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Love Your Life Show: Personal Growth, Mindset, + Habits for Busy Moms
Three Gen X Blind Spots That Hurt Our Relationships and How to Heal Them
00:23:16
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- [00:02]
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Hi, this is the Love youe Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let's go, warriors.
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Oh, hello, warriors. I am so glad to be with you today. I am Susie Pettit, your certified life and relationship coach, and you are listening to the Love youe Life show. If this is your first episode, you're gonna want to run over and get the podcast Roadmap, which gives you the foundational episodes for emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, all the fun stuff. You're going to get that@smbwell.com roadmap all one word. And I'm so excited you're here because today we are talking about something that so many of us in midlife feel but do not always know how to name it. I was motivated to do this by watching some TikToks that one of you wonderful listeners sent me. And I'm so excited for how this is going to help you today. It is, let's just call it, the Gen X blind Spots. The quiet impact of the way in which we grew up. These blind spots that shaped our childhoods, shaped by the culture, by the era we grew up, by the survival strategies we learned long before we knew we were learning anything at all. My dear listeners, and what I want most today is for you to feel seen and supported, to hear about these patterns and recognize that you didn't choose them. They were formed inside a childhood that asked a lot of you. Not because your parents were intentionally trying to harm you, but rather because they didn't know any better. They were parenting in a way that they had been parented. And yet impact was still done. I see it all over in me and my Gen X buds. And because we were raised in this way, and quite frankly, because we're badasses, we created ways of acting and being and behaving. We were kids and craved safety and so learned to act and think in certain ways. Yet as adults now, we do those. Okay? And so the things that we did as kids that were great and kept us safe, that sort of badass behavior, as a coach now, I'm sorry, as a coach, I know now that those are limiting us. Those keep us maybe sometimes feeling emotionally lonely or responsible in relationships where we're not hyper vigilant. And just a lot of it can add a lot of heaviness to our mental health, our current mental health. And my intention with this episode is to help you so you don't feel Judged. We're all in this together. To help you see yourself in your patterns With a gentle mindset and the Love youe Life show, I'm going to be giving you some tiny practice size things you can do to help yourself in this and for sure always an invitation to join with me in deeper work. In February, in the Love youe Life School, we're focusing on relationship healing.
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So.
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So that would be a great place to start. But let's listen into this episode because I'm going to walk us through three Gen X blind spots that I see over and over in my own coaching and that used to show up in my life. So you are not alone in any of these. The blind spot number one is this automatic I am fine response. Right? Most Gen X kids grew up with this clear message that our emotional needs were something to be dealt with privately. Maybe we were told to stop crying or you had a parent who was overwhelmed and had very little capacity for your feelings. Maybe you simply noticed that being emotional made things harder at home, so you learned to swallow it and keep moving. Hey, we kids are quick learners. For myself, it didn't take long for me to learn that my parents didn't like it when I was emotional, when I was sad or upset. In making this episode, I was trying to think back to one of the earliest times I had this. And I have lots of memories. But one came I have a super early memory that must have happened in like first or second grade when I came home and told my mom about how I was upset. These two friends of mine, Charlotte and Cami, remember their names, wouldn't let me play their leaf game on the playground, can remember this so clearly. And I still, when I was reflecting on it, I had a pit in my stomach. Okay. Cami and Charlotte were splitting the fall colored leaves into piles during recess and wouldn't let me join it. I remember sitting on the swing and watching them and wanting so bad to cry. I remember them saying like, you could sit on the swing and watch us, but you can't do it with us. And I just wanted to cry so bad. And when I saw my mom after school, I did start to cry. I had that like, ah, okay, I can let it down. And while I don't remember what she said, I do remember how I felt. And it was like I was in trouble that I had like how I was feeling and I had better get over what was going on for me before dad came home because he wouldn't want to see me like that. That was the feeling I get. And as I say