Unlocking the Dynamics of Relationships_ Rules, Roles, and Identities

0:00Welcome to Resilience Redefined. I'm your host, Michael Osterlink. This shows about building better humans, institutions, and systems. On the show, I'll be interviewing many different experts from across many different fields, including human optimization, health and fitness, team building, mind body medicine. In the institutional space, we're looking at different institutions in how we can create new ones, new models and maps, including in medicine, in education, in intelligence community, in law enforcement, in the military, especially in the special operations community. Thanks for being here and enjoy the show. Welcome to Resilience Redefined. I'm Michael Osterlink, your host, and today we're going to be talking about rules, roles, and identities. It's an exercise I created 15, 20 years ago for my work with couples. As many of you know, I'm trained as a marriage and family therapist for almost 30 years now. I've been doing coaching with couples for about 25 years. So, a long time in the field, I got to work with some amazing couples. I'm really honored to have got into their lives and hopefully in many, many, if not all cases, improve their lives,

1:03their connection, their intimacy, their love, et cetera, et cetera. One of the exercises that I have most of all my clients do is what I call rules, roles, and identities. Let me break down each of those sections. Rules. There are rules or guidelines if you want to use that word, if that's better for you, which guide our relationships. It tells us inside that relationship, what we're able to do, what we're able to say, we're able to not to say what we're able not to do. What's interesting about these rules that we create or co-create with our partner is that most of them are unconscious. It's not like we're two lawyers to sit down like here's the 300 rules which are going to guide our relationship. What it is is different forces that come through the individual, family of origin, ethnicity, nationality, various aspects of culture, religion, all those various things come together and teach in the individual how to show up in a relationship. And you have two people who come together and these unconscious forces interact with one another

2:04and create these rules. Now the purpose of the rules, roles, and ID exercises is to excavate those rules, to go from unconscious to conscious and then look at them and make a determination to these rules or guidelines still benefit us if they ever did. In the kind of relationship we want to have and create into the future. So it's important that you want to go deep looking at these rules that guide you, bring them up and look at them and then make a determination together. You know, you might be able to say yes, we understand what those rules came from, this particular rule came from, why it emerged between us, but maybe if it ever served the relationship, it served some purpose, but maybe it doesn't serve the relationship now, we're going to remove that rule and maybe replace it with something different. So let me give some examples of exactly the unconscious forces and how they interact to create these rules. So as I said, most people are not lawyers just sit down and draft up our hundred rules of how we're going to do a relationship. Now there might be a few

3:08explicit rules that you come up with, which is great. Like maybe you're monogamous, you know, you get married, you're monogamous, that's an agreement you guys have, okay, and you clearly define what that means and you live into that agreement. Awesome. But mostly the other thing is are more like wink wink, nod nod. So let me give you an example. So let's just say you're, I can't give you an example of actually have a particular client of mine back in the day. So they, I think they got together in their 19, 20 years old, so you know, young little bit immature and I believe it was the man who was a little bit more insecure than his FMO partner. And what would happen is she would talk to other guys, I believe they're on often college when they first started dating. And she would talk to other guys and he was very insecure at the time. And instead of saying to her, hey, I just want to let you know I'm really feeling insecure. This is not about you because she was literally not getting into behavior that was kind of inappropriate. But like, you know, he's still felt insecure, but he did not say to her in most 19, 20 year old young people would not do this in

4:12most 40, 50, 60 year old people would do this. But he didn't say, hey, I'm really feeling insecure when you talk to these guys. I know it's not about it. It's not you. It's me walking through some of the dynamics and perhaps where this came from. And I just want to share this with you because I don't know how to deal with this in this present moment. My inclination is to kind of shut down and want to run away whether literally physically or like just inside my human system. And or just want to kind of like, er, I'll growl at you because it's really bothers me when I see this. But like I said, it's not you. I know it's like 99% me. Cool. You know, and there's some aspects of the other person perhaps involved, but but no one does that. No one said that to their partner. No one acknowledges their own fears and insecurities and and the lack of capacity to learn to deal with it in that very moment in a healthy way. What would happen is if I remember correctly, this guy would kind of like shut down. He would stop talking to his girlfriend, kind of getting moody with her and kind of disappear inside of them psyche. And she'd be like, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong.

