In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Penny Tremblay about resolving conflict without compromising, and the inner work behind healthier relationships.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we’re gonna discuss conflict resolution and healing inner work, and that is why we have brought on a guest speaker to really help us dig deep into this important topic.
Barbara La Pointe: Penny has been teaching relationship strategies for over 25 years, with powerful metaphors like play nice in the sandbox. Penny has trained large companies across the world about how to manage conflict in the world, in the workplace, and within our family systems. She has developed multiple programs to help her students build a powerful system of healthy relationships without compromising on personal boundaries.
Barbara La Pointe: So without further ado, welcome Penny.
Penny Tremblay: Thank you very much for inviting me to be here today. I’m very honored to be a part of your Broken Families podcast.
Andrew Folkler: Thank you.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, we’re super excited to have you, and as you know, we talk a lot about conflict. But you talk about conflict as an inside job, and I was just curious, what does that mean?
Penny Tremblay: Well, that is such a great question, because in my understanding of conflict and how we show up to relationships, which like you said, are everywhere, we have relationships at home, at work, in our communities. So much of how we show up today has an influence from the past. So often when we look at the conflict that we’re dealing with on any given moment of any given day, we can take a real good look at how we are showing up.
Penny Tremblay: So here’s another example. Oftentimes when people hear that there’s a Play Nice in the Sandbox training coming to their workplace or coming to a session that they get to go to, they get really excited. They say, “Oh, yay, playing in the sandbox. I can relate to that fun metaphor.”
Penny Tremblay: And they think that in the process, I’m gonna help fix everybody else. Right? But the reality is that the greatest opportunity to resolve conflict is an inside job, meaning it’s my work, it’s Penny’s work to work on how I get attached to conflict or how conflict affects me. It’s Barbara’s work to work on Barbara so that she can move through conflict on a regular basis without it really having a strong hold effect on her and so on.
Penny Tremblay: So what I hope that people will understand is that there’s only one person that they really have control over, and that’s themselves. And the more that they try to relinquish control of other people, other circumstances that are outside their control, the more effective they’re going to be at finding that peace.
Penny Tremblay: And when you get really honest with yourself and you think about all of the conflict or all that you are showing up with that is contributing to the conflict that’s appearing in your life, you’ve got a lot of work to do, right? When you’re really honest with yourself, if you’re vulnerable enough and honest enough to say, “This is mine, and this is mine, and oh man, this is from my past and it’s still showing up today,” you have a ton of work to do.
Penny Tremblay: And so if you could just embrace that work and let other people find their way and let other people do their own work, then you’re at least taking on a job, a responsibility that you can influence, that you can control, and you’re letting everything else go that’s outside your control.
Penny Tremblay: So that’s about the best explanation that I can give you. It’s probably the best explanation I’ve ever given. Just to really help people understand that most of conflict resolution is an inside job. It’s about preparing ourselves to face and embrace the things that come up on a regular basis, and look at what’s ours and what’s not, and take on what’s ours and reflect on it and really understand where it’s coming from.
Penny Tremblay: Why does that trigger me but it doesn’t trigger him or her? And recognizing our strengths and our weaknesses and then being vulnerable enough about it to speak about it honestly and to own it.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. In fact, that description reminds me a lot about, what was it?
Andrew Folkler: Alan Watts’ Backwards Law, how when we want something, oftentimes we chase after it and it’s almost like we’re chasing something that’s always just out of our grasp. But the moment we stop chasing it and we relinquish control, that is when we’re able to actually attain it.
Penny Tremblay: That is exactly. There’s just so much skill required to maneuver through our own lives that just understanding the mindset that you just talked about there, about recognizing that so much of what we’re chasing is already inside us. It’s not about getting something more or getting more skills or getting more stuff or getting more relationship or getting more love.
Penny Tremblay: It’s about remembering. Remembering what’s already here in us, and mining for that and pulling out the nuggets and dusting them off and polishing them off, and really recognizing how pure and perfect that we came into this world. And moving through life with a desire to unpack all of that stuff.
