Navigating the "Failure to Launch" Phenomenon w/ Dr. Mark McConville

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Speaker 1: There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet
the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek.

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Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Chris Meek, and you've tuned to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Our special guest today is Dr. Mark McConville. Dr. McConville is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Beachwood, Ohio, specializing in adult, adolescent, emerging adult, and family psychology. He's a senior faculty member at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, and has lectured and taught widely on the subjects of child development, parenting, and counseling methodology. His book, Adolescent Psychotherapy and the Emerging Self, was awarded the 1995 Nevis Prize for Outstanding
Contribution to Gestalt Therapy Theory. He's the author of the Counseling Feedback Report, an innovative and widely used adolescent assessment tool, and is co-editor of the 2001 book, The Heart of Development, Gestalt Approaches to Childhood and Adolescence Volumes 1 and 2. His 2020 book, Failure to Launch, investigates the root causes of why modern kids are struggling to transition from childhood to adulthood. In addition to his private clinical practice, Dr. McConville is a consulting psychologist at the Hathaway Brown School and University School, both in the Cleveland area. Dr. Mark McConville, welcome to Next Steps Forward.

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Speaker
3: Well, thank you. It's great to be here.

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Speaker 2: Great to have you, sir. Appreciate your time. So, Mark, I understand you were raised in a strict Catholic family, which predictably led you to being a chief altar boy. That also instilled in you what you've described as an irreverence
for authority. Share with us more details about the younger Mark McConville, and then tell us what inspired you to establish, I'm sorry, to specialize in adolescent care as a clinical psychologist. Is there a connection between the two?

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Speaker 3: There might be. There just might be. You know, I grew up, I'm in the grandparent generation right now. So I grew up in an era when Catholicism was fairly right-wing in the sense that it, what it asked for was compliance and obedience. And I was a good Catholic boy in a very Irish Catholic family. Really lucky to have wonderful parents. But questioning authority was just, it was nowhere in the deck. And you know, that sort of, and I was good at it. I was good at being compliant and being the kid I was supposed to be. But when I entered adolescence, this crazy thing happened. My frontal cortex began to myelinate. And I began to do something that really wasn't encouraged at the time. I began to think for myself. And so irreverence for authority is probably an overstatement on my part. I certainly learned that authority couldn't always be trusted, and that it needed to be vetted. And it certainly, there are, in my world today, there are many people. My physicians, for example, that I recognize and respect and count on their authority. But I have a say-so in
deciding to whom I grant that status. And you know, the question of does that have a connection? I think so. Part of what that added up to is that I was a, at the time I would have said very troubled adolescent. Now that I've become an adolescent specialist, I would say I was mildly troubled. You know, I didn't get it. I didn't do any jail time that I remember. But I certainly felt alienated from the adult world. And I was one of those kids that had kind of an overly rich inner life. Too much thought, reflection, too much emotion. I was extremely sentimental. And what do you do with that as a teenage boy? Today there may be, there's more receptivity for it. But certainly when I grew up, there was none. And so while I was socially skilled and rather graceful, internally I felt sort of alone and isolated. And I think when I have stopped and reflected, I've been asked by students, why did you become an adolescent therapist? The answer that is most satisfying for me is that I wanted to become the adult that was missing in my own growing up years. I think that's the connection.

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Speaker 2: Very insightful for somebody
as an adolescent to think that way.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: Well, of course that insight came more
recently as to why I got into the line of work I did.

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Speaker 2: For most of your career, you've counseled adults, but about half your clients were adolescents. First is that
an unusual client balance for a psychologist? And do most of your peers specialize in either adult or adolescent care?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say it's not unusual at all. When I first started practicing, psychotherapy was kind of anathema, it was a stigma. And it would be, you'd be hard pressed to find a teenager that would go to counseling willingly. Today, it's not unusual that a 16-year-old boy might come into my office and mention to me that one of his friends previously saw me in counseling and that they were chatting about it. So when I began practicing, the rule of thumb was no one wanted to see adolescents because they were difficult.
They were always disagreeable. 98% of the time, they came against their will. And so adolescent specialization was pretty unusual at the time. Today, it's very different. Kids are much more open to it. There are certainly some adult therapists who will say, I just don't see people under the age of 18. They may not have had the developmental psych training. It would be unusual, it exists, but it's unusual to find someone that only sees kids and does not also see adults. Because when you work with kids, you have to work with adults.

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Speaker 2: And what do you find most
rewarding about working with adolescents?

