The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Breaking The Cycle Of Love And Control (Premium Episode) #43
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Exclusive access to premium content!A grainy home video from 1993 opens a door many parents avoid: the thin line where love and control blur. From that single forced smile, we follow the thread into cognitive dissonance, exploring why we promise ourselves we won’t yell and still end up yelling, and why small justifications feel so necessary when our identity as a “good parent” is on the line. Leon Festinger’s doomsday research gives language to our everyday contradictions, showing how, when identity is threatened, we don’t change our minds.... we change reality.
We bring this science home with two stories. Lisa’s body remembers what her beliefs reject, and the old neural pathways fire when her child pushes back. Then Tina Payne Bryson shares a vivid, practical moment at a “sticky theater,” modeling how to regulate first, lead with curiosity, validate a child’s feeling, and hold the boundary without collapsing into punishment. The method is simple but not easy: calm nervous systems, shorter stories, cleaner choices, and consistent repair when we miss. Shame tightens the loop; curiosity loosens it.
There’s a deeper conflict beneath tactics: loyalty. When Daniel chooses a new approach and his mom hears, “So we did it all wrong,” the tension isn’t about timeouts—it’s about belonging and gratitude. We talk about honoring our parents’ love while retiring what harmed us, letting love and harm share the same page. That lens scales up to national myths too, where competing truths demand better storytelling. The payoff is quiet and powerful: a parent who almost prompts a thank you—and waits. The child thanks on his own. The cycle doesn’t shatter; it thins, and light gets through.
If this conversation gave you a new way to see your past or a tool to try tonight, tap follow, leave a quick review, and share this episode with one parent who needs it. Your recommendation helps more families find practical calm and truthful hope.
There's a video I can't stop watching. It's 1993. The lighting's bad. The fashion is worse. There's a dad with a mustache tucked in polo, leaning over his daughter's shoulder as she opens a present. She's five. He whispers something. She freezes. Then forces a smile. Later, the camera pans across the room, and you can see the mom in the background, arms crossed, tired, but proud. They look like good parents. And in so many ways, they were. When you watch closely, you realize that something else is happening. A tiny fracture. Invisible to everyone then, obvious now. A moment where love and control overlap so tightly that you can't really tell them apart. That's what I want to talk about today. You start digging through your own childhood, dusting off beliefs, brushing the dirt off of your old habits, and sometimes you find artifacts that don't fit the story that you've been telling. When we do that, we often say that we want to break the cycle. Raise our kids differently than how we were raised. But the minute we try, something uncomfortable often bubbles up. Because breaking the cycle isn't just behavioral, it's existential. It means asking forbidden questions. Questions like, if my parents loved me and hurt me, what does that say about love? And if they were good people, and I'm trying to do the opposite, what does that make me? To understand what's going on in all these questions, what's going on in us when we become new parents, I want to take us back on what might feel like a diversion. More than 70 years. In 1954, a young psychologist named Leon Festinger snuck into a doomsday cult. For those who are unfamiliar, doomsday cults are exactly what they sound like. They're cults, usually founded and led by a charismatic leader that predicts the end of the world. In Festinger's case, he was studying a relatively small, unknown cult, led by a Chicago suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin. Martin claimed to have been told by a mysterious extraterrestrial group, a group that she called the Guardians, that the world would end on the winter solstice, December 21st, 1954, via global flood beginning in the Arctic Circle. That prediction might sound totally random, but it actually shares a lot of typical doomsday cult motifs. It usually starts with one otherwise typical person receiving a message from some superhuman or superior being. Maybe it's God, angels, or in this case, aliens. December 21st, as those who may remember from the famous 2012 Maying calendar Doomsday Prophecy, is the most common day for apocalyptic prophets to place their Armageddon prediction. Global floods, stretching back literal millennia, are the most common means of destruction, both for future predictions and also in a plethora of ancient religious myths. The Arctic Circle, a fixture in other conspiracies like Atlantis and Flat Earthism, with its uninhabited mystery, is the prototypical place for such an event to find its genesis. In fact, if you look at the popular disaster movie 2012, starring my fellow Evanston, Illinois native John Cusack, and you replace the mysterious aliens known as the Guardians with nerdy scientists who no one listens to, it seems like Dorothy Martin could have been the screenwriter. Festinger and his colleagues, in other words, have found the perfect group to infiltrate to get the full doomsday experience. Specifically, what Leon wanted to study was what would happen to the cult members if he was right and the world didn't come to an end. And spoiler, I should mention he was right. The world didn't end. And yet the cult didn't end either. In fact, the cult members became even more convinced. Festinger called this peculiar phenomenon cognitive