5:13Nothing's wrong. You know, like that kind of stuff, which is a lot of us do all the time. And you know, after a while, she kind of got the she got the message. The message is if she wants to keep him as a boyfriend, she needs to lessen her contact with other guys. And she agreed to do that. Like, but she didn't sit down with him and say, Hey, I just want to let you know, I know you're insecure. I'm going to do this for you. It's more like wink wink nod nod. She wants to survive inside this relationship. She's going to have to change your behavior. She changes your behavior. Mostly not thought through kind of more than unconscious level. She restricted her connection with the other guys, especially in front of him. They deep in their connection. They finally got married. And I think they saw me in their 32, she's like 12, 13 years later. And this came up as one of the rules because she's still as she sat and thought about it. Like she still was kind of guided by this rule from 13 years ago, she was all 13 years ago, that she shouldn't talk to other men. And they talked about that, you know, 13 years later. And he acknowledges insecurity, you know, when he's a teenager, early adulthood, kind of apologize for his behavior the way he handled it. He just was

6:17immature. They talked about that and they kind of broke the spell around the rule. And she like, she's realized like, wow, that's kind of stupid that I can't talk to other men or limit my contact other men because she wasn't doing anything wrong. Like in the conventional sense of like just having a conversation with another big dude, like that's all cool. So they had that conversation and they removed that rule. He felt secure. He doesn't care. She talked to other men within the limits of their agreements, other rules, right? And she was free to then go do that. So her whole system relax and I feel unconsciously like, why am I feeling so weird talking to the dude in front of him or he knows about it. Some reason I feel bad, although I'm not literally doing anything wrong. So that rule was removed from the relationship. That's an example of like rules that if you sit and think about and be with like what guides us, those kind of things can emerge. And other things you might ask yourself are what cannot we talk about? Are there topics that are haran that we cannot touch? Or are there people that we can't talk about? Or are there topics

7:22in people we can talk about? But we have to talk about in very prescribed ways. Very limited in the range of what we're able to say about this person or the situation or whatever happens to be. As you discover those things, those are some of the rules that guide you mostly unconsciously, as I said, and what you want to then do is I have both of them right up at least 10 rules that they sit with and you discover like, oh my god, these are those, these are some rules that guide our relationship. And then the couple gets back together and they talk about it. And then they walk through each one. Hey, is this a rule that really guides us? Oh my god, it is. Does it? Do we still want to be guided by this rule? No, cool. Let's judges in it. Now that also takes, as I shared in the earlier podcast, working on the second and third domain, the second domain is the inner work, this necessary working on your wounds and he kind of trauma that stuck in your system, learn to regulate yourself and learning to adapt in your own nervous system and evolving your consciousness. All those things need to happen because even if you verbally agree to remove a rule

8:25and replace with something else, these are unconscious things. So still stuck in the nervous system to some degree or another. So you still have to do the work to remove that rule from the nervous system. It's not enough just to cognitively agree with your partner, locate that rule sucks. I don't know if it ever served us a certain, well, it served us for some purpose. You know, when we're maybe less mature or less capable, it doesn't serve us now, let's replace it. Cool, cognitively, we get that. But then you actually have to do the work to make sure it's removed completely from the nervous system. And then this, you know, the third domain, as I had mentioned in the previous podcast, the first domain is the agreements. Second domain is doing all the inner work and the third domain is a co-regulation. So there are ways that you also want to do the inner work to remove from the nervous system, but also you can do some co-regulation work with your partner to make it easier to remove those rules and replace it with new rules. All that's really important. So that's the rules. Really powerful exercise because as I said earlier, most people have maybe a handful of rules that are consciously chosen to discuss and the rest are kind of unconscious forces driving

9:28through the system that lead to the way we engage through one another. So like, hey, let's be conscious about those and make better decisions for ourselves moving forward. And it's an iterative process because so you might come up with a new rule today. Like, hey, here's a new guideline, how we want to do things. Six months from now, it might not serve you anymore. A year from now, I might not serve you. Five years from now, I'm not serving you. So it's not like, hey, we replace all these old rules with new ones or guidelines. It's like, no, you can be keep checking in, keep checking in. It's a great intimacy building because you actually have to be aware of yourself and you have to share honestly and openly with your partner, which is deep into intimacy as you explore and discuss these rules because it requires some vulnerability. You actually have to be able to acknowledge, hey, when I was 19, I was insecure and I did these things and acted this way, I'm really sorry. I was very immature of me to do it that way. So you have to have some self-awareness. You have to have capability of being honest and open and acknowledging your own challenges in your own life, your own insecurities and fears, which deepens intimacy and in of itself too.

