Daniel Maté is an award-winning musical theatre songwriter, educator, and the world’s only "mental chiropractor". He holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from Tisch/NYU.

Daniel’s original musicals include The Trouble With Doug, Middle School Mysteries, Hansel & Gretl & Heidi and & Günter, and The Longing and the Short of It. Works in development include The Sweet Hereafter, an adaptation of Russell Banks’s acclaimed novel. His work has been produced and/or presented at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (DC), Lincoln Center (NYC), and in locations from California to Florida, Seattle to Prince Edward Island, and Denmark to Paris. He has received the Edward Kleban Prize, a $100,000 award given annually to the “most promising lyricist in American musical theatre”, as well as a Jonathan Larson Grant and the ASCAP Foundation’s Cole Porter Award for Excellence in Music and Lyrics. He is also an acclaimed voice performer, a two-time Audie Award nominee, and winner of the Earphones Award for his narration of Gabor Maté's In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He is also the voice of the New York Times best-selling The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, on which he served as co-author with his father.

With his father, Daniel has co-led workshops on parent-adult child relationships since 2016, to be reprised this Fall in New York and Vancouver. A book and podcast, both titled Hello Again, are also in progress.

Olga

Hello and welcome to The Caring Instinct podcast. We're joined today by Daniel Maté, a composer, lyricist, playwright, and the co-author of The Myths of Normal with his father, Gabor Maté, and an upcoming book, Hello Again.

Joe

What did you think of it? One of my favourites, this one.

Olga

This is the one that's really challenged me, that is different every time I re-listen to it. Yeah, that is sure to change things for you, as it has for me.

Joe

Yeah, it's a very unique perspective, isn't it as well. And obviously the son of Gabor Maté. And together we focus on the Hello Again project, which is a workshop series and it's the upcoming book that they're gonna release and it's gonna be published in 2025 potentially.

Olga

Yes, this is about navigating the relationship between grown-up children and parents. And for parents of young children this is an answer to the question of what we can do to futureproof our relationship, if anything. That's a tricky one.

Joe

Yeah, so such a unique episode, wasn't it? Enjoy.

Olga

Daniel, We are huge fans of all kinds of things you do. The Myth of Normal. Your Instagram is a big one in my life at the moment and what you say and how you speak to people. We'd like to talk to you about your Hello Again work, if that's OK.

Daniel

It is OK. Yeah. I mean, that book is at least a year and a half from coming out.

Olga

OK.

Daniel

So I don't really, I don't really have anything to promote regarding it except the content that's already out there on the Internet. But I just got back from Los Angeles last night, and the reason I went was that last weekend we lead our most recent version of that workshop near Los Angeles, so it's certainly fresh on my mind.

Joe

So how's the workshops going?

Daniel

It's very good. This was a very unique iteration of it. We've done, we've been doing it for over 7-8 years now and we've done it in a bunch of different places. The first time doing it in California, but also it was our first time doing it and having it entirely recorded. So this was filmed and will be made into an online course that people will be able to take at home. And it's also going to be made into a something of a documentary. They were filming us, they were filming participants, interviewing people in between sessions and really turning it into an online offering, which is something I have no expertise with. But there's a whole team that worked on it. So basically we were on a film set as well as being at the front of a workshop room and there were only 14 participants. So much more intimate than we've ever done it. Normally it's 120 people,

Daniel

so we weren't sure what it was going to be like, but it was very good. There were challenging moments for me, for everyone. I think, yeah, it always comes into the port in the end, but it did also feel possibly like the end of an era. I'm not sure that we're going to continue doing this workshop in its current form, especially since it'll be recorded and available online, and the book will be out. Maybe I'm jumping ahead by saying that, but I I came out of the weekend

Daniel

with this dual sense of being very proud of what we've created and very satisfied with it and feeling like I don't know if I need to do that again. Especially if it's found its final form to get out to more people

Daniel

with less effort on our part. Because it is effort, it's a very difficult course to navigate, to lead. It's very rewarding, but essentially I'm up there on stage talking about parent, adult, child relationships

Daniel

with my father, with whom I'm in one of those relationships. Yeah. And we knew when we started this workshop that we were never going to perfect it or complete it. All we could do was investigate the territory and share what we find, but that doesn't mean we're ever done. And so doing that work with him is

Daniel

just part of life, you know, if we all choose to engage in this relationship, but doing it with him in public, in front of other people and having our relationship and whatever we go through on stage be a teachable moment every time it takes something from me. And I actually said to him, after having had a day or two to really just decompress, I said, I think I just want a dad. And collaborating with him creates a whole other collaborative relationship that amplifies some of the old stuff. And it's been great. I've got, I've got no complaints about it, but, um, we're going to be writing this book anyway. That's a very close collaboration. Anyway, long answer, you asked how it went.

