The Mel Robbins Podcast
It’s Not You: Why Your Family Stresses You Out & What To Do About It
22 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What causes family stress during the holidays?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. If you've ever wished you could change your family dynamic for the better, today's conversation is for you. Maybe you've wondered, why is there always some sort of tension whenever we're all together? Or you thought, why can't we get along? Why can't things just be easier? Here's what I want you to know.
You're not alone in thinking these things. And it's likely that your parents and siblings, they wish that your family felt closer too. Our guest today is a world renowned psychologist who is going to give you the exact answers you've been looking for.
She's also gonna provide the strategies backed by research that will help you improve your relationship with your family and help you become more connected to the people you love. Dr. Marielle Bouquet is one of the world's leading experts in intergenerational trauma, and she is here with fascinating research.
Many of the things your parents and grandparents didn't deal with or acknowledge have profoundly shaped who you are. You didn't create the family dynamic. yet you're all living in it. Dr. Bouquet is here to help you understand how your childhood shaped who you've become as an adult and how your parents' childhood determined the type of parents they became to you.
Dr. Bouquet will also reveal a hidden generational link that created the dynamics your family is stuck living in today. But here's the good news. change, peace, and connection are possible. And Dr. Bouquet is going to show you how to break free from the broken dynamics and start experiencing more peace and clarity in your life and relationships.
The Let Them Theory is the best gift you can give this holiday season. It's the gift you give to someone who's overwhelmed, to the people pleaser, to the friend who carries way too much, to the sibling who's exhausted from dealing with everyone else's emotions, to the coworker who needs a break. It's meaningful, it's practical, it's hilarious, and it's life-changing.
The Let Them Theory, for everyone on your list. Available at letthem.com and wherever books are sold. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm really excited that you're here. It's such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you.
And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. I'm so excited for you to meet Dr. Marielle Bouquet. Dr. Bouquet is a psychologist who earned her doctorate in psychology from Columbia University.
She completed a three-year fellowship in collaboration with the US Department of Health and Human Services and Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Bouquet is a psychotherapist who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts in healing intergenerational trauma.
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Chapter 2: How do childhood experiences shape adult relationships?
This is an invitation for you to be able to do that.
Is it ever too late to start this? Because if you're older, you tend to get more stuck in your ways. And it's easy to go, well, I've always been like this. And what if I don't want to deal with those things? It's too late to deal with those things anyway. Is it too late to start this, to heal, to feel better?
It's never too late. And those statements are fear-based. It's fear talking. It is possible for anyone to change at any age. My eldest patient was 84 years old when they first started working with me. And I love bringing this person up because it gave me a lot of hope as to how much can be done even later on in life to actually transform and influence the upcoming generations.
We can never believe that it's too late because as long as we're living and breathing, we have an opportunity to initiate change in our lives and to change the trajectory of our emotional legacy.
Dr. Bouquet, can you unpack that a little bit more?
Yeah, absolutely. We don't, no one has a perfect parent. No one can be a perfect parent. It's actually a myth, right? So we look at the parent that we do have and we acknowledge what they are able to give and we grieve what they cannot.
And that usually is the way that I like to work with folks that are really kind of having a tough time with the fact that people before them didn't do the healing work and handed down pain that they now have to sort through in their lifetime. And In my work, I actually help a person to attend the funeral of the parents they wish they had. I call those sets of parents their false family.
It's the family that they wish could have been, the family that they envisioned when they were little, like, These are my actual parents, which never were. They were actually flawed human beings that, you know, went about life, maybe hurting you, maybe not. But it's important that we step out of that false illusion of the parents that we manufactured in our heads.
And we step into what I call our true family, which is the family that we see in front of us. The family that potentially can invalidate us. The family that, you know, maybe won't be ready to listen to the wounds that they've caused. The family that is real, right? Not the family that we manufactured.
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Chapter 3: How can generational trauma affect family dynamics?
But what if you have a sibling? Because I would imagine this is the kind of episode that... if this is resonating, you're gonna wanna send it to your sister or to your brother and really invite them to learn from Dr. Bouquet. But what if you're in a situation where you have a sibling that had a very different childhood?
Mom wasn't like that, dad wasn't, that didn't, like the sibling and the sibling's denial of your experience in the same household is part of the pain that you're dealing with.
No individual in your family and in that household can validate your experience because that's an internal job. And so that person, any sibling that you have will not be able to mirror the experience that you've had because you've had completely different lives, even within the same household.
So it's going to be really essential for you to simply learn how to engage in that auto validation and not expect it from anyone else, including your siblings.
Dr. Bouquet, can you speak to the eldest daughter and the type of trauma or wound that she may be experiencing and has the opportunity to heal?