10:31So the rules, the rules part of the exercise is that. Really, really powerful. The second piece is roles. So you can think of roles in two different ways. We all play various roles in relationships. I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a son, you know, I'm a brother, I'm a sister, I'm a wife, all the different roles that we play. I'm an uncle, I'm an aunt. What we don't give much thought to is how do we define those roles? What's it mean to be a brother? What's it mean to be a husband? What's it mean to be a mother? You know, those kind of things. So what I have my clients do is sit down and acknowledge the roles that they play in the family dynamic and then talk about what their expectations of themselves in that role and what their partner expects of them in that role. What do you expect of me as a husband? What do you expect of me as a wife? What do I expect myself to be as a wife or a husband? You know, those kind of conversations

11:34so it requires one to sit and think about, oh, these are the roles that I play. Awesome. This is how I do those roles. Cool. I told this in very moment. So I want to continue to do those roles this way at this present moment and I need to have a conversation with my partner to find out what he or she expects of me in those roles. Because a lot of this like the roles are unconscious forces. You know, I play the husband role because this is what our Tadi husband does and family of origin and its culture, religion, all those different forces, which are fine. Like just those are the forces that kind of guide and how we think about these things. It's like how do we make that conscious and make better decisions? Bring attention to those roles that we play. And it's not a one and done deal. So like one of my favorite things to talk about with couples that have like the Elm is the empty next syndrome when when I want their kids are leaving the home or a kid is leaving the home. And what I'll say to them is that you know before the child or your kids leave go to college or go onto their life and they

12:35literally leave the physical home. It's important that you guys start having way before this happens. Well, so having these kinds of possible conversation about the roles. Because what I found is you know when people first start dating it's they look at each other and they get married and they have kids and their attention goes from this. Which is beautiful to that to their children. And that's mostly to be expected. You need to pay attention to your children. You know, you are a responsible for their growth and development. Cool. I get that. But what happens is that then the children leave and they're like, oh wait, we need to look at each other and like holy shit, we haven't looked at each other literally in like 18 years in this way. Like, who are you and why are we together and what's going on? And like our focus has been the kids they're gone. Like we have to focus on each other. And that's where a lot of divorces come from. This is space. So I would recommend my couples, but way before the children start leaving this is literally developmental. You have a five year old is different than 10 year old than different than 15 year old different than 20 year old.

13:38Each different stages you want to keep looking back at each other, looking back at each other because your relationship as a mother and a father to your children change your different just say as a father to a five year old son then to a 10 year old son to a 15 year old son. Like you need to rethink how you do that role in relationship to that particular person. But you also have to keep looking at your partner. Like, like don't just do this and then after 18 years do this because that's detrimental to the relationship. And as I said earlier, it leads to a lot of divorces. So like you keep asking this, what's it mean to be a husband, what's it mean to be a wife and you keep going internal and asking the conversation, asking that yourself that question, but engaging with your partner, what are their expectations? No mind reading, no remundations, like literally ask them, what do you expect of me as your husband, what are you expecting of your life? And you can continually do that. I mean like every day, but like you know every couple of years, if not sooner, like keep engaging those conversations. That way if you have enough kids and they leave, you have a strong foundation or strong connection.