Daniel

What you can probably hear is that it went complicated, but it was also very successful. I would say like it was on its own terms, completely successful and I think it'll be a fantastic course. And then there's my personal experience doing it, which has always been complicated and it's always felt worth it. And so getting to the point after this weekend where I think, huh, you know what, I might be complete with. This is a very interesting feeling, feeling of having accomplished a mission and knowing when to step away from it or shift away from it. But we'll see. We'll see. That's my initial reaction to the week.

Olga

Wow. I'm sure it will be a gift to us when it is in an online accessible form for everyone. As much as I do hear that it can be difficult for you. Thank you for this work. I'm curious. In a way there's never been an easier time to stay apart from your parents as a grown up than now, in the same way as divorce has been mostly normalised in our society. In the same way, everyone probably knows someone who is not going home for Christmas and we support them usually. The pressure of respect your elders, be compliant, be visiting has eased. It's not gone, but it has eased. And if people say, do you know what?

Olga

It costs me too much in terms of my mental health to be visiting my toxic parents. There is now space for that, and I wonder if it has meant that parents and their grown up children have become more intentional about meeting each other again, building a relationship that has been ruined. Would you say that?

Daniel

That's a very interesting observation. I mean, you could also throw into the mix that young people, as they become grown-ups have never before, I think, been so trauma aware, like trauma and working on oneself and dealing with the baggage they are carrying has become a lot more normalised. And especially among millennials who are now becoming, well, they've already become grown-ups and Gen Z are becoming grown-ups.

Daniel

These are groups who are acutely sensitive and aware of what they're carrying from previous generations that is not theirs. And the Internet has allowed for a proliferation of a new kind of pop psychology. And I'm not using the term pop psychology to disparage it, although it has, you know, parts that are more superficial and less substantial than others. I think. But people are aware that trauma is a thing. People are aware that the world they're living in is a toxic world. Our book The Myth of Normal wouldn't have been a hit if people weren't already feeling like there was something off with normal. So not only do they have more licence, as you're saying, to chart their own path and

Daniel

create an adulthood that isn't necessarily, I mean, what we're talking about is voluntary estrangement, and not only is that more allowed, but also more and more people have a sense that they have something inside them that makes it just not worth it to try to connect with those family members in adulthood. But what you're pointing to is part of the essential and unique structure of this relationship. There's no other relationship that starts out as choicelessly, and we point this out at the very beginning of the workshop. No child ever decides to get into a relationship with a couple of parents. That's not how it works. The relationship is foisted upon. I mean, like you literally were not even around to be asked the question

Daniel

and then all of a sudden you exist because of some choice other people made and then you're completely dependent on them and they don't get a choice in terms of which you they get, they just get you and they only get to find that out as they go, right. So it starts out as a relationship, you know, cosmically arranged relationship, right, with no guarantees. And then somehow, 18-20-25 years later, you're supposed to somehow graduate into some sort of equality or being two grown-ups relating to each other. But the thing is, by that point you no longer need each other. It is actually developmentally optional. Certainly with COVID, people got a taste of what it is like to not be as physically connected. And for a lot of people that was very painful and they missed birthdays and anniversaries and deaths.

Daniel

You know, they weren't able to be there for these rights of passage that everything in us wants to be there for. But let's be honest, for a lot of people it was a relief too. A lot of people felt their equilibrium got reset by the lack of that obligation. And they realised, just like with office work, that there's a lot of the things about the way we live in the society that are actually optional. But, you know,  our workshop is not about saving this relationship. It's not about fixing this relationship. There's no should in it at all. We don't tell people, OK, great, You're going to rescue this relationship and you ought to. No, we tell people.

Daniel

You don't have to be in this relationship. You don't have to work on this relationship. The difference with divorced, there's no such thing as an ex-mother or an ex-father. You can be estranged, but they are still your mother and father. You're not going to get another one. There's no replacing. So if you're going to be estranged from them, our question is what's the quality of the estrangement? If you're going to be in a relationship with them, what's the quality of this relationship? Either way, it's both set in stone and completely optional what form it takes, and you have to live with the consequences of whatever you choose. And there are consequences

Daniel

whatever way you go. So it also seems like it's a moment where people are realising, I don't have to be in this relationship. But a lot of people realise that just throwing it away doesn't do much for their sense of autonomy either. That's not an automatic path to healing. Maybe for some people it's a necessary condition that they need space from those people, and I completely understand and sympathise with that, but it's not sufficient even if it's necessary. So our workshop and the book and online course that it's going to become are really aimed at helping people navigate whatever choice they make and be responsible for it, and to make sure that they're seeing all the possibilities before they make a decision or a choice based on limited or faulty options.