Barbara La Pointe: I so agree with you, Penny. But sometimes and so often people avoid conflict.
Barbara La Pointe: And so what do you say to those people that have moved through life or moved through workplace avoiding conflict or avoiding doing that inner work and checking in or in a workplace with so many unmanaged emotions?
Barbara La Pointe: How can we address those...
Penny Tremblay: One of the ways I explain that concept in my seminars and keynotes and written material is that... Have you ever gone to the carnival and played Whack-A-Mole?
Barbara La Pointe: Yes...
Penny Tremblay: You’ve got that big hammer and the clock’s set, and those moles keep popping up in the holes, and you have to keep hammering them down.
Penny Tremblay: And you whack one down, out it pops over here, out it pops. And at the end of two minutes or five minutes or whatever that timeframe is, you’re literally exhausted from trying to keep the moles from popping up. That’s what it’s like trying to put a lid on and keep suppressed all of the resentment and bad feelings and old stories, which are mostly fiction, trying to keep them down.
Penny Tremblay: And you’ve got this filter because we know from our upbringing and our training and whatever influences that we’ve had in life that we really should show up a certain way. So from the neck up, we’re supposed to be some professional worker who can handle and manage stress. But from the neck down, we’re just a bundle of turmoil, like a bunch of moles just wanting to pop out.
Penny Tremblay: And we innately wanna behave a certain way, but our filter has to keep going, “Nope, can’t say that. Oh no, can’t use the F-bomb. Oh no, you can’t call this person out,” or, “Oh no, you can’t challenge what your boss says because...” And all of these things, it takes a lot of energy to keep them down.
Penny Tremblay: So what if we could just live an authentic life and talk about things as they’re coming up, and learn to talk about them in a way that’s not hostile, that’s not aggressive, it’s not intimidating, but just to be really honest with people, and just to be able to have the skills to say something like, “There’s something that I’ve been thinking about for days, and I really want to have an opportunity to share it with you.”
Penny Tremblay: “Would you be willing to talk about what happened yesterday?” Or “Would it be okay if I get your opinion on something?” When we’re able to do that, we don’t have to have that filter to keep things down. One of the things that I often say is where there is resentment, there can be no relationship.
Penny Tremblay: And if there is, it’s kind of fake. It’s not kind of fake, it’s fake. Let’s face it. You’re not authentic. You’re not just living into who you really are and what you think and you know from relationships that you have how some of them are just so real and true and authentic, and you get to show up, and you get to be your awesome self, and you get to be your horrible self, and you get to be everything you are in the moment just by being honest and sharing that.
Penny Tremblay: And the person that you have that relationship with just loves you no matter what, right? Isn’t that peace? Isn’t that the definition of peaceful relationships? But you’re right, Barbara. People avoid conflict. And I think a lot of it is because of our upbringing where we weren’t taught how to, or given permission to speak up and just be honest.
Penny Tremblay: Because we were made to think that that was wrong, or that the person that we’re being honest with was feeling wrong, so somehow that’s our fault. Because we’re honest and you feel like you’ve done something wrong. Also perhaps our religious backgrounds and upbringings, cultural backgrounds and upbringings.
Penny Tremblay: Perhaps there’s something that you said in school that you got in trouble for. Like I said, we carry these stories, but they’re mostly fiction, and we really need to dissect those beliefs. They’re limiting beliefs. We need to dissect them. And so one of the things that I often say is that you have to be doing your own work.
Penny Tremblay: You have to be doing your own work, meaning your own internal stuff, right? And people get what I mean when I say that. Some people get what I mean really clear. “Oh, I know what you mean. I have to do my personal development. I have to do my journaling, or my work,” or however they do their personal reflections or their work with a counselor and but some people don’t get it. They don’t understand what I mean when I say that. “What do you mean my internal work?” I’ve learned it as your work with a capital W. It’s sacred work. It’s very important. It’s the highest priority work that you can do, and it’s very valuable. Being able to recognize even just how you manage through conflict.