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Speaker 3: The thing is that they may give the impression of being very stuck and immovable, which is why someone brings them off to see a therapist. But in fact, they're in the middle of a process of very dynamic growth. So it's kind of like confronting a log jam in a stream, where if you can figure out which log to pull, the whole thing releases and moves. And that is the most satisfying thing, when you're working
with an angry, stuck 15- or 16-year-old, and three years later, you get an email from them telling you that they're in college, they're wrestling with something, and they'd like to meet with you once or twice. And you can see that that growth curve is very dramatic. It's very different from when you work with adults, where you work very hard to make small bits of growth and change. That's what's so rewarding about it.

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Speaker 2: And the flip
side of that, what's the most challenging?

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Speaker 3: The most challenging. I have often said, when I would teach therapists about working with adolescents, I would say adolescents are the easiest clients to work with, because of that, that they're in a process of growth already. But they are the hardest people to get to become clients in the first place, to get them to buy into the process. Now, that's a lot easier today, in 2024, than it
was in, say, 1974. Today, kids... But still, you'll find kids that are, because of the issues of independence, of autonomy, resisting adult control, and their assumption, understandably, is, here's another adult that's going to try to tell me what to do, and I don't want anything to do with it. So that's the biggest challenge, is how to engage them in a way that, in a way, dispels that presumption.

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Speaker 2: What are the key psychological issues
that adolescents commonly face in today's world?

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Speaker 3: Oh, my. Well, social anxiety, first of all, it's endemic. It's part of adolescence. I often joke that if we adults had time machines, no one in their right mind would ever go back to middle school, because in middle and junior high school, everyone was anxious. Even the kid that seemed
like he was so cool and confident, no, he was anxious, too. That was his cover, right? So part of the psychology of that age is, where do I fit in? What do people think of me? As I carry my tray across the cafeteria, if I have the slightest stumble, will the whole school be talking about it?

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Speaker 1: Right?

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Speaker 3: I mean, that's the kind of magnification of feeling like I'm in the spotlight. And the problem today is that that is amplified by social media. So I've had kids say to me, you know, my girlfriend and I broke up last weekend, and it was pretty ugly, and I was at a football game on Friday night, and some kid I didn't even know came up to me and said, hey, I hear your girlfriend dumped you. So it's not just their imagination. Now there is this augmentation of that feeling of being under the spotlight. The other thing that is unique to this generation, I found this very enlightening. I had a conversation several months ago with a first-year college student, and a kid who was very reflective, very enlightened, and very, very articulate. And he said to me, the problem for our generation, and he said to me, and your generation doesn't get it, and he's actually quite right. He said, things are too easy. What
do you mean by that? He said, well, pot, if I want pot, it takes me five minutes of wandering out of my dorm room to procure it. Pornography, it's there in a click of a button. And I think, well, my generation, we really had to work for our pornography. But it's just, it's there. And the other thing he said that was new to me, he said gambling. And so he's the kind of kid, like a lot of males and some women, that they track sports, they care about sports, they talk about it, they watch barstool sports or listen to it or the Bleacher Report. And he said, you can't really be in that world now without gambling. It's just part of that world. And the problem is, it's all one click away. And I said to him, have you yourself struggled with any of this? He said, oh, yeah, all three, right? So it really, that was enlightening to me, that the way he put that. I think that's a unique challenge that's new to his generation.

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Speaker 2: Completely different world now, isn't it? It is. Yeah. When you came out, you talked about the student in
middle school walking across the cafeteria with a tray. If they trip and fall, not everybody's going to videotape it.

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Speaker 3: Yes, right. Right.

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Speaker 2: And there it is. It'll be viewed, you know, 50,000 times. Exactly. Exactly. So, Mark, let's talk about Failure to Launch, your book and the issue. There's a 2006 movie by that same name in which the successful and capable main
character, Matthew McConaughey, didn't want to leave home. All things being equal in that movie, he could have been 36 years old when his parents were trying to get him out of the house. Is that your average Failure to Launch candidate?

