve noticed it come up in my life a lot in my relationships I’ve projected my mother onto basically anybody I’ve ever dated uh to varying levels of effect I’ve projected my mother and my father onto like the management in the company in my company and in Friendship groups and so a lot of times when we do this work there’ll be a group it’s often in a group setting and I know that you size those groups such that family Dynamics can come up and then be worked with so yeah let’s let’s talk about that a little bit tell me a little bit about what family Dynamics means to you and what makes this important something that’s most interesting about is like family Dynamics are cool and the fact that they allow you to see why things are coming up and they’re also cool in the fact that it gives you one way to heal patterns that are no longer useful to you in your life that’s what makes them cool there it’s also you know if you look at like Freud’s work or like a lot of the early Psychotherapy work it was all very focused on that early family stuff and and there’s a lot of ways to have significant transformation without ever really going into any of it so I I say that at the front end just to say that it’s like there’s lots of avenues of transformation there’s lots of ways of healing there’s no one way and so this is a cool thing to talk about but if anybody’s listening thinking that this is the only way like please let that go in your head but the way I think about it the the best explanation I’ve ever heard is that our brains you know there’s many brain waves that we’re like hang out in and so there’s Delta and Alpha and beta and Theta and Theta is kind of the the brain wave that we get into right before we go to sleep or right as we’re waking up it is the brain waves that happens when you’re under hypnosis and it’s the brain wave that you’re in basically from like zero to seven eight years old for the majority of it and it’s really a way that you’re being programmed just like you would under hypnosis and so as kids are young they’re in these Theta brain waves it’s why that like fairies are real for them and uh it’s why that you know they’re in a magical reality it’s kind of that dream state between that dream and awake space in the American Indian culture was represented by dragonflies which I just think is a beautiful you know imagery of like what that is and um anyhow and so they’re we’re being programmed in that young age and we’re in that brain state that tells us what reality is and So This Is Love love is what we experience Mom and Dad doing and how we experience their interactions with us this is what money looks like this is what power looks like this is what nature looks like so we get taught all this whole way of looking at the world in those young time so if you’re three years old and you’re scared and you run to mom and she’s like it’s time for you to be strong that’s what you’re going to learn if the mom pulls you up and holds you that’s what you’re going to learn if the mom slaps you and says why do you always bug me that’s what you’re going to learn and that’s how you’re going to react to fear so that’s the way I think about it it’s just like that zero to eight years old particularly is very much your programming I think it continues I think we learn things traumatic events can teach us and unteach us things so there’s other experiences that we can have therefore that’s reality and if we stay in that path whatever we learned in that time frame even though it might be painful it’s very easy to stay there it’s when you move out of that path that it becomes challenging and the other thing about this which I is ancillary but I think cool to think about is that most of the transformation techniques that I’ve seen be very useful tap into the Theta brain waves like it oftentimes when people say finish uh groundbreakers the week-long course that we do very rarely people are like I can’t remember anything that happened I like I don’t know what happened and when we when you and I did ESF together people were like what the hell happened it’s been three days but I don’t know what happened yeah I can still hardly remember 95 of what happened there yeah and so it’s very much it’s because you’re in that Theta space and and that’s where you’re doing the reprogramming yeah yeah so so to bring some some examples into this on the on the Q a today somebody had just made a comment in a in a session with you and they were like well I’m enduring the storm or I’m weathering the storm and you’re like wait a minute in that there’s still an enduring going on and like you can see you can see the whole fractal family Dynamics show up of like okay I was taught that life is a storm to be weathered and you could see how that might create a pattern where you know like if if I’m carrying that that belief then I will be attracted to people who are also experiencing life as something to be endured and then we find this thing where we’re enduring it together and that that could be one way if my mother was that way to me or was that way with life and taught that to me then I might find myself in a relationship and even if I’m if I’m resisting that if I’m like I don’t want to live with the life that feels like enduring then I’ll find myself living a life where I’m resisting the perspective that it’s being endured and finding others in my life to feel that resistance with yes so sometimes you’re finding people who are seeing the world the way you see it but you’re also finding people to prove that the way you see it is right so if you’re somebody who believes that the world should be endured then you’re probably also finding somebody who makes you endure life so so you’ll find people who both become the thing to be endured and the people who you can say oh isn’t it true we have to endure life together that seems to be the pattern that you recreate over and over again right right so let’s talk about a couple of other like example patterns just to make sure we’re not in one particular Zone here um like another thing that might happen is that you might have somebody might grow up with a father who’s somewhat emotionally absent they’re always working but they’re providing for the family and sort of