Penny Tremblay: And then you can start connecting some dots. You can take a look at, “How are the other relationships in my life?” Or let me start that over. “How is this pattern showing up in other relationships of my life?” Because we often exit one relationship thinking that the grass is greener on the other side, and then we do it again, and then we do it again, only to realize that there’s only one common denominator.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah. That’s always a fun aha moment.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, it’s definitely a painful one for a lot of people considering that they’re in a way reenacting either traumatic moments in their lives by just replacing one bad relationship with another one.
Penny Tremblay: Yeah. And that’s an option. Like when you say painful, that’s one option.
Penny Tremblay: Yep, you can think like that. You can think this is painful, or you can also recognize that this is a golden nugget because you get to change that, right? It’s back to what I said about really understanding what’s yours and what’s not yours, and what you have control of and what you don’t have control of.
Penny Tremblay: Like Stephen Covey’s habit number one in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to be proactive, right? So when I’m working with people, teams, individuals, coaching people, I often say, “Well, the very first step is getting people to understand that they’re responsible. They are responsible to create the life that lights them up.”
Penny Tremblay: It’s nobody else’s responsibility. When you start giving that power away to somebody else, that’s when you’re in trouble, right? Because you’re powerless. You’ve given pieces of your power away to somebody else and that’s what happens when you blame somebody. You give pieces of your power away to them, and as long as they’re holding those pieces of power, you will never be complete because you’ve given away pieces of your power.
Penny Tremblay: I think of it like a puzzle. You’re trying to put your own puzzle of life together, but you’ve given a piece to him in a previous decade. You’ve given a piece to her. You’ve given a piece to your grade six teacher when she told you that you’ll never amount to anything or you won’t be a good writer because your essay stunk, right?
Penny Tremblay: You give pieces of yourself away to people, and then you try to put together this puzzle of, this is the powerful Penny, but I’ve got holes in my puzzle. And so we have to recognize how we need to take back those pieces and own them, and this is where we need to have a lot of other skills that I talk about in the sandbox strategies because I think it’s just really common nature to blame others, right?
Penny Tremblay: It’s just common. Absolutely. It just seems like the easy thing to do.
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah. I never thought of it that way. But when you were talking about giving away your power, pieces of yourself, and your core kind of becomes like Swiss cheese, isn’t that when you feel out of control?
Penny Tremblay: Yes.
Barbara La Pointe: Or out of control and conflict?
Penny Tremblay: Right. Because you can’t control pieces that you’ve given away, right? You can’t do that. And so then you have to haul out a whole new set of tools. How do I repair those holes in me? And that’s where tools like empathy and compassion for others, for the humanness of other people, forgiveness, things like that, come into play.
Penny Tremblay: Conflict really interests me because I get to help people work through it, right? And one of the most important things that I say is that there’s only one way through conflict, and that’s through it. You can’t go over it or around it or under it. You have to go through it. You’ve gotta go through the fire, and that’s what’s uncomfortable for people.
Penny Tremblay: Because conflict is uncomfortable, or else it wouldn’t be called conflict. It would be called ice cream sundaes with a cherry on top or something, right?
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely...
Penny Tremblay: But it’s also that other side of life that gives us contrast. If we didn’t have the night, we wouldn’t appreciate the day.
Penny Tremblay: If we didn’t have the light, we wouldn’t appreciate the dark, right? If we didn’t have the joy, we wouldn’t appreciate the conflict. So it’s that side that helps us stay the course. And when we feel agitated, it helps us understand that we’ve veered off of our path, right? We’re agitated.
Penny Tremblay: And doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong. One of the most powerful things that I have adopted for myself, and I encourage people to adopt, is losing this judgment that things are either right or wrong. It’s not right or wrong. It doesn’t have to be. You can make it whatever you want, but it doesn’t have to be right or wrong.
