Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's wig show, where I show you how bad states of mind and difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Hey folks, how are you today? How are your relationships? How are they influencing your life? I hope it's all going well, but if not, no worries. We can process it. I'm ready to go further into the idea of how we play roles in relationships that we covered in the last episode. You know, that question. Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Is your life like a movie or is a movie like your life? <laugh> which one comes first, neither life and art are the same thing. And they both arise from your process. Life is art and art is life. Your relationship. Isn't like a movie. It is a movie. It's a dream and you play a character in it, your character, and that of your partner create the story. And hopefully it manifests lots of goodness, but trouble is always a potential lurking in the shadows ready to leap out.
Speaker 1 00:01:44 And one of trouble's main instigators is when your character rolls get cemented set in stone, fossilized trouble, senses this and thinks time to jump in, gotta loosen up this static system where each person is stuck in one role in the relationship. You're the rational one and she's the irrational one, or you're the thinker. And he's the feeler or one of you is responsible. And the other is irresponsible. There are endless character roles available, dramatic and calm, extroverted, and introverted, educated, and uneducated, spiritual, and mundane, pragmatic, and idealistic leader and follower, doctor and patient Inkeeper and drunk. <laugh> lots of different ways. Couples create distinct roles in episode 54, how to switch roles to change a relationship dynamic. You worked on conflict by integrating your opposites, which are represented in the other person's behavior. It's a process of discovering the positive version of the other. Person's perceived negative qualities and integrating them into who you are.
Speaker 1 00:03:11 Relationships are much more complex than just communication processes. When you interact with someone you're relating to them, but also to various unconscious parts of yourself that you project onto them, the exercise teases it all out and makes it conscious. So you can both change. Conflict occurs when each person gets stuck in a particular role. But what exactly is a role, it's a pattern of behavior and experience driven by your underlying story. The story contains a sort of ideology that expresses a specific viewpoint and a way of behaving that embodies this viewpoint either just in the moment or over the long term. For example, if your story is that you feel you need love and attention all the time, you might get angry. If someone ignores you, your role is the one who expects to be focused on and your ideology is that this is the correct way to be related to now the person who ignores you has a different story that makes them play the role of the ignore.
Speaker 1 00:04:26 Maybe their story is that they just wanna have fun and not have to take care of someone. Their ideology is that everyone should take care of themself. They get upset when you demand attention, because it conflicts with their need to just play and enjoy themself. The roles might play out purely on an emotional level where you argue about your needs, or it may go beyond this to debating relationships in general, like when a conflict gets philosophical with each person stating their personal philosophy of how people should behave, each person gets stuck in his or her position. It's like Anot, where each one of you represents one of the two interlocking strands. The only way to untie the knot is to disidentify with your role enough that the energy goes out of it. But if you disidentify with it, what role should you take on? And how do you determine this?
Speaker 1 00:05:28 You're not going to pretend to feel a certain way that you don't actually feel. Although people do try this. And to be honest, a lot of therapy implicitly, or even explicitly tries to guide clients to feel a certain way, which is never really authentic or useful in the long run. Clients often adapt to whatever their therapist says because of the authority projection, but you can't make yourself feel something if it's not really your process. So what role should you take on? Well, the actual role you need to explore is right there in front of you in the other person, their role represents a way of being that your subconscious is trying to get you to integrate. That's why you're with them either in this moment or over the long term. Now I don't mean the literal way. The other person behaves, especially if it's unconscious and negative.
Speaker 1 00:06:30 I mean that, there's something about who they are that you need more of, but in a conscious positive way. So for example, say the other person is loud, aggressive, powerful, overbearing, hurtful, and obnoxious. <laugh> a lot of unpleasant qualities, but chances are, you are more passive and unex expressive than your process wants you to be. The other person is showing this to you. I'll bite in their annoying way in the exercise. When you switch roles, the aims to tease out this positive element of the other person's role and bring it into your being the rule is whatever you blame. The other person for contains a tiny hint for how you need to be again, not literally, but in some way. Now, what if the other person is abusive, bad shit, they need help, but here's the deal. The abusive spirit is already present in you.
Speaker 1 00:07:43 It may be a part of your known personal history, or it may be unconscious either way you're in that relationship. So you can work through it. Sometimes the worst shit is actually a stroke of luck. If you use it in the right way and get the help you need, if you didn't have that relationship, you might never wake up to your process. But what if no one's ever abused you? It doesn't matter. For example, if you're part of a minority group, including being a woman or, or just part of a group where abuse happened somewhere in the past, you automatically have an abuse process on some level because you inherit it. In some ways, we all have a bit of this simply because we're the products of thousands of years of human abusive behavior. This is why folks are confused. When someone with great parents, education, finances, and so on commits some horrible crime or gets heroin, addicted, or kills himself, your inner process is affected by your environment, but it's not created by it.