their role is creating creating a space in the home but they’re not as present maybe because they can’t be and then that person grows up and then they find themselves doing the same thing or also just expecting the same of others yeah or marrying that exacting that yeah yeah so they might become the role of the father or they might marry the role of the father and expect that that’s what just as normal yeah maybe maybe another example to paint like a third example into this picture is you know a mother who has a hard time accepting the way that uh the way that her child is different from her or following a different path and struggles with that so then the child grows up with a belief that and then dating people who have a hard time accepting parts of them and feeling judged and there’s an intermediate step there right which is Mom doesn’t fully approve of me therefore the voice in the head doesn’t fully approve of me therefore I date other people who don’t fully approve of me that’s all part of that scheme and and those are all that we can find one of those for all of us we can all find one of those but there’s also ones that almost pertain to almost everybody not everybody but almost everybody and I’ll just give a really simple example of that as a kid one of the things that you learn is that there is a mother and a father in their authority figures and they have control over your life and so most people walk around the world with a boss who’s an authority figure who has control over their life not everybody but most people walk around the world with that now I’ll often tell clients you don’t have a boss you have a client you have a customer unfortunately you’re not Diversified you don’t have lots of customers you only have one but you have a customer and they’re not your boss they’re not your authority figure there’s somebody who’s a customer and you can lose them or you can get another customer or another client whatever you however you want to look at it just even the perspective that you have a boss who has some sort of control over your life is a projection of a family Dynamic typically yeah and that points to something that this family Dynamic thing is which is when you were growing up it was real you know your parents had authority over you you didn’t have certain kinds of power that you do as an adult but the perception continues yes and then that’s that’s the way that that the lives that we lived in our family become the lives that we recreate in you know subtler and subtler ways as we mature and develop that’s right that’s exactly how it works what are some examples of how this has shown up in the workplace there’s you just had the boss projection how about like within a within a team what are some ways that perhaps some people’s family Dynamic issues interact with one another uh what are what are some examples that you’ve seen one of the coolest things you just said in the team one of the tricks that I will teach um to Executives is that if they aren’t the authority figure in the room that everybody’s reporting to then a lot of these Dynamics diminish so one really cool way to stop those kind of projections that we’re about to speak to is to make the team report to itself meaning every time you have a team meeting somebody else is responsible for holding accountability meaning that the team when somebody fails it’s not the boss who says hey what happened it’s the team that says hey what happened like to really make the accountability to the team which is really where the accountability lies it’s not to a boss and so that’s a just a just a cool way that you can create a structure inside of an organization that changes a lot of this kind of Dynamics which is just a drag on an organization the drag can be so many ways it can be I project onto my boss that I need to please them I project onto my boss that them they’re never happy with me I project onto my boss that their opinion matters more than my opinion or that they have more Authority than me the my one of my favorites is I project onto my boss that they’re a bad authority figure and I need to rebel against them one of the more destructive ones that I see a lot of is you know if I grew up with a say a father or mother who I always disappointed I will recreate ways to disappoint my boss and you see you see that happening all the time where people are creating ways to disappoint their boss but they can’t see that they’re recreating it so that all of that happens and then the boss also has projections back like I’m responsible for these people no that the boss is not responsible for that everybody’s responsible for themselves or um these people I can’t depend on them I have to do it all myself or I can’t let them down or nobody can do it except me or I’m necessary that’s one of my favorite ones that bosses have is that and you see this especially at like not exactly the top tier of an organization a big organization but the level below that when I work with Executives that are you know not quite at the sea level often times that those people the big thing that they have to do to get to the next level is learn that they their job is to become unnecessary that they aren’t necessary anymore that they can create a structure that basically makes them irrelevant and when they do that boy they just just take it to the whole Next Level it’s when they think that they need to be needed or that they offer something special that the team can’t offer without them that they hold themselves back and all of those are projections and family Dynamics as well yeah absolutely and that kind of points to something that you said earlier about how family Dynamics is an interesting way to think about things and it can be useful but don’t get too hung up on it because I I can imagine some of these some of these dynamics that come up like issues with authority might not actually have come from your family it might have just come from your school I might have come from a mixture of those things yeah like there is a tremendous amount of men in Silicon Valley who are in the top tier of their game who got bullied pretty heavily in the you know these are a lot of the billionaires a lot of the like biggest players in Silicon