Episode 41: Responsible for the Universe

Manny Wolfe

About:

Manny Wolfe is the author of the international best-selling memoir, The Tao of the Unbreakable Man The story of my life, told unflinchingly, that served as the most powerful growth tool in my life.

Born in a hippy commune in Berkeley, California, during the notorious Manny Wolfe’s childhood, was marked by violence, brainwashing, drug abuse, and worst of all, no guidance. He brings to the table wisdom and a new perspective.

Social Media:

Facebook: Manny Wolfe

Podcast Transcript:

Damaged Parents: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Relatively Damaged podcast by Damaged Parents were confused, beaten, scarred people come to learn. Maybe. Just maybe we're all a little bit damaged. Someone once told me it's safe to assume. 50% of the people I meet are struggling and feel wounded in some way. I would venture to say it's closer to 100%.

Every one of us is either currently struggling or has struggled with something that made us feel less than like we aren't good enough. We aren't capable. We are relatively damaged. And that's what we're here to talk about. In my ongoing investigation of the damage self, I want to better understand how others view their own challenges.

Maybe it's not so much about the damage, maybe it's about our perception and how we deal with it. There is a deep commitment to becoming who we are meant to be. How do you do that? How do you find balance after a damaging experience? My hero is the damaged person. The one who faces seemingly insurmountable odds to come out on the other side, whole.

Those who stare directly into the face of adversity with unyielding persistence to discover their purpose. These are the people who inspire me to be more fully me. Not in spite of my trials, but because of them. Let's hear from another hero. Today's topic includes sensitive material, which may not be appropriate for children. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advice. The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the person who gave them.

Today, we're going to talk with Manny Wolf. He's had many roles in his life. Father sibling, child and author of international best-selling memoir the Dow of the unbreakable man. We'll talk about how telling his story unflinchingly, allowed him to learn and grow in a way he never expected. Let's talk. 

 Welcome Manny Wolfe to Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We're so glad you're here today.

Manny Wolfe: [00:02:04] Thank you. I'm glad to be here today.

Damaged Parents: [00:02:05] Yeah. Now you are the author of an international best-selling memoir the toe of the, did I say that right? The toe.

Manny Wolfe: [00:02:13] It's everybody has a different pronunciation of the word. It's I think it's Dow da da w but it's spelled T a O

Damaged Parents: [00:02:22] Okay. Okay. So we'll say, so I'm going to say that again. The Tao of the Unbreakable Man, and underneath that on the pre quested form, you said the story of my life told unflinchingly that served as the most powerful growth tool in your life. Can you explain that to us?

Manny Wolfe: [00:02:41] I'm really glad that you, focused in on that, because of all the things that the book means to me, in a way that touches on the most important thing. I mean, I was just, I was headed for, as they say in in alcoholics anonymous or narcotics anonymous of which I was at, I don't know, alumni of both.

They say, if you continue down the road, you're on, it leads to one of three places, jails, institutions, and death. And that's, that's pretty accurate. And I was heading for. Let's see, I had done institutions. I had done, I guess I had done jails, not like mental institutions or anything. And I really was, I was convinced in my, in the core of my being that I was heading for death, I was just utterly convinced of that.

it started to my life, started to get like, what would be a good analogy. Like if you're operating a piece of heavy equipment, like a car or something, and suddenly the critical system stopped working and you realize you're in this thing that you can no longer control, you know? And it's much, it's much bigger than you.

Damaged Parents: [00:03:44] So you found yourself in that place and then you were able to win because what I get from that statement is that by telling your story, that that was the conduit to grow.

Manny Wolfe: [00:03:58] Well, by telling my story a certain way, because I had, gotten very good, like I've observed that most addicts among other things have, at telling stories a certain way to elicit a certain response. And so, in a way, for me telling the story unflinchingly, was a process of undoing something I had gotten very good at doing.

I'm just, working people, you know, manipulating people through my story. I have any number of, events in my life that make the average person go, Oh dear God. You know, and, and then, and it was very easy to, to elicit sympathy from people for that or to very sort of humble. Braggingly put myself up on a pedestal.

I think it was, if you have a really, really challenging history, And you're manipulative, which I very much was before I knew knew better. It's pretty easy to do that. It's pretty easy to work the sort of,  the sympathy, and the unlikely hero angle on people.

Damaged Parents: [00:05:00] Like a victim mentality. Like, were you still playing the victim card then

Manny Wolfe: [00:05:04] Oh 100%.

Yeah. And so to tell it unflinchingly, like I came to a moment, of clarity where everything had just come down to being totally out of my control  and I. Made a choice that like, I don't care what is on the other side of the unknown, I have to stop doing this. Whatever I'm doing here has got to stop because I was, I mean, I was literally making plans to kill somebody with somebody else while holding guns.

And, you know, there's this voice inside of me or this awareness inside of me. That's just like going off like alarms, just what the hell are you doing? And so I disappear from my whole life. I just Kaiser Soze and so I disappeared, uh, left it all behind and then started to rebuild, started to get sober, started to look for ways to piece my life together because that was a terrifying moment. It was just a horrible moment for me. And I had crossed so many lines of my own sort of personal standards and ethics to get to that point. And yeah, in that moment, it was like, I, if I crossed this line, no matter what the outcome, I mean, cause there's no guarantee we'd even succeed. Right. And then what if we did succeed?

So there was no good was no good outcomes. I really had to undo those things. I really had to understand how I could have gotten there in the first place.