it, I still feel it in my belly now, like, I was in trouble for having an emotion, like I did something wrong. Can you relate a little Gen Xer? As a kid, we learned to quickly shove these feelings down. Hey, it's remarkable. Like, you know, when mom asked me the next time, how was my day? Oh, fine. Good. Nothing to report here. Protective for me, little Susie. Right. But can you see how quickly it can turn into an instinctive habit so that now, as adults, we don't even slow down to see it as something we did protective in our past, and it becomes maladaptive in our present because it keeps us unconnected from ourselves emotionally and from others, which leads us to feel disconnected, like no one really gets the real us. Hey, we often are saying, like, I want more emotional connection. Well, often we are not giving that emotional connection to ourselves while this instinctive behavior makes sense as a kid. Right? Okay. But now as an adult, just noticing it. Someone asks how you're doing, and before you know it, the words are already out. I'm fine. I'm good. All good here. When we're anything but. So this is the first of the Gen X blind spots. I'm highlighting us believing that emotional neediness or emotional feelings are weak. We think we should be able to handle everything ourselves. We believe that having needs makes us a burden. And because of that, we disconnect from ourselves and the people who love us. So your action step. I'm going to call these action steps little band aids. Okay. Is what they are. They're like beginning ways to heal. But remember, a band aid is just something you put on top of a wound. Okay. You can only do so much on a podcast with these things. There's only like a certain level you can do in a podcast while coming in to see me as a coach. We can go deeper. It's like we can get to that infection, and that's where the freedom and healing comes from. And for day today, there is a band aid. You could go on an I am fine diet until next week when the show comes out. Again, choose to not use the word fine. Okay. Look at the feeling wheel. I'll put it in the show notes for this week. It's smbwell.com 391 and choose a different word. Choose a word other than fine. Be more honest with yourself and with the people in your life. So the next time someone asks how you are, pause. Choose a word other than fine. Tell the truth. Like one degree closer to the truth. You don't have to over share. You don't have to tell your whole story, but simply use a word other than fine. And if that feels too vulnerable saying it out loud, I get it. Again, please make a coaching appointment with me because I can help so much with this. And yet if that feels too uncomfortable, if someone says, you know, how are you? And you, it's just too uncomfortable for you to say something other than I'm fine. At least. Please, dear one, pause and try to be truthful. In your head, ask yourself, how am I? How was my day? Okay, think back to that experience I shared as a little girl in the playground. I learned so quickly to answer in a way that kept my mom calm and thus in connection with me. It was safe for me as a little girl to say, I'm fine. My brain hadn't developed enough to think, well, I'm actually quite sad. But I'm going to say I'm happy so dad doesn't get mad. No, I went straight to I'm fine. Our brains are so fast. It's like, ah, protection. I'm fine. So there's this part of me that I actually started to believe it, which then begins to create this disconnect, my dear ones, between our real self, our real authentic warrior self, and our people pleasing our self, our fake self. And while that's a whole other episode, and I've done episodes on that, what I'm trying to say here is that when we're very young, we stop looking inside of ourselves for an answer as to how we are, and we start looking outside of ourselves and giving the answers that they want. This week, let's practice turning inward again. Even if it's just in your head, go on an I'm fine diet and come up with something else. How am I really? Take a breath and then let that little you talk. All right. Blind spot 2. Confusing self neglect with Competence Gen X parents were taught that to be good parents, you needed to meet your child's basic human needs. Food, shelter, clothing. Do that, you're done. Good job. Check. No need to teach emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, or to emotionally validate those kids. They didn't see this as their job or their responsibility. So when we little kids shared our needs in that way, a need for emotional support, we were often met with almost confusion, like, wait a minute, kid, you have food on the table. What more do you want? You need a hug. Toughen up. You're sad. Turn that frown upside down. You feel anxious? Stop being dramatic. And frankly, I don't think we even had the word anxious. You feel worried? Don't worry about that. That's dumb. Okay, we now would label this as neglect. Interestingly, okay, nowadays, 2026, we would label this as emotional neglect. The model I teach in my parenting class is super simple. And one of the main three parts has to do with support. How to support our kids emotionally because we