Joe

One of the questions that comes up for me is the people that come to the workshop just to be in that space of going towards with your parent or parent with their adult child speaks to their intention already. Do you have any insight or anything you could talk about how early on in a parent-child relationship we can kind of lay those foundations where we can even be a place where we can be open to looking at how it might evolve when we're adults?

Daniel

It does, I but I think there's a premise in your question that may not be accurate, which is that only people come to our workshop who are coming in a pair of parent and adult child relationship and both want to work on, yeah, that's not the case. We always have  a significant minority, which is to say between 20 to 30% of the people in the room generally who don't come with anybody. They come to work on a relationship with someone who's not in the room. They come to work on a relationship with someone who died. They come to work on a relationship with someone they've decided not to speak to, but they're still working on the relationship. Why? Because as we said at the very beginning of the course, this is not a relationship course. This is not a course about how to fix your relationship, or even how to work on your relationship. Not primarily. It's a course about your relationship to the relationship,

Daniel

OK? And only you can work on that yourself. So the first thing we do when the course starts, and we'll do the same thing, you know, in the online version, and I'm sure the book will have some way of making this clear, is we separate people. We say you're not qualified to work on this relationship yet. Go sit with somebody else. Go sit with a stranger. Because until you can really put on some new glasses and see your relationship to the relationship for what it is, it'll be hopeless. You can't work on the relationship because the relationship is mostly not happening in between you. It's happening within each of you

Daniel

in terms of who you think the other person is, how you interpret the past, the ways that you are or are not conscious of the patterns and traps that you yourself slip into before you even walk in the room. So very much it's a course about perception and interpretation and context and paradigm, rather than about tips and tricks for how to fix this relationship. It's not relationship counselling. Only on the last day do we have people get back together and share what they've discovered for themselves with each other and start. Maybe to brainstorm and imagine a fresh start, Which is the phrase from the subtitle of the workshop. It's a fresh start for parents and adult children, not a happy ending.

Daniel

So that's a prelude to an answer to your question, because I think it's important to understand that it's not like being able to come to this workshop with your parent and adult child makes you better than anybody else. That said, you're asking me a fair question, which is it sounds like you're asking how can parents of current children maximise the chances that when the children become adults, the children will still want to speak to them and possibly work on their relationship. OK, so first of all, as we often do, we just, I'm not going to answer the question in the form it's asked before. I point out some things about the question. So I don't know if you can hear, but I detect a certain amount of anxiety in the question itself, which is understandable, right? Especially if you're a follower of the work of Gabor Maté. You know something about early childhood development and how kids experience the world mediated through the nervous systems and energetic spaces and bodies of their parents, creates problems later in life. And if that's true that we're living in a society where to be normal is to be traumatised,

Daniel

well, then it must be the case that it's very few families where damage isn't being done to that child's sense of integrity, reality, where that relationship isn't fractured because it's a fracture when trust is lost. Or when, you know, if I'm traumatised in myself as a consequence of my rearing environment, that means that relationship got fractured from an early age. The prototypical kind of trauma that my dad writes about is the the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity, where we have to sacrifice our own authenticity in order to stay in relationship with the people on whom we totally depend, and yet who seem not to be able to handle all of us. So I have to change. Well, if that's the case, well then when I emerge into adulthood, there's going to be some hell to pay, or at least some accounts to reconcile.

Daniel

And that is just built in. So if what you're asking me is how can I parent my children in a way that they won't resent me, I'd say that's the wrong question. I would say you're already coming from a place of fear. You're already coming from a place of wanting to avoid some outcome. Now why are you coming from that place? Is it out of pure concern for them or is there a certain amount of parental narcissism in there? I don't want my kids to hate me and I think a lot of parents parent from a place of I don't want to hurt them or I don't want them to be angry at me rather than what do they need right now. So I would say parenting for the future of your relationship.

Daniel

I'm not sure if that's the most powerful place to parent from because it's always going to be self interested. But one thing you can do is not impose your version of it on your kids. One of the things my parents did, especially my dad, that has made it complicated, it's made it take longer in our adult life to get to really know each other as actual people in the present, is that he made up a whole lot of decisions about what my upbringing did to me. And then he's been didactically telling me that for decades. Like, he knows what happened to me. He knows what it was like for me. He knows why I am the way I am. That's a terrible way to relate to your adult kids.