Damaged Parents: [00:06:26] Okay, that makes sense. So unflinchingly is, I'm going to look at what got me to this point

Manny Wolfe: [00:06:33] It was more about. It was about what got me to this point, but it was more about there's this. I feel that it was very, elegant and very literary the way I did it, but there was this sort of like this awareness inside of me the whole time I was using drugs and being a criminal and all those things.

And in the book, I called it the moral man. The part of me that knew what I was doing was wrong. The part of me that was out of control, you know, he might as well have been like locked away, but he could see, he could watch it all. And he's just going, what the hell? Like this is not us. And so after I left and then I started to get sober and I started to look at, spiritual tools, by the way, I, I still to this day, although I'm not, I don't consider myself in AA or in NA, I think that the spiritual tools that you'll learn there were just of the highest caliber.

Damaged Parents: [00:07:26] Yeah,

Manny Wolfe: [00:07:26] really good.

Damaged Parents: [00:07:28] uh, in fact, I was talking to someone in recovery also that doesn't consider themselves in AA. And I had asked them about what they thought about the steps as far as learning emotional intelligence. And if that was a factor.

Manny Wolfe: [00:07:40] yeah. It was learning emotional intelligence. It was learning accountability. Yeah. That might've been the biggest one. I think that there's a tendency among people who wind up in the kind of situations that I round up in to, to not really understand what accountability is to say nothing of like radical accountability,

Damaged Parents: [00:07:58] Right. Okay. I'm just, I want to let you know, I love puppies and it sounds like you have a puppy or is it? Oh, you've got three. Okay. So we are hearing them in the background. I'm loving it. So thank you.

Manny Wolfe: [00:08:10] good. That's Arlo, Arlo is the loudest.

Damaged Parents: [00:08:13] Yeah. We have five here. So they are a way

Manny Wolfe: [00:08:16] Oh, you can relate.

Damaged Parents: [00:08:17] I can totally relate. Yeah. That's why I was chuckling. I was like, I want to know who these puppies are. They're speaking to us. They want to tell their story today, right?

Manny Wolfe: [00:08:25] Well, Arlo's always telling his story to anyone who will listen.

Damaged Parents: [00:08:28] He's he's trying to show you up, man.

Manny Wolfe: [00:08:31] He is, he is. And if, I mean by his accounting, it's been a hard life.

Damaged Parents: [00:08:36] right. Yes. Yes. So I'm sorry. I got us distracted there because

I was enjoying the puppy talk.

Manny Wolfe: [00:08:42] The whole piece about telling the story unflinchingly was, uh, it did, first of all, it came to me after great many years. That was not something I just got sober, changed my life and said, Oh, I think I'll just tell my story unflinchingly. I really had to recondition myself out of that whole sort of survival mode, uh, manipulation hustler kind of approach to how I interacted with people. And so I wound up doing all kinds of personal improvement, work, all kinds of self-help stuff. You know, I became, fans of. No. I don't know everybody from Lao-Tzu to Wayne Dyer, to Tony Robbins, to whoever I'm really looking for, how to piece together, my own sort of methodology and ideology that would help me. And there was still always this sort of instinctive tendency when, you know, in certain situations to, to be what ultimately comes down to deceptive.

Damaged Parents: [00:09:38] Okay. How was that? I mean, that was working for so long and it sounds like it was a really great tool for you. So when you figured out you wanted to change, how difficult was that?

Manny Wolfe: [00:09:53] I mean, for me, it was extraordinarily difficult. It was akin to the analogy of like feeling around in a dark room, that you just sort of know, at least I, in my case, I just, I knew there was a lot that I didn't want to do anymore. And there was a lot that I didn't want to be anymore. You know, I cobbled together as I like to say, an approach I cobbled together a way of looking at life that allowed me to, think first, before I got angry and to sort of analyze my own behavior to a certain extent, and then writing the book, I actually liked telling this part of the story.

I like telling all of the story, but this one part I really like, because I was doing exactly what I was talking about, where I was sort of blindly telling these horrible stories in order to impress. And I was doing this to the woman I was dating at the time who then became my wife. And I'm just like telling her these like unbelievably terrible stories that I'm glib about it.

Normally this was the kind of thing that would get me sympathy and it would, I'd get energy from it and good feedback. Well, she just looked at me, she just looked at me like, I don't know how to describe it. She just cornered me with a look and she's got like a little bit of water welling up in her eye.

And she says, you have to write this down. You have to write a book. None of the attempts to manipulate worked, she's just like, you have to write a book. And I kind of like backpedaled. And I said, Oh, well, I always thought I'd write a book, but I thought I'd do it after I got more successful.

And she acted like she was hitting the stomach. and she's just like the fact that you're here, the fact that you're alive, the fact that you're actively engaging in the struggle to be a good single parent to your son. The fact that, that's success and I didn't have anywhere left to go when she said that, you know, I was just sort of, again, cornered by her, just the honesty of the moment.

Said okay. I'll do it. And I literally went home that night and started writing.

Damaged Parents: [00:11:45] It gets really interesting. The words you used to define success was being actively engaged in the struggle or what she used

actively engaged. And because as I was browsing through the book and reading over your sheet, there, wasn't just one struggle.

Manny Wolfe: [00:12:03] No, there was not just one struggle. I always hope that I can be a beacon for people because when people tend to talk about and articulate struggles, it tends to be one struggle. And so those of us who felt like we have literally just had brutally hard lives for years on years on years feel like they're, it seems like there are very few people who kind of talk about that and who talk about coming out the other side.