did not get this as parents. So learning. I'm trying to teach a new generation of parents how to parent differently. And for us now listening into this, that since this wasn't yet known in the parenting realm, we now confuse self neglect with competence, resiliency. Like, if we push those feelings down and power through, then we get our gold star. Since we had no one around us to help us with our internal world to learn how to feel these feelings, we learned to meet our own needs by shoving them down, silencing them externally and eventually even internally, which becomes our Gen X blind spot when adulthood arrives. We think we're strong because we don't ask for help. We think we're capable because we don't need anything from anyone. But underneath that pride sits a lifetime of self neglect, emotional neglect. We mistake emotional starvation for independence. We mistake loneliness and disconnection for being low maintenance. Your band aid is simple but powerful. Here, dear listeners. Begin to notice when you feel needy. Notice when you crave connection or validation. Notice when you want to matter to someone. And instead of shaming yourself for it, practice a bridge thought. You can say, it makes sense that I feel this way, or it's okay to want another human to empathize with me. These thoughts soften the inner alarm that tells you you're doing something wrong. They create a small pathway back to your healthy interdependence. Over time, you're going to feel less guilt about needing support and more clarity about what it looks like to be a whole human who deserves emotional care. Practicing those two things, those softer things of saying it makes sense, I feel this way, or it's okay, I want another human to empathize with me. Okay. And before I go on to blind spot three, this is a little asterisk for those of us who are parents right now. I just want to highlight that I said interdependence, not codependence. In a podcast like this, I get to skim the surface and give you, you know, the band aids, as I said. But I want to make sure that you don't hear me saying, like, let yourself be needy with. Confusing it with. Put that responsibility for someone else to meet that need on Their shoulders. There is a difference between co dependence, us having a need and someone else being responsible for meeting that need. We're doing the same thing to them, okay? Like if we're a parent and we're like, oh, we're needy, okay? And we go to our kids or something and we're like, hey, you need, like we're doing the same thing. That's why we need a coach so we don't get confused in here. All right? Enmeshment is what that looks like when we're putting our emotional needs on our kids, which is what our parents did to us versus us acting in emotional maturity in our safe adult relationships. Okay, I'll put a super awesome interview I did with an Incredibly brilliant woman, Dr. Kate Bellstreet, on family enmeshment, because that's what I'm speaking of here. I'll put that below in the show notes. But for this step three, just start to notice where we're confusing self neglect with resilience and shift out by letting it be a little more comfortable in your nervous system to be needy and blind spot three is seeing our over functioning and people pleasing and like fixing and caregiving as a personality trait instead of what we did to survive. It's like, I'm a helper. This is what I do, you know? Or look at her. She handles it all. She takes care of everyone else. She's always thinking of everyone else. She's so giving. Oh my goodness. This is one of the most common patterns I see in midlife women. We were raised and praised for being the caretaker, the fixer, the over functioner, the emotional manager. Most of us took on emotional roles as kids that were not ours to carry. In addition to what we've already talked about in our podcast, maybe you also had an alcoholic parent at home or a depressed parent or a reactive parent. Probably all of those. Or you were asked to look after your siblings when you were still a child yourself. Many of us learned the safest thing we could do was to keep the peace. Don't make dad mad. Don't worry, mom. Keep everyone calm. Hold your feelings in so no one explodes. These, these experiences created survival instincts that helped us feel safer in childhood. The problem is that as adults, we think these instincts are now our personality. And we say things like, this is just who I am. I'm the responsible one. I'm the one who notices everything. I am the one who fixes things. I'm the one they come to when they have problems. I hold it all together and deep down that feels like big pressure. And then we feel like if I don't do this, everything will collapse. If I stop, the people around me will fall apart, which is what we learned as a child. So of course that feels true now. And then sometimes as adults we've set up this pattern and so we're the over functioning and we create the learned helplessness for others. And yet the blind spot here is that it hides the truth. You are not responsible for other people's feelings, lives or decisions. If someone else is upset, you do not have to find a way to make it so they're not upset. We