dissonance, the unbearable tension between two conflicting and irreconcilable truths. Often, when the stakes are not high and people are faced with competing realities, we just change our minds to resolve the conflict. But what Festinger found was when our identity is at stake, we don't change our minds. We change reality. When we're talking about a cult of a couple dozen people in Chicagoland, that sounds insane. But if we're being honest, most of us have become very acquainted with cognitive dissonance when we try to parent. Her dad's rule, don't talk back or else. Now she has a four-year-old who negotiates everything. Bedtime, broccoli, socks. And every night Lisa says the same thing to herself. I will not yell. But then, there it is. Coming back as my grandmother used to say, like a bad penny. The heat in her chest, the flash of, how dare you? And suddenly, she's yelling. Immediately afterward, the guilt floods in. Why did she do it? Why is she becoming her father? Why does it feel like her body betrayed her? Maybe it's because it did. Just like the members of Dorothy Martin's cult after her failed prophecy is another version of cognitive dissonance. Lisa lives in two contradictory and competing realities. She knows that her dad yelling at her was not good parenting. She knows that she doesn't want to yell at her kids. But she also believes, somewhere deep down, that yelling is what it means to be parental. Two competing realities existing at the same time in one person. How is it even possible? It's possible because it's about identity and baggage and trauma. Lisa's nervous system remembers what her intellect rejects. In the moment of defiance, her past re-emerges and her daughter's actions feel threatening. She doesn't decide consciously to yell, and yet, suddenly, she's yelling. The same neural pathways that fired when we were defiant as kids and were met with anger, punishment, or pain, like Lisa, fire when our kids are defiant with us. Here's how I explain it in my book, in the section on this phenomenon. We all have implicit memories, even if we weren't hit for our mistakes or defiance. We all have times when our parents punished us by shaming or yelling or otherwise sending us into our fight or flight response. Because of this, we remember, but not always explicitly. And the younger we were when it happened, the less we will remember explicitly. Then when our children do the stuff that we used to do, the neural pathways associated with those old, often implicit memories fire back up. It's no wonder that so many of us are triggered by our kids. There's no time in the mind, and our nervous system sometimes flat outs forgets that what's happening to our child is not happening to us. And when that happens, we snap. Whether it's the kind of parent we believe we should be or not. Festinger paid participants to review a bad product that they'd been paid to endorse. Some people got one dollar. Others got twenty. You would think that the people who were paid more would naturally be more passionate about the product. But actually, the opposite was true. The people who were paid only one dollar found much more that they liked about this objectively bad product because their brains couldn't justify lying about the bad product for almost nothing. Instead, they had to convince themselves of a new reality. Convince themselves that they actually believed the review that they were giving. Now you might be thinking, like I did when I heard about it, why didn't the people who got twenty dollars feel the same way? After all, it's only twenty dollars. But remember, it's the 1950s we're talking about here. The average monthly mortgage payment was only$25. For the people who got twenty dollars, it was worth admitting to themselves that they were lying for the money. But what about for the people who got twenty times less? They couldn't handle the contradiction. And so they rewrote reality in their minds, changed the story until it fit. Parenting for us is full of these one dollar rationalizations. He needed to learn a lesson. She knows that I love her. It was just a bad day. These little edits are the ones that help us to grapple with the question that we're all asking ourselves. If I do this stuff, am I still a good parent? When I initially recorded this episode, I moved right from this moment on to a story about my friend named Daniel. But I wanted to take a little bit of a diversion before we get there. Because I realized that I never really answered this question. Are we still good parents if we don't always break the cycle? If we don't always get it right, if we still in some ways embody that stuff that comes from our childhood, the ways that we were wounded, and carry those forward into the future? And I think the answer, pretty definitively, is yes. And to answer that question more fully, I wanted to cut back to a clip from an earlier episode. An earlier episode that many people never listened to. It was a really long conversation with my dear friend Tina Payne Bryson, who wrote The Whole Brain Child. She's probably one of the foremost parenting experts alive in the world today. Certainly she sold more copies of books than just about anybody else about parenting. And she tells this story about a movie theater and her reactive response to her kids. And in the process, she gives us some alternatives, some ways that she has slowly and meticulously and painstakingly changed the neural pathways that she has to be more responsive, to be more effective as a parent, to break that cycle. She even mentions that it might have come from her childhood wounding in this clip. So I wanted to play that for you because we do have a little bit of time in this episode. And then I'll return back to Daniel and we'll conclude our conversation about cognitive dissonance.
