Tom Paris on the Masculine: Why Men Must Treat Women Well

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Today our guest is doctor Tom Paris. He is a retired psychotherapist whose practice was based mostly on dream work and came from your knowledge and how you benefited from your time with Doctor Bail? That's exactly right. Thank you for being here. Well, it's nice to be back. I, I feel honored being invited back again. So we have a topic to talk about today that I think will be of great interest. And that is the masculine.

Our work here revolves around the feminine. And we'll discover that today our work does too. Even though we're talking about the masculine. But we have what's called the mother's imprint that basically creates this world that we delve into, the dream, work, etc., etc. all leads us back to what we call the mother's imprint. But that holds true for men and women. We all come from women, at least up to date. We still do. Everybody has an imprint. Yes. So can you just briefly describe to us what an imprint is, even though we talk about it every episode?

It's always refreshing just to hear it for a few minutes. I'll give you my my feeling and my impression and how I think of the imprint. I know that you have spoken to other therapists and analysts who who have been able to give you probably a very definitive definition. And so the way that I think of the imprint is that if you think of the developing fetus inside the mother, that developing human being is marinating inside the mother. It's literally in the amniotic fluid. In that literal sense, it's marinating, but it's also marinating in the mother's emotional life through hormones and neurotransmitters.

All of the mother's emotional life is experienced by that developing fetus, which is to me, is kind of a stunning concept that if the mother's happy, the baby feels that if the mother is depressed, the fetus is experiencing that depression as well as everything else in the mother's life as she goes through her day to day life and her relationships, or whether she's alone or not, and how she feels about that. So that's one that's more the aspect of what the developing fetus experiences, the imprint as Doctor Bail discovered it and described it, has to do with the the unfinished business in the mother's mind, primarily what is in her unconscious.

When we work on ourselves and we try to fix things that don't work for us, and those aspects of ourselves that are unfinished. Doctor Bail often referred to that as the trash. We have to clean up the trash and throw out the. Trash, which is sometimes hard to do because we're not even aware we're carrying. It. That's a big problem. What is unconscious for us in our behavior? We tend to think we know ourselves really well. If you become involved in a process that tries to uncover what isn't known through the dream is the way that Doctor Bail discovered was the most effective.

Because the dream is a direct expression from the unconscious. We're literally not conscious when we're dreaming. So you have access to the unconscious of a person through their dream. So these unconscious aspects of ourselves then, aren't known that we have a personality that's design mind to defend ourselves against, because they represent parts of ourselves that we don't like. We don't want to know about it. We can find hard to tolerate when we bump into them. All of those kinds of feelings and aspects of ourselves reside in the unconscious.

Well, that gets transmitted to the developing fetus. That's what Doctor Bail called the imprint. And the mother projects those unwanted parts of herself into that developing fetus, along with many other things. Her love, her care, her expectations, her excitement. Those are the good things. We know that mothers and fathers have a lot of ambivalent feelings about kids in pregnancies. Even if a child is wanted. It's a very complicated thing to bring a kid into this world, so people have complicated feelings about that. A lot of the negative feelings tend to be in the background.

They tend to be things that the mother of the father don't want to think about. Oh no, I would never feel that way, that this child is going to be a burden, for instance. So these aspects of the mother that she finds difficult to look at or to feel or to see, or hasn't been able to work through, end up inside of the baby, and that's a way to look at and understand what the imprint is. Animals are imprinted and we are of nature. We are an animal, and we also have an imprint that comes from the mother. If you can think about it, this simply, this sort of helped me get there, as you said, early or everything the mother does basically gets transferred in utero.

So if a mother is undernourished, that in utero being is also undernourished, but in terms of food, but undernourished in terms of love, also true. I mean, that is as transferable as what we think of as the things that are physically transferred that either help us become healthy or not. We often it's not uncommon to know that an expectant mother looks to the coming baby. As someone who will love the mother. And I think a lot of times both mothers and fathers have children in order to be loved. Our hope is that baby will love me unconditionally because it needs me.