If this, literally, if this podcast did one thing, it would be that I was happy about. It would be for someone to hear it and realize that like, my life was bloody fucking hard. I mean, it was just hard for decades, decades. It wasn't easy, hard, easy, hard, easy, hard, easy, hard in all of what it was.

I learned to build a positive attitude. I learned to do what I would now call like reframing and assessing my own thought process and  taking command of the space between stimulus and response, all of these things. I didn't know, that's what they were called. I didn't know what I was doing.

I just knew it was like, there were moments when I got really, really dark and I was like, am I the kind of person that could commit suicide? And I was, I, it was very clear. I was not, you know, I was just, it was fortunately, I guess it was just like, not a thing that was really on the table for me.

Damaged Parents: [00:13:24] So the thoughts still came.

Manny Wolfe: [00:13:27] well, not the thoughts of suicide, but thoughts of like, God, is this what my whole life is going to be until I die. And so since quote, taking the easy way out was not an option. I then resolved, you know, I then asked the question, am I tough enough to do this? Do I have what it takes to do that?

If this is the rest of my life, can I do this? And I said, yes. And from that, that kind of just creeped open a little bit of, a little bit of a place to go wherein I could begin to change my perception of things. I remember when I lived in Stockton, which if you, I don't know how much of the book you read, but Stockton was very, very traumatic and very, very, had a huge impression on me.

It's an incredibly dangerous city, you know, and it's, it's incredibly racially charged and it's incredibly like, economically, it's difficult to get ahead there. It's all these things, it's a bad, it's a bad rap, you know, and I had some profound moments within that because like the police hated the black people that lived there.

And I mean, they hated me too But, you know, it was, it seemed pretty evident to me that black people in Mexican people in particular were extraordinarily profiled by the police and that there was high mortality rates for young black men and all these things. And within all of that, I remember some really sort of touchstone interactions with like these old black guys and old black ladies who had so much peace and happiness in their hearts, they were poor as dirt.

You know, like it was like, it was iconic. It was out of a movie. And I use those, to go like, look, those people found peace, happiness, and serenity. And they clearly haven't had like life handed to them. If they can do it, I can do it. So it was sort of that kind of thing.

Damaged Parents: [00:15:11] Regardless of what life is going to be, you can choose to find joy and happiness or not.

Manny Wolfe: [00:15:19] And then only many, many years later, when I discovered the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, wherein he talks about that exact thing. He talks about the last of the great human freedoms, which is our ability to choose our reaction to the world around us. And so I cobbled together, all those things in the midst of what, by any standard is an incredibly difficult life.

And I don't say that to gain sympathy and like, I'm not interested in anybody's sympathy or anything, but it was hard. It was hard. You know, I almost died many, many times. By my own hand and by others. And so what happened was. In sort of resigning myself to, okay, all right. I can do this then little by little, my whole world changed.

Damaged Parents: [00:16:02] So it sounds like accepting that it might be how it was, which was super challenging

Manny Wolfe: [00:16:09] Yeah.

Damaged Parents: [00:16:10] by coming to accept that made it possible to change.

Manny Wolfe: [00:16:15] A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I have yet to see a success coach, a mindset coach, uh, any of these new age coaches who basically all promise the same thing, some sort of a transformation who, when you reduce a way, their particular language, aren't talking about that exact thing. It's, it's cornerstone to what the whole industry teaches. Know, it's the only, it's interesting because it's the only real change there is.

All the other change is sort of stacked on top of that. Right. But the only real change there is, is in changing your ability to choose what kind of person you want to be and what kind of, experience you want to have within the world around you.

Damaged Parents: [00:16:59] Right. So I think makes sense, because if you can accept where you're at right now, then maybe you're not projecting where you think you should be, which leads to expectations, which we jokingly talked about before, before we started the podcast. How do you get to that point?

I mean, for you, it sounds like it was just almost a moment, but, and there were yet many, many, many moments before that where it may be, could have happened and maybe not. I don't know. Can you explain.

Manny Wolfe: [00:17:29] It's not something I've mapped out. If anything was the conflicting sort of pressures of the real experiences that were happening to me around me and that I was creating too, but unaware that I was creating them which by the way, that's what happens if you are sort of adopting the victim mentality, right.

You're creating these experiences, then you're blaming the world for them.

Damaged Parents: [00:17:51] Because I, that is also very confusing to me. So if we could talk about that a little bit, and I think it's probably confusing to a lot of people because

Manny Wolfe: [00:18:00] Slippery stuff.

Damaged Parents: [00:18:01] right. Yet you grew up in, in this really difficult situation and then, so you then start creating more difficult situations for yourself where you just put yourself in those positions.

How does that work?

Manny Wolfe: [00:18:15] well, to take a very nuanced and oblique idea and make it simple to understand. Yes. But that doesn't capture all of the doubt and second guessing and confusion and feeling around blind that happens in the process. Right? So it's one of those things where it's like, yes, the truth is that we create our reality.

Well, that's nice. And you can put it on a greeting card. Right. You know what I mean?

 But that's like the reflection at the top of the Lake that, that in no way talks about how deep the Lake is, you know, in no way in form, it's a huge, huge process. That is then sort of, uh, wrapped up in this nice tidy little, Oh, well we create our own realities

Damaged Parents: [00:18:59] Yeah. And it's, I think probably super difficult to accept and understand and furthermore, to understand, because you know, like I know people in my own life, it seems like just one thing after another always happens to them. And it doesn't seem like to me, it does not seem like to me at all that they're going out and asking for it.

