Dr John Demartini offers a new perspective on resolving conflict through understanding family dynamics and cultivating fulfilling family relationships.

This content is for educational and personal development purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any psychological or medical conditions. The information and processes shared are for general educational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental-health or medical advice. If you are experiencing acute distress or ongoing clinical concerns, please consult a licensed health-care provider.

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Every symptom in the family dynamic is

trying to teach you to have sustainable

fair exchange, by learning

how, and asking the question,

how specifically is what they're

dedicated to in the family,

helping you fulfill what you're

dedicated to and vice versa.

One thing we all have in common, ,

we came from a mother and

had some original father

or possibly an IVF, and

we have a family dynamic.

And I'd like to understand or share some

understanding about the family dynamic,

some things you may or

may not have contemplated,

because you'll see that that's where some

of the funniest things happen and also

some of the most challenging

things happen in life.

So let's go down the rabbit hole a bit

on the family dynamic and take a look at

some things you'll find.

You might want to take some notes because

it might be really helpful immediately

on your dynamic. First of all,

I'm going to make a statement,

that when I was 14 years

old and I was a street kid,

I learned that nothing was missing.

So you might want to write

that nothing is missing.

And so people go around in their

life and sometimes say, well,

my mom wasn't here to do that. My dad

didn't do this, and he was this way and,

you know, had a crazy sister or a crazy

father or brother, or whatever it is.

And what I found out that in my

own life is that nothing's missing.

Everything that you're looking for

in your life, believe it or not,

is in your life,

but it may not be in the form that

you fantasize or become addicted to

or expect. You know,

when I lived on the streets and I

left and I wasn't with my parents,

I noticed various people

becoming parent-like,

I also noticed that the girlfriends that

I had back when I was living at home,

I had new people playing

out the girlfriend's role,

new people playing out the sister's role.

So I learned as a teenager living on

the streets that I really didn't miss

anything. It morphed into

forms that I didn't recognize,

initially. But once I recognized it, I,

I kind of chuckled, because I realized,

oh my God, that's like, that person's

representing part of my father.

And it was in parts,

it wasn't like one person representing

everything about my father.

There were three or four people playing

parts of my father that was there.

And the same thing for my mom. The same

thing girlfriend. Same thing for sister.

And I found that that was extremely

valuable and resourceful to have the

realization that nothing's

missing, it's a new form.

Because if I expect somebody to

be a certain way and they're not,

I think I'm missing something.

And then I'm feeling in this grieving

loss thing or this thing of lack or

feeling like I missed out or,

and I'm usually comparing what's happening

to a fantasy about how I wished it

would've been.

And depression is a comparison of your

current reality to a fantasy about how it

should have been, would've

been, could've been.

So the first principle I'd like

to share about family dynamics

is that if you made a list of everything

you're looking for in the family,

and then ask yourself who's providing it,

you'll find out you have what is the

genetic family and you'll also have an

extended family.

So sometimes if all of a sudden you're

not really close with your father,

then you may have a male teacher

at school that becomes Father-like,

or a coach or some best friend's

father that takes on that role.

I watched that when my mom

went to work when I was nine,

I had a third grade teacher that I used

to stay over and talk to until five

o'clock. Then I'd go home

and my mom would be home.

So she played part of a

mom's role during the day.

And then my mom was there at night.

And then when my mom stopped

working and stopped the job,

I noticed I wasn't as close to

that teacher in the next grade,

which I thought was interesting.

I didn't do that dynamic. And,

but the second she was gone again,

in the fourth grade, it showed back,

or the fifth grade it showed back,

no, sixth grade it showed back up.

And I thought, that's interesting,

it's not missing, it's changing forms.

So if you make a list of everything you're

looking for in a relationship in your

family and ask who's providing it,

I had a lovely woman who said,

well, my mom was never there for me,

she abandoned me when I

was young. And I said,

so you felt you were not wanted

and you thought you were abandoned?

And she said, yeah. And I said,

so what specific trait did you

perceive you missed out on?