end up doing a lot of things for other adults that they should and should what they should be doing for themselves. Sometimes they can't because of that learned helplessness, but they should be doing for themselves actual action things like remembering doctor's appointments or family members birthdays. But also emotional things like let them figure out how to manage their upsetness. Let them figure out why they're triggered over this certain thing. We can sometimes act like therapist for our, you know, we're like, oh well I bet this is happening because of that. Like our brains are always looking for these reasons as to why other people are upset. We take on the emotional management for other adults, which leads us just overly burdened. Like we have to, we have to do our own emotional management and theirs too. We have to figure out why we're triggered and why they are. And so we get into this like hyper vigilant state of like, is everyone okay? Is anyone upset? What's happening okay, which just is so hard on us. And it leaves them in an emotionally immature place. To never learning how to feel anger without getting reactive, say, or how to feel upset without yelling at your child, not your job. These were strategies we learned as a kid. And if we keep using them and they will keep us and our relationships in an immature, unhelpful place. In order to step into more maturity here for you and for the sake of your relationship, please start noticing where you feel this. If they're good, I'm good. If they're not good, I'm not good either. Feeling this hyper vigilance kept you safe as a kid, but these strategies are maladaptive and limiting you and the other people you're in relationship with. And if you are a parent, it is especially important that you pay attention to this now. And to be frank, your band aid here is to commit to weekly coaching. I haven't seen anything else make as big a difference. Okay, we can sort of dance around here with little things. But like, really, what are you waiting for? I have seen coaching be magic here. Freeing. It is the thing that moved the needle in my life. Think of how old we are. We have all those years of programming and. And I did not want to. I'm 54. I don't have 54 more years to figure this the F out, frankly. So I was like, no, I want to. I think I was 50 when I was like, okay, I'm done with this pattern. All right? And the freeing thing, maybe if you know my story, you're like, wow, well, Susie blew up her life, okay? But that's not. I did that more at 40 and that was other things. And I want to say that when I'm helping people with this, it's not that the outside of their life will look much different. Rather, it's that they're inside internal part of their life feels much different. It's this. Oh, heck yes. Freedom. That feels so dramatically. Not like not feeling responsible for everyone and everything. Not being so worried all the time. Not having your brain constantly buzzing and scanning in the background to check, is she okay? Is he okay? Did I do something wrong? Is he mad at me? Oh my goodness. I have been there, felt that way. Which is why I can help you so much. I have done and continue to do the formal training while also doing the real work in my life. So I know what helps. I'm not speaking as some elevated expert who's just read the research without kids and a spouse and this family programming. No, I'm a Gen Xer. I've done all that stuff and then I've done it in my own life. Which is why I can help women just like you address the very specific things that have happened in your life and the way in which the error we were raised affects us. I've seen this transformation in thousands of women and in my own life. You do not have to carry this burden all alone anymore. All right, dear one, I hope that as you listen to these three blind spots, you did so with a soft and non judgmental heart. You are not broken, you are patterned. The good thing about patterns is they can be unwound with compassion and support. We can learn how to relate with more honesty, calm and connection. How to stop over functioning. How to set healthier boundaries without feeling that guilt. Hey, we are doing this all next month in the Love youe Life school as we commit to a whole month on relationships. It's a beautiful time to join and I'd love to support you one on one coaching and hey I got the idea for this podcast from a listener shout out to Karen Woohoo and I want to invite you to send me ideas of things you'd like me to dive into and explore on the podcast too. I am here for you and I am thankful that you are here. Thank you for being the type of woman who listens to shows like this. That puts you in the top 10% of humans. It's actually the top 4% people who are working on self awareness, self knowledge, taking responsibility for themselves and making this world a lighter and more wonderful place. I am honored you listen in and I love and support you. Let's go Warrior.
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Thank you for listening to the Love youe Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on itunes. Also leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get em Warriors.