Yeah, you know, the eldest daughter is the prototypical parentified child. It's the daughter that typically takes on a lot of the family burdens. It's the daughter that is typically the fixer of the family household. And it's the daughter that tends to have to act as a parent to younger siblings well before a time when she's ready to parent.
All of these things actually create really deep wounds in a person who's robbed of their childhood and who needed to feel a sense of security and dependence upon others. And so eldest daughters have an opportunity to heal that parentification, have an opportunity to really offer themselves a reparenting process and give themselves what they did not receive.
And they have an opportunity to rectify the relationships that they have had with siblings or with parents that may have been fractured as a result of the role that they were forced into.
What are the types of things that the eldest daughter has experienced? Just to validate that, you know what I mean? Like, how does that manifest in terms of how the eldest daughter, and I'm assuming you mean not just necessarily birth order,
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Chapter 4: What daily tools can help manage family interactions?
Things would have been different. Doesn't excuse anything, but I think it creates this space to do the work for yourself, to see with very clear eyes who you're dealing with. And from there, decide, am I looping this person in or am I grieving and setting boundaries to protect myself and giving up any expectation that this person can change?
Mm-hmm.
And just seeing with very clear eyes what I'm dealing with. Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah.
And it's critical, right? Because the idea that a lot of people have is that a parent knew better and they chose not to do better. And so if we can think about the possibility that what was handed down was not intentional, it gives us a different way to look at everything, to look at ourselves even.
So it is a very different approach that we take when we can see that many of these wounds were not recognized. People didn't know that they were there. They were just living life in the best ways that they could. And unfortunately, that meant that hurt was passed down through the generations.
Dr. Bouquet, what do you want to say to the person who's listening or watching right now who all of this is just really resonating at a very deep level? That you are not broken.
You are simply carrying around generations of pain. And it can make your emotions feel at times unbearable. And like healing is impossible. But I can tell you with certainty that you can heal. That healing is accessible to you. And that it all starts with you just saying four simple words. I am not broken.
I could hear... In the person listening who's here with us right now, almost like this ding, ding, ding, that's me. Could you just stay in this moment for just a little bit more? Because I want to talk about...
The experience of feeling like you're the fixer in your family or you grew up in a family where mom and dad were working or one of them was never around because of addiction or other issues. And so you were constantly reading moods. You were constantly smoothing over conflict, trying to keep the peace.
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Chapter 5: How can one break the cycle of family dysfunction?
So when we rock, we actually engage that ventral vagal nerve, which is just a beautiful thing. I mean, if you think about it, for example, like when you're in hammock rocking, right? Or in a rocking chair, what's the effect that it gives you? It's true, or a swing or like anything like that. It grounds you.
Or even when you think about as a child, when you were in a caregiver's arms and they were rocking you to sleep, the reason why you were able to get sleep is because you actually felt a sense of safety because your ventral vagal response was being initiated. Wow. So rocking. What's another one? Another one is humming. Humming is also a way to elicit that ventral vagal response.
Chapter 6: What are effective strategies for emotional validation?
So it actually helps a lot, you know, to be able to even pair the two. I like to hum and rock. And it's almost like you can even pick your favorite song if you're doing it with a kid, with a child. It's very child friendly as a practice. And so this can be a way in which a child can also like help themselves to soothe. If they're in the middle of the school day and something happens,
they have the opportunity of just rocking a little bit and even, you know, humming and allowing themselves to feel calmer. When neurodivergent folks, especially, especially folks who are living with autism, they have stimming behaviors, like actual rocking is a part of what they naturally may do in order to self-soothe.
And so we're in essence borrowing from that also in knowing that it's quite effective in calming down the nervous system and we're utilizing it in order to initiate that calming response within us.
If you later today are driving through traffic Or you're sitting at your desk and you get an email or you get that text, we need to talk. Or you sent a text to somebody last night and they still haven't responded and you feel that kind of emotional wave hit. What's something you can do in that exact moment to put your nervous system back into a calm state?
The easiest thing that we can do is take time. deep breaths and not three, not, you know, just a few. We need to take at least five minutes of deep breathing. It's really essential because that allows our nervous system to catch up to the fact that we're giving it the opportunity to recover. And oftentimes I get people telling me like, who has five minutes? Like we live in a busy world.
And if you're a parent, you're incredibly busy, right? But I always like to remind folks, you have 1,440 minutes in a day. If you just take five of those minutes and recalibrate and just give yourself an opportunity to engage in deep breathing, you're going to feel so much better.