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Speaker 3: No, that's an outlier. And I'm embarrassed to say I have not seen the movie. I love Matthew McConaughey, but I haven't seen the movie. That's almost become a bragging point now, so I may never see it. But that, I have certainly encountered. It's usually the parent that reaches out in most cases, where they have a 30-something, a 40-something. I've worked with a family that has a daughter who's 53 and seemingly quite competent, but lives in the family's vacation home, has never held a steady job. But the
normative, the center of that bell curve of Failure to Launch individuals, they're in their early 20s, maybe up to mid-20s. They've been knocked off their horse by the pandemic. They had executive function issues that related to having difficulty in school. They're at home. They're living off the land, off of mom and dad. So it's an earlier developmental stage. It has not become quite so ingrained. When you meet someone who's in their 30s, and that is their state in life, it's much harder to get them out of that rut.

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Speaker 2: The most basic question is probably the most important one, and
that is, why are they having trouble launching? What's holding them back?

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Speaker 3: Yeah. There's, you know, we could spend a weekend on that, and there's just so many reasons. Part of it is, it's the outside world, the environment. The fact that in today's economy, you need more education than you did, you know, many years ago. Manufacturing jobs. Back in the day, you could graduate from high school, go to the steel mill in my hometown of Rochester, New York, go down to Kodak, go down to Xerox, get a good-paying job. You could make a car payment in about three months. If you were earnest and saved your money, you could put a down payment on a small bungalow maybe in 18 months. I mean, it was a different, what was needed. Back in, you know, 1970, I think 30% of people went off to college. Today, 70% go off to college, and it's in no way the guarantee of a better life and a higher income. You know, we read about today's college graduates may be the first generation who will not exceed their parents' standard of living. So that's part of it, just has to do with how the world has evolved, how our economy has evolved, how the need for education has evolved. The other thing is, this is kind of the downside of the fact that, you know, I said today's kids are more open to counseling. They're less afraid of
their inner world. So they're more, it's more acceptable to reach out to a teacher or a counselor and say, you know, I've really been too depressed to get this project done. So there's more familiarity, and that's really, really a good thing. But the flip side of that coin is that we find kids who get lost in that inner world of emotion, like quicksand, and their anxiety becomes binding. Their depression becomes binding. They are too interior, right? And so they're just stuck. They're afraid. The level of anxiety that I encounter about growing up, about doing grown-up things, that I think existed when I was that age, but today it just plays out more. It stops kids in their tracks. You know, you need to renew your driver's license, doesn't do it. You need to go to the bank and deal with this overdraft charge, doesn't do it. It's as if interacting with the adult world, even in those simple administrative ways, is somehow going to expose you as a fraud. The adult world, you're going to be that, you're 20 years old, but you're going to feel like you just stumbled in the cafeteria. You're going to feel like you're on broadcast on social media as a fraud and a failure. So there's a much higher and more powerful level of anxiety today.

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Speaker 2: And it seems though there's a special niche of 20-somethings that want to continue to behave like teenagers.
Are we simply seeing more immaturity and have societal changes led to this behavior, or is it just basic economics?

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Speaker 3: I don't think it's an either-or. I think it's sort of all of the above. But there certainly is more immaturity. And in a way, it's like the kids that I end up consulting about, and I should to put a framework on it, since my book came out, I've talked to maybe 350 sets of parents and several handfuls of their kids where I've also met with a kid. And I've noted there's a very, very clear pattern in these, it's a self-selective process. First of all, it's a parent that picked up a book, paid for the book, picked up a book, read the book, decided to reach out to the author. That's a certain kind of person. And the profile of these parents is they tend to be very education-oriented. So they're very concerned when their kid doesn't follow through
on education. They're also very child-centered. They are people for whom the development of their children was a very central agenda item. I have sometimes joked with my wife that I've yet to be contacted by a truck driver married to a waitress, to a kind of blue-collar working-class people where there just isn't the capacity for indulgence. You know, where it'd be like, what do you mean you're not going to get a job? Of course you're going to get a job. As opposed to the families I work with, where parents are more concerned and anxious about their kid's stuckness. And so he has Wi-Fi and he has a roof over his head and he has three meals a day and he has use of the family car. He's 23 or four years old. He's living in mom and dad's country club.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: So sometimes the answer to why is he living that
way? The answer is, well, because he can. Because he can.

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Speaker 2: There have always been the proverbial stories of the nerds living in their parents' basement, playing video
games, watching Star Trek, generally not fitting with others. Is today's failure to launch trend bigger than that?