Joe

What is that like?

Daniel

It's stifling and it's confusing because it's not like there's a clear demarcation line between your parents being the authority on your life and them not being. It's not like there's some ceremony at age 18 where you say, OK, great, now I don't need to take your word for it anymore. You know, they occupy a big place in an adult child's consciousness. And it just didn't help our relationship that my dad wasn't willing to, or that he has a hard time putting aside his point of view about me and just really learning who I am that he hasn't quite broken, or he's still breaking it. And he, to a large extent, has, I should say. But I'm saying, going into this work, going into my adult life, the idea that you know your kids better than they know themselves and that you have nothing left to learn about who they are and that you know what their trauma did to them

Daniel

is not exactly a recipe for getting to know somebody, is it? And you know, this relationship is fundamentally different than any other relationship. But the principles of good relating actually apply. Like if you want to be in a good relationship with someone, be curious about them. Don't act like you know everything about them. Don't walk around speaking and listening out of a place of guilt all the time. Even if you have some remorse about things that have happened, the space of Hello Again is a space of trying to get to a place of natural relating. So you have to deal with all the ways in which you can't be natural with your kids

Daniel

or with your parents. I imagine that's not quite a satisfying answer to the question you asked. But I just, I hear in the question you asked a sort of "how do we safeguard things and not mess them up?" You can't, you actually can't game the system so that your child will be wanting to be in a relationship with you. You got to let them emerge into adulthood and decide that for themselves. Just don't be a weirdo.

Joe

Am I right in saying that you suggest to actually invite those mess ups as well and be open about them?

Daniel

Well, that's important. I certainly think that instilling a sense of panic about things going wrong is not a great way to create a spontaneous, safe, enjoyable, appealing relationship. So yes, clean things up when they get messy. I mean, certainly there are ways you can be a more conscientious parent of kids and teenagers and those might well influence your kids willingness to have them in your lives years later. That just kind of goes without saying. You know how you treat somebody affects whether they want to be in a relationship with you. But when? Certainly when it comes to being grown-ups. Being afraid of mess ups is not really a fun way to relate, is it? And there's always opportunity in it if you're clear on what the intention is. If we're here to learn, if we're here to understand ourselves and each other,

Daniel

well, then these breakdowns in communication can be openings. And that's what happens in our workshop. Every time something happens between him and me, on stage or in the room with anybody else, we're always looking not to find out who was right and who was wrong or how to fix it. But what's the opportunity in it? What's being revealed? What's ready to be transformed? What are we both sick and tired of here?

Joe

Part of what we try and shine a light on is play, with younger children and working with families and bringing relationship into the context of play. And it just allows for this messy space of relationship, for emotions to move towards each other in a place where there's no shame and there's just more flow there. So I'm just curious if your workshop has a space for play as well, and if you use that.

Daniel

Well, I think my dad. I I think my dad and I have a very playful dynamic at our best, and even not our best. It's playful. Sometimes it can be a little bit pugilistic, but it's playful, yeah, and sense of humour is very important, so built into it is anything but a solemn, reverent approach. My dad's the more solemn one, I'm the more irreverent one. But together we form a dynamic where

Daniel

you know, taking it deadly serious is just not going to help. Play is very important. My dad has talked about how he didn't know how to play with his kids until they were a certain age. He just didn't know how to be spontaneous with babies who don't have language, so there was a kind of stiffness. Now I remember him actually being very playful physically and in ways that I really remember enjoyably. He might have a view of himself that's a little dimmer than mine when it comes to that. But as far as being playful in the present as two grown-ups, what you have to first deal with is that the playground got damaged at some point. You got to reset the ground for play. You can't just be like hi, we're really tense with each other and I resent you and distrust you and deep down I kind of hate you.

Daniel

Let's play. Haha no. You got to look at why do I not trust you and what does it take to play a game that's not always safe? Like if you and I are gonna go and play squash, that's a rough and tumble game, right? We gotta have some rules, we gotta have some gear, we gotta have a a room that's set up in a certain way with certain dimensions and we both know where the lines are. We have to have a ball that's a bright enough colour that we can both see. All of this stuff, we instinctively do this when we're playing. Play only works within certain boundaries and certain rules. Even imaginative play has rules. That's why when you're playing with a kid and you know they're making things up wildly and then you add something, they say no, that can't be that, you know because they have their sense of rules. You have to learn them

Daniel

well. Any game worth playing needs definition and it needs space. So it's actually interesting to use that framing of play, because on our very last day of the workshop, when we finally get people back together and sit next to the person you came with, we do things that we call play dates. And it's really just a brainstorm. We ask them now that they've examined all the things that are in the way of a fresh start. Now we have them start to collaborate a bit on a vision of how else things could be. And it's very tentative. It's like a play date with a new friend, you know, And we still have to guide them to have a conversation that has some structure to it. So yeah, play is the goal. I think the ability to have it, be playful, to have it be a creation.