It really needs to be the other way around. The mother needs to love that baby unconditionally. However, that baby presents itself with the personality that it comes into the world with. But there's a lot of babies tend to look to the mother to see how they should feel. It's easy to see that when the child's a little older, like a toddler who falls down and bumps their knee, and often they will look to the parent to see how they should react. If mom goes, oh my God, the it the kid can start to cry, and if mom's kind of calm then it may just just they'll just get up and keep going.

So the baby's looking to the mother. The mother's looking to the baby. But the mother, we hope the mother is the adult and is able to more give the baby what it needs. Then try and do extra something from the baby, because it's not helpful for that baby to grow up having to adjust itself to who the mother is and what the mother needs. Mom's unfinished or unfulfilled feelings, like you're saying. The part of mom that's malnourished emotionally, she's going to tend to try to get that from the baby. You love me so I feel okay. Once I feel okay, I'll take care of you.

And for the the baby. That process unconsciously happens in that the baby wants the mother to be okay. The baby wants to take the burdens away from the mother. So that the mother can be present. The baby needs the mother to be okay. Babies. Human beings have the longest span of maturity of any animal. So for years and years, we need that mom to be okay. It's very obvious when, as an infant, when you're first born, you can do nothing. All you can do really is cry. Cry for help, cry to be dry, cry to get warm, cry in order to get food. So yeah, the baby needs mom.

So the baby is going to adjust itself to try to make mom okay. That's survival. And it because it happens so early, it becomes a way of life and it becomes deeply etched inside. And also we seeds from awareness if it's in there from the very beginning. And that service that we end up adopting carries us through. But that service is not allowing us to be who we truly are because we're so busy maintaining the system that we can't devote time to being our true selves. If your survival was dependent on adjusting yourself inside in order to get mom to be okay, then you're not going to know who you are.

From the very beginning, you will have developed in a way that was always in adjustment, always looking. How's mom? Is mom okay? What's mom doing? Is mom happy? Is mom sad? Is mom anxious? Why is my me anxious? Is that my fault? What do I need to do to get mom calm and attentive to me so you can imagine? How could you know who you are if that's your prime objective? Is looking out there instead of being inward focus? How do I feel? What do I want? What do I need? What are my interests? What way do I want to go in life? I think that needs a lot of support and encouragement to have that and to get it to develop.

And then you're quite fortunate if you have parental units who will do that for you, who support you, where your true interest lies, not in the life they want for you. Lawyer doctor, athlete. And hard to come by. This imprint goes on generation after generation, so there's a lot of undoing that has to happen in order for us to figure out who we truly are. It can be a lot of work. Yes. Well, so we were going to talk about the masculine and what that all means in this big picture. Again, men and women are all coming from women. Why is it important for men to treat women well?

Why is it that women universally are still treated less than and what is achieved by that? I think one piece of the answer is that human beings do not like to give up power and privilege, and being decision makers and being in. Charge, and you apply that to men and women. I think that what we've seen, let's say, in the last number of decades as women have come into the workforce, is that women in power can want to stay in power as well, whether that's running a company or being a head of state. There's too many individuals to stereotype that in too big of a generalization.

Having said that, in general, when you have more women centered organizations, they tend to be more emotionally oriented, not so defended against that. There would certainly be examples that would not follow that. But yeah, I think in general that's a safe thing to say. I think it's complex. I think men historically and still very much in the present, have felt divorced from pregnancy. They don't know what it's about. They don't understand it. They're often excluded, even if they're not excluded. And many, many women want help, need help, are asking for help and support.

But I think boys don't get trained to learn how to attend to a mother in pregnancy, or to feel that they have a real investment in that. Like it's hard to encourage dads to talk to the fetus, which is very helpful. We know scientifically that the developing fetus can recognize the father's voice from other voices. When hearing first begins to develop, the fetus can recognize dad's voice. So that's really important. That's a I wish I had known that mom and I was very involved. My first wife, the mother of my second son, really demanded that I be involved.