14:42So that's half of the roles. Second piece of the roles are like roles we play for a very short period of time. So for instance, a caregiver is a role that you can play. A martyr is a role, some people play. People play is a role that some people can play. You know, we play these different roles, a lot of them for own survival purposes. Now, a caregiver is mostly time constrained based on maybe having to take care of a family member. Cool. But things like the martyr or a people pleaser are roles that we learn to play probably early on in our family of origin for own survival. And we continue to play into adulthood. And those are less than healthy. You know, so I will always encourage the individuals within the client, within the couple dumb to start looking at some of the roles they play. Are you the martyr or you the people pleaser or whatever you the role you play that's kind of in the negative space? I mean, it's positive in the sense that help you survive. But it's not helped. It doesn't help you thrive in your life. It's more of a survival mechanism. So we start

15:42uncovering those roles. And we're like, who do you really want to be the people pleaser? No. Okay, so what can we do? And this goes back to the three domains agreements, inner work and co-regulation. So the inner work is like, what do I need to do just stop being a people pleaser? I got to do some healing. I got to learn how to regulate myself. And you need to evolve my consciousness, all the different pieces of it are really important. So I don't play that role anymore in my life period, let alone in my partnership or my marriage. And that then goes to the co-regulation piece because that, you know, if I'm no longer going to do the people pleasing, I got to let my partner know that I'm going to be showing up differently. And she needs to understand that the dynamic in me let me to become a people pleaser. And then I'm going to attempt not to do that. And I'm going to probably do it very unskilledfully at the beginning. I don't know how not to be people pleaser. So I'll mess it up a little bit. So, you know, I'll encourage her to hold the space for me to experiment and try new things, which requires her to do all the inner work as well. So she can show

16:46up for me as I need to show up for me. So I can work through that particular role. So whatever role it is, like you need to be aware of it, you need to do the inner work to disconnect yourself from it, to disidentify from that particular role, it takes some time. And you also have to have an agreement with your partner on how you're going to engage with her, him differently as you undo that role inside your system. So those are two things. Like the roles we play as a husband, a wife, a son, a mother, those kind of things. And then these other roles that we picked up as a result of survival purposes that we no longer want to embody. And so those are the roles. It's really a powerful thing. Because you can imagine when you're having to clarify conversations with your partner about, hey, this is what I mean by being a husband. What do you mean? What do you want me to do as a husband? And or, hey, I don't want to be the, you know, people please are anymore. And this is how it's going to look like I think and it's going to be messy. And please assist me in this process of undoing the set of my system. Beautiful conversations. Leads to really good intimacy, really good connection.

17:52Yeah, it requires a lot of honesty and openness and support. And some challenges too, like, you know, you want your, you want your partner to be able to challenge you if you're not showing up fully based on what you've agreed to in terms of playing out a certain role or, or getting rid of a certain role. So that's the rules. And that's the roles. And the identities is also connected to both. And as a transpersonal psychotherapist, I love the, I love to think about how we create identities, psychophysiologically, that shows that we show up in the world in particular way. A lot of us on defense mechanisms protect us against real and perceived threats. And those identities are both kind of innate in us in some way and also created by the environment we find ourselves in. So it's kind of this relational, create co-creation together. And nothing wrong with identities. We all need them. We all have them. What I love my couples to do and even my individual clients to do is start looking at how those identities serve them,

18:54cool, and also limit them. And it's the limitations that I really want them to start thinking about. And then be creating space in their life and their psyche and their psychophysiology really, to experiment, to add some flexibility to their system. So they can still have that role, but they can also try new things. Let me give you an example of one of the roles that I play. The Zen Guy, always been the Zen Guy. And it's got me kudos because people have the expectation that I'll be the calm, cool, collective one, which means I can solve problems, which is true. I'm usually the calm, cool, collective one who can help solve problems. I can hold the space. I'm emotional, resilient. I'm a front-side focus. I can do that for people, which is wonderful. So it's a way I showed up in the world, which partially is just innate in me as a human being. And partially, if you know my history, it was created from environmental triggers that created this this way of being in the world, which was a protective mechanism for myself, but also serve me

19:58interpersonally in the relationships. That's awesome. Actually, I love being the Zen Guy. Being calm, cool, and collected, and being able to think through and help people solve their problems, without getting all worked up, cool. And I also like that just in my own life, too, because I personally find it less effective to be all emotional over the place. No judgment. That's just the way I kind of organized my thinking and my life for myself. No judgment on other people who don't show up that way. Cool. And cool. I love that identity. I get support from my ecosystem, my social system. For that people have that expectation and like that way of me being in the world, awesome. The problem is it's self-limiting. What I mean by that is like the few times that I've gotten angry about whatever I'm angry about in the particular moment, and I get worked up and I get really excited, I both feel guilty for that because that's not who I am, and I get social pressure not to do that. Oh, wait, you're the Zen Guy. You can't get that way. I'm like, oh, shit.