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Speaker 3: Oh, much bigger. For one thing, today, those nerds find each other. They are no longer isolated. They have, my goodness, they have conventions, right? So they will build a social network that's maybe more virtual than having friends in the neighborhood. But they are not that sensitive. You know, that's a good thing about the Internet, that that kid who might have felt really kind
of freaky and as an outsider feels less so today. It's a much broader phenomenon than that. So that kids will find communities that are way beyond Star Trek, having to do with arcane and obscure belief systems and politicals and, you know, the incel, young male involuntary celibate culture. So there are a lot of these communities and people find themselves. It's not so isolated anymore.

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Speaker 2: We're talking about the young person's failure to launch. Now, obviously, some of that must have to do with today's parents. What part do
parents play in the failure to launch? And to narrow that down, how much to helicopter parenting and snowplow parenting contribute to the failure to launch?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is my one of my favorite questions, because it's it's very easy to knock parents, right? And helicopter
parent, the one who hovers, you know, they they track their kid on their cell phone to make sure he's going to class at college.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: They know, wait, he's staying in his dorm room today. What's going on? The snowplow parent takes it a step further. They email the professor and say, I want to talk to you about my son's sociology paper. And that may sound like fiction, but I have heard professors interviewed who say, oh, no, that actually happens. And it certainly happens at a high school level. I can I consult at two private high schools in the Cleveland area. And it's, you know, we train. I do a workshop at one of the schools where we train the new teachers for how do you deal with intrusive parents? It's a whole skill set. And the parents, the thing is, in 95 percent of the cases, it's really they are coming out of a very loving and caring place. You know, I think my
daughter should have been placed in advanced placement, French, and she wasn't. But really, you know, she went to Paris last summer or whatever, that sort of thing. A parent that's really thinking they got their kid's best interest at heart, their intention is to be supportive. I mean, that's that's the common denominator. The problem is that the flip side of support, if I offer my kid support and I am by nature a very supportive parent and my kid doesn't utilize that support, then even though my behavior doesn't change, my support converts into enabling. Now I've become I'm in a way running interference for my kid. I'm not letting them face the challenges rather than coaching them about how to approach a teacher. I'm approaching the teacher for them.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: And so then it becomes
a force that really pulls kids back.

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Speaker 2: And does today's typically smaller family size play a role in how kids are treated and raised differently? And not to say parents and past generations
didn't love their children or love them as much. Is there a greater sense of investment because there are fewer eggs, not only one egg in today's family basket?

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Speaker 3: I think absolutely. Yes, that's very, very clear. When I grew up, especially in an Irish Catholic background, while we only had four, we were a small family. I certainly you know, one of my best friends had. I think he had 10 brothers and sisters that that was not in any way unheard of. You did not get a cable TV special for having 10 children. But today, and I like to joke that, you know, I was delivered to my parents doorstep by a stork. I came and they very
graciously said, well, we have another one. We're going to we're going to take care of him. We're going to try to teach him some discipline. We're going to educate him. But today's kids are much more planned and desired. They're much more. They are. There's a seat at the table that's been prepared for them before they come. So in a way, they are more invested at an emotional level. And so, for example, today's parents, they really they want a relationship with their kids.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: That means a great deal to them. And I can identify with it. I have I have two adult children. Having a relationship with them means the world to me. Having a relationship with their children means the world to me. But in my in my upbringing, I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of my parents. He was a he was their young friend. Right now, I want to shock you a little bit here. My dad was born in 1902. You know, if he were alive today, he'd be one hundred and twenty two years old. So he was of a different, a Victorian type generation. And this younger friend who were meeting with my three brothers were sitting around a table with a drink. And he's telling us about our dad,
what he was like. And he said, you know, he was very proud to have four sons. And we all did well. We all worked hard and achieved things. He was very proud of you. But but he would never in in the world, he would never have told you that to your face. And he was not particularly interested in having a relationship with his sons. He just wanted to see that he had done a good job of preparing them, that they would make their way in the world. And I thought, you know, today we would we would say what in the world is wrong with that man? Right. But but really, in his age, it was what was right with that man. It was a different, you know, the whole meaning of parenting to parents has changed dramatically.

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Speaker 2: My wife and I have three kids, and so I know there are a lot of great parents out there and we're blessed
to be friends with them. What are today's parents doing generally that deserves credit? What are they getting right?