Penny Tremblay: How about it just is what it is, right? It just is what it is. And then it’s just fact, right? Or it’s just your perception of fact. And so what? So, yeah, I can make better use of that example when we’re actually talking about a specific conflict.
Andrew Folkler: Definitely. A lot of what you’ve said reminds me of especially Carl Jung’s integrating the shadow.
Andrew Folkler: And if you include Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, that really wraps the whole concept around where you’re... And for those who don’t know, the monomyth is the hero’s journey. There’s also the heroine’s journey. Regardless, it’s a pathway where we are initiated into a long journey of self-discovery and self-improvement, and we enter various stages of conflict, and we seek out mentor figures and go through what is called the divine world or the underworld.
Andrew Folkler: And we go through these trials and tribulations, only to come out as a master of two worlds. And I know at least per Carl Jung, he’s kind of mentioned this as well with integrating the shadow, and other psychologists have reflected on how the myths in our days and age are reflected on this idea.
Andrew Folkler: So you would have, for example, the story of Achilles or even Orpheus in Greek myths where they’re entering the underworld and coming out stronger and more powerful. And this is symbolic of their ability to go through those challenges, go back deeper into the subconscious, find out more about themselves, and then return to the present world as a stronger and better person.
Penny Tremblay: That sounds phenomenal.
Penny Tremblay: I’d love to spend some time in exactly that because the skills that are required to move through conflict, to resolve conflict, to maintain peace and productivity, ‘cause I think we live in a pretty world where productivity is important. These aren’t new skills.
Penny Tremblay: These aren’t... It’s not like, hey, we’re in a pandemic. We need a whole new set of tools. We do need tools that are new to our toolbox, but they’re ancient and there’s history about them, and there’s philosophy about them, and there’s a lot of examples and stories and I think that’s one of the things that makes learning stick is when we can really grab ahold of a concept in a different way that resonates with us and go, “Oh, yeah.”
Penny Tremblay: One of the things that I often say is that Communication is an art, not a science. It will never be perfect, right? It will never be perfect. So we have to just keep living into our daily lives and giving it the best shot we can. We don’t win them all. If you’ve watched my manifesto video, you know, I talk about a conflict that I’ve been through personally in my life.
Penny Tremblay: And one of the reasons why we did that video is because the videographer that I hired to do a manifesto video about me and my work, he asked me in a survey, “Tell me about some of the conflicts that you’ve resolved.” And I was assuming he was talking about workplace conflicts that I have helped teams work through.
Penny Tremblay: And so I gave him a couple of those examples, but then I also gave him a personal one. And one day I was out walking on a frozen lake in Northern Ontario. Beautiful day. I was training with a group of people and we were on a lunch break, and I often bring my golden retriever lab with me.
Penny Tremblay: Her name is Joy. She travels with me whenever possible. And I was out on this frozen lake walking at lunch with Joy, and the phone rang, and it was my videographer. And he said, “Yeah, I read through your questionnaire, and I’ve decided I’d like to do the story on your personal conflict with your boy.”
Penny Tremblay: And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And I somehow knew that he was gonna pick that one, but a part of me just didn’t want to... I guess a part of me didn’t think that it was applicable to workplace conflict. And I said, “Oh, okay. Are you sure?” He goes, “Oh, I’m sure.” And then I started to cry. Like, I’ll never forget that moment.
Penny Tremblay: I’m walking on the ice with my cell phone, and the tears are freezing on my face. And I’m just crying tears of I don’t know what. I’m thinking about it right here and now with you. I guess I was shedding tears of fear maybe? How this story was going to be a story for business.
Penny Tremblay: Fear of how this was going to land with my children and the people who know us, et cetera, et cetera. Because you try to sweep some of these things under the carpet, right? Especially when you’re the conflict guru, and then you’ve got this personal conflict and it was, I think, a process of really embracing the vulnerability around that so much richness came to my brand and so many things that have developed from that where I’ve said things like, “Conflict resolution is an inside job,” and I say, “Communication is an art, not a science.”