So when do you know the difference or how do you figure it out? I don't know.

Manny Wolfe: [00:19:25] And honestly, I don't really know either, but what I know and it's because first I saw person after person, after person talking about it. And then I did it myself. That's my litmus test, but there's no scholarly research that I can share with you or anything. Right. No peer reviewed, whatever, but.

When I heard over and over and over again that, things like little platitudes, like change your thinking, change your life, you create your reality, all of these kinds of little different cliches. And then it happened for me. And it happened for me because I was in sort of a pressure cooker between like knew that I wasn't the kind of guy that would cop out and just end my own life.

So that was off the table, you know? And yet my life is this really, really, really challenging set of circumstances. And it just seemed like every time I got up life knocked me back down. Every time I got up life knocked me back down. Well, if I'm being brutally honest, every time I got up, I still had residual sort of like, How could I even put this?

Like everything that I had done was still waiting to come back on me, the chickens come home to roost, you know what I mean? And so every time we played victim, no matter how it is big or little, we are creating a deficit in a sense, in an abstract sense. And that deficit has to come back and balance itself.

There was a period in my life where I was a single dad to a young kid. I was incredibly committed to fatherhood and to taking care of my son. I was also running a construction company, not a big one at that time. Not a successful one and so it's easy to look at that and go, well, I didn't give my son enough attention today because.

I had to go out and work 12 hours to bring the money in, to pay for whatever. Right. And that's true on the surface, but you could also say that when I was much younger, I made choices not to go in different directions that could have wound me up either with a different kind of income, a different kind of work, a different kind of situation where, where me and the mom were still together, any of a number of different outcomes that I didn't do.

And so the radical level of accountability is to say, I don't even have to know what it is, but somewhere my choice has led to this.

Damaged Parents: [00:21:46] Right. So I think what I hear you saying in that your choice has led to this is even right now what's coming into your life is based on what, I guess, in some sense, the seeds you planted earlier are coming to fruition.

Manny Wolfe: [00:22:02] mixed with, that my sort of engagement, the way I engage with the world, the thought processes I have. Right. I got very, very good at finding an extraordinarily good. I think at being able to find the bright side, I got very, very good at conditioning. My mind to always look for the answer, always look for the solution, always look for the way out.

And those skills are, they're worth that probably the most valuable skillset I have

Damaged Parents: [00:22:26] So, because you went through those struggles, you were able to look for the solutions, but

Manny Wolfe: [00:22:32] not quite

Damaged Parents: [00:22:33] not quite okay.

Manny Wolfe: [00:22:34] because many people go through those struggles and never really changed from them.

Damaged Parents: [00:22:38] Okay.

Manny Wolfe: [00:22:39] Right. At some point somewhere along the line, I don't know exactly what it was. I don't have a, I don't have a pin in the map that says it was exactly right here, but at some point I developed a tendency toward, taking responsibility, even if I couldn't see how I caused it.

Damaged Parents: [00:22:59] Okay.

So right now you see your responsibility in whatever is happening in your life. So it's not about blame blaming anyone else for what is happening in your life. And because by blaming, then you become the victim.

Manny Wolfe: [00:23:19] A hundred percent. Yeah I will occasionally for short amounts of time, uh, in certain areas default to blaming, but I catch it really quickly now. And in most areas I don't blame it all

Damaged Parents: [00:23:32] And how hard was that to start catching yourself

Manny Wolfe: [00:23:35] pretty hard.

Damaged Parents: [00:23:36] right. But what, I mean, how hard was it to even notice that you were doing it? I'm assuming this is not something you just make a decision and it happens. This is something I'm thinking that you make a decision and it's like, you're moving slow, like molasses.

Manny Wolfe: [00:23:50] And that was my experience, you know, there's I find that I was always sort of a catharsis junkie. No, like I wanted the lightning bolt to come from above and just blast the crap out of me. And suddenly everything was different. And in some places, in some circumstances, I think catharsis is a really powerful thing, but whatever the opposite of catharsis is like process or something, I think I became the kind of person that was okay.

That with being in process, rather than I got to get to the outcome.

Damaged Parents: [00:24:21] Okay. So learning to love the journey.

Manny Wolfe: [00:24:25] but let let's say this, let's say this learning to do the journey. Okay.

Damaged Parents: [00:24:30] Okay.

Manny Wolfe: [00:24:31] Learning to accept the journey.

Damaged Parents: [00:24:33] For whatever it is.

Manny Wolfe: [00:24:34] Yeah. And I'm recalling taking my son on a hike and his little brother. On a hike one day and they're just complaining every step of the way. And there I am. I'm like, ah, what a beautiful metaphor. This is, my legs are sore too.

My feet are tired too, but I'm choosing to look around me and see all this beauty. And then here are these two ungrateful little teenagers where it is all is about as my feet and my back is tired and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Like I was just accepting that this is the journey I'm on, you know? And, and there's some power in that.

I think if we had to make it a process, it would be if you can accept the journey and you can, if you're ready to say there's this notion in Buddhism. And I don't remember the name of it, uh, where they will sit and they will meditate with their hands. Cup together like that with their thumbs touching or barely touching.

And this is supposed to be symbolic of, I take responsibility for everything in the universe the idea. As I understand it is that as humans, it's challenging to take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives. Our minds are just like elastic, you know, like rubber bands that snap back to, but it isn't my fault.