21:00That's not healthy. That's not healthy for me because I'll just use the anger example. If I repress the anger because I have to be the Zen Guy, it doesn't go away. It can come out sideways as passive aggressive behavior, possibly. I've seen it myself over time. But more likely for me shows up as in my physical system as chronic illness. There are the various conditions I've had that I can really connect deeply to repressing anger. So it comes out somehow, it just doesn't come out directly because it's not my identity. So one of the things personally I've been working on is like, no, it's okay to be angry. I mean, I don't want to walk around a road raging and beating people up. It's just not me. But it's healthy to both allow the anger to flow through the system to manage it and to express it in healthy ways. So literally that's been my path in the more recent past is like to do all that, feel it, manage it and express it, and open up the identity from Zen is cool. But it's also kind of cool to have the ability to

22:05respond to environmental triggers or internal conversations inside myself and feel anger and use that anger to motivate me towards action. Now that doesn't have to be your trip. We all have identities like that. This is who I am. That's just who I am. Or that's who people expect me to be. So in my work with couples, we kind of identify, handful of these identities that we bring into their relationship. Cool. And then we look at how they're all locked into place by our own self-psychology, the other person and other people in our life. And then back to the three domains, agreements, the healing regulation, adaption and evolution of the individual. And the co-regulation, all those three things come into play when we start working with identities. Because I might say to my partner, hey, I'm Zen dude, cool. And I don't think it's healthy for me to repress my anger anymore. I'm not really good at it. I go from zero to hero in like three seconds and I don't like that. Like too much energy in my system. So I'm not really skilled

23:07at allowing and managing it and expressing it healthily. Not like I'm going to throw in throw things around like that, but I just don't know how to do that well. So we come up with an agreement. Like, hey, I'm going to try something new. I'm going to allow the energy of the anger to flow through my system. I'm going to allow it to come out. I'm going to express it and hopefully in healthy useful ways. And I know myself well enough, I'm not going to throw things and break things, but like, you know, I'm going to work on that. So the agreement is like, hey, can we create this space in our relationship for me to try something new? And I know what the partner says, yes, that's completely fine. And here's her parameters, here's her limitations, here's her expectations of that. Have that agreement. And then when it comes up, I'm able to practice something outside of being the Zen dude. And you know, sometimes I don't do so well. Sometimes I do better and I learn over time as a learning process. And in time, I find that middle path and not repress it. Not overly expressive by that middle path where I can allow it, I can manage it and express in healthy ways. And I

24:10eventually get there. Thank you to my partner for holding the space and helping me figure out what that looks like. So, you know, that is really important. So it's huge. If you really want to learn, if you really want to grow, evolve, adapt and learn as an individual human being, you need to begin to disidentify the from your identities as not fully, you're not going to get rid of your identities unless you're doing some really deep spiritual work, which is a completely different conversation. We can get into the transpersonal stuff at a later date, but just regularly go to development. Yeah, we want to begin to lessen the hold our identities have on us. Not to say we get rid of them, they serve us as some of you or another. Create space for experimentation to take place, engage with our partner to create the conditions for that to happen. So we can play around with it, experiment, find that middle path, get really good at it over time. And then we have that flexibility in our system, mind body system, to experiment with the new ways of being in the

25:11world. And all that is great for the individual, just freeing it's much more playful, but it's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful for the couple, because literally using the same words that allows for more playfulness in the relationship, a more dynamic, intimate dance. So that is the rules, that are the roles, and that's the identities. So if you like this podcast, please give us a pause or review, please like us on the very social media platform as you can find us on. And if you're interested in working with me as a couple, or so also with individuals, but if you want to work with me as a couple or as an individual, please find me at Michael, de-Australink.com, and you can sign up for a discovery call. I look forward to talking to you soon.