Well, I think it might be interesting for us to go down that path because you've, you've written about the, you know, breaking the mother son dynamic and as it are resetting the patterns. Cause I, you know, in a lot of the work that I've seen with men is that there's a projection of their relationship to their mother onto the women that they're with, you know, and I did it,

I did it terribly. Same

here. And you know, I think it's interesting because I don't think I've ever said this on the podcast, but one of the major shifts for me personally was a conversation that I had with my mom that was me stealing the key under the pillow because my mom had substance abuse issues with alcohol quite a bit and, you know, dealt with them, dealt with them on and off for a long time, but didn't really ever address them. And so I was constantly in this role growing up of trying to save, trying to save, trying to save, like you should go to rehab, you know, exactly. The hero, the savior, you know, I'll pay for it. Oh, whatever, you know, I'll come home and drive you there. I'll constantly trying to convince her and the whole thing. Right. And, and finally one day, and you know, I, this was in, you know, years after starting this work and years after reading Aaron John and I sort of like knew of the concept. But one day after doing, doing some work with a mentor of mine, I finally had a conversation with her where I said, you know, whether you decide to continue to drink or not is not up to me. And if you continue to drink, I'll still love you. There'll be some boundaries. I'll still love you. Don't call me if you're drunk. I don't want to talk to you and I won't. I'll just hang up. But I love you. Boundaries. Boundaries. And so that conversation happened and it was this big symbol signal of I'm no longer engaging in this. And it was the first step. And then the second step was when she was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, she was still drinking and she had stage four terminal cancer. And she was basically, she was still drinking. She was given, I don't know how long the timeframe was. And I had to have another conversation with her to reaffirm. And I said, you know, whether you decide to go to chemo and drink, which will kill you, I'll still love you. Whether you decide to get clean and sober and go to chemo, I'll love you. Whether you decide to not do chemo and drink yourself to death, I'll love you. And that's just there. I don't condone the behavior, but I just want you to know that that's where I stand. And that was like this final reclamation of, I'm not going to try and save you or control you or any of those things. I just want you to know that I'm your son and I'm, you know, marching to my own path, you know, and I lived a couple thousand miles away from her. And so it was a really interesting thing, but it hit me a couple of weeks after that conversation. I was like, oh, I got the key. I was like, oh, I went and got, I went and got the key. It was this big, you know, these big conversations. So anyway, I wanted to share that because I think for a lot of men, it seems vague. They're like, okay, well, what does it mean to steal the key? And where does that start? And how do I do that? And so. Well,

and the answer is every man has to find his own way into that material. And again, in the South particularly, but it's kind of all over, but especially, do not speak ill of your mother you can go to jail for speaking ill your mother family

jail yeah

yeah you do not collect 200 or anything you go to jail and my dad actually said that after the flying boy came out which is mostly my holding his feet to the fire and he reads the book and sees the success of it. And then he says, you know, everything that you said in that book about me is true. But if you ever speak ill of your mother, you will not be a son of mine. And for a few years, I didn't. I stayed focused on the father-son wound. You know, my book at my father's wedding that came out with Bantam back in 91, that's healing the father-son wound. And, you know, I had to do, you know, one of the things that I said, I think I was like 36. And I said to my mother, Mom, I don't want to see you, hear from you, talk to you until I'm ready because I continually am projecting this wound, this mother stuff on my girlfriends. And I got to stop. I don't know how I'm going to stop, but I'm going to stop. And one way I feel I must is to totally disconnect for some time because, you know, I'm 36. She's 56. She's a young woman, you might say. And so we did that. And I did a lot of work during the six, eight months that we didn't talk. First time ever. I mean, up till then, we talked once a week, no matter where I was, you know. And then I went to see her. And the first thing she said to me, she'd been going to Al-Anon. My dad was the alcoholic. First thing she said to me right out of the gate, she said, you know, I've been thinking and you have lots of reasons to be angry with me. And I went, oh my God, do I? But so that, that key, you know, one of the things that you said you did with your mother, you said, yes, I'm your son. But what you actually was doing was stopping sonning. You stopped sonning her. See, all the time that you were trying to get her into rehab and this and that and me trying to get my mom to alan on me trying to get my dad to stop drinking although all that is is sunning i'm going to be the dutiful son i'm going to be the hero son and i'm going to take care of you i'm going to be the son so uh one of the things that i try to get men to do as best they can is to look at how they're still sonning their mother and father, if they're still alive, or if they're dead, how they're still sonning their mother and father.