I wanted to be involved. So we were hippies, and we thought we were doing everything different than we were trying to be different. And I think that was really important. So I think, you know, this question has to do with how do you get fathers involved in pregnancy in early infant care and in child rearing? And I think starting with pregnancy, it's difficult because men don't feel they don't have much to do. You can make dinner, you can bring a pillow. You can be empathic and understanding of what the mother's going through. And I think that's all really important.

But it's you're in a supportive role, you're left out. And I think that that traditionally men haven't they haven't worked very hard at trying to get over that or to get through that. That is an experience that a woman has. That is something a man, at least to this point, can't have, can't physically carry that, can't know what that feels like, can't have the emotions that a woman has when this is happening to her. And there there must be something about not being able to have that experience that is difficult to contend with, consciously or unconsciously.

How do you support this experience that you're having but not having you're not having it the same way. You're responsible, you're one half responsible for the beginning of this life. Yes. But then for nine months that that that much to do with. You, you are literally on the outside, you're. On the outside. And again, I think it's important that the more a father can be supportive in during pregnancy, more involved he is if he wants to go and learn about what is going on inside of the mom with the developing fetus, what happens? How does it change?

Because those things happen quite quickly. The whole thing is done in nine months. I think that helps a man feel more involved in the pregnancy, and not just as a sperm donor. I think a lot of men come to this experience, though not even thinking of that as a possibility. Okay, I did my job. You're pregnant. Now you go on and make that happen and I'll be over here. And that has a, I think, a huge effect on this developing fetus that if it were, as you say, and what you experienced with your own child, if there was more of that, then men could see that they do have an effect.

And how precious that effect is and how important it is. So how do we get men to really understand that? I feel like there's even a stereotypical shame for a lot of men in that, that it has to do with feelings and love, and men are strong and burly, and they go out and hunt and the women are home making babies. It may be that for a lot of men there is an unconscious resentment at being left out, that once the sperm as penetrated the egg and the zygote is on its way, as we're saying, there isn't much for them to do other than to be obviously to help provide safety and emotional support.

But I think men can feel left out that there isn't space for them. It may be that that any particular mother may not invite men in. Human beings are complicated in that way, and I think there isn't a lot of cultural support. I think that's been changing over the last 3 or 4 decades. I think certainly with my generation, and I think there was the beginning of some movement to have for dads to want to be more involved, different dads, to be there at the birth. That wasn't true not so long ago. Now it's much more common. You see it more in celebrities and athletes.

They want to be there at the birth of their kids, which I think is only a good thing. It can only be helpful. But there you're right. There was for a very long period of time, I think that women didn't want men present through this process. This was a woman's process, and men didn't want to be part of it either. And so there was this stereotypical thing that was happening during this phase in our lives where we're birthing these children. As we were talking about this, it makes me wonder about women being in this less than position and being okay with that or not thinking that they have a right to something else.

So not only men or helping women be in this less than position, but women also think that this is what they deserve. And collectively this is what we deserve. We don't even get to think about it in any other way. In if it's in, if it is all that you are allowed to have pregnancy and child rearing, that's your job. That's what you get, then you're going to be possessive of it. It makes a lot of sense. This is mine. Okay. You stay out there. I'm supposed to stay at home. I'm supposed to rear the kids. I'm supposed to be the mom, the cook, the housekeeper.

And it goes on from there. I get a job, but I don't deserve to be the CEO. Or if I am co-CEO ING, I don't deserve as much money as my male counterpart. And even today, in 2025, to some degree that is still acceptable. I think it's not only acceptable, I think it is what what happens. And we know that working moms still do the majority of the childcare. They do the majority of the housework, including cooking and shopping and things like that. You may have two working adults, a mom and a dad both working 40 hours a week. Yet who's supposed to do the child rearing, who gets up in the middle of the night?

Who does the cleaning? Who does the wash? Who cooks the meals? It's not uncommon for that to be more shared, but it's still the case that it's seen as the woman's job, even in otherwise families or homes or people who are supposedly sophisticated. You know, when it comes down to it. This is what happens. This is what happens. So that sort of mindset for a woman thinking that she's less than is so pervasive. And while it would be wonderful if we could help women and men see that this is really not of value to keep it going like this. So many people completely object to that as an idea, and you can't press it on anyone.