Daniel

You know, when we say playful, we don't necessarily mean frivolous or mirthful or giggly or ha ha ha. But when you're playing a game, you put something at stake. You make something more important than other things. So we could be playing a game called "How much can I learn about you every time we talk". We could be playing a game called "How long can we go without talking about politics?" I mean it. It'll look different for everybody, but it should be fresh

Daniel

and it should be aligned with how you actually want the thing to be. Part of the problem with these relationships is they're so sticky and gravitationally pulled back into the past and old patterns. So only play can create new experiences. So that's how I would relate it. And you have to. You have to learn each other in order to have an authentic game based on the present. And parents really need to watch out for trying to

Daniel

redeemed the past or make up for it. You can't. Your kid's grown now. You got to deal with them as they are now. You got to deal with the past as it was. Yeah. And in terms of playing, I mean another aspect of that that we repeat like a mantra throughout the workshops. You always win the game you're playing. So you're already playing at something. It's just probably not very fun. And you and the two of you haven't agreed on what it is and you know you're playing the game called "I'm right and you're wrong", or I'm playing the game called "I'm screwed up irrevocably because of you". Or I'm playing the game called

Daniel

"You're not trustworthy". And whatever game we're playing, we'll always find evidence for. So if you want to have a better experience, play a better game. But first you have to realise the game you're playing.

Joe

Yeah, I love that. Even that introduction of play there allows someone potentially to jump away to see it in a different light.

Daniel

Hope so.

Olga

So it sounds like curiosity is a huge part of this work, becoming curious about each other.

Daniel

Well, otherwise, what's the point? What's the point of a relationship where you know everything already?

Olga

But that is how we go in a lot of the time, into that relationship with the parents as grown-ups.

Daniel

Well, it is, right? But that's why the title of our workshop is "Hello again", not "ohh you again".

Olga

I was just going to say the title makes more sense now to me, yeah.

Daniel

Yeah, it's a really a a new encounter. And it's not a one time thing either. It's a willingness to relearn each other ongoingly. And if it's just you, if you're the only one doing this course or reading this book, then it's an opportunity to bring your own fresh eyes and ears into it every time, whether or not they're doing the same.

Olga

I've got a quote here, Daniel, and that is you quoting your father. "I never worried my children would be angry at me. I worried they wouldn't be angry enough."

Daniel

Yeah, I hate that quote.

Joe

Why?

Olga

Do you?

Daniel

Because it's so self-serving. I mean, he realises that now. OK. It's also totally, I don't know. I don't really want to say hypocritical. That's a little harsh. But I don't know what other word to use. It's disingenuous in practise. It sounds good. I want my kids to be angry at me. Well, that's his guilty conscience talking. He used to say it to me when I was a teenager. It's a really weird thing for your father to say to you, it's too much information. Now he's putting pressure on me to be angry at him.

Daniel

But guess what? When it actually came time for his kids to be angry at him, if they're not angry at him in the ways he wants them to be angry at him, that doesn't go so well. And that's the thing. My anger isn't gonna conform to his version of it, because his version of it would be in a way that he can easily understand. And where there's like, forgiveness immediately on the other side of it, it's messier than that. In real life, you don't get to dictate to your kids how they feel about you. So I think that was him doing risk management, a certain kind of because if he had kids who suppressed their anger, then he'd feel even more guilty. But at least if we can express his anger, then he doesn't have to feel so guilty because we, you know, we must not have been so screwed up. You hear it? It's not actually about when he tells me he hopes I'll be angry at him. It's not actually for me.

Olga

Yeah, he's taken that away from you now.