Penny Tremblay: It’ll never be perfect, but we have to keep trying. I say things like, “You could be trained at Harvard and have worked for decades in the industry and written books and blogs on the topic, but that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna win them all.” And that story is all of those things.
Penny Tremblay: Also, I say, “Playing nice doesn’t always mean being nice.” Right? So a lot has come from my own personal conflicts. That’s just one of them. I’m certainly open to talking more about that ‘cause we’re on a broken families podcast. But when you have somebody who’s claims to be an expert on relationships who can actually tell you, “I understand ‘cause I’ve been there.
Penny Tremblay: I’ve been through it.” And we still go through it. And as you said in the beginning, Barb, conflict is inevitable. It’s everywhere. It’s going to be consistent. But suffering is optional, and that’s the point that I really want people to understand, is that there is a lot that you can do for yourself to help you move through conflict on a regular basis.
Barbara La Pointe: So if we were to just take this moment to pause and consider someone who hadn’t watched your manifesto video, which was really deeply emotional for me to watch, I’m just curious, maybe you could just unfold that a bit, what that video was about, why it was important for you to make, and how it’s affected people when you tell that story on stage.
Penny Tremblay: Okay. All right. So the manifesto video is a five or six-minute video that was developed to speak to who I am and why I do what I do and the work that I do. Basically, as a keynote speaker, some speakers might call it a sizzle reel, but I’m more than a speaker. Speaking is a way that I get my message across, but I am a well, first of all, I’m a mom. I’m a woman. I’m a woman in business. I’m a woman who hasn’t settled for romantic relationships that weren’t healthy. I’ve broken the mold in my family where everybody stayed married happy or not. I’m a mediator. I do mediation work.
Penny Tremblay: I’m a trainer. I’ve trained adults in seminars for over two decades. Like over three decades actually. I’m really showing my age. But I’m also a speaker and I’m an author. And so the manifesto video was basically developed to showcase who I am, and the business that I have is very unique.
Penny Tremblay: Some people know me as a motivational and inspirational speaker. That’s great. It’s actually a very small percentage of my business revenue. I do help organizations and workplaces have better relationships, and that requires a lot of training. I say people are hired for their technical skills, but fired or stuck in dead-end positions due to their lack of ability to get along with people.
Penny Tremblay: And often the lack of those skills show up when people start moving up the corporate ladder to front lines, frontline supervisors and managers and senior managers and so on. Their ability to influence and to get people wanting to do good work for them is a skill set that is really important.
Penny Tremblay: And people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. The manifesto video was developed to showcase who I am and what I do, and then the very great videographer, his name is Josh Harley, his business is called Defiant Astronaut. He gave me this questionnaire and he asked me a bunch of questions and then he framed the story.
Penny Tremblay: So basically his art is in storytelling for businesses. So basically if you haven’t seen the manifesto video, it’s on the main page of my website, pennytremblay.com. It’s called My Story, and it showcases who I am and what I do. And corporate conflict is a $359 billion industry in North America, and that’s pre-pandemic numbers.
Penny Tremblay: And in fact, those are getting to be pretty old numbers. So if you haven’t heard that number before, it’s a shocker. It’s made up of lost time, sick leave, high turnover, lost productivity, litigation costs, investigations and so on. It’s a really high cost.
Penny Tremblay: But as a small business, I can’t imagine how something like that could impact my bottom line and could take me out very, very quickly. So I wanna do what I can to change that and to help people really connect and to be efficient. ‘Cause when you’re a small business, efficiency is everything.
Penny Tremblay: So that’s the purpose of the video. But one of the stories that I tell in the video is a story that I also started telling from stage back in 2014 after a 16-year long loveless, I’ll say marriage. Although it wasn’t a formal marriage, it was a common law situation.
Penny Tremblay: I walked and it was my decision to do that. But there was a lot of years of pent up reasons why, and people on the outside would’ve not known that. If they looked at our family, we had pretty much everything, including the white picket fence and the golden retriever and a boy and a girl.
