 Hi, welcome to today's podcast show. As always, I really appreciate you being here with me and giving me the precious gifts of your time and attention. And today I want to speak to you from my new e-book called I Am Not My Father. And I thought it would be good to chat with you a little bit about some of the content of the book. And especially from chapter 5 where I wrote a chapter entitled The Trojan Horse of Family History. What I wanted to communicate through this particular chapter was how things hide themselves, you know, difficult things, troubling things, damaging things, travel inside things that look acceptable and not damaging and not threatening, which is the concept, as you know, of the Trojan Horse. They're inside that Trojan Horse, that wooden horse that the Greeks built to offer to the city of Troy as an apparent peace offering, and they're apparently left to town as it were. And so the citizens of Troy welcomed the wooden horse into the city gates. And not knowing that it carried this lethal cargo of Greek warriors inside that would sneak out and take over the city in the dark of night. I think in the same way we all have things that are lethal to our lives, hidden inside families and relationships that appear to be, quote, normal. And I wanted to speak in the book about that from my own experience with regard to how we break generational default patterns of behavior of any kind, especially though in parenting and in fathering, how we break generational default patterns of behavior by realizing that what we have here is something that appears to be normal in our family. There's no warning signs here. Everybody's just keeps doing the same thing. Everybody keeps having the same approach to parenting or to fathering. And in my early 20s, as I speak about in the book, I had this kind of wake up call moment in an incident that happened at my home that woke me up to the awareness that I was slipping into this repeating of history. And I was defaulting to becoming a repeat of my father. I felt stuck and financially broke and with no prospects, no options. And I felt therefore my family was stuck with me. And I found this in a sense of defiance to do something about it other which came this cry that I articulated later of I am not going to be a repeat of my father. And so as I began to awaken in my consciousness about where things could be hiding in the Trojan horse of my own family history that were lethal to my generation and to my watch as a father, I began to be intentional about looking for what these and where these could be. And I realized that these things that were unhelpful that were damaging, that were continuing the patterns of generational trauma in families were hidden in things like mindlessness, unconscious belief systems that are governing outcomes and continuing on outcomes through history that live of course below the radar of our consciousness and therefore go undetected generationally. And I'm not pretending at all that this is easy work to do. It is always intrinsically difficult to pick a fight if you like with your subconscious programming. When we start to question our subconscious beliefs that were put into us by nurture and in fact I've come to realize by nature even before we were born, let alone after we were born the conditioning that takes place that embeds into us these mindsets about all kinds of things live and sit there and psychologists tell us that by the age of 8, latest 10 your fundamental beliefs about life and about big things in life are established. So whether you grow up to be a stingy or generous person whether you grow up to be a risk taker or a play safe person an introvert or an extrovert, a forgiving or a grudge holding person these things are really established in the first 10 years of our lives and they weren't established by us but by our caregivers or the environments which we grew up in and I speak in the book about how therefore context and environment shape us and we're completely blind to this shaping that takes place by context and environment I speak about how the ugly duckling story, the premise of which is that the ugly duckling it turns out wasn't a duckling at all, it wasn't an ugly duckling, it wasn't a duckling at all it was a swan whose egg got into a duck's nest and when he hatched out of its egg and saw ducks all around it, it assumed it was a duck and by comparison felt a misfit all its life perhaps like you have in areas of your life and I have and so context governs our mentalities and teach us how to be and how to think and models to us, relationship and friendship and parenting and fathering and mothering and marriage or wherever it may be not knowing that as we age we carry with us inside the Trojan horse of apparently doing life normally and doing parenting and relationships, quotes normally like everybody else we're unaware that we are carrying this lethal toxic cargo that is debilitating us that is preventing us from changing patterns historically about anything analyzed particularly for the purposes of the book that we're talking about today the continuation of lousy unconscious parenting and fathering and I want to ask you to think about where in your life this may be true for you no matter what age and stage of life you're at and I know this is not easy any age but I know the older you get the more difficult this conversation becomes with ourselves the more difficult it is to access our subconscious programings because we've just learned and adapted to living our lives around them not knowing that we are continuing to carry forward into our life this toxic negative unhelpful damaging traumatic cargo as it were of generational default mindsets that we've just learned to live with we've kind of made peace with none of this makes you or I a bad person it makes us what I would say normal and common I suppose we are everywhere we are most of the 7 plus billion on the planet I'm describing that now so there's no judgment here at all there's no finger pointing because this was true for me and this wake-up call I had in my early 20s I think