SPEAKER_01:I think again you came back to that the F-word, fear, uh, fear-based parenting. And I will say that when I reflect after I've been the parent I hope not to be, which happens all the time. And I will say has happened less and less and less over time as I've practiced this approach to parenting, and it's become more wired in my brain to be more automated. Almost always my um my moments when I'm not the parent I want to be, and I go against what I believe in terms of this lens that we've been talking about, are always rooted in fear for me. I I love to tell a story about a time my um my kid, he was probably seven or eight at the time, and I had offered to pick him up after school and take him to the sticky theater. It's not actually called that, but it's a discount theater, so it's really it was gross. So I was like, hey, I'm gonna pick you up after school, and he was like, Really? Oh, that's so fun. Like he was super excited, grateful, just the response I wanted from him. And then he says, Can I get popcorn? And I said, No, we're not getting popcorn today. We've already had too much junk food. I'll bring a snack and when I pick you up. And he he pouted, you know, arms folded, you know, pouting. And so what happens immediately for me is it moves me from like it's now that's not what I expected, it's not what I hoped for, but it immediately moves me to a fear-based place that my kid is entitled, he's spoiled, he's a brat, he doesn't understand the how the how much privilege he has, you know, all of these things. And so that leads me to want to be like, I'm not taking you to the movies, which is totally punitive. You know, it makes me my first response, even knowing everything that I know and practicing, is to say, guess what? I am in charge here. I'm in control of you, and I'm gonna take this away from you. That's my first instinct, is to say, fine, we're not going to the theaters. If you're gonna pout, you don't get to go. But what I did instead in that moment, which is it's much more helpful because I'd have tons and tons of terrible parenting moments throughout my, like after playing Yahtzee with my boys, I threw the dice across the room, yelled at them because they were fighting, and I lost my mind. Um, so I had lots and lots of parenting fails. But in this moment, I first regulated myself, and then I said to him, um, something just happened when I said, Go to the movies, you got so excited. When I said no popcorn, something happened. What happened? So I start with curiosity. And he says, I'm disappointed. I love movie popcorn. I don't get it very often, and I'm just, I really wanted it. And so I say, Yeah, sometimes when we want something and we don't get it, that can feel really disappointing. And I said, now we're not getting popcorn, but we can still go to the movies. Would you still like to go? So I'm still holding my boundary of no popcorns. I'm not saying fine, you can have popcorn. So that's where I'm emotionally responsive, connected, gentle, and I'm using air quotes when I say that, while holding the boundary. But I think let's say I had screamed at him, taken away the movies, um, you know, told him he was a spoiled brat. What I need to do in that moment after that is to start with curiosity with myself, because shame spiral just actually makes me more likely to be reactive again the next time. Shame actually primes our nervous system to be more reactive. So instead I go to curiosity. I really want to be gentle with myself and say, okay, Tina, that was not ideal. What got in the way? This is the question I literally asked myself, what got in the way of you being the parent you would have wanted to be in that moment? And I would say to my kid, Oh, I wish I hadn't done that. Um, can I have a do-over, right? And then I might say to myself, you know what? I act that way because I haven't had anything to eat all day. I haven't peed by myself in three years, and I'm exhausted. Or I might say, when my kid does that, it reminds me of my dad, who really wanted me, you know? Or makes I'm pissed at my husband, or whatever it is. But it begins to then create a space for me to say, what is it that I need so that I'm ready to stay receptive and get my kid receptive.