Penny Tremblay: And we had the million dollar family and we had the nice house and the couple of nice cars. And our kids had everything that double income families basically. We had a lot of sports and we had people over and family and we had a beautiful cottage on the lake and a lot of wonderful, amazing things.
Penny Tremblay: In fact, we even had a live-in caregiver, but the relationship itself had no substance, and I was empty and I was dying inside. And so after years and years and years of trying to change that, I threw in my towel and I walked and it created a divide, because... We had two teenage children watching it all.
Penny Tremblay: 13-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, and my daughter decided to come and spend a week with me and a week with her dad, who still lived in the family home. I moved out, and my son didn’t, and he broke ties with me. He broke relationship with me. And I never thought when I made the decision to save myself, that I would not be able to save my children as well.
Penny Tremblay: And so I was broken. I made a move. I didn’t have my boy in my life anymore, and that’s really hard. That’s really hard to think, and I’m sure that there will be a lot of people listening to this who don’t have their children in their life or who didn’t realize at the time that they made those choices the impact that it would have on the dynamic of the family, including the children and relationships and going forward and whatnot.
Penny Tremblay: And so that was really, really tough time for me because I think it goes without saying. You build a baby, you birth the baby, you feed a baby, you bond with that baby, you raise that baby, and then all of a sudden, that baby has got a door closed, and there’s really not a lot of control that you have.
Penny Tremblay: I really didn’t have a lot of control because he was old enough that I couldn’t fight legally in the court system for him. Although a judge could rule, yes, you have to go spend time with your mother, he wouldn’t have to, right?
Penny Tremblay: And so it was just an opportunity for me to really work on me. To recognize what I could and couldn’t control. I couldn’t control my boy. I couldn’t control the influence that he was under from his father. I couldn’t control much. I couldn’t control the rumors that were going around in our small town about me.
Penny Tremblay: I couldn’t control the friendships that I had lost because people had sided, had taken sides. There was just so much that I couldn’t control that I was forced to do my own work, to dig in, and to really recognize, and to hone, and to put everything I had known, and learned, and taught to test.
Penny Tremblay: To really put it to test. And I’ll tell you, when I’m working with a team in conflict, I’m involved, but I’m not emotionally involved, right? This is their conflict. This is not mine. And when you’re in it, it’s completely different, and you don’t necessarily know how to use the skills from that perspective.
Penny Tremblay: And so it was such a learning opportunity for me to kind of eat what I’ve been dishing out to other people, as far as a prescription. I dish out a lot of prescriptions. None of them are pharmaceutical, by the way. They’re all exercises, and activities, and do this, and write this, and journal on that, or think about, or let’s have this conversation.
Penny Tremblay: When do you wanna have it? And of course, nobody wants to eat that pie, right? So I had to experience it and it was probably one of the most painful conflicts in my life because I just felt so displaced. I felt unimportant. I felt like I didn’t matter. And then I realized that all of these feelings were within my control, and recognizing how I wanted to feel, and really getting clear on how I wanted to feel and how I wanted things to go, what kind of a person that I would have to show up as to attract that back in my life.
Penny Tremblay: And there were some very, very significant things that happened. So in summary, at this point, we’re one, two, three years into a separation where my boy is not responding to me. He’s not picking up what I’m putting down. He’s not willing to connect with his mom. And one of the things that people would often say, which really annoyed me, is, “Oh, he’ll come around.”
Penny Tremblay: I just wanted to choke people who said that. I just wanted to be... And the inside me, the moles that I had to slam down were like, “Oh, yeah? When? Tell me when.” It’s been months or it’s been years. When is he gonna come around?
Penny Tremblay: But there were some really subtle things that a key few people in my life influenced me with, and I’m gonna share those with you and your listeners. One of them is I have a very good friend. His name is Barry. And he’s a motivational speaker. He’s written books with Jack Canfield.