Dr. Bouquet, I just love how you shared that. It makes so much sense when you explain it that way. And that's something that I want to share with other people in my life. It's something that I want my family to be able to understand and to access for themselves too. We need to take a quick break to hear a word from our amazing sponsors.
But while we do that, text this episode to one person who needs to hear what you're hearing right now, because we all deserve this life-changing resource that Dr. Bouquet is giving us right now. And don't go anywhere. We have so much more to dig into after this short break. So stay with us. Welcome back. It's your buddy, Mel Robbins.
And right now we're in the middle of one of the most powerful, clarifying conversations that I've ever had on this podcast, because we're talking about how to stay calm, clear, and centered around what can feel like difficult family dynamics with Dr. Bouquet, who's one of the world's leading experts in intergenerational trauma. So Dr. Bouquet, why does healing matter?
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Chapter 7: How does compassion for parents influence healing?
How do you deal with that? parents and siblings or relatives or your partner who dismisses or even mocks you for wanting to talk about your feelings or for this attempt to try to heal yourself.
Yeah, that's painful. Um, you really let them, um, You do? I mean, you cannot change a person's reaction. You can change your response. They're going to react and mock because they're going to reflect their unhealed parts. And you cannot force them into validating you. It doesn't work that way. You just have to let them be who they are.
And then the let me part is standing inside yourself. And instead of allowing the trigger and the emotional wave to drive your reaction, hold on to that one second moment where you notice and then choose what you're going to do when you see the wounded part of your parent or your sister or your brother or your boss. That's beautifully said.
And allow yourself... to let that reaction that you have be a reflection of your healed self or your more healed self. And then what surfaces, which is so beautiful, is pride. You have pride that overrides the shame that once existed because you're able to see yourself like, wow, I didn't respond to that in the ways that I used to.
How do you deal with a parent who just never had the tools? never had the resources or the support that you now have. And they're difficult to deal with. They're doing what you say, you know, they're kind of complaining and nagging.
And, you know, what you start to realize is that underneath that nagging and complaining and the stuff that you don't like is probably a desperate need for empathy or, or, You know what I'm saying? Like, how do you deal with that dynamic?
Because I can't imagine if you're the one who's the cycle breaker and you're the one that's doing the healing of this wound that has been passed from one generation to another and your healing just exposes the wound in your parent or your sister or somebody who hasn't dealt with it. Like, how do you recommend to your patients that they deal with a parent that's never gotten the support?
Mm-hmm.
Well, I work with my patients, right? I'm not working with their parents. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So I work with my patients to ensure that they're going into that family gathering with the same people that are having the same conversations and that are engaging in the same unhealthy family dynamics. Everything is the same except you. my client.
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Chapter 8: What is the impact of being an eldest daughter in a family?
I'd like to apologize. And they will have healthier interactions with others as a result.
Dr. Bouquet, what are the most common ways that parents accidentally invalidate their kids' emotions without even realizing it?
Don't cry. Everything's going to be okay. That's big. And it's so well-intentioned most times, right? Sometimes parents, you know, what they mean is, you know, I'm here. I care for you. You know, I don't want to see you cry because it hurts me. But it can actually send an invalidating message. So words are really powerful.
So I really urge parents to just be mindful of the words that you speak and how they can land because don't cry. Everything, you know, happens for a reason. You're not, you know, you're okay when they're really not okay. All of those things can really kind of disregard how a child is feeling and actually train them to emotionally suppress.
Instead, what we want is to open up the dialogue and say, how are you feeling about this moment right now? How can I be helpful to you? Help me understand.
These are very open-ended, right? Oh, I love that. Three things you could say. How are you feeling right now? How can I help you? Help me understand. Oh, I love that. Dr. Bouquet, speak directly to the person who's with us. If they take just one action out of everything, that you taught us today, what do you think the most important thing to do is?
The most critical thing will be to choose the journey, right? You have to choose it every day. Every day you have to make a choice. I'm going to stick this out until I feel different. And that means that you're going to bring yourself back. Even if you backtrack, you're going to bring yourself back. You're going to help yourself recalibrate. So it's the choosing really.
It's the daily choice to break the cycle. Dr. Bouquet, what are your parting words? Every day presents an opportunity for us to break the cycle and shift the emotional legacy of our family line. And all we have to do is take that opportunity. And I hope that for anyone who's listening, that you would be willing to carry that beautiful legacy of being the cycle breaker in your family.
Here's one of the things that I've learned just from this conversation. Because the last three years, I have been doing so much work to try to put my nervous system into a calmer, more present and grounded state. And it has changed the way that I feel in my day-to-day life. It has changed me as a parent. It's changed profoundly my relationships with my two adult daughters.
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