SPEAKER_00:I want to talk about another one of my friends. He's also in his 30s, like Lisa. His name is Daniel. Every Sunday, Daniel calls his mom. He tells her about his week, his kids, his job. I often think to myself, I should be more like Daniel. One day, Daniel mentions to his mom that after reading a parenting book, and out of humility, I won't tell you which one, he started letting his daughter cry and complain instead of just sending her to her room or putting her in timeout. There's silence on the line. His mom says, So you're saying that we did it all wrong? Daniel's quiet. Because how do you answer that? He's not saying that they did it all wrong. He's saying that he's doing it differently. But to his mom, those sound like the same thing. And herein lies the twist, the place where we've been trying to go this whole time. The reality that breaking cycles has never actually been about what we do in parenting at all. It's about loyalty. Our deepest dissonance isn't between old school parenting techniques or new brain-based parenting strategies. The conflict is between loyalty to our family of origin and the family that we're trying to build today. Loyalty to the people who raised us and the person that we became as a result, and loyalty to the person that we're still becoming. We think we're arguing about bedtime or screen time, but what we're really asking is, can I honor where I came from while walking away from parts of it? And to do that, we have to let love and harm coexist in the same story. Which means dismantling one of our favorite illusions: that good parents and bad parents live on separate planets. This tension between love and revision isn't unique to families. Nations do it too. On Monday in the United States, we actually wrestled with this reality as our nation celebrates Columbus Day. A man who, by his own accounts, in his own journal entries, was a serial child abuser. He was hateful, greedy, vindictive. And yet, undoubtedly, he was historically significant to the country that we have now. We wrestle with the competing realities that America is founded on genocide of the indigenous and settler colonial violence, and built on the backs of slaves, and also at the same time, was founded with some objectively good ideals in mind. Things like democracy and fairness, due process and liberty. The Declaration of Independence reads We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. But it was written by men who did not think that all men included Africans or the indigenous, the Chinese, or for that matter, women at all. These founding fathers, much like our own parents, were not all good or all bad. Humans, in other words, are incredibly messy. Some of that we seek to change, and some we cannot. And so we change our reality to harmonize the dissonance. To end our episode, I want to go back to the home video. The girl with a forced smile. She's a parent now. Her own son just had a birthday. There was no VHS this time, just an iPhone propped up against the cake. That girl. Now mom catches herself almost saying thank you. Almost. Instead, she smiles and waits. Her sun beams. Unprompted. He looks up and whispers. Thanks. It's such a small thing. There's no dramatic music here, no grand epiphany, just a microscopic repair in the timeline. The illusion doesn't shatter all at once. It just thins a little bit. And in that thin place, a little bit of light leaks through, just enough to see what love looks like when it stops defending itself. And so I ask those of us who are very rightfully trying to break cycles: what if breaking the cycle isn't actually about rejecting our past? What if it's about telling the truth beautifully enough that everyone in it, the parents, the children, the ghosts in between, can finally rest. I have three quick favors to ask you before we end the episode. Number one, if you got anything out of this episode, if it made you think, if you felt like you have something new to try with your kids or it made you a better parent, please take a moment to go and leave a review and rate this podcast five stars wherever you're listening to it. It's the single best way to help more parents find this show. It'll take you less than a minute, just scroll down on your podcast app, tap those stars, and if you've got an extra 30 seconds, leave a couple words for me to let me know how this podcast has been helping you. I read every single review. It really means the world to me. Number two, after you rate it and review it for the masses, I really want to encourage you to think about what we talked about in this episode and send it to one parent in your phone who you feel like might benefit from this specific episode. It's great to have ratings and reviews, and yes, they help so much, but there's nothing like a personal recommendation from a friend, hey, you gotta listen to this. It's really been helping me. Last, if you want to go deeper with me, get exclusive parenting insights, free resources, and updates on everything that I'm doing, go ahead and join my email list. It's where I share things that I don't get to get into on the podcast. I also will let you know about upcoming episodes and events, and best of all, it's completely free. You can sign up at wholeparentacademy.com or just go to the show notes below and there'll be a link there. Alright, that's it for now. Thanks again for listening, and thank you in advance for doing those three quick favors for me. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast.