But yet women and men sharing equal space is of the utmost importance. And if we don't get there, in my opinion, we're falling apart. So how do we have this occur when a good portion of the world don't even we don't think about it as a possibility, or we can't imagine that? I, as a woman, would have an equal place to a man. It just that's just not how it is. So how do we get beyond that? I wish I knew an easy answer. I think as in many things, I think there are small steps that have to happen. Millions and millions of small steps, and those can often lead to cultural changes.

Again, if you think of more natural childbirth, that's been a huge change from what it was when you and I came into this world, or my certainly from my generation and my parents generation. I think people have to. You just have to keep working at it. You have to talk about it. You have to present it. You have to write about it. The people in the arts have to do it. It just I think those are complex when and where you're asking, how does culture change? How do we change? Centuries of assumptions? And I think since the 60s when everything blew up, there's been movements in the direction you're talking about.

Unfortunately, culturally, when we take a step that I would call forward, there's often a backlash for people who don't agree with that, who don't like it, for whom it frightens because it upsets the status quo. And so you get a backlash. We see it with the women's movement. We see it with in the civil rights movement. It's happening now. We see these things swing from liberal to conservative and back and forth, and I think we're in a that to my mind, the culture wars of the 60s never ended. I think we're just we have another version of it now.

So it's a few steps forward, a few steps backwards. And I think you just. Love. Progress. You have to keep pushing and talking and trying to in whatever avenue that you're in. If you work in a hospital, you can try to make your understanding of how things can be better. You do it there and you're doing it here by doing these podcasts. So I think I think everybody has to do some piece of the work. And it's so hard if you're dealing with your own imprints. And this that's happening is imprinted on almost all of us, if not all of us. This inequality between men and women and what we're seeing outside.

We're making a few steps, taking a few steps forward and taking a couple steps backward. It reminds me of what's going on inside me when I start to look at my dreams and try to move myself forward and watch, pay attention to my dreams. And I make a few steps forward, and then I backslide because it's taking me someplace. It's unknown that's uncomfortable. Ultimately, it may be the best thing. For me. It is the best thing for me, but it's way too scary to go that way. So I have to backtrack a little bit and say, maybe I just need to stay put. My whole system is working.

Doesn't feel quite right, but this is what I've been assigned to. This is what life is that's going on inside me. And I look outside and the same thing is happening. I can't let women have an equal seat at the table because I don't know where that leads. So it seems like it might be a good idea, but it scares me. So I'm not going to support that. You know, I think we have to drag ourselves kicking and screaming toward health. That's a good way to put it because it's scary. It is scary. And I think, you know, when you when you work on yourself through whatever modality that might be, whether it's a psychotherapeutic situation or it could be religious, there's many ways that people can grow.

But that's hard because a part of us is always entrenched in the status quo. It takes a lot of courage to grow. It takes a lot of perseverance. That's very obvious to see in the world of drug abuse, where people don't tend to seek help until they reach their bottom. And that bottom can be very, very ugly. And they may have blown many, many opportunities to get clean and sober. But it's hard and it's really scary. Even though a sober life, they may see a lot of people who are functioning quite well. So there's a part of us that's holding on to the imprint is really what's the part of us that wants to keep things the way they are?

That's how we survive. That's how we survived. So. So you're asking yourself to to get outside of what worked seemingly or what got you this far, what got you here, your imprint and your defensive structure and so to step outside of that is very frightening. It feels like you're at the edge of the cliff and you're being asked to step off, and you don't see where the ground is. I had those dreams. It's almost as if this life that we've taken on this imprint that we support is tangible. Like this chair is, I know if I sit down, this chair is going to be here for me.