And in the process of doing that, she

said, I missed this, this and this.

I said, well then who provided that?

And she said, well, my aunt provided it.

And then I found out that my, pardon me,

I had somebody at my

door my aunt provided it.

And all of a sudden my best friend's

mom provided it and teacher provided it.

And I said, what was the

benefit of them providing it?

I got to learn a different

language. I got to have better food.

If my mom had provided it,

we would've been in more impoverished

situation and I would've been trapped and

I'd been living in a small town and I got

to finish my education because of what

happened.

And once you see the benefits of the

new people taking on that role and

the drawbacks of the fantasy that you

made out of the original people you

thought you missed out on, you

realize you didn't miss anything,

you changed the form of it.

So if you make a list of everything

you're looking for in a relationship in

family, and then you ask who's

providing it, you'd be mind blown.

Your first response is because

you're so attached to the form it is,

I didn't have that, I missed

out on that and I'm a victim.

But being a victim of history instead

of a master of destiny is not going to

empower you. But it is by asking questions

on what was the form that it took.

And I've done that on thousands of

people in the Breakthrough Experience and

liberated people from a story, the

victim story that they had in their life.

You know, I didn't have this, I didn't

have that. You know, it was interesting,

Sir Isaac Newton,

his father died when he was born

and his mother then didn't have

a way of providing.

And so she had to look for another

man and she had to give up her son

temporarily. And he stayed in this

kind of apothecary place with this guy.

And and what's interesting is

when she finally came back,

during that time,

he ended up falling in love with Mother

Nature and he ended up wanting to know

God's will, the Father, God the

Father's will. So he ended up being,

pursuing God the Father, and

the laws of Mother Nature.

And that was initiated during the time

when father was gone and mom was gone.

So he ended up building the Principia,

one of the greatest scientific treatise

on gravity as a result of that. So,

and he realized he had a connection,

a real strong connection to nature and

to the perception he could talk to God.

So it was in a dissociated

way, but he still had it.

And some people will disassociate it.

Some kids will actually take on a

blanket that'll represent a security to

represent somebody. I noticed

that when I was around four,

I had a girl who lived across the

street, and when her mom was at work,

she made these dollhouse

that she had. She became,

I mean the dolls became

the mother talking to her.

And then all of a sudden

when the mom would come home,

she'd turn around and be

the mother to the dolls.

And I watched her change that while

I was playing with her sometimes,

and it was quite interesting to watch

that it was morphing and changing.

So the first principle of family dynamics

that I'd just like to share is that

nothing's missing. Look carefully,

but beware of the attachment to a fantasy

form about how it's supposed to be.

Because if it's not matching that you're

going to think you're missing something

and loss, and then you're going to want

to run a story about it. I just ask,

what is the form that it's in?

Another aspect of the family is that

there's pairs of opposites. ,

if you were to take the summation

of all the values and do a Value

Determination,

go on my website and do a Value

Determination on every one of your family

members and take a look

at what those values are,

you'll find out there's

complementary opposites.

You'll have a brother or sister that

represents an antiparticle to you,

an opposite behavior.

You may be dedicated to being very focused

and driven and take command of your

goals and things of this, and

they may go with the flow.

You may be dedicated to building your

wealth and saving your money and living

frugally and deferring gratification.

They may be in immediate gratification,

going shopping and filling their

place with stuff that depreciates.

You may find out that they're very social

and extroverted and they may be the

introvert and quiet and go and

live on video games or, you know,

read or something. One may be an

academic one, may be a socialite.

You'll see that these pairs of opposites

make up the family dynamic because you

typically marry your disowned parts,

the things that are repressed in you.

And then you end up

procreating the disowned parts.

And so the family dynamic has

got pairs of opposites. Now,

if you think for some reason that

your value system is right and

you project it onto your family,

you got a lot of clashes,

because they're going to perceive that

their value system is right and they're

going to project back. And so there's

lots of clashes. In every family

there's a balance of peace of war.