Penny Tremblay: He lived across the street from me. He was kinda like who I wanted to be when I grow up, and we’re still great friends today. But I was talking to him one day and of course I was willing to share my honesty with people who asked. And there would be a lot of tears and I’ve learned to love tears and welcome tears because it’s just like ice around the heart that’s melting.
Penny Tremblay: And so I was vulnerably sharing with Barry one day and he said, “Geez, Penny, it seems like you’re holding onto this so tight. You need to let it go so that God can pick it up.” And that was life-changing for me because I realized that I was trying to control things that were outside of my control, and I needed to let it go.
Penny Tremblay: I needed to let it go so that the higher powers to be could pick it up and make it whatever it needed to be. But I still had me and I still had my work to do, and I was just gonna let it go, and that forced me to trust. It really forced me to trust that. You know what? I’m a good person. I’ve been a good person.
Penny Tremblay: I could be a better person. I’m gonna work on being a better person. Good things will come to me. And through this process, a lot of kids wanted to hang out with me. I did work with youth, and they would call me and text me and email me and cheer me on and follow my Facebook posts and call me when they were struggling and accept my monetary gifts and donations and all of this.
Penny Tremblay: I had a lot of kids. I just didn’t have the one that I needed so badly, until I stopped needing it so badly. And I just realized that I needed to let this go for my own sanity. I’ll call her a medical intuitive. Other people call her a psychic. But her name is Karen Sarlo, and she’s from my community.
Penny Tremblay: And I see Karen once in a while. And one day I went for a session with Karen. She goes, “Hi, so why are you here?” I said, “I wanna know about my son.” She’s like, “What about him?” I said, “When’s he coming back?” She goes, “Not for a while.” I said, “That is not the answer I wanted.” She said, “I know. But you know what?”
Penny Tremblay: And the next thing she said also was life-changing for me. She said, “Your son’s on a journey with his father right now, and you’re not supposed to be on it.” Wow. I know. That was life-changing for me because what I got out of that was if life is this grand, then this is a tiny blip in time. This is a small blip in time where my son and his father are on a journey, and I’m not supposed to be on it.
Penny Tremblay: So I could accept that because I could see the before and the after the blip. It gave me hope. She said, “They’re on a journey right now,” meaning not, “Your son’ll never be back.” She just said right now. And so that was really important for me. And, you know, of all the counseling I had been through, and trust me, I had a great counselor, and I milked my benefit plan and spent every cent that I could to to speak to him because although I’m supposed to be this guru that knows all of these great things, I don’t know everything. And like I said, I’m in it, right? I’m in the middle of it. So the emotions really take over the logic at this point. And then another friend of mine, her name is Sandy, from Sudbury.
Penny Tremblay: I call her Super Sandy from Sudbury. She had been through a change in her marital status and she had two boys. And she said that she loved it when she cooked bacon and her kids were over, and they would just hover around the stove. And I said, “I can’t wait to cook bacon for my boy.”
Penny Tremblay: But she said, “Penny, it’s like feeding the birds.” She said, “If you’re standing there to feed the birds, you stand very still, you put out the offering, and you just wait. And sometimes the birds will come, and sometimes the birds won’t come. And sometimes the birds will come and they’ll land, and sometimes they won’t land.
Penny Tremblay: And sometimes they’ll come and they’ll land and they’ll eat, and sometimes they won’t. But just keep on feeding the birds.” And that was a significant metaphor for me because what it meant was I had to put myself out there. I had to put my offering out to my son in a way that wasn’t gonna scare him off.
Penny Tremblay: When you’re standing there feeding the bird, you’re not like, “Come on, bird. Where are you, bird?” You’re just standing there very quietly and very peacefully, and you’re trying to attract this bird to come and to land. And if he comes and he lands, you don’t say, “Where have you been?”