It's going to support me. I know this imprint so well, and if I live by it, I can continue living. But it's like there's a spring that's sticking out. But you know where that spring is and you kind of get used to it and it pokes you and you're uncomfortable, but that's your chair, and your body fits just right in that chair, because it's been there your whole life. And you can ignore that. Thing that yeah. It seems that much of the world feels that it's the father who creates the upset in the family. It's the father who makes the kids behave a certain way or creates the disappointment.

It's the father we're afraid of. But could we call that a father's imprint, or really? Not so much because that father is dealing with a mother's imprint, which he received in utero, and he's carrying that on? Well, it's really complex because people are complex. You can say part of this this way, that children experience themselves to be a part of their mother and a part of their father. And so we have these two parts of ourselves, I think that most people don't understand. They haven't come in contact with the imprint, what it is and what it means and how to understand it.

And it's much easier to look at fathers who, if we're speaking in a more traditional, generalized way, have been in charge or have been the boss, have been the one with the job, have been the one who took care of the family other than the child rearing and mom was doing child rearing and and taking care of the house. So dad looked much more powerful than mom. And I think people like biographers, most biographers are not trained psychologically. So they just like you describe, they look at the father and everyone wants to look at the father. Well, who was the father and what was he like?

And was he a so be. And that's why this kid's the way they are. Or however he was. But people aren't trained to look at the mother, to understand the the imprint and help us to understand who that person is. And to add to that the idea that we've put our parents on pedestals and we've made them into these perfect beings so that we can survive and we take all that trauma that was passed on to us and hold it dear, unconsciously believing that we've now given our parents a safe space so that they can parent us, we're saying, okay, you're in charge, you're on this pedestal.

I'm not going to ask you any questions. I've made you perfect and you lose your voice. When we idealize someone, whether it's a parent or a political figure or a celebrity, we deny them their complexity, and it's hard to deal with complexity. It's hard to understand a person that has some good aspects and some not so good things, and to take that whole package that a person is, and to be able to resolve those inconsistencies. It's much easier to say this person is a saint. And not ask questions. And not ask questions, because if you ask questions, then you now presented with the problem of trying to synthesize some good and bad aspects.

And that's not easy. I mean, if you look at someone like Michael Jackson, people still love his music. Some people will defend him. I think it was pretty clear he had some difficulties inside of himself in relation to young children. Some people don't want to talk about that. Some people have trouble enjoying his music the way they did prior to finding out all of that scandal. It's hard to do. It can be hard to do when you idealize someone. It's really hard to do in relationships. It's hard to do when you get to know somebody, and then you get to know the other side of themselves.

You fall in love right away, and you have this big hit of, wow, I'm really going to get what I need now, and this person's so great. And then as you go along, you, you see that this is a person like other people who has their own difficulties and things that aren't so great or that they need to work on. Is part of that, that we've taken this idealized parent and made ourselves satisfied with that. And then we take that same treatment and apply it to the people that we choose to have relationships with, so that we survive there, too. I think so, because if you think of a child trying to understand how mom can be the person who is your everything, and then she has these other aspects of her where she can be, is it depressed or angry or drinks too much?

That's hard for an adult to wrap themselves around and to integrate into work through. How do you do when you're five years old? So we tend to make mom or dad really all good, you know? And I think it's problematic. And it shows up later, right? I mean, it's really stifling. So we often hear that the masculine sort of represents the intellect. There isn't much to do with feelings and that the feminine comes from feelings, emotions, subjugation, empathy. Don't all of us carry both of those qualities, the masculine and the feminine? Yes, I think, I think, of course we do.

And I think if you scratch the surface underneath the stereotype, of course it's true that a question is then why did things develop the way they did? And I was just thinking a moment ago when we were talking about pregnancy and childbirth, I think that women and perhaps it's because women are the ones who carry the next generation that in order for that to work, empathy has to be involved. The mom has to make some sort of a connection, then a bond, an empathic bond with that newborn infants so it can survive. And maybe that had something to do with women having a different kind of connection to their emotional life.

I think in terms of being pregnant or child rearing, that involved different emotions. And if fathers in the past were separated from that for many different reasons, they weren't required to feel that. It almost seems like it's part of evolution in a way that over time, the way humans live and interact has changed and will continue to change. Hopefully we'll all still be here for a long time, but that now the success of humanity rests to a great deal on men and women being equal. And that means that it has to be okay for men to have feelings, to know they have feelings, to share their feelings.