valleys are men that don’t have a like inherent large social intelligence that they got fully bullied and so they learned that there is such a thing as power and it’s real and that it is a you know doggy dog world and they need to be in the place where they have the power and they’re incredibly smart and they can do it and so so that also in itself is a projection obviously it’s not the only people who are in you know the top tier of Silicon Valley but there’s quite a few of them right yeah it seems like a common cluster characteristic yeah so this this then also brings us back to what can we do about this and so we if we’re using this kind of framework to start recognizing that a lot of the patterns that are occurring in our lives are being recreated from our family of origin and then kind of spreading out from that to our community or whether we were bullied or whether how teachers treated us how church treated us various things and we’re still recreating these patterns let’s talk about an example of a team or a personal relationship or a group of friends When people’s stuff comes up they start to slot into these roles where one person will have a set of projections onto the group and then that will just happen to click into place when someone else has their set of projections and so on around the group I would say it doesn’t click into place unless they meet uh the right opposite or right corollary projection yeah yeah it’s like they find themselves and they’re like click and this happens in almost every marriage I’ve ever seen I think every marriage I’ve ever seen where their traumas overlap in this perfect way where they can play the opposite roles with each other where they can therefore learn to grow and transform because of the relationship yeah it’s like people find each other based on the the complementary surface area of their traumas and that’s the thing that makes a team yeah yeah and the best part is that when they get into blame like one of the main moments when I’m working with a couple was think something gets undone is when they realize oh it’s perfectly matched there’s no one to blame here I I’m holding my side you’re holding your side that’s like a great moment when people see that it loosens the whole thing yeah and then the dynamic can change and loosen the relationship can grow or develop or they can move in separate directions whichever whichever is right if they move in separate directions without healing it they will most likely create another relationship that’s very similar yeah that sounds right yeah yeah so it’s interesting there’s there’s almost this way that you could frame like our family Dynamics or our projections our family projections as something that holds us back in the world but it’s also exactly the kind of thing that is like heat seeking seeking us into exactly the kind of situation we need to resolve those Dynamics and grow growth through them in connection with people yeah the the reason I said don’t make too much of the family Dynamics is because I don’t find knowing this doesn’t help you heal it very much a little bit it does but let’s take this exact same metaphor but we’ll we’ll talk about it on an emotional level like instead of saying family Dynamics will say what’s happening emotionally in your family you were taught certain emotions you couldn’t have them and your body needs to get to homeostasis just like if you were taught you couldn’t pee you’d be walking around trying to find a place to pee so your body’s trying to get the emotions to move through so that you can get back to homeostasis and so what the subconscious is doing is it’s recreating patterns where that emotion can come up so that it can be felt and as soon as you fully allow that emotion you fully surrender into that emotion and let it move all the way through you then you’ll stop recreating the pattern on an emotional level so the intellect understanding it is useful it loosens it up emotionally feeling the thing that the pattern has taught you not to feel well very much loosen it up that’ll change it pretty dramatically and the other thing that helps on a nervous system level is that when you are in that pattern there is a felt sense that’s different right and so if you think about like the time that you got most angry for no good reason or most I felt most out of control for no good reason even though you might identify the reason you you realize oh this doesn’t make logical sense that I’d be this upset that’s the Sensation that you have not the upsetness but the sensation that’s that’s carrying that upsetness that’s how you know you’re in your trauma and so there’s a felt sense of going oh I’m in my trauma I’m in the pattern here I know this and then that’s where the rational brain can be really helpful and say oh when I’m in my pattern I just can’t believe my thoughts right now I can’t believe this and I remember in my journey there was this really wonderful moment where somebody came to me it was in a business thing and they were like hey what do you what should we do and I said I can’t trust anything I think right now my brain isn’t in a place where I can trust my thoughts so I’m gonna go get my brain into place and my body in a place where I can trust my thoughts where I’m out of my trauma so that I can think clearly and we can get to because if I’m acting out of the trauma I will recreate it over and over and over and over again yeah it seems like a great way for the for the rational intellectual mind to be able to support the emotion in its process and then on the on the opposite side of that I can see that the thing you just said like my emotion that just came up is way more than it should be I could also see that being a rationalization for well I should down regulate that emotion and not have it because it’s clearly too much for this situation somebody just looked at me a certain way and I’m all upset but another way to frame that is this is exactly the amount of emotion that my system needs and this thing brought up a bunch of bottled up pent-up stuff that maybe I don’t want to bring up right now in this environment and attack people with but it’s a pointer to the fact that it’s there yes and it wants to be felt and it wants to