And the Vienna Farin, welcome to Iway. How are you? I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. I'm so thrilled to have you.

We have wanted a licensed professional for these Ask Me Anything episodes for ages because otherwise it's just me and my friends and we really didn't go to school for long enough to answer any of the more serious questions and so I'm so happy to have you here and we have so many fun questions for you both from your audience and mine.

Before we get into it, would you like to explain your area of expertise?

Sure. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.

So I work with individuals, couples and families

within the context of relationships,

but really specifically, I love looking at the family of origin, the family system that we grew up in,

sometimes multiple systems. If you're like me, my parents went through a divorce.

And so there were two systems in which I needed to learn how to be and relate and what the rules were and you know how to operate in these different homes and so I really like to look at how we grew up and

understand the foundation the framework that was built for us you know in those early

years our families are the first education as we know when it comes to how to communicate,

how to fight, what boundaries look like, what love is, what attachment is, what it isn't,

and so many of us do not have the best education. I didn't have a great education when it came to that.

And so my work is really about looking at the unwanted patterns in our lives today that we can't

seem to shake and change no matter how much we want to, no matter how committed we are to it, and really pointing people back to

the irresolution from their past, looking at the wounding that took place in their earlier years. maybe hasn't gotten the attention and the honoring

and the acknowledgement that it needs in order to actually create the change that we want to see in our lives and in our relationships.

And you have a book about this, it's called The Origins of You, how Breaking Family Patterns

Can Liberate the way that we live and love, and that came out last year, and so anyone who hears this and then wants to dig deeper I think this is so helpful because I think we are in a growing

emergency of needing to understand the cause rather than the symptoms.

So much of Tik-Toc is about understanding the symptoms and I think that's great and it's a start,

but if we can't actually find the route, it's so hard to rip it out and start again. So I really appreciate that.

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