Daniel

Parents really need to own how self centred they can be when they're with their kids. You know what they want for their kids. Even when my dad, I mean, we have an argument about this constantly and we still argue about it. I I don't think we see it quite the same way. For years he's told me that what he would really want from me is that I would honour my mother and father. Not for him, not for my mom, but for me, for the quality of my life. Because when we don't honour our parents, we suffer. And even if I'm angry at them, even if I can't forgive them for certain things,

Daniel

honouring them, and I'm always just like, but, Dad, you have some idea of how that's supposed to look. That's not really about me. There's some way that I am that you're uncomfortable with. Now maybe in our relationship you would like to feel honoured. That's fine. Then tell me that. But don't tell me it's altruistic. Don't tell me you're just quoting the Bible because kids have to figure out for themselves what that Bible verse means. I think there's truth to it, that we would find a way to honour the beings that gave us life. Or at least honour the life force. You know, the mother principle, the father principle.

Daniel

Our lives go better. I think that's true. And when we're not carrying tonnes of resentment, our lives go better. And when we can forgive what's forgivable, we can let go of what's letgoable. And hopefully, ultimately, everything is. Who knows? That's good. But this thing of I want that you should honour your parents. I don't know, maybe this is just my personal thing with my dad, but  it's been an ongoing thing and whenever the topic comes up in the room, it's very interesting. People have very different

Daniel

ideas about what it means to honour your parents.

Joe

Yeah, the first thing that comes up for me is what What does it mean? I don't know what it means.

Olga

Exactly. That's what I'm sitting with.

Joe

Probably only know what it means in the context of my own parents, potentially, but yeah.

Daniel

How else can you know it? There's no objective definition of that and you can't dictate it to anyone else. There are people who honour their parents by not speaking to them anymore.

Olga

Yes, maybe that's the best you can do.

Daniel

It could be the best you could do. I don't know. Everyone has to decipher this up. What I'm saying is, it's not for the parent to impose some vision of what that looks like on the adult child. That's just more of the same. And as Stephen Jenkinson has talked about, "honour thy mother and father" was a commandment and an expectation that that existed in a context. There's an assumed corollary to that that doesn't even need to be spoken, because it's so natural and we used to have a society that knew how to provide it, which is that children would be honoured by their elders. But what does it mean to say that in a world where routinely kids grow up not having learned how to honour themselves from their parents, where their parents are the source of learning how to betray themselves, how to abandon themselves,

Daniel

how to sell out on themselves, how to not be authentic? Well, sure, the ideal of honouring your parents is still nice. I got nothing against it. But I've just had to tell him that when that wish for me comes out, I don't trust it. I don't trust where it's coming from and that there has to be another way for him to say what he's saying, which is to say, I hope you can forgive me or I really don't like it when you hold these resentments against me and take it out on me with this, with your witty barbs. I mean, that would be a vulnerable thing to say.

Daniel

Or "Ouch. That hurt Daniel," not, you know, "Not for me, son, but I just wish for you that you should be able to honour your parents though." Come on man. Like, just talk normal. I'm not trying to give adult kids licence to hold on to their stuff forever because you pay the cost. If you do that, obviously getting to a place where you can look at what happened and say you know what, what happened happened and couldn't have happened any other way given who my parents were, that's obviously a much better place to live from. But some people have learned what that honouring their parents means. Shutting themselves up, not saying what's true, not saying that things their parents don't want to hear. So like you just said, you don't even know what that means. That's because you were never taught what it means. You didn't grow up in a society that actually exemplified it or had rituals that made it

Daniel

a natural part of our lives. It's a theory, it's a rumour. It's an allegation. It's a sort of vague "ohh yeah, I've heard of that. I don't know exactly what it is," so we have to discover it for ourselves, is what I'm saying, and create relationships that are honourable

Daniel

and worthy of honouring. There are people who, if they're really going to honour their mother and father, they're going to have to honour someone who never really showed their face, because what's honourable in their parents was completely obscured by what was not honourable. There are some people who were sadistically abused by their parents or who had to caretake their parents' terrible addictions.

Daniel

So honouring your mother and father is going to have to honour some essence of them, or some potential in them, some possibility of them that isn't necessarily evident on the surface. So it's up to everybody to decide for themselves what that means. And there are consequences to not doing it, that's true. But there are also consequences to doing it in ways that are forced or inherited without really being embodied.

Olga

This is more confusing than love.

Daniel

Right, exactly. Honouring is more complicated than love cause love. Most people will always love their parents or love their kids on some level, even if you know. But what does it mean to honour somebody that's contextual? I heard one adult child say, "The way I'm going to honour my mother is by respecting her enough to tell her the truth about how and why I can't be in much of a relationship with her right now. That's me honouring her."

Daniel

I don't know. It's not for me to tell anyone else what honour means and we would have to create a much different society if we wanted to have a more, across the board model for honour  because honouring takes ritual and tradition and shared understandings and values, and we're living in a very individualistic society that's very

Daniel

malnourishing for individuals because we're not meant to be so cut off from each other. Anyway, I feel like I'm getting a little theoretical here, but hope that answers your question.