Speaker 1 00:08:57 You're born with a story, a hand of cards, a process that you can either consciously work on or allow to dictate what happens to you. The roles we play in relationships are driven by these underlying stories. And the way to move your process forward is to get unstuck from your primary roles and take on new ones. Roles are fluid and interchangeable rather than being fixed and static who you are in a relationship isn't set in stone. In fact, it should be, mallable be Malibu. A healthy relationship should allow for a lot of role changing. Don't get stuck. Also the concept of fluid roles, doesn't only apply to a two person relationship, but also to groups of people, families, companies, teams, and so on group conflict arises from the same basic problem of folks being stuck in roles. I've worked with lots of families where the solution to their problem was to pick up aspects of the roles that the other family members were playing.
Speaker 1 00:10:11 This is especially common when parents need to integrate elements of their children's processes. Oftentimes the child is the so-called identified patient in therapy. The parents come in and say, my child is causing such and such a problem. But the real problem is often the parents, you don't have to be a bad or mean parent to make your child crazy without realizing it. You just need to be a normal human being who puts your unconscious problems onto your children. You can't look at couples, families, or groups solely in terms of causality cause and effect only happens on the communication level. I say this, and it causes you to feel that and so on, but on a deeper level, things don't happen according to cause and effect they happen according to process. So when a family says our child was born this way, his bad behavior is biological.
Speaker 1 00:11:12 I say bullshit, whether there's a biological element or not is meaningless in terms of your family process, you're using it as an excuse, a way to avoid waking up to something. Children always compensate for what their parents lack or are unconscious of. That's one of the unconscious reasons. People have children namely to challenge their own status quo and evolve their lineage. We project our hopes and dreams onto our children, which is awesome and the right thing to do. But it's also a projection of what we are avoiding in ourselves. Yeah. Your kids will outgrow you because that's how human consciousness evolves, but that doesn't mean you should stop growing. So I say let's process how you need to be more like your child, rather than putting all the focus on how to change your child, switch roles and explore what your child is trying to wake you up about.
Speaker 1 00:12:18 I've even had children taking on the parent role in a session and offering astonishing wisdom. The first place I encountered role switching within a system was growing up in Canada and spending every waking school hour, playing hockey on each team. There are six different positions or roles to play goalie left defenseman, right? Defenseman left, wing forward, right wing forward and center forward. There were two aspects to our training. One was learning how to play our position. And the other was learning how to temporarily switch positions with another player, the nature of a hockey position, or probably any sports team position is that it's fluid. Now. Not all coaches agree with this philosophy, but if you study sports, it's the most effective one. For example, a defenseman gets the puck, suddenly sees an opening and rushes down the ice as if he's a forward. And at that moment, one of the forward sees this and drops back into the defenseman's position.
Speaker 1 00:13:30 We always beat the teams who used more rigid positioning, where nobody ever stepped outside of their one dimensional job. It's the same in couple relationships. And in all kinds of groups, the more rigid people get in their roles and positions. The more stagnant the system becomes businesses on the cutting edge, break down the walls, both figuratively and literally between the various levels of workers at the company to create more free flow interaction and sharing of ideas. The old model had, and still has a much more rigid hierarchical setup that makes people feel confined in their roles and disassociated from the systems level of the company. Those businesses tend to be way less innovative. Now my most powerful experience of role playing and switching has been music playing in a band is a crazy adventure. It's like being married to five people at once. It looks like everyone has their specific role to play lead vocalist, guitarist, bass, player, keyboards, drummer, and so on, but music or let's say good music doesn't really work like that.
Speaker 1 00:14:49 Instrumentation works like that. But music itself is a completely open fluid system where any instrument or vocal can be played by any other instrument or vocal at any moment. The first time I experienced this was in a blues band I used to play in, I was improvising some blues licks on my guitar and the vocalist started riffing off of them. And eventually he took over the solo with his vocalization sounds. It was an epiphany for me. I suddenly got that. I'm not playing the guitar. I'm playing music and music is a flow process where each of us can play any role at any time. A cool example of this is Stuart Copeland's drumming in the police. It was so creative and gave the band such a unique sound because he wrote his drum parts purposely not using the snare in the way it's supposed to be used.
Speaker 1 00:15:49 Meaning for the back beat. Each drum plays a role in a drum kit as a whole system, but whenever there was supposed to be a snare hit, he used a different drum or symbol. The result was incredible. So role switching happens even within playing one instrument, including if that instrument is you, <laugh> say you primarily use your intellect when you interact with people. Cool. You probably have interesting discussions and debates, but if you're awake to your process, you'll know when to drop your intellect and relate purely through feeling. If you don't, you're sewing the seeds for conflict with some folks because they'll automatically play the role of your feeling side that you marginalize. Then you've got the classic role system where one person is the thinker and the other is the feeler. And they accuse each other of being unthinking and unfeeling or dumb and cold or whatever <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:16:58 So being awake and fluid in yourself means being able to swap the roll of the various parts of yourself in a given moment. Of course, this requires working at developing your inner opposite in the first place. And it's why inner work is so crucial to having good relationships. Speaking of drummers, another way I notice the difference between playing an instrument versus playing music, meaning being stuck in a role versus being fluid in your roles was after we fired our drummer for getting so drunk. He literally passed out, fell onto his drum kit, knocked it over and crash BA boom. That was the end of the song. The crowd loved it, but we hated it and had to fire him. When we auditioned new drummers, I noticed that some of them played the drums, meaning they played beats and rhythms. Whereas others played music, their drumming was musical.
Speaker 1 00:17:57 And I knew that they'd be able to switch roles as we played rather than being locked into a one dimensional job. A great drummer can take on the rhythmic elements of the guitar or keyboard or even vocalist at any moment. An interesting experience I recently had was being asked to play guitar on another artist's album. It was an honor and I wanted to do a good job. I practiced my part until I felt I had it down. I went to the studio in north Hollywood, but there was no one there except the producer and the engineer. Where's the band <laugh> there. Ain't no band brother. We make the music on the computer and we just want a bit of real guitar to make it sound like a band. It's all about the vocal. This is when it really hit home for me, how music has changed and why so much of it sounds the same nowadays, like it's made from a cookie cutter formula.
Speaker 1 00:18:58 It also explained to me why all the YouTube music, reviewers focus almost exclusively on music from the 1970s and some from the 1980s. Because after that music started to get made on machines, even the rock bands in the 1990s and early two thousands who still played real instruments, put the drums and vocals through a computer to take out the human variations and make them mathematically precise. Yuck <laugh> that's what happens in current recordings too. No role switching. In fact, there are no roles left. The TV talent shows featuring aspiring singers killed the idea of a real band where the vocalist was just one of the musicians within a larger system called music. Nowadays, people don't even really listen to the music only to the singer. A lot of the music has gotten incredibly simplistic, much of it is made on or processed through computers. And it's more of a background thing for the singer.
Speaker 1 00:20:05 This has made a lot of singing unnatural sounding because it's the entire focal point. So you gotta put a lot of drama into it, even if it's not real <laugh> you never hear a two minute musical intro to a song anymore because people aren't that into music with all its complex and nuanced roles and interactions. They're into vocals. It's interesting to me that I consider myself a songwriter and musician, not really a vocalist per se, but I get hundreds of comments. I love your voice. <laugh> because that's what the music industry has trained people to focus on. In the past. Music fans knew the name and personality of everyone in a band. They knew the drummer, the bass player, the keyboard player, and so on because the ethos was that everyone played an important role. The notion of music as a dynamic process of role interactions has gotten whittled down to a one dimensional focus on one singer.
Speaker 1 00:21:14 Folks aren't even much into vocal harmonies. Like they were in the past. There used to be groups, specifically known for their beautiful harmonizing voices. Now people want to hear one voice unthinkable in the past, but who knows, maybe we're all seeking to find our own voice. And that's why we're attracted to the one singer act. But I actually think the reason is that the world and life have gotten too complicated, which has to, so it which has dissociated us from our own feelings, our basic emotions, staring at a screen all day, Fox up your ability to feel yourself, a dramatic singer can make you feel. So that may be one of the underlying reasons. Music is where it's at these days. Seems like there's just no time to feel and life is feeling. But for me, music as a whole vocals guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, horns, strings, even classical instruments is much richer.
Speaker 1 00:22:19 It can take you so much further. It's not just a babysitter for our need to feel something listening to or playing. It is like taking a walk with the gods. It goes way beyond just feeling a simple emotion, like happy or sad or something. Great music with a whole band that really knows how to write songs and play instruments, communicate something that expands your consciousness. It's a mythical endeavor. It's like a relationship in that. It shows you who you are at a deeper level, exposes the roles you play and it changes you see you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at Dr. Wigg and you can sign up on the mailing
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