It isn't my fault. If you go just as big as you can I take responsibility for everything,

Damaged Parents: [00:25:56] Okay.

Manny Wolfe: [00:25:56] all of it. I don't have to know how it doesn't have to make sense. I take responsibility for it. You know, it's an abstraction that's meant to create perspective. Oh, a meteorite just hit Mars. I take responsibility for that.

You know, then from that perspective, it starts to be easier to see that yeah, shit happened to you. It did. It happened to all of us. You really have two choices. You can. I mean, again, to reduce a complex thing down to a simple analogy, every one of us had a period in our life where we were 100% victimized.

We were not given the opportunity to say, what ideology would you like to have put in your head? You know what I mean? What belief system do you choose? New human. We just don't get it.

It's and, and it would, it's laughable when you think about it that way. And so at the very least, we got our parents sort of individual unique manifestos downloaded into our consciousness.

Damaged Parents: [00:26:54] Yeah, with the good and the bad, whether

Manny Wolfe: [00:26:56] Good, whether it's good, bad,

awful, amazing. A mix of both. Doesn't matter what it is. There's a period where you don't have autonomy in your life. You just don't. And so every one of us can play the victim card. We can all point to our childhoods and cry or knowing that that has percent of the time that has helped anyone is absolutely zero. It is not approaching zero it's zero it's flat line. It's just a decimal point. Then we can say, maybe I'd like to try something that's more empowered. That gives me more autonomy, more sovereignty of choice. The only option there is to do some form of, I take responsibility for all of it.

Damaged Parents: [00:27:38] Right. And because it sounds like what you're saying is by taking responsibility is also owning it. This is where I came from. This is where I am. And by owning it, you're better able to say, well, you know what? I don't like that. And now I can change maybe what I can, bring to myself in the future.

Manny Wolfe: [00:27:59] Yeah. I have yet to see somebody who was, you know, sort of in victim mode ever demonstrate autonomy of choice.

Damaged Parents: [00:28:07] Right. So, and I'm thinking that people have to get there. But you can't make someone shift out of victim

Manny Wolfe: [00:28:15] No, you can't. And I will tell you, even if they pay you thousands of dollars in coaching fees, you still cannot make them pop out of it. I have literally had people pay me thousands of dollars just to tell me their sob story and they refuse to get out of it.

Damaged Parents: [00:28:31] So when and how does someone know they're ready to step out of victim or learned helplessness or whatever label we want to put on it?

  How did they know.

Manny Wolfe: [00:28:42] I don't think it's the same for every person, but I think if you could reduce it down to, like, let's say let's use the analogy of a chemical reaction, right? You add enough of this chemical to this base. And at some point you get a reaction. I think it's the same thing.

It's maybe different for each person, but ultimately I think Tony Robbins was the one who said change doesn't happen until the pain of staying the same becomes too great. I really think that's what it is. I think in the beginning, real transformation is down in the mud. It's dirty. It's, it's scraped knuckles and chipped teeth.

You know, it's, it's not this absurd love light and rainbows nonsense. that's the biggest disservice anyone could do to the world of personal change is to put up all that, that rainbows and unicorns crap, because the person coming in who doesn't have any frame of reference might believe that.

And they might not know how to process the deeply uncomfortable things. They're about to experience, yeah. So again, I, I'm not sure that you can say it's sort of like, I guess, you know, when they start taking action,

Damaged Parents: [00:29:52] Okay. So th that would be us knowing.

Manny Wolfe: [00:29:54] yeah. I think that's how, you know, somebody is ready is when they do the things that a ready person does, you know?

Damaged Parents: [00:30:01] Okay. So when you started taking responsibility for everything in your life, you said that was like a rubber band that kept snapping back. I mean, it sounds, it sounds like there were some moments. Maybe you could give us an example of when that when you try, you went to take responsibility and then you found that rubber band coming back at you.

Manny Wolfe: [00:30:20] A lot of it. So the ability to take responsibility. You're probably gonna find that it tends to have these sort of, connections to whatever your biggest wounds are. And my biggest wounds, I believe, were around a really insecure attachment style to my mother. And so that led me to, like I had the experience that as soon as I hit puberty, I was just like, catnip girls just loved me and I never, so I never had to learn how to talk to a woman.

I never had to learn how to interact with them as, other humans. It was just like, they would throw themselves at me. And as a horny 14 year old, I was like, great, this is awesome. And that went on all through until I got sober. It continued like that. And so after I got sober, one of the things that really immediately, like, it was like the day I got sober, I was like, I cannot stand the way I treat and interact and think about women.

I have to change that. And I just had no idea what that would entail. And so it took years and years and years of reflection and experimentation and the rubber band snapping back over and over and over again, in relationships and the fun house mirrors kind of reality of like, okay, I really think this is different.

I think I've made progress, finding myself in the exact same emotional sort of pattern with yet another woman

Damaged Parents: [00:31:44] Okay. So I think what I hear you saying is you wanted to change the relationship with women, and then you would get into these relationships, find yourself in the same situation. I'm thinking that the rubber band coming back would be there's. There's a what's the word I'm looking for? Do you know what the height of a story climax of the story, right. Or the pinnacle yet. and you think maybe this is going to be different. And then again, you find yourself and I'm thinking when the rubber band snapped back, it was in those moments that you were like, Nope, I really don't want to take responsibility for it.

It's her.

Manny Wolfe: [00:32:16] There was some of that, for sure. Yeah. Well, it wasn't, I don't want to take responsibility for it. It was just like, you know, it was more raw and young than that, it was like, why do you keep doing this to me?