It has to be okay for men to still be strong. But yet say they feel love. And it has to be okay for women to be supportive of that too. I think we're at a place where we really need this to happen. I think that as culturally, we've opened up and allowed women to go to work and to have careers and to be powerful and to be in charge of corporations and. In certain parts of the world, in. Certain parts of the world, at certain times. Yes, it's certainly it's still still limited. But we beginning to see anybody can do anything. A man can be a preschool teacher.

Why not? Women can run a corporation. Why not? I was just watching recently came out Ken Burns, documentary on the American Revolution. So one of the interesting things was when all the men went off to war. In many of them, most of them were farmers. The women had to do all of the work on the farm. They had to plant, they had to harvest, they had to do the plow. They had to cut the firewood. And they did that. They did all the jobs that the men were doing. That was in 1776. The same thing happened, I'm sure, many other times. But again, in a dramatic way, during World War II, two women went to the factories.

Women were plumbers, women were electricians, women were riveters. Rosie the Riveter. Women built airplanes and tanks and did they did all of those things? And do you think that that has opened the doors, shed a little light? Well, there was a backlash when there as we talked about a few minutes ago when the men came home, they wanted those jobs back. Women were supposed to go back and have babies and take care of the house and be traditional mothers like their mothers were. And so there was a whole reversal which had to be gotten out of again.

It took another 30 or 40 years for that to be softened and changed and opened up again. It's interesting that both of those occurrences were the result of war. Well, I think that's what takes men away. Which if we didn't have war, how would we come about giving women the recognition that they can actually do these things? There's got to be a better way. Yeah, there has to be a better way. And I think it has to. It has to be instead of from war. It has to be through growth. I think we've had enough history to see that men and women can do just about any job interchangeably, but you have to overcome a lot of a lot of culture and a lot of history in order to go up against that.

And as we said earlier, people are often defended against change. Change is scary, whether it's personal change or change within religion, which is an institution that tends didn't want to stay rock solid. Few people remember or know that in the beginning of Christianity, for instance, women were very, very involved for hundreds of years. They were very involved in the church, and they were leaders in Christianity. And then that changed. Then they got thrown out and it was decided that priests shouldn't marry, and only men can be priests. But it hadn't been that way.

Why did that happen? What was there amongst the men that made them feel compromised by these women? You know, I don't know. Off the top of my head, I wouldn't say fear. Fear that they wouldn't, as men, be able to do the job as well, or fear that they wouldn't even have the job. Maybe both. It's a good question. I think men would be afraid of women's ability to be spiritual, but if they can do that too and. Got nothing. And have babies. Yeah. What do we. Have? What do we have? We can lift a heavy rock. You know, but it's amazing then, how pervasive it's become that both men and women like to understand that women are less than you know.

And I think I grew up in a world knowing that that was the way it was. I never expected to be considered an equal. And, you know, even to strike out on my own and create my own career took some doing it. It was a little bit of stepping off that cliff. I think, again, as we've been saying, there steps forward and steps back. We grew up enough in America to have women in the military, and now there's a backlash for that. The people at the top have decided they shouldn't be in those positions of power. They shouldn't be on the battle line. Hopefully no one's on the battle lines, but we're not there yet.

So I want men to feel good about being men. Men are as important in this world as women. I think this work helps men and women understand that. I think if we can use our dreams, the perfect tool, the perfect gift every night to help us mind our unconscious and discover what is ours, what is our trauma or our trash, who we really are. We'll come to terms with the fact that there is no difference between us in terms of equality. It's just there. We've just done that with all this trash over eons. I think we have, you know, one aspect of this, and I want to be careful here not to have this sound like I'm blaming mothers because mothers have taken a lot of blame.