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Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's interesting, the same thing that we call snowplow parenting or helicopter parenting, this sort of over-involvement is that is the underbelly of what I would call support. And so today's kids, I'll give you an example. If you are a 14 year old boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, first of all, they have a name for it now. It used to be just that you were inattentive, careless and a bad, weak character. Now we have a name for it. They might have a 504 plan for you. They may, you know, you have a fighting chance of getting a reasonable education, developing a sense of academic competence and getting to college. That that would not have happened when when I was a ninth grade boy. So we provide support in ways that previous generations didn't. I think of. I have a bunch of grandkids. I'll take I'll pick out the two oldest girls, 16 and 14. The 16 year old is an absolutely avid and committed soccer player. She's come back from two ACL surgeries and has done it. In fact, in her rehab, she worked at times alongside the Cleveland running back Nick Chubb. And she worked like a pro athlete at it. And her soccer, she's really quite adept, may or may not be interested in playing in college. But her parents have been nothing but supportive of
that activity. It's her activity. They don't push it. But if she needs or she asks for training classes with a particular soccer clinic, she's right there for them. The second girl is an Irish dancer. Again, it's her thing, not her parents thing. These things cost money. They involve a lot of driving to and from practices. That I think of that kid. She I have a client who's about my own age. Who one of her stories to me is that when she was young from a West Side Irish family and she was a gifted Irish dancer. And when when the teacher said, we really want to take her and develop her, the parents said, well, that's that's we can't do that. That's not useful. She needs to have an after school job and kind of contribute to the family. She had, I think, five or six siblings. And so and to this day, she mourns that would be career as an Irish dancer. Whereas my granddaughter has had all kinds of support, works at it assiduously, made her way to the world championships last year, finished. And there are tens of thousands of Irish dancing teenagers. She finished in the top 50 in the world. Right. That I just am so in admiration because it's hers and she worked hard, but that would not happen without today's generation of supportive parents. And that support has become more normative.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: So there's an awful lot of good, the vision, the sense of horizon of what's possible that kids have. It's so common for college students to do a semester abroad. Well, that costs
money. Right. And but but the outcome is we have a generation, not just a failure to launch, but kids who are supremely launched, whose vision of what's possible is way broader than mine ever was.

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Speaker 2: We've been talking to Dr. Mark McConville about the
failure to launch and we'll be right back after a short break.

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Speaker 1: Are you inspired by stories about personal empowerment, well-being and the motivation to achieve more? Get ready for next steps forward with Chris Meek. Each week, Chris will talk with experts and icons from different walks of life who personify
energy, direction, excitement and purpose as they take bold steps forward in pursuit of excellence and service to others. Tune in to next steps forward Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel.

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Speaker 1: That's one eight eight eight three four six nine one
four one. Or send an email to Chris at next steps forward dot com.

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Speaker 2: Now, back to this week's show. We are back on Chris Meek, host of Next Steps Forward. My guest today is Dr. Mark McConville. Dr. McConville is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Beachwood, Ohio. He specializes in adult adolescent emerging adult and family psychology. His book, Adolescence, Psychotherapy and the Emerging Self, was awarded the 1995 Niebus Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Gestalt Therapy Theory. And his 2020
book, Failure to Launch, investigates the root causes of why modern kids are struggling to transition from childhood to adulthood. We were talking about parenting before the break. As a parent, I've been especially concerned about the long term effects of COVID pandemic on children and teens as they do experience social distancing and isolation at a key point in their development. What have you seen so far and what long term issues to anticipate?

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Speaker 3: Well, it's very interesting because the first research is beginning. It's coming out just just now. And I don't work with younger kids. But what the study, I think it might have been the Pew Center. I'm not sure. But so the younger kids are showing more of a deficit, more of an ongoing deficit than than older kids. So kids may be in the primary grades when there's really so much neuroplasticity and they're learning these rudiments of mathematics and rudiments of reading and writing. So that, I think, is very significant. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about that. What I what I've seen is more and particularly in the failure to launch kids, this this disruption of social skills, social
skill development. And if I think of it this way, and as I said before, in middle school, we were all socially anxious. We're all socially self-conscious to a greater or lesser degree. And yet somehow when you fast forward 10 years and so you put us all in our early 20s, 23, 24, 25, some of us may be socially anxious, but it does not nearly show as much. You know, if you're 25 and you you report to a friend, you know, I'm actually quite shy. Your friend may say, really? I would not have known that. It doesn't show in the same way. Why? Well, because you've learned compensatory social skills. And the reason is in in the language of psychotherapy, the simplest antidote for anxiety is exposure.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: So if I'm if I'm made anxious by roller coasters, which I am, if I went and spent a day riding the roller coaster at Cedar Point, that that anxiety would be gone. What happens socially is between 13 and 23 is you have thousands and thousands of smaller and greater social exposures, whether you want to, whether you seek them out or not. And so so you have managed to navigate to things like going in and filling out a job application, calling for an interview, going out of the Motor Vehicle Bureau to renew your life. These are things that like you may not want to do them. I still don't want to do those things, but you can do them because you've developed the requisite skill. I'm seeing kids and the families of kids who, in many cases, have not developed those requisite skills. And so I've
encountered handfuls, 15, 20 families where I would I would call their kid a pandemic hermit. Like is his zone of comfort, which is supposed to be expanding. You know, when you sort of get out of the immediate family orbit, later high school, the years of college, post-college, your your your zone of comfort is expanding even geographically and socially and intellectually. And for so many of these kids, it did the opposite. It began to contract. And so I have had any number of families where they reported on a kid, 22, 24, 26, who was living in his bedroom or her bedroom, more often males than females, confined, reluctant to get out of the house. It's simply that the anxiety, rather than developing those compensatory skills, the anxiety became entrenched and became, you might say, their operating system.