Damaged Parents: [00:32:26] Do you to yourself or you

Manny Wolfe: [00:32:28] No me saying that to them,

Damaged Parents: [00:32:30] Uh,

Manny Wolfe: [00:32:31] Yeah. Never realizing, never being able to sort of grasp that, that there's something deeper here to learn and you haven't learned it yet. And since you haven't learned it, you're doomed to repeat it.

And so we tend to bring our same, short-sightedness our same biases. Our same childhood wounds are same, but all the stuff that is us into these relationships and the reason that it feels like. Why do I keep reliving the same relationship over and over again is actually because you haven't gotten to the heart of what it is inside you that keeps attracting this thing, narcissists attract empaths, right.

Victims attract, whatever the opposite of a victim is. Tormentors. That's a tough one to swallow, but it's true, you know, energy attracts energy. And like, I just felt like it was so hard. I just was like, okay, I've done everything within my power to try to make sure this woman is different and here we are again.

Damaged Parents: [00:33:29] Yeah, that would be so frustrating.

Manny Wolfe: [00:33:32] yeah, but it wasn't about her ever. That was the big aha moment is it? Wasn't about her. It was about me. And it was about. What did I need to be sort of fully formed emotionally as a child that I didn't get and to acknowledge that. And then, and here kids, here's the kicker. You don't fix it. You can't fix it.

That blew my mind. That was so brutal. That was like literally, literally laying on the floor in the therapist, office crying. That's how hard that was. It's too late to fix it. So what do you do?

You fold it in to who you now are, you become more multidimensional in the sense that you have more dimensions to you.

You become like a diamond with more facets. That was so hard to wrap my head around. That was so infuriating. I was like, I don't want that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to let it, come to have a seat at the table. I want to be pissed about it.

Damaged Parents: [00:34:33] okay. So instead of being mad about it, you're saying almost in a sense saying I love this part of me come to the table.

Manny Wolfe: [00:34:41] Yeah. I have to, I I'm a firm believer that the things that happened to us in childhood, there is a huge misrepresentation, of the process of becoming sort of quote unquote, better from those things. And the misrepresentation is you don't fix those things.

Damaged Parents: [00:34:58] Yeah, I think society as a whole is still got that

Manny Wolfe: [00:35:02] with it. Yeah. Yeah. You have to, you have to let them be what they are.

Become aware of them at a higher level, stop having defense and, different sort of coping mechanisms around them and like, let them come in and be part of who you are. Really. I think at the simplest it's like you gain a higher and higher, more and more nuanced awareness of that.

Damaged Parents: [00:35:27] So by accepting them for what they are and recognizing them and

Manny Wolfe: [00:35:32] They cease to have power over you.

Damaged Parents: [00:35:35] right.

Manny Wolfe: [00:35:36] Yeah. That's, that's what it is. They literally it's like the parts of us that we don't really have a clarity on, or the parts that have power over us.

Damaged Parents: [00:35:45] we don't know

Manny Wolfe: [00:35:46] Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, if we were a big spaceship and somebody came along and put one little motor, one little engine, you know, like you're flying this way and somebody attaches an engine here and suddenly we're just flying this way and we can't figure out why.

Damaged Parents: [00:36:01] Yeah. It totally changed. It changes the trajectory and it just that tiny little motor changes. It enough that years down the road, you're over there instead of where you wanted to go. Right?

Manny Wolfe: [00:36:12] You're in a different galaxy.

Damaged Parents: [00:36:13] Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Because I'm still struggling over  this part that maybe you just wanted to deny was even there,  because I also saw you, you had said on your pre-interview questionnaire, CBT, which I believe is cognitive behavioral therapy was huge for you.

Manny Wolfe: [00:36:30] It really helped me.

Damaged Parents: [00:36:31] Okay. And what are some of the things that you do in CBT that, that, how was that helpful for you or what were some of the things you did that made it so helpful for you?

Manny Wolfe: [00:36:40] So it had a really interesting experience with that because I didn't know what CBT was, I just knew that I was getting a little sick of this super negative self-talk right. This was before the whole self-talk imposter syndrome thing was so sort of yeah. En Vogue, I just knew, like, I don't want, I want to be listening to my own negative.

What we called it when I was a kid, was the tape in your head.

Yeah. I grew up in a cult and they talked about all this stuff. Like you got to change, this is how old it was. Change the eight track in your head,

the tapes in your head, man, you got to change the tapes in your head.

And, that's what I call it. That's how I conceptualized it. And I just knew I got I at a certain point. I'm like, God, I'm so sick of the things I tell myself, like,

Who that loves themselves would talk to themselves that way. And that's kinda how I came to it. And so I just started doing a thing, a practice of like catching those negative ideas of self-talk and stuff and challenging them. It was the same way that I, I began to get fit by literally just doing like pull-ups in the door jam. As I walked by, I jumped up and grabbed the door jam and do a couple of pull-ups real quick. It, nobody told me it was good for you. It was just sort of a fortunate glitch or something, you know?

And it became a habit. It became a habit to really, really start to chase down those ideas and go wait that doesn't like, where does that even come from? And then. Years later I would discover, Oh, there's this thing called cognitive behavioral therapy. And it seems like it's exactly what I've been doing for 10 years.

So in that case, it was a really weird fluke that I just sort of latched on.

Damaged Parents: [00:38:18] And it sounds like being curious about those thoughts  and being willing to let the thought be wrong or not wrong. I'm not sure that's the right

Manny Wolfe: [00:38:28] I'm okay with the word wrong here.

