2018-01-08
56 分钟In order to say I grew up in an abusive childhood, you have to say my parents were abusers.
And that's a very hard thing to do because there's never any black or white, you know, and there was mental illness in the case of my mother.
And so it was confronting.
My sister did have therapy a number of years later, and I remember this because she called me up and I said, how did you go?
And she said, did you know that ours is a case of child abuse?
And I said, yeah, I did.
And she was like, spin out.
You know, that was the way she spoke, spin out.
And there was like a pause between us, and then just this sadness.
She said, it's true, though, isn't it?
And I said, yeah, look, it's true.
And it's not about blame, but it is about understanding where you've come from so that you can start the healing process.
Today's guest, Leah Waters, grew up in a tiny town in Australia, 800 people.
And spent the better part of her childhood playing the role of protector of her siblings from physical and emotional abuse from her parents.
That led to a lot of different ways of coping, some of them pretty physically destructive.
Yet she latched onto what she sensed and knew was a fierce sense of intellect and ended up going to school, pursuing her PhD in psychology.
But it wasn't until she got exposed to the world of positive psychology, and strength based psychology in particular, that a lot of things began to really change in her mind.
And when she herself was about to become a parent, she realized that she wanted to take a very different look at both the world.
The way that she practiced her profession, the way that she would end up teaching as a professor at the University of Melbourne, and the way that she was as a parent raising a family that led her down the rabbit hole of positive psychology.
And strength based parenting became a field that she has done a bunch of research in and written a fantastic new book called the Strength Switch, which is all about strength based parenting and really powerful conversation.