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Speaker 2: We talked briefly in the first half about social media. And during the break, I was talking about my wife and our three kids. Our oldest one has graduated from college this spring and she was graduating. She was a senior in high school when the pandemic
started. And my youngest, our youngest was, I think, in second grade, seven years old. So the two teenagers, the 21 and 18 now, what are your thoughts in terms of how social media either helped or hurt them get through the pandemic in terms of staying connected?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it helped. The story I was hearing a lot at the time was, because in psychotherapy, people tend to refer adolescents along gender lines. So of my adolescent clientele, probably 85 percent male. And so I had any number of teenage boys who were sitting at home in bed at 10 o'clock. Their schoolwork was done in the half hour between 9.30 and 10. And they were playing Fortnite with their friends. So they were able to avoid the sense of acute isolation that for so many other kids was really debilitating. I think it helped more than hurt. The problem, it's very much two edged.
Let's take a kid who is just socially kind of introverted and kind of shy, who finds in social media a world, maybe a gaming world. And so he sets up a network of friends and those friends, you know, he lives on the east side of Cleveland, but those friends are everywhere from Manitoba to Rio de Janeiro. Right. So so while on the one hand, he feels part of a social network, it's paralyzing. He cannot evolve past it to to develop just living that social network in the real world. And so if he takes a job or goes to work or wants to date, those real those in-person skills are still underdeveloped.

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Speaker 2: And staying with the effects on children, I don't think we can afford to overlook divorce. What have you concluded from
years of working with adults and adolescents about the effects of divorce on children and how to mitigate as much fallout as possible?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, there's a series written by Judith Wallerstein, who back in, I think, I think in the 70s, when the first time that psychology began to take a look at divorce and say, what's actually going on here? It was less stigmatized. It was it was more mainstream culture. Families get divorced. And she asked the question, what
does it do to kids? So she had a large sample of kids. She interviewed them, tested them, did the whole works. The thing she did that was brilliant is she revisited that sample, I think, three different times over the ensuing 30 years. Right. So she ends up talking to a 40 year old about what it was like that his parents divorced when he was 11.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: So now you had the perspective of someone that lived it, but they could see it through the lens of sort of a wider, more worldly lens. And the most destructive thing is when parents would kind of include the child in their own relationship conflict. And that happens way more than parents think. Parents would say to me, oh, I never you know, I'm upset with his father because he's late with his alimony payment. But I never, ever, ever, ever let my kid know that. And then the kid comes in and says, what's she talking about? She's talking about it on the phone. I can hear her clear as day. Right. You know, and when I come home from dad, she says, so what's going on at your dad's house? Is he dating? You know, that's what really hurts kids when
they feel recruited. They feel recruited by their parents. And it doesn't have to be that way. My closest male friend, he's part of my writing group, part of my golf group. A man named John Brandt is and he's done a lot of publishing. He's writing a book on divorce. He himself is divorced. He has two kids in their mid to late 20s. He and his ex-wife could not be more collaborative, more considerate of each other. And the kids are deeply appreciative. So there's always an invitation extended. Would you like to join us for Thanksgiving? Would you like to join us for this birthday celebration? And it's because they're able to put their differences aside and say, what is really best for the two people we love most in this world? Our children. It's doable.