Damaged Parents: [00:38:30] Yeah. But it certainly, wasn't a helpful thought and you could look

at it and say, I want to have a thought that's going to help me.

Manny Wolfe: [00:38:38] Yeah that was a really important thing. What you just said. Like I became little by little guys, little by little. I started to be, to want to, my, my outcome that I wanted was, well, can I just get myself sort of like. Being the kind of person who doesn't have conflict in his thoughts and like I want to be, even in my life, stays as hard as it is now.

I said to all those years ago, I don't want to be the kind of person, like, I don't want to be walking around the world, pissed off, not contributing anything even when I'm happy, I I've got like a male resting bitch face that makes people cross the street. And so, like, I didn't want to be putting that in the world. And I used that iconic sort of image specifically, I remember riding a Greyhound bus once across California to go see my dad, I think. And these three old black ladies took me under their wing. And it was like a 12 hour bus ride.

And then they let me sit with them and they were like, so sweet and so happy. And they also had a little bit of booze that they were sneaking me and we were all drinking in the back of the bus and everything but the point was just the, I was struck by the these are happy human beings.

These are human beings who have a lot of peace, and I just sort of used that iconically in my head as an archetypal thing. And I was just kinda like, I want to be that I want to be that I just, I don't want to be pissed. I don't want to be a time bomb. I don't want to be this, what I would now call this, this reaction to all my circumstances.

Damaged Parents: [00:40:12] Right. And I hear a lot of, I don't want to be's and I'm wondering if at some point you shifted that to, I want to be this in not, I don't simply want to be that because I've heard there's a difference in what you focus on and you know, like the, have you ever been whitewater rafting?

This is the only story I know how to tell it.

If you look at the rock you're going to

inevitably hit the, then you're aiming for it. But if you look at the river, so do you think you also did that in your mind?

Manny Wolfe: [00:40:40] At a certain point. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was just in a really good conversation with a friend of mine, uh, on Facebook yesterday, several people, but primarily him, because he started the conversation, talking about how. How the sort of love and light, rainbows and unicorns spirituality does a disservice to real transformation.

And he was talking about how real transformation starts off really, really hard. But then he also pointed out, he said at a certain point, it becomes really, really enjoyable,

Damaged Parents: [00:41:11] Like you can almost enjoy the struggle.

Manny Wolfe: [00:41:14] It doesn't feel as much like a struggle anymore and that's what he was talking about. And I would agree with that.

And I would guess that to some extent, I began to stop thinking about what I don't want and start thinking about what I do want, which is what you were asking. But I know for me, it became this, I developed this ability to start looking for lessons before the pain.

Damaged Parents: [00:41:35] You got to explain that one.

Manny Wolfe: [00:41:37] Well, I noticed that. Every, without exception, every major challenge. Every time I got knocked down, every time I was just cleaned out by life, I learned something powerful, something really, really powerful. and I think we all know this the greatest lessons are hidden in the biggest struggles.

So then I reasoned, well, maybe I can just start looking for the lessons rather than waiting until the wave crashes down on me. You know, if I live trying to figure out what the lesson was, what if I just start proactively looking for those growth lessons? In my case, that was that I think that was a real like, uh, uh, progress accelerator.

You know what I mean? And I also think that that's a real sort of, it's a nice level of like, I am definitely not a victim now.

Damaged Parents: [00:42:21] right,

Manny Wolfe: [00:42:22] You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm going out looking for what's the net, where can I grow? What's next? What do I do? You know, what, what cool thing can I learn? What, uh, how can I take what I know and implement it in a new way?

This kind of stuff is just very proactive thinking.

Damaged Parents: [00:42:35] I'm thinking that would be scary to it if someone's starting out working to think that way

Manny Wolfe: [00:42:41] I honestly don't know. You know, for, for me it was a, it was a very seamless, like evolution. I could just kind of came around and then I was there and then I went, yeah, this is much better. Let's say you're driving a really, really nice car and the parking brake is on, and then you figure out to take it off.

And suddenly the car starts behaving and responding like it should. And you're like, Oh, this is much better. I like this a lot better.

Damaged Parents: [00:43:03] So it's much easier. Again, it's getting to that point where you can maybe feel confident enough to look for the lessons instead of have them come back at you or

Manny Wolfe: [00:43:15] Yeah. I'm not sure if it's confidence. I, unfortunately I don't have a lot of like cleanly packaged explanation around this stuff. It's I know what happens, a lot of people who have really, really created and then facilitate for other people, like mindblowing levels of transformation are in my community and in my friends network.

And it's pretty much agreed upon that. Can you give me one second?

Damaged Parents: [00:43:42] Marlo was the name, right? Marlo,

Manny Wolfe: [00:43:44] Uh, no are low,

Damaged Parents: [00:43:46] Arlo, Arlo. Arlo's trying to tell a story again,

Manny Wolfe: [00:43:48] but yeah. And then you were also hearing Pogo and if you listen very closely, you can hear Rufus. So, they all agree that at some point, if you're, I guess it's like, if you're a resolute, then at some point the whole growth and transformation process shifts out of being really painful and it shifts into feeling really wonderful. No, I've never, I've never thought to really sort of isolate the moment or anything like that, but it, it seems to be true amongst all the people I know who are in, like that's their work.