without that and without my awareness that it was that I would have just continued on blindly repeating my father's poor fathering unstuck life but I would have denied to your face that I was guilty of that that's how enmeshed all this becomes and how unaware we are of our own repetition of false narratives that we claim not to be part of but in so many ways we are as was I particularly around parenting and fathering I think is particularly worthy of attention which is why I did this chapter in the book about the Trojan horses of family history in which these unhelpful things hide themselves conceal themselves and operate in stealth whilst they continue to trouble and visit themselves upon multiple generations beyond and way beyond the one that is long dead and gone and I don't know how far back this lousy fathering went in my family line I never knew my grandfather my dad's dad but I get the feel that he was also an awful father to my own father and so that's helped me be less judgmental I suppose to my own dad about how he continued on that legacy I suppose and he was as I speak about in the book a post war generation parent and most of that generation all of that generation I suppose especially of my father's age were carrying post post traumatic stress disorder or trauma coming out of a world and a Europe that had been enmeshed in a world war for four years so I know it was survival mode probably my parents were in and they had no money and no prospects and no options and it was a very cruel harsh context and environment and country to be in at that time in history so I'm allowing for all of that when I talk about lousy fathering it's my shorthand for saying that's really what it became but I'm not waving your finger at my dad though I wished he'd got help to figure out why he was like he was why he was an alcoholic and why he became violent and that was his behaviour out of his life I wish he'd got help I'm sure my dad looking back on mental health problems that term I think back then wasn't even a mainstream term that was used and of course as a man and a man's man, my dad was a coal miner I think it would have been huge shame and embarrassment to have admitted that his own mental health problems needed help and that that would have helped to break the generational patterns of trauma because the mental health problems my dad had didn't enable him to figure out how to fix his own trauma that I think he carried throughout his life too and passed on to us me and my five siblings, six of us altogether I think through the book I'm wanting people to think about where in their own life and certainly parenting journey you may be passing on this Trojan horse syndrome as it were where you yourself are unaware and need to wake up and become conscious that you are continuing to pass on and reproduce what you despise what you know you don't like and what you hated in your own upbringing and what you despised in your own parents or your own father and in many ways and it's not obvious in many ways you're doing better we do better not knowing that there is still a residue the still things that remain in our parenting style, our fathering style this was true for me that are still not right so you're not as bad, I wasn't an alcoholic I wasn't violent with my family, I didn't repeat history that way but I shouldn't allow that to make me think therefore I am a completely new breed father because I realised that I still had traits of my father I still had traits of the way he parented that were not as obvious as those but were just as damaging to the culture of my home and to the success story of my relationship with my children and my wife so I want you to be a little bit more forensic about looking around your life for where you have these default mindsets and beliefs and behaviours to do with your relationship with your children and I want to appeal to you to get help and I've put a lot of resources in the e-book at the end of the book I've put a huge list of books that have helped me and social media sites to visit that I think will be a help to people so that you are not short of resources I think people, my father could have said well I had nobody to talk to he was of course in an age when there wasn't the internet he couldn't pick up a book or go and see someone or find these voices to help him but we don't have that excuse so resource yourself, think, read, listen widely beyond the scope of my book and if you need to get help, get help because it's not just to do with you and I, isn't getting help of course it's to do with killing off that Trojan horse once and for all so that it never gets to live and invade another person's life and another generation ever again because we kill it, we destroy it we set it on fire with all its lethal cargo from the moment we recognize it and therefore what we pass on to our children is a cleaner, healthier, wiser, conscious version of parenting that perhaps we ever had passed to us thank you for being here with me again on the show I really value and appreciate your interest in all that I am doing hey, if you are not used to making a comment or leaving a review, I would love you to do that it helps the profile and the spread of the podcast apparently the algorithms mean that if you leave a review or a comment, perhaps you don't know this why people say this but it really helps the podcast be seen and heard by other people so if you want to pay it forward and spread the love then please do that if you don't subscribe, I'd love you to subscribe and if you want to get ahold of the book it's at Iamnotmyfather.com and there will be some details in the show notes if you want to look into that a little bit more I've done an audio book as well there's other options for the book beyond just getting the basic book so have a look and I hope that adds huge value to your life and I wish you well in your parenting journey or someone that you know that you can give the book to that you feel this podcast and the book may be a help to alright, wish you well and I will speak to you on the next podcast thank you