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Speaker 2: That's great to hear. We spend so much time after a child is born focused on their physical well-being. Obviously, have they been fed?
Are they too hot, too cold? Are they getting enough sleep? At what age should parents really start to focus on their child's mental well-being?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say the day they're born, right? I'm not being facetious. We know that when a newborn enters the world, they have in their brain neurons that are called mirror neurons that are sort of pre-programmed. When they open their eyes and here's this buzzing, confusing matrix of visual data, somehow the mother's face stands out to them as more relevant than other visual sensation. And that's because they're pre-programmed to be in relationship. And that mother who looks in that child's eyes, that is the beginning of a message. And that message says you are relevant. Because when you're born, you honestly don't know if you are a piece of furniture or you're the crown prince of Persia. You don't know. You have no sense of self and identity. The world, psychologists call it mirroring. The world mirrors back to you who
and what you are. And so if you are treated and regarded as someone that has intrinsic value, right? If I, as a parent, am more interested in discovering what your needs are, what your talents are, which is quite different from, I'm going to impose my narcissistic needs for you to be an all-star shortstop or to attend an Ivy League school, right? Which, you know, those, so it's right from the beginning the child is learning, I have relevance, right? I matter. You attend to me. So that's, I really mean that. It's really that same thing we call support and interest and that it's child-centered as opposed to meeting my needs. I mean, it does meet my needs as a parent. I mean, as a grandparent. When people ask me, you know, as you get older, how do you know your life has meaning? I said, I can count it. There are seven reasons why I know my life has meaning.

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Speaker 2: We're also talking earlier about your irreverence for authority, which you
said may be a little extreme as a teenager. Do you still have that same irreverence today?

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Speaker 3: I certainly question authority, and I think there's a value in questioning authority, but it also leads you to investing in authority and saying, you know, this person or this system, I'm, you know, for example, law enforcement, I'm very respectful to law enforcement and appreciative. I'm not a person that would challenge that. So yeah, I still have it. I take everything
with a grain of salt. I'm going to listen and decide for myself, does this person know what they're talking about, or are they just blowing hot air? So I would say I have it. I don't know if you were to question my circle of friends, I don't think any of them would say, oh, Mark is irreverent. Oh, no, they would say I'm irreverent, but they wouldn't say I'm irreverent toward authority.

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Speaker 2: One of my previous guests, Dr. Beth Kurland, a clinical psychologist from the Boston area, said we teach others, but we
need to learn ourselves. Has this been a hallmark of your own career, or should I turn my credentials now as an amateur psychologist?

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Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting. A mentor of mine, Dr. John Margrat, a psychiatrist, he's passed, but took me under his wing when I first entered practice, and he said to me one day, he said, you know, I think what we do all day is we're giving advice to ourselves. And I found that very amusing and also thought-provoking. But I would say not so for me. I think it's the other way around. I've spent a lifetime working on myself, on
trying to know who I am, trying to come to accept who I am, trying to become more centered, and I have tried to share what I've learned with my clients. Right? So I really do think, and that is part of the essence of the kind of school of thought that I am closest to, gestalt therapy, that what the therapist brings is authenticity, as opposed to methodology or technique. And so I feel like I'm trying to take people as far as I've gone.

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Speaker 2: You shared something once that your brother Mike said, and something I thought was especially profound. He said the definition of an adult is, quote, when you learn when
and when not to be an adolescent, and when you figure that out, then you can call yourself a grownup. Keeping in mind that simple is not always easy. Is it really as simple as that?

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Speaker 3: Well, of course, nothing is as simple as that. But I love it. That's bumper sticker psychology. But I love it for the wisdom. Because what it says is part of growing up is you do retain your playfulness. You do retain your capacity for irreverence. You retain that. Now, you learn when it's fitting, and when it's not fitting, right? That's the grownup part. But the idea, and this is a misconception that so many 20-somethings have. They think that to be a grownup means you're a grownup 100% of the time. And I mean, can you even imagine how boring life would be if we
had to behave like a grownup every bit of the time? I just think I have this social group. We're all golfers, but we're more than that. We attend each other's family events. And we have this kind of irreverence on the course and this playfulness. And we make up stupid boy rules, stupid clubhouse rules. As my friend says, you can't be a stupid boy group if you don't have stupid boy rules. You have to wear the group hat on Wednesdays, or else you have to buy everyone martinis, right? So yeah, there's a playfulness that I think is absolutely essential to having a full adult life.