I've asked people in Breakthrough

Experience for decades now,

how many of you had times of calm

and times of turmoil, times of peace,

and times of war, times of getting

together and times, you know, fighting?

And every hand goes up.

So it's unrealistic to expect peace

all the time. You don't grow there.

If you get nothing but peace and

support, you stay juveniley dependent.

If you get nothing but the

challenge and conflict,

you get precociously independent.

But if you put the two together,

which is what happens in the

family, you get maximum growth.

Maximum growth and development occurs

at the border of the pairs of opposites.

That's why nature has it. Just like

your body has pairs of opposites,

a sympathetic and parasympathetic

nervous system, one builds and destroys,

and one is catabolic and anabolic. And

so too in the family you'll have this.

You'll have anabolism and catabolism,

build and destroy, support and challenge,

nice and mean, kind and cruel, positive

and negative, whatever it is, extrovert,

introvert, people that are, you know,

resourceful and non resourceful.

So if you look at what it is that you

are dedicated to and write down its

opposite, you'll find it in the family.

The family has nothing missing .

And that's why

if you're under the assumption you're

supposed to get a one-sided world and

living in some sort of moral hypocrisy

that you want always nice and never mean,

always kind, never cruel,

you're going to be very

depressed and very angry at life,

because sorrow is a byproduct

of unmet expectation.

And if you have an expectation

that's one sided and not both sided,

you're going to think something's missing

and you're going to think that there's

something wrong and

you're going to be angry.

And then you're going to be trying to

fix people and they have a different set

of values.

And you can't get people to live in

your values and you can't live in their

values.

But you can honor by communicating what

you value in terms of their values and

respectfully communicate and have a

sustainable fair exchange. In fact,

every symptom in the family dynamic is

trying to teach you to have sustainable

fair exchange, by learning

how and asking the question,

how specifically is what they're

dedicated to in the family,

helping you fulfill what you're dedicated

to and vice versa. If you do that,

you'll not have to fix them,

but you'll learn to communicate in a

way where they're winning and you're

winning. And that's what life's

about. It's teaching you that process.

The family is not there for happiness.

The family is there to teach you how to

be authentic and embrace both sides of

life and be resourceful and learning

how to see the fullness and that there's

nothing missing, and abundance.

How are you going to have a fulfilling

life if you think things are missing,

and empty, and you're

having false expectations?

And if you expect yourself to live in

their values or you expect them to live in

your values, you're

going to have futility.

And a family dynamic is a

spectrum of value systems.

It doesn't work otherwise.

Imagine if every single person had

nothing but family values and just raising

children. Nobody wanted to go to

work. Nobody wanted to build a city,

nobody wanted to do architecture.

Nobody wanted to do drive

cars or fix cars or make cars.

Nobody wanted to do anything

else. They just wanted to do that.

It wouldn't work. And if everybody was

just building cars, that wouldn't work.

And if everybody just did

banking, it wouldn't work.

The society needs a spectrum of values.

Everybody has a different hierarchy of

values, therefore a different perception,

decisions and actions. The

world is set up that way.

So you get a plethora of complete bouquet

of fullness of all the things that are

needed to maximally grow.

And your family is the basic unit of

society that's teaching you how to grow.

And that's why you're going to have

a complementation of opposites.

In the Breakthrough Experience I teach

people how to take the things that you

resent in somebody, because

you keep wanting to fix them,

you think you're superior

and they need to be fixed,

and then you find out where do you

do all the things that they do,

and you find out what's the benefit of

what they've done. And you find out that,

oh, there's nothing to fix,

there's something to appreciate.

And anything you can't appreciate

in the family is your own delusion,

not their actions usually. You

find out that you think, well,

that's a terrible thing they've done. No.

They're balancing out the family dynamic.

Whatever one person's repressing,

the other's expressing.

Nietzsche wrote about this and many

others said that whatever's a collective

society's repressing,

somebody else is expressing.

Well that occurs in the family.

