Ep.35 In The Blood

In this episode, Marc LaFleur explores how inherited emotional patterns influence our relationships, reactions, and identity. He challenges the idea that certain traits are unchangeable, emphasizing the power of awareness, choice, and intentional growth to break generational cycles.

Main Topics:

• How inherited programming from childhood impacts adult behaviors and reactions
• The science behind attachment patterns and familiar emotional responses in relationships
• Strategies for breaking destructive cycles and rewriting family legacy
• Recognizing and differentiating between familiarity and true compatibility
• The role of awareness and intentional action in personal and generational healing

Transcript

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Welcome back to Hold On Tight episode 35. I appreciate you joining each week. It's so cool to see the audience grow, including hitting over 10,000 followers on Instagram. There's a million podcasts out there. So I appreciate you choosing mine each week. My commitment is no weeks off, and not many podcasters can say that. Doing a new episode every week. So I thank you all for spreading the word. So let's get started. There's a song by John Mayer that came out in 2017 off his album, The Search for Everything, titled In the Blood. In the Blood is about questioning whether the emotional traits, struggles, and patterns we inherit from our parents define who we become, or if we have the power to break free from them. There are a few lines in that song that just sit with you. Such as how much of my mother is still in me? How much of my father am I destined to become? Will it wash out in the water? Or is it always in the blood? And I've been thinking about that a lot. Because if I'm being honest, how much of you is actually you? And how much of you is just something you inherited from your parents or generations before that? Most people walking around right now aren't operating on choice, they're operating on programming. Stuff they picked up as kids, how love was shown, how conflict was handled, whether emotions were expressed or buried. You didn't choose any of that, but it got wired into you anyway. And now you're out here living life, working, dating, building relationships, trying to grow, and wondering why you react the way you do. Why you shut down, why you chase, why you feel like you're really never enough. Most of the time you're not reacting to that person in front of you. You're reacting to something that started decades ago. And here's the part nobody wants to admit. People love to say, that's just how I am. No, that's how you were conditioned. And this is where I've had to really get honest with myself. Because not everything I inherited, I kept. My dad, growing up, I saw someone who struggled with depression, negativity. He came from a broken home, no positive male role model, anger, bitterness. But here's the part that matters. That wasn't random. That's what he saw growing up. That was his environment. That was what was modeled for him. So that became his lens. That became how he saw the world. And I saw it early, really young. And I'm not gonna sit here and pretend it was some clean, simple realization. Fuck no. It wasn't. It was confusing, it was heavy at times. There were moments where you could feel that palpable energy in the room, and as a kid, you don't have the language for it, but you fucking know what it is. You feel the negativity, you feel the weight of it, you feel how it changes the environment. And I remember thinking, not in some polished self-help way, but more like, fuck, I don't want to feel this way when I'm older. I don't want to live like this. And I remember thinking, that's not who I'm gonna be. I didn't want to live like that. I didn't want to walk around negative, I didn't want to be bitter, I didn't want to see the world through that filter. So I decided, and I didn't even realize it at the time, but I was interrupting a pattern that had been running long before me. What I decided to do is what the professionals call intergenerational healing or breaking generational trauma. It's addressing the trauma, dysfunctional behaviors, or emotional burdens that have been passed down from one generation to the next. On the flip side, my mom and maternal grandmother had this compassion to them, patience, understanding, the ability to care deeply, and to their faults, sometimes too much, too deeply, and probably given to those that didn't deserve it. But that's something I leaned into, something I chose to carry forward. So when people say it's in your blood and you can't change it, I call bullshit. You can look at one parent and say, that stops with me, and look at another and say, I'm taking that with me. That's awareness, that's choice. Even the parts of my mother and grandmother that were good perhaps didn't have boundaries to them. And I had to learn to implement boundaries on my output. But here's where it gets real. Because even when you break one cycle, it doesn't mean you're free from all of them. You might not carry the negativity, you might not carry the bitterness, but there are other patterns that are a little bit more subtle, a little harder to see, like how you love, how you attach, how you hold on. I've seen that in my own life. As I've talked about many a times, I've been in relationships that felt effortless. Chemistry off the charts, connection instant, like this is it. And when it feels like that, you don't question it. You lean all the way in, you think this must be right. But I had to stop and ask myself, is this healthy or is this just familiar? Because here's what I want people to understand even the things that feel good, even the things that feel natural can still be patterns. Familiar doesn't mean right. Familiar just means you've felt it before. And there's actually science behind this. Your brain is wired for efficiency and survival, not necessarily happiness. So it's constantly scanning for what it recognizes, and you know what? It's what feels predictable. And when you meet someone who triggers a familiar emotional experience, even if that experience came from something unhealthy growing up, your brain doesn't warn you. It says, I know this, this feels like home. Psychologists call this attachment patterns, the way we're wired to connect based on early experiences. And those patterns don't just show up in toxic relationships, they show up in the ones that feel pretty fucking good, really electric. That instant chemistry, that deep pull, that feeling like you've known someone forever, right? Like the second someone walked into that bar on that first date, you just knew, yeah, per. Sometimes that's not compatibility, though. Sometimes that's recognition. Recognition of a dynamic your nervous system has already experienced. And your nervous system loves what's familiar, even if it hurt you before. That's where people get stuck because they confuse intensity with alignment, chemistry with compatibility, familiarity with love. And if you don't stop and ask yourself whether you're drawn to something because it's right, or because it's something you already understand, you'll keep walking into the same feeling with different people, same movie, different cast of characters. There's another line that's on that hits me pretty hard. And it goes, what about this feeling that I'm never good enough? This one's real. Because a lot of people carry that and don't even know where it came from. They just know that no matter what they do, no matter how they show up, there's still that voice