4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2016
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Are we doomed to repeat the patterns of our childhood? The Sugars hear from the child of two alcoholics, who cannot tolerate her new boyfriend's drinking; from a young woman whose partner is reminding her more and more of her emotionally damaged father; and from a daughter who is stuck in a co-dependent relationship with her mentally ill mother.
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0:00.0 | Dear Sugar is supported by. |
0:09.0 | Hi Steve. |
0:10.0 | Hi. |
0:11.0 | So Steve, do you feel in your current life or have you felt in your adult life let us say |
0:16.0 | that you have carried some of the wounds from your childhood into it or you recognize a pattern? |
0:22.0 | That's something that you've had since childhood and haven't ever been able to change or at least entirely lose? |
0:28.0 | Yeah, oh yeah. |
0:30.0 | I've always had an incredible need for sort of intensity and reassurance and neediness. |
0:37.0 | And for a long time had no clear idea of why I was sending that out into the world, needing from friends initially and then later in life from romantic interest, a certain kind of intensity. |
0:50.0 | And it took me many years to figure out that I think what was going on is that as I've constructed my history, you know, my twin brother was more independent than me. |
1:00.0 | He moved off into the world before me and I never really got over it. |
1:05.0 | It was kind of the central, unrequited love of my early childhood. |
1:09.0 | And I kept reenacting it, you know. |
1:12.0 | When I was a kid, my mom tells the story. |
1:15.0 | We would lie in the crib and Mike would bonk his head bonk on the crib and I would bonk. |
1:20.0 | And he would go bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk and I would hit my head bonk, bonk, bonk. |
1:24.0 | I mean, I think it's at a level that's so deeply embedded in me that I just naturally expect it from the person who I choose to be my twin. |
1:31.0 | And I have all these ideas about how close we're going to be and it sends them screaming in the other direction, which in a sense is what I think happened. |
1:39.0 | I think deep down with my twin brother, but I experienced it as I've lost him and I keep losing him again and again and again. |
1:46.0 | It's really connected to what we're going to talk about today because most of these letters are about, you know, those childhood wounds or those patterns that were inflicted in a sort of family system. |
1:57.0 | Right. |
1:58.0 | And the same question of how do we evolve into the people we've grown into being as adults? |
... |
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