Olga

I'm curious. You talk about authenticity versus attachment. Gordon Neufeld has got this beautiful metaphor for it of a cookie cutter. Do you know that one? If we imagine as parents we have an invitation for some things in our child but not others. We like our child when they are successful but not when they're failing. When they work hard, but not when they are lazy. Maybe when they are kind and caring, but not when they're grumpy. Maybe when they are unwell, we have a lot of invitation for that and we look after them and we shower them with love, but not when they are... and there could be anything out there. We have an invitation for them to be straight but not gay. It can go anywhere and a lot of the time we can't help it even if we're aware of it. Even if we're aware of what we're doing, we still convey,

Olga

at least with our body language, that ohh, I don't like you right now and a lot of what's outside the cookie cutter is pushed there through shame. The child starts to feel ashamed of what's not invited in them by their most significant caregivers. And a lot of the future relationship between that growing child and a parent Is the child often trying to bring what was left outside the cookie cutter to the attention of the parent and say, look at this, can you accept this or is it still too shameful for you? Because now it's become shameful for me because of you. And there's a lot of shame on both parts. And that's where a lot of defensiveness in parents comes from I think. They don't want to talk about it. They don't accept their child who is angry at them because anger is outside the cookie cutter and so on and so forth. Shame was a very effective way of managing behaviours when the child was small and they just don't know what to do. They try to probably do the same when the child's grown up. So navigating this shame on both parts.

Olga

What can we do?

Daniel

Well, I can tell you that that's a very good way of describing that dynamic. I hadn't heard the cookie cutter metaphor, although of course I know Gordon, he sort of saved my life when I was 8 years old, first psychologist my parents took me to and he looked them in the face and said your son's not the problem, it's you. So he was always my hero after that. Look, the dynamic you're describing is still very much in the mix with my father and I, and it happens on stage and it happens around my expressions of anger or pain that don't, uh, pass his review board, that don't come in the form that he would like them. And I I see his shame kick in. I see his defences against his shame.

Daniel

I literally see his body language change. And then I have two reactions. Usually one is guilt. Ohh, I made my father upset. and the other one is a doubling down on the rage because once again, I'm supposed to inhibit myself on my end. It's tricky on the adult child's end because fundamentally you have to be able to give up on what's not going to happen, what didn't happen, what's not going to happen. I mean, Gordon Neufeld also talks about moving from frustration to futility.

Daniel

That's when kids can finally express their grief that something did or didn't happen and then move on. To be an aggrieved adult child, to have a grievance means to have a grief you're not willing to feel. And grief only comes when you realise that something is dead. That is to say, some alternate counterfactual future that should have been or could have been, is not and will not be. So inside of me, one of the big things I've learned this year is that there are things that I'm, I continually keep trying to bring to my dad's attention. I call it going back to the well over and over again. And we do this as adults and developmentally it makes sense for a child to do it. Once we're grown-ups, it's kind of unseemly. Here I am, a 48-year-old trying to bang on my dad's 79-year-old door to see some part of me he's never seen. Why?

Daniel

Well, I must have a working theory that he can give me something that'll help me. I must have a working theory that somehow, if he finally sees it, then I'll be free. I mean, I actually wrote a song when I was 25 years old that said "I will not be truly free until you give me time to be my own man." It was directed to my parents, and you can hear the trap in that. I want freedom, but I'm asking you to give me that freedom. And the freedom of being myself is only something you can bequeath unto me. That's just really, really. That's very fuzzy thinking. Put it that way. The shame that I felt as a kid and that I've carried with me most of my life at not being seen for who I am. I have to deal with that on my own time and not go to my parents to try to take it away from me because they can't take it away from me. They gave it to me for life and now it's mine.

Daniel

It's not theirs anymore. They're not doing it anymore. I don't need them like I used to. It's a vestige, it's a holdover and it lives in me and it looks like it's coming from over there, but it's not. So that's number one. As far as what the parent can do with their own shame, I don't know. Deal with it on your own time. Go get a therapist. If you're Gabor Maté, do your own Compassionate Inquiry course and forgive yourself.  I don't know, but your kid can't take that shame away from you either. And if you insist

Daniel

that they only interact with you in ways that doesn't trigger your shame while you're putting a huge ceiling, a very, very low ceiling, on what the relationship can be. Because here's the other thing that's very asymmetrical about this relationship. If you're with a spouse, you each have the ability to trigger each other's deepest wounds. Yes. Yeah. OK. So, Joe, are you married?