telling them they're not enough. And if you don't address that, it shows up everywhere. You start overgiving, over-proving, over investing, trying to earn something that was never supposed to be earned in the first place. And I've caught myself in that too. Wanting to show up at a high level, be consistent, be present, be the guy that does it right. But if you're not careful, you start expecting that same level back from people who simply aren't capable of meeting you there. And my God, have I lived that. And when they don't, you don't walk away. What do you do? You buckle up, you hold on tighter, you try harder. Yeah, it's another pattern. So now we get back to the real question. Is it in the blood or can't it be changed? But here's the truth. Yeah, it's in you. Your tendencies, your instincts, your triggers, they're real. But does that mean you're stuck? You don't get to choose what you inherited, but you absolutely choose what you reinforce and what you break. And now this is where the real world work starts. Not looking outward, looking inward. Asking yourself where you ignored the signs, where you overrode your standards, where you stayed when you should have stepped back. That's not weakness, that's awareness. And awareness is everything. If you want to break the cycle beginning today, and you're listening and this resonates, it starts with seeing it in real time when you're triggered, when something feels off, catching it. This just happened to me this week. And then, but you gotta own it. Not blame your past, not justify it. Just fucking own it and say, Yeah, this is mine now. I'm in control. Then you gotta interrupt it. If your instinct is to chase, you pause. If your instinct is to hold on, you release. If your instinct is to overgive, step back. That's how cycles break. And then you repeat it over and over again because those old patterns have been running your whole life and they're not going anywhere quietly. Trust me, this is going to take reps, time, patience, and you will fall back in those traps from time to time. But catching yourself in real time, that's the difference. And don't expect to do this on your own. Get the help of a therapist, do research, read the books. There's so many out there on how to break this cycle. But allow me to do this. Allow me to take this one step further. Because this isn't just about you. There's a line in that song that goes, Does a broken home become another broken family? Then that hits different when you have kids. Because now it's not just about what you carry, it's about what you pass on. Your kids are watching everything. Maybe not listening to everything, but they're watching everything. They don't inherit your intentions, they inherit your behaviors. The question becomes, are you repeating it or are you rewriting it? Because you can be the one that changes it. You can be the one that says, it might be in me, but it's not going any further. That's leadership, that's growth, that's legacy. So yeah, maybe some of this is in the blood. But so is this. The power to step back, the power to see it, the power to choose something different. You're not stuck, you're just unexamined. Take a real look at yourself. No ego, no excuses, just honesty. What patterns are you running? What are you holding on to that isn't serving you? What are you calling love that might actually just be familiarity? Because once you see it, you can change it. Break the cycle, do the work, become the one it stops with. So I'm going to wrap up this episode with a closing remark or two. The more I think about it, the more I believe this. How we express love, how we receive it, even what we're drawn to, a lot of that is already in our blood. You can love someone deeply and still be honest about what they awakened in you. You can look back and say that was real. So real. It mattered. That changed me. And still admit not everything that felt powerful was meant to stay. That's the hard part about love. All kinds of love. Sometimes the person who woke something up in you is not the person who gets to walk with you for the rest of your life. Sometimes they were the mirror, sometimes they were the lesson, sometimes they were the interruption that forced you to finally look at yourself. And that doesn't make the love fake, it just makes it incomplete. And maybe that's where this whole idea of in the blood really hits. Because sometimes it's not just the person, it's what they tapped into inside of you. The way it felt so natural, so instant, so undeniable. It can feel like it was meant to be, like it was written somewhere deeper than logic, like you've lived past lifetimes together. But maybe part of that poll wasn't destiny. Maybe part of it was familiarity. Maybe part of it was something already living inside you, something your nervous system recognized before your mind could even catch up. And that doesn't take away from how real it felt. It just means you have to be honest about what part of that feeling was connection and what part of it was conditioning. Because the goal is not to become cold, the goal is to not stop feeling, the goal is to not punish your heart for loving hard. The goal is to become wise enough to know the difference between what feels familiar and what is safe, steady, mutual, and real. You can always carry the imprint of someone who mattered. You can always have a place in you that remembers what it felt like when it was good, when it was easy, when it felt like everything lined up in so many different ways. That doesn't go away. It never will. Maybe that's the part of what stays in the blood. But eventually if you want peace, if you want growth, if you want a different future, you must choose love now, not just the love you felt then. You must choose the kind of love that doesn't ask you to abandon yourself, the kind of love that doesn't live on confusion, inconsistency, longing, and hope. Choose the kind of love that feels less like a roller coaster and more like peace, less like survival and more like home. And maybe that starts with choosing yourself. Maybe it starts with being the one who says, I can honor what that was, I can respect what it meant, I can carry what was real about it, but I will not keep calling pain, uncertainty, or familiarity love just because my heart recognized it. That's the work, that's the shift, that's how you break the cycle. Not by denying the love, not by pretending it didn't matter, because it sure did, but by deciding from this point forward, love has to be more than intense. It has to be healthy, it has to be reciprocal, it has to be clear, it has to choose you back. So maybe people stay with us in a way that isn't even visible. Maybe they live in the way we think, the way we feel, the way we learned. Maybe they help shape parts of us that will carry forward into something better. And maybe the strongest thing you can do is recognize that just because something felt like it was written into you doesn't mean it's meant to define you. Because what's in the blood might explain you, but it doesn't get to decide you. That part is still yours, that choice is still yours. So choose the healthiest love, choose the earned love, choose the calm love, choose the love that doesn't cost you your sanity to keep. Choose the love that meets you where you are and builds with you from there. And if part of you still holds on to something from the past, that's okay. That doesn't make you weak, that makes you human. Just don't let what's familiar keep you from what's right. So until next week, tell someone you love them, and let's fucking go.