So if I repress ,

I've got three children to

represent all three variations.

And one that's very similar to me and

one that's quite plays the opposite role.

And that's the perfection. And if you

try to get everybody to be the same,

somebody else is not necessary. It's

the pairs of opposites that make things.

It was Heraclitus in the fifth century

BC or so that said that there's a unity

of opposites. And he said that trying

to get a one-sided world will be futile.

And embracing the two sides of life and

seeing the unity and the simultaneity of

those two is liberating.

So in the family dynamic,

if you understand nothing's missing and

you understand the pair of opposites,

your expectations are more grounded.

Imagine if you're going out on a date

with somebody and you expect them to be

nice, never mean, kind, never cruel,

positive, never negative, peaceful,

never wrathful, generous, never stingy,

giving, never taking, considerate,

never inconsiderate, and only one sided.

Well, if you have that expectation,

they're not going to

live up to it. ,

if you do things that support their

value, they'll play that role.

If you do things that challenge

their values, which is probable,

they'll play an opposite role.

And then you're going to be angry and

you're going to be aggressive and blame

them and feel betrayed and

you'll criticize them and

challenge them and you'll

be despaired and depressed and you'll

want to exit and escape and you'll feel

futility and frustration.

And you'll be grouchy and grieving and

you'll hate them and want to hurt them.

And then you'll, you know, be irritable

and irrational and you'll be, you know,

jaded and the jerk , you'll

get all the A-B-C-D-A-E-F-G-H-I-Js

of negativity as a result of

the unrealistic expectation.

So the family's there to teach

you how to embrace a wholeness,

not a one-sided life,

to crack the fantasy that the amygdala

is constantly trying to get you to do,

to survive, and get you in thrival,

and teach you how to be authentic and

teach you to have fair exchange and teach

you how an inspired life.

And it can do that if we have a realistic

expectation on the family dynamics.

So you tell me what you're looking for,

and I'll show you, I've done this many,

many times, I had a woman one time sitting

next to me on a plane and she said,

she's looking for her soulmate. And

I said, what are you looking for?

And she wrote it down, 22 different

things we wrote. And I said, so, okay,

now what's the opposite of those?

And we wrote those down. I said,

who's providing this in your life?

And we found all the people that were

providing it. And she goes, well,

I didn't realize that

I've got it in my life,

it's in a form that I didn't realize.

Then on who's providing this?

And she had those, she had both of

them in her life, it wasn't missing.

And then she realized also that the

things that she thought were all positive

that she was wanting had downsides and

the things that she was trying to avoid

also made her grow and made her more

independent. And then she realized that,

wow, I'm not missing it

and I'm not desperate,

and now I realize I already

have it and it's in my values.

And then she came from a poised state

without a feeling of desperate lack and

which turns guys off when they see that.

And then she was now able to do it and

three weeks later she ended up getting a

guy that matched some of those behaviors.

But she was more receptive for both.

So she was not living in a fantasy

of a one-sided world. So in families,

if you think your values are right and

you project those values onto others,

and they have an opposite set of

values and they're doing it back, well,

you're going to have the war and

the peace going on. But if you,

because you're going to have

similars and differences in it.

The ancient Greeks said if you see

more similarities than differences,

you have infatuation, if you see

more differences than similarities,

you have resentment. When you have

infatuation, you go, oh my God,

we have the same number of

eyes, same number of ribs,

same number of arms and legs, we're

soulmates. And if we have differences,

we don't have anything in common, we're

going in two different directions,

we don't see eye to eye. If

we see both of them together,

support and challenge, similarities

and differences, we have love.

And the family is there

to teach us how to love.

So the dynamics of the family is

really trying to teach you how to

embrace both sides, like a magnet,

there's a whole lot of magnets going on,

all pairs of opposites.

And if you can embrace both

sides and see how both serve you,

then you have a tremendous amount

of resilience and adaptability.