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Speaker 2: Well, and maybe as a follow-up to that, we talked about adolescents and their issues in the first segment. Let's talk about adults. Our culture has a fixation with remaining forever young. I'm talking about people in their
40s and 50s and even 60s and 70s dressing, behaving like children or teenagers, and not wearing the team hat and having to buy martinis. And that's only seemed to intensify in recent years. Are there consequences to that fixation?

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Speaker 3: You know, I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that. I know that exists. It's not in my domain. I can't say that when I look at my adult clientele, I don't really see that. I think I see people struggling to come to grips with aging, but I can't say I see that. Maybe the place I do see it is in the schools where I consult and with parents, where there are sometimes parents who will often be people in their
late 30s to late 40s, and they are trying to, they're over-identifying with their teenage children, trying to sort of be pals with them. That I think, but I see that more in the light of, that's a very important thing. I see that more in the light of, that's ineffective parenting. It's not useful for your kid to do that. It's meeting more the need of the parent to sort of, I guess, fight against their own aging process.

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Speaker 2: Before we run out of time, I'd really like to get the ins and outs of
gestalt therapy. Would you provide an overview of that therapy and its core principles?

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Speaker 3: Well, again, do we have a weekend? Gestalt therapy is more a collection of principles and attitudes as opposed to a kind of methodology or technique. It's founded very much on European philosophy called existential phenomenology, as opposed to sort of more Western analytic thinking. It's radically relational. The idea is that it is the relationship that is healing and curing. And so we often, when we're teaching our students at the Gestalt Institute, what is the tool or the instrument you bring to the counseling relationship? It's self, we call it use of self. It is really that you bring your own authenticity, your own depth, your own therapy work, your own having come to terms with your own quirks, your own shortcomings, and sort of learning how to live with them with grace and integrity. And that's what I, one of my favorite quips, you know, it's one of these sort of just mildly hyperbolic things, as I say, the idea is not to overcome your neurosis, right? We all have some kind of neurosis. The idea is learn to carry it gracefully, right? And to carry it with integrity. And I really believe that. So Gestalt therapy is, it's founded very much on the principle of self-awareness and self-acceptance. And it's a radical kind of self-acceptance. It's sort of understanding yourself, not in a way that says, I'm just fine the way I am. I accept, no, it's more like, oh, you know, that's right. I am that way. I guess that's part of who I am. And we often, I'll give you an example
of what would be a classic Gestalt therapy maneuver, you might say, or episode in therapy. A woman came to me. I have a recent client in mind. And her complaint is that she's too wimpy. She's too unassertive that people walk all over her. She's very ashamed about this. She feels this is testimony to her weakness of character. And she just can't seem to put a stop to it. So in learning about her and learning who she is and her history, what I learned is she grew up in a very volatile household. She had an alcoholic father who was unpredictable. And it turns out learning not to rock the boat was a survival strategy that she intuited around age four or five, right? And she got through that family, I wouldn't say unscathed, but she did not get beaten up or abused. She did get adequate support for her education. And so when she came to see, oh my God, this trait about me, this is not some flaw or failing. This was the result of my implicit childhood wisdom, right? My instinct for survival. So this is who I am. I will always be someone who thinks first of, how do I create safety? And the paradox, and we call it, our theory of change in gestalt therapy is called the paradoxical theory of change. When you learn to accept that about yourself, it frees you up to grow. That woman today is decidedly more assertive. You wouldn't put her on the assertive side of the bell curve, but decidedly more capable of being assertive once she came to understand that counter tendency to not rock the boat.

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Speaker 2: So we have about two minutes left. How would someone get in touch
with you if they wanted you to speak to a group and how can they find your books?

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Speaker 3: Well, the books are on Amazon. That would be the simplest way. I have a
website, which is pretty simple. It's www.markmcconvillephd.com. Easy to reach me that way.

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Speaker 2: Perfect. That's it. Dr. Mark McConville,
thank you so much for being with us today.

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Speaker 3: Well, it's been a real honor, Chris. I
really do appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun too.

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Speaker 2: It's been a lot of fun. I appreciate your time. And I'm glad we share some stories about upstate
New York and I could really relate a lot of what you said with my kids. So thank you for helping me today.

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Speaker 3: You're great.

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Speaker 2: And thank you to our audience, which now includes people in over 50 countries for joining us for another episode of Next Steps Forward. I'm Chris Meek. For more details on upcoming shows and guests, please follow me on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash
Chris Meek public figure and an X at Chris Meek underscore USA. We'll be back next Tuesday, same time, same place with another leader from the world of business, politics, public policy, sports or entertainment. Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.