be processed and it wants to be loved yeah that’s exactly right that’s beautifully said better than I could have said it so like keeping on the topic of family Dynamics there’s another thing that I can kind of see that occurs is that people will go through a story of life this is maybe one of the ways that this can be a trap is that they will say oh I just keep dating my father I keep dating my mother and then that’s a story and becomes a belief about themselves and then they become sort of a learned helplessness within that and it seems like the emotional stuff we were just talking about is a way through that yes yeah I don’t know it seems like there’s there’s something useful about recognizing these things be like oh I can see I can see what’s happening here because that might be one breadcrumb back to the thing for me to work with the emotion to be felt and it also might only be a breadcrumb back to the thing next to it and it might actually not have been a family thing so you can learn this stuff intellectually you can learn this stuff oh this is the family pattern and then it cannot change and then you can start the belief system of oh I can’t change this of oh I’m always going to be in this or you can notice the pattern and you can have the belief system of this is going to be really tough to change and then you can say oh look I’ve changed it a little bit but I’m not making progress quick enough all of those things are more of the projections from your Early Childhood right the belief that I’m not quick enough that emotions are hard transformation is difficult I’m not quick enough I can’t do it I’m helpless mom was helpless blah blah blah blah blah right so there it’s just be controlled by my emotions yeah yeah it’s just or I can’t trust emotions emotions can’t be trusted all of these things are are learned from somewhere in the childhood and so so what often happens is somebody sees the first thing that they’ve been working on and they stick right there on that thing but they don’t see that it’s held in place by a whole bunch of other ones yeah and so as one or two start falling apart it’s easier that the rest start collapsing so that if somebody’s listened to this episode and they’re starting to look for family Dynamics in their life from this perspective whether this might be interesting it might be helpful it might be a trap not not to take it too too heavily and they start to see something I mean what’s what’s the next step for somebody who starts to recognize oh wow I’ve had this pattern all of my life I can see how it comes from some form of these Dynamics and how can I start to see people as an individual unique human that they are and not as the people that I was raised by yeah so the next step to take outside of learning to recognize it and the best way to do that is when you’re triggered to know that you’re in it then um and to feel through it which is another great step the other thing that’s like a couple really cool tricks to to play with are first if you find yourself in a like an emotionally triggered space stop everything you’re doing feel the emotion and without any intellect just feel that emotion trace it back to the first time you ever felt it and that will really teach you where this thing came from so that’s a really useful trick and sometimes just feeling where it came from and this happens oftentimes with like things you don’t expect like you might be triggered over a boss and you find out it has something to do with a babysitter or you might be triggered over money and you find it has something to do with a dad so that’s that’s a cool trick and then another really cool trick as far as like next steps of kind of dilapidating the programming is to remember that all of these programs came for a good reason you know like if you were striving your whole life to find your dad’s love and so you’re programmed to strive for love well that’s your job as a kid is to make sure you’re loved by your dad or you might not survive it’s like it’s just Instinct and it’s and it’s beautiful and so can you love these patterns can you respect them for what they tried to give you can you just help them find new ways of doing it more effectively rather than move into you shouldn’t be doing this so I keep doing that what’s the problem here because that’s just more of the pattern so learning what the pattern has done for you how it’s served you that it’s intent even if it’s mean and vicious its intent is to take care of you and to see that and to honor that also is really effective in allowing the patterns to become more useful and more effective and more functional yeah it’s almost like like honoring honoring your path to have been perfect as it is and your behavior to have developed according to very logical environmental shapings yeah makes it easier to step forward and say that my my future behavior is also going to make perfect sense in some regard and I don’t need to be self-critical and I can just feel what’s true for me yeah I was just dealing with a person recently somebody old friend who I love dearly and just going through the Heat and at some point he looked up and he said to me he said um you know I realized that it doesn’t matter who would have been put into my position this is what would have happened to them like he saw that it wasn’t personal to him that the the life the patterns all of it wasn’t personal to him that anybody put into that situation would have ended up that way he could just it was so much relief in that so do you have any integration questions for us about family Dynamics oh yeah the first one would be what’s the pattern in your life that you most feel holds you back and then the second question would be what’s the way that you try to avoid it that’s actually keeping it in place what’s the way that you’re trying to avoid that pattern that actually holds the pattern in place would be this other way to say that and then the third question is what is it about this pattern that’s been serving you has tried to serve you and and has served you in the past yeah great questions thank you Joe thank you Brett thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US in your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com