And they're just doing the best they can. They're doing the best they can. And I think whatever feeling part a man is connected to and then inside of himself is probably because of his mother or women in his life who have influenced them in that way. But we also, I think we need mothers to know consciously that it's okay for their boys, not to be big, rough, tough guys. Mom has to be able to support that part. That emotional part in her developing boy. I think that's a piece of work for moms, you know, because we all come up in a culture and most of those cultures are patriarchal.

And so women, even though women have been on the receiving end of that patriarchal influence, some of that shows up in how boys are raised. Can you be a man and still have your feelings? And is that okay with moms? I think theoretically mothers would say yes, absolute. I want my boy to be a sensitive, loving and caring man. I don't know, that's so easy to do on a day to day basis. As a boy is growing. They're not always so easy. And as a mother, you have an imprint that you're passing along to this infant, and part of that imprint is probably filled with this stuff.

Men are to be this. And so my little boy is going to need to fashion himself after this. And that is an imprint. I mean, our imprints have gone on for generations and generations. Yes. And so you're it's very complicated because you have mothers and fathers who both have imprints, and they bring that to their children. They bring that to each other. They bring that to raising children. And it's it gets terribly complicated very quickly. I think if it's one thing we've learned from Doctor Bail, it's that working on the imprint gets us further down the road.

It allows us to evolve as people and to get rid of at least some of the trash, the stuff that's rotting and doesn't smell. So, you know, it's got to be it's got to be resolved. And I do think it's baby steps, but we've got to get started. And I think if you are completely opposed to the idea of accessing your unconscious through your dreams, that's okay. You don't have to listen to us. But if it interests you, but yet you're not sure you believe, I say, please just open the door a little bit. Just give it a little. Try and see what you can discover about yourself, about your upbringing, about what you're carrying, that perhaps you don't need to.

There are so many gifts in there. I think is why it's important for parents to support, to try to know yourself. So that you don't, in an unknowing fashion, just dump your imprint on your child. Try and allow that child to grow into who they are, and part of that means supporting them where their interests lie. So if you get that kind of support as a kid, you'll be more open as an adult to new ideas. You'll have some belief that following your interests is okay, and that could get you here, that could get you to, oh, the imprint. What's that? That's interesting.

I don't know, I think I'll find out about that. That could create a place that's safe enough for you to explore that. Because you've been safe in exploring someone made it safe for you to explore who you are. This mother's imprint is being passed on unconsciously and then supported by the receiver unconsciously. So it really is important that we begin to know the difference between ourselves and the imprint, so that when we're bringing future generations in, we are not unknowingly passing this trash along, that if we are parents coming from a whole place, a healthy, loving place with empathy that'll make all the difference in the world.

It does make all the difference in the world. So when or if we ever get to the place where women and men are equal, what will the world look like? That's a great question. I don't know that I've ever asked myself that. It's funny because I my first reaction was sort of a blank. It's like, oh my gosh. Well, I don't know that. It's an I. Think we might have an absence of war. That is a machine created by run by men. It is. Somebody said it's old men sending young men to war is almost always how it works. And certainly we see over the course of centuries that war has not really done or done anything to improve the situations.

I don't think so. And I think to another step in answering your question is I think it would allow. So let's just say there would be an absence of war. What would happen then? I think human beings could grow, we could function better. And I think it would offer us an opportunity to grow spiritually and I don't know what that would look like. Right. That's an unknown. But it is true. We wouldn't have war if we were coming from a place of empathy and love just would be impossible. Science fiction tries to come about that by saying, what if aliens came and threatened the earth?

What happens is everybody on Earth comes together. You know? That's right. We become a tribe. Yeah. All of a sudden. Yeah. Thank you for this. Very enlightening. And men are so important. And we just want this equality to come about. And I really think that we're on to something here. If we can delve into our unconscious and uncover who we really are and rid ourselves of the trash. I think Doctor Bail is on the right track in highlighting the idea of the imprint and how it holds all of us back, and if we can work on that, we can take steps forward.

It works on all of us equally. It does. Yes. Thank you again. Thanks for having me. Please follow us. Please pass the episode along to someone who might need it. This is. And now love, listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.