But the second you are judging things

with moral hypocrisies and expecting

somebody to do something that you don't

even do and live a certain way that

you're not even living,

then you're definitely going to have chaos

in the family because you're going to

get the normal chaos,

which is feedback to let you know

you have an unrealistic expectation.

I've helped people in the

Breakthrough Experience, I mean,

every weekend in the

Breakthrough Experience when

people come they usually pick

somebody that they've got a resentment

to that's usually family or relationship

related. And we show

them how to dissolve it,

and how to put the

expectations back into balance,

how to understand people's values,

how to see the pairs of opposites,

how to balance it out

and not have this chaos.

Because the chaos is is

the missing information.

In information theory, and the

gentleman who's Claude Shannon,

who has written about

entropy and thermodynamics,

he said that entropy, which is disorder,

tendency to disorder

is missing information.

And the missing information

is what we're unconscious of.

And what we're unconscious of is the

things we're blind and ignorant to in our

perspectives and expectations on life.

And if we ask the right questions and

become aware of our missing information

and become aware of it, we are very

graced and very poised and very stable.

And so if you'd like a stable,

more poised and more present life,

then come to the Breakthrough Experience

so I can share with you the questions

to make you aware of that and show you

how to put the puzzle together in your

family and realize there's

nothing out of order.

I've had the opportunity to have whole

families come into the Breakthrough and

do each other, do this process,

the Demartini Method on each other.

And there's just tears of gratitude and

they realize there's nothing to fix.

they finally understand it.

But they were comparing the family

to fantasies, ideals, expectations,

their own values, not

understanding pairs of opposites,

not understanding that other

people are playing out the roles.

I remember this gentleman was having

a whole lot of praise at work and was

getting nailed and criticized

at home. And I explained to him,

you get pairs of opposites, if

you get over supported at work,

you're going to get challenged at home.

If you get over supported at home,

you're going to get challenged at work.

There's going to be a pair of

opposites somewhere in your life.

You've gotta have support

and challenge to grow.

And then when you put the puzzle together

and looked at the exact moments when

there was challenge at home and

where the praise was, synchronously,

he was brought to tears. He goes,

my wife is actually doing the

necessary thing to keep me growing.

I'm going out there and getting

praise. I'm getting puffed up,

I'm getting arrogant, I'm projecting

my values onto her. I'm arrogant.

I'm not being authentic. She's

criticizing and challenging me,

bringing me back into

authenticity off the pedestal,

putting it back where we have a match

and I've been addicted to the high and

she's actually helping me get

authentic and not superior.

The superiority complex and pride complex

is not the authentic you and you're

here to be authentic. And

so she's doing her job.

And the second I come down in that

balanced state and don't attach to all the

support, then all of a sudden

she's now appreciating me as I am.

And if I go down and beat myself

up, because I thought, oh,

I screwed up for the day, she lifts me up.

The family dynamic is constantly

trying to get you to authenticity.

The purpose of the marriage is not the

happiness, this euphoric one-sided world.

It's there to help you become authentic.

It's help you to break the delusions

that you're running on your life.

It's there to ask questions and kind

of make you accountable in your life.

And that's the beauty of it. Now,

if you're not married and you never did

have marriage and didn't even have kids,

then nothing's missing.

You'll find out that you're now running

a business as if you're like a mom or a

dad and you've got now employees

that are like the kids,

or the clients that'll be like the kids.

So you'll have the responsibilities

that you didn't have maybe genetically,

but you now have it in another form.

And I've seen women that have big

businesses and they're running it,

they didn't ever have children,

but they have big businesses and

they're running it like a mother,

a matriarchal system.

And then I show them what all the things

that they thought they missed out on,

I didn't have kids. And I go, what

did you not think you you got?

Well I didn't get to diaper and

clean up people's poop. Good,

who you cleaning up the bullshit

in people's lives? She goes,

I'm doing that every day. I

said, so it's not missing.

It's in a form you haven't honored.

And many times if you expect the form

that you are actually creating to be in

somebody else's values or somebody

ideals, you won't appreciate your life.