Penny Tremblay: You say not too much. You say, “I’m so glad you’re here.” And you put out the food, which of course is bacon, and you hope that they stick around, and you hope that they come back, and you hope that they’re hungry for more of what mom has to offer. And so those were some really significant teachings and learnings that I went through in this process, in this time period where I was wanting to take the high road.
Penny Tremblay: And my counselor, I call him my shrink. I don’t know if that’s rude. Let me know if it is ‘cause I’ll stop using that term. But it’s kind of funny, and I want to bring humor and playfulness into this topic of conflict because recognizing that there’s nothing wrong with seeking counsel to get the help that you need.
Penny Tremblay: If you had a broken finger or a sore back or a challenge physically, you’d go to the doctor. So if you’re struggling mentally, why wouldn’t you go and seek some support from somebody who can help you? And so my psychologist, Dr. Russell from Toronto, he really helped me by hearing how it’s going.
Penny Tremblay: And after I would tell him how it’s been, the first thing that he would do is validate my feelings. He would say, “Oh, you are going through such hell,” or, “You’re just going through such a challenging time,” and, “It must be really brutal and...” Already the $250 an hour paid off for me, ‘cause I was like, “Yes, this professional gets it, understands it, understands me, understands how horrible this is.”
Penny Tremblay: And that alone was worth the money that I was spending to seek his help. But he would also guide me from what I thought was doing the right thing to really doing the right thing. And so that helped me really do what I say is take the high road. Take the high road and do the right thing that’s gonna support a strong relationship with my children in the end, right?
Penny Tremblay: And so that’s hard to do because we don’t always know what to do. We don’t always know what the high road looks like. And we fall off. We fall into the mud, and we swim around the cesspool of negativity. And another thing that I encourage people when they’re working through conflict is there’s people you can go to to talk this through, and there’s people that you can go to who will suck you into the cesspool of negativity, and there’s people who you can go to which will pull you up and out of that negativity into the higher road, like into the higher way of being.
Penny Tremblay: And we know that we have these people in both levels, right? But we choose to go one way or the other depending on what we want. And I think that that’s a really important awareness for people, ‘cause I know there’s girlfriends I can call up if I wanna swim around in the cesspool of negativity and be like, “Oh, yeah?
Penny Tremblay: Guess what happened now?” “Oh, really? What a...” Fill in the blank. I know Andrew’s probably gonna bleep it out anyway. But anyways, you know what I’m talking about. We have people in our lives who will help us swim around that cesspool of negativity, but is that really getting us any closer to what we’re looking to accomplish?
Penny Tremblay: And when I teach and coach, I tell people there’s a cost for everything. There’s a cost for conflict, and this is one of the most enlightening things that I help people with, is that there’s a cost to taking the high road and there’s a cost to staying in conflict. And so either way there’s a cost, but you really have to decide what you’re what outcome that you want, and then you have to be committed to pay that price. And that price isn’t always what comes naturally, right? It’s not always what’s habitual. It’s not always what your neighbor did or your friend did to make it through her conflict. It’s something different. It’s something new.
Penny Tremblay: And so that’s some inspiration to stay the course. But when I started telling this story, I couldn’t tell it without crying, and I can now. I can today anyway. Sometimes I can’t. And it doesn’t matter, I’ll still tell it. It’ll just be with some Kleenex. And I’ve learned as a keynote speaker when people ask me what stage props I need, I say, “I need a stool and a box of Kleenex,” because I don’t know when things are gonna move through me, and I’m not afraid of them, and I’ll just let them out.
Penny Tremblay: But when I tell this story from stages, whether that be one-on-one with a coaching client or I’m speaking to thousands of people, people come to me after and they say, “Me too.” Or they’ll say, “I haven’t seen my grandchildren in six years,” or, “I haven’t seen my boy,” or, “My former wife took my kids to another country,” or lots and lots of stories.
Penny Tremblay: I listen to your podcast, Barbara and Andrew. I listened to your very first podcast and I get a sense that you could easily say me too as well. And although the story isn’t the focal point of my work, I can’t believe how many people resonate with it and have this happening in their families because divorