Transcript
Patrick
Today's conversation is a continuation of my discussion on applying the lessons of tracking animals in the wild to tracking in your own life. I encourage you to listen to yesterday's episode first. In this second part, Boyd's sister, Bronwyn, joins and offers perspective on business and life. Given that Boyd and Bron grew up in this wild place, their perspective on the world is refreshing and very different. We discuss a wide range of things, but the section on restoration near the end is just phenomenal stuff. Please enjoy part two of my conversation with the Varty family.
We were having a conversation at lunch and I don't want to lose this thread, this track, so to speak, which is some of the common things that you both see when you're working with people whether they come here or whether it's somewhere else, and we were talking about shame as an interesting concept and problem that people deal with. I think it'd be fun to talk about some of the problems, actually, and the common threads you see across people with these problems. I'd love to just get your perspective on the notion of shame and the role that it plays.
Boyd
Shame and guilt are definitely two of the primary things that people are working with. If the culture is always presenting you with ideals of what you should be, and everyone you've been around has been playing to those ideals, then one of the natural byproducts of not living into the ideal is a certain kind of shame that is almost like, even if you haven't been particularly shamed, it's just there underlying. There's something you should be that you aren't. So that's one I see a lot and if you just look at the roles that men are presented with, and usually like male shame tends to be more around the presentation of roles, whereas what I've seen is that female shame is usually because of more some kind of instance, something that happened, some kind abuse that happened, some kind of sexual abuse that happened. Something like that creates a lot of shame, and that happens in men too, but it's also very prevalent in the cultural roles that have been presented. And with the most classic one, the role of provider. And the minute that the role of provider is not met, then some kind of shame flows into it. And all of those ideals that the culture presents you to be, you're never really allowed to be yourself. And so, that's one of the primary places.