Damaged Parents: [00:44:20] Yeah. And I think what I've really have been enjoying about our conversation is that there's not really a clear journey because a lot of times it seems like it's super easy for, it would be super easy for you or for me, or for anyone to say, yep, you do X, Y, and Z, and you're going to have it, the, the rainbows and unicorns.

Right. And what I love about our conversation is I'm not sure. And I don't know, has been speckled throughout this conversation

Manny Wolfe: [00:44:52] Yeah.

Damaged Parents: [00:44:52] maybe it's not so clear. Maybe it's much more like you were saying about the diamond with more facets to it. That we take this journey and it might just look a little bit different and no one person has that answer for you.

They can support you and they can be with you and, you know, do their best to lift you up. But you're the one who ultimately has to find the answer for you. Am I, did I pick up on that?

Manny Wolfe: [00:45:18] I think you're right. Yeah. I think you're right. I think Sherpas are more valuable than gurus, you know, when it comes to that stuff. Yeah, because I mean even, if you just take a single individual's journey of transformation, let's see if I can, let's see if I can nail this. So you could make an argument that the reason the symbology and the icon ology and the Bible are what they are versus the reason that the sin, the symbology in the icon ology in the Tao Te Ching or, or the Koran or what they are, is very much because those things are reflective of the world, around the people that wrote those texts.

And so what I mean by that, or where I'm going with that is, our reality is is sort of pinned down on the bulletin board by words.

You know what I mean?

Damaged Parents: [00:46:08] I'm not sure.

Manny Wolfe: [00:46:09] Let me see if I can get that part first, the shape of our particular reality, the way that we perceive and engage with reality, the way that we understand reality, is hugely influenced by our language. The words that we're most familiar with within the language, right? Because words are the conduit between the thing that you experience and the expression of it.

So knowing that if somebody had a sort of tightly packaged process for your transformation, it's almost assured that at some point the lexicon between their minds and their experience, and what you're saying is going to break down.

And so therefore it's, that's why it's far better to have a Sherpa than a guru.

You know, the Sherpa goes ahead of you on the path and says, okay, this is, this is safe. The guru stands at the top of the mountain and just tells you, well, come up here.

Damaged Parents: [00:46:59] Right. I really liked that analogy of having someone. I love the idea of having someone on the path with you versus aiming for a goal. And I think we even talked a little bit about that too, is you can aim for a goal, but unless you change your behaviors, getting to the goal, it may or may not happen.

Right. So, okay. So three things that the audience could do today, or that you would say do today, I'm betting one of them's get your book. I could be wrong though, but three things that you think might help them today in recognizing or figuring out where they're at on their journey.

Manny Wolfe: [00:47:38] I don't think we recognize those things until we've passed them. Sorry. Sorry.

If you, if you, if you wanted like three things that I think would universally help everyone, the first would be understand that we we've, we've all been victimized in the sense that we have had actions, behaviors, and things forced upon us that we had no control over it.

It's universal to the human experience. So set in a much simpler way. Everybody can play victim. Everyone can play the victim card. All of us, not just you, not just your annoying spouse. Right. You know what I mean? So first thing everybody can do that. Now, when you look around, you're bound to see some people, for some reason, don't do that.

The tendency is to assume because of a whole series of biases that we, that humans have is to assume that those people didn't have it as bad as you, in my experience,

everybody's, everybody's sort of like own experience of their traumas tends to be roughly on the same small continuum, meaning yeah. There are some people who were like ritually abused and, and they're just on the extreme end and that doesn't mean you, you get the right to play victim. It just means, yeah, you did have it hard.

No. Congratulations. You can come in, you know, the secret handshake will welcome you in the door. But it's not a wide continuum is the thing. Even I've coached people who had idyllic childhoods, and we're so fucked up by that because they felt like nobody in the world will understand me. Cause I'm the only one that didn't have abuse.

And so they carry the same level of feeling separate from everyone else.

Damaged Parents: [00:49:19] Isn't that fascinating?

Manny Wolfe: [00:49:21] So just understand that every single childhood entitles you to, to play a victim for the rest of your life. If you choose am, I use the word choose very, very strategically here because the third thing is if you really want to make change, You let go of all that you stop living in all that, and you accept responsibility for everything that doesn't mean.

And here's the one that gets thrown about the most often. That doesn't mean you invited that person to rape or molest you. It doesn't mean that it means that you're saying from this moment forward, I'm empowered. I choose to be empowered. And only way you can do that is by saying what happened to me happened.

It's now my responsibility what I do with it. So in that way, I mean, I don't, I don't think I was ever sexually abused, but I was beat up all the time. I was mentally abused. I was raised in a cult and literally conditioned from birth, not to fit into society.  I'll stack my story up against yours and I figured out a way to do it.

mean? And so, so the third thing is take responsibility for the entire universe.

Damaged Parents: [00:50:28] I love that. I must admit I'm still working on wrapping my mind around some of the things that we've talked about today, and I've just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I find your perspective super intriguing, and I'm just really grateful. I got to have you on the show.

Manny Wolfe: [00:50:44] Well, I I've loved this conversation too. This has been wonderful. And so I feel pretty grateful to have been here.

Damaged Parents: [00:50:49] thank you so much, manny.

Manny Wolfe: [00:50:51] You're very welcome.

Damaged Parents: [00:50:52] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We really enjoyed talking to Manny about how he grew up in a cult and learned how to take responsibility for himself. Two separate things we especially liked when he talked about taking responsibility for everything in the universe.

To connect with other damaged people, connect with us on Facebook. Look for damaged parents. We'll be here next week. Still relatively damaged. See you then.