And that's what I teach people in the

Breakthrough Experience how to embrace the

magnificence of the life that they have

so they're not sitting and comparing

it to fantasies about how it

should be. And as a result of that,

they're setting realistic expectations

on people and on themselves and on the

family. And they're seeing the pairs of

opposites and the order that's there,

and the nothing missingness

and there's more fulfillment.

And that's a different paradigm

than most people thinking.

Most people are telling you this

is how the family should be.

Well those moral idealisms are going to

end up creating conflict because they're

not going to follow it. ,

you're not going to get that.

And I've seen so many people go and read

a book about how they're supposed to be

and then expect that on their family,

their spouse to be a certain way,

and if they're not that way,

there's something wrong and

they need therapy or whatever,

and then they undermine the relationship,

instead of loving the person.

When you love people for who they

are, they turn into who you love.

But if you keep trying to fix them, well,

I don't know of anybody that

wants to be fixed really.

Unless they're asking for mentorship

from somebody and refining it for a sport

or some, being a musician or something

and want feedback, that's one thing.

But I don't know anybody, they

want to be loved for who they are.

People want to make a difference when

they're authentic and when they're

authentic, they maximize that. They

want to be loved for who they are.

And if you actually balance

out your expectations,

realize that people are both sided.

I'm not a nice person or a mean

person as I said, I'm a human being,

an individual with both potentials.

I'm a hero and a villain,

a saint and a sinner. I went

through the Oxford Dictionary,

I found out I had every known trait,

4,628 traits, kind, cruel, nice, mean,

positive, negative, peaceful,

wrathful, honest, dishonest.

I had them all when I

looked honestly at myself.

So if you expect somebody to be

anything but that whole picture,

you're going to end up having

probably a lot of false expectations,

unrealistic expectations. You're going

to end up being angry and depressed.

You're going to want to fix people and

project assumptions on them how they're

supposed to be.

You're thinking that people are

all supposed to be a certain way.

I've seen fathers say well everybody

has to do really well in business.

I've seen mothers say, well

where's your grandchildren?

And these unrealistic expectations

on the rest of them are going to just

backfire. Learn to love people for who

they are and they turn into who you love.

Learn to see that they have

both sides. You do too.

Watch your finger pointing

because it's pointing back at you,

and know that there's nothing missing.

It's in a form you may not be honoring.

Look deeper, broader, look extending

even beyond the genetic family.

And understand the family is

summating and all the combination,

you put all the family together in a

blender you get out a perfect balanced

value structure. And society's trying

to teach you how to be authentic.

And the best way to do it is to have

support and challenge maximally.

We maximally grow and be

ourselves when we have both.

If we get over supported and get

puffed up, we lost our authenticity.

If we get only criticized and we

put down, we lost our authenticity.

We get a balance of both and we're

aware of both simultaneously,

we get ourselves.

And the magnificence of ourselves is

far greater than any fantasies we put or

any nightmares we run the story of.

So stop the victim of history story.

Start putting a realistic expectation on

and appreciate the family dynamic that

you got.

Come to the Breakthrough Experience so

I can really make sure that's solid in

your life and it will save you an enormous

amount of aggravation in your life

and you'll be appreciative about your

life and get on with doing something more

amazing instead of trying to

fix something that's futile.

Let's go and learn about the family

dynamic by having expectations that

are grounded.

There's a lot of moral ideals out there

about how everything's supposed to be,

but that's as Alasdair Macintyre

wrote in his History of Ethics,

that's not how it is,

that's how we wish it was.

And realizing there's an

is and there's an ought to.

And many people are addicted to ought

to's and how they should be instead of how

they are. And when you love people how

they are, instead of how they should be,

you get farther in life than if you do

if you try to keep fixing people and

spending all your time with futile energy.

Come to the Breakthrough Experience.

Let me show you how to broaden

the perspective. See both sides,

appreciate the laws that govern the

family dynamics and then get on with doing

something you love with

the people you love.