Joe

Yes.

Daniel

Yeah. OK, So husband? Wife?

Joe

Wife. Married for seven years, yeah.

Daniel

Married for seven years. OK. So can I ask you a question? OK, so there you are with your wife and you guys are interacting and she triggers your deepest wounds, one of your deepest core wounds in the interaction. Who and when is she reminding you of? Like, what's being triggered? When is that from?

Joe

From childhood.

Daniel

From your childhood, Yeah, Yeah. At which at which she was not present. She was not even a notion in your head. Right. OK. When you trigger her deepest wounds, when and where are you reminding her of being activated?

Joe

Her childhood.

Daniel

You were nowhere near, right? Right. OK, great. Now imagine yourself with one of your parents when they trigger your shame, your fear. No, let's put it the other way. Let's put it that way. When you trigger their shame, what are you triggering in them? What are you reminding them of?

Joe

Something from their childhood.

Daniel

From their childhood. Not only were you not there, you weren't even alive. Yeah, you had nothing to do with it whatsoever. And there's shame now that seems to be about you. It's a strong bet that it's got nothing to do with you in its origin. It's just now finding you as a pretext to express itself. Same thing with guilt. We do this all the time in the workshop.

Daniel

Parents, I'm so guilty about my child. Well, it takes my dad 20 seconds to be like, "When in your life have you ever not felt guilty?"

Joe

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel

But here's the punchline. When you're there with one of your parents and they trigger you, who are they reminding you of?

Joe

Childhood with the same parents.

Daniel

They were there, Yeah, they were there. They're not the same people, but their voices are gonna sound the same. It's the same nervous system which conditioned yours, and you needed them 100%. And whatever wound you're carrying is some echo or continuation of a wound of not having gotten what you needed from these particular people, and they can no longer give you what you needed from them in the first place, but it's still them now. That's a very complicated little situation for parents, I already said. For adult children, you have to realise that going back to the well is just going to leave you really thirsty. You have to get that from

Daniel

other sources. Bjork said. All is full of love. You know you'll be taken care of. Maybe not from the directions you're staring at. Maybe not from the sources you've poured yours. So wherever we think the love is supposed to come from,

Daniel

it's often not. But when it comes to parents dealing with their adult children's anger and their own shame, you gotta deal with your own shame. And you taking your kids anger personally or wanting it to go away or come in some form that's easier for you to handle, that's not an antidote to anything for your child. They're gonna experience that as just a continuation of the same thing, because you never wanted to see their anger in its pure form. You wanted it to be pleasing to your own ego or whatever, so each person has something slightly different to deal with,

Daniel

but it's a very thorny thing to navigate that shame because it really shuts down our full intelligence when it takes over, actually.

Olga

So we've got a traditional wrap up question that we ask our guests and that is "What do you do for play?" But I'm aware that I'm asking here a musician and a songwriter and a writer. So it's sort of, on the one hand, quite obvious what you do for play. On the other hand, this is also work, isn't it? So my question is going to be how do you protect play from work?

Daniel

Ohh. Well, fortunately my musical theatre work is pretty seasonal. I'm not doing it all the time. That's not fortunate. But it just means that it's not like a daily grind, you know? So it's actually always a treat. Plus, just picking up the guitar and playing is different than sitting down and trying to write a really difficult moment in a musical. There's, you know, it's different. There's a craft to it and I have to sit down at the piano

Daniel

or the word processor and really think. But it's different just to pick up a guitar and play or sit down at the piano and play. A big playful thing for me right now is collecting vinyl records.

Olga

OK.

Daniel

I've got a lot of new ones to listen to, having just gotten back from LA, a bunch of them arrived while I was here, so just the world of listening to music. I take walks. I don't know if that's play, but it's some kind of recreation or light exercise, Yeah. And even in the more serious things, I do like the work on Instagram that you mentioned, you know, which has been very political recently, I try to keep it playful activism, I try to keep it playful. I try to keep my language playful, try to keep it light, both for myself and for other people. But I mean, the topics are anything but light.

Daniel

But no, no, no. It brings a sense of play, and at the very least a sense of playing a game worth playing by choice rather than I have to do this. No, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to be in this relationship. You don't have to speak up about the political issues of the day. You don't have to. There are consequences to doing it, and there are consequences to not doing it.

Joe

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming on. Very nice meeting you.

Olga

Yes thank you.

Joe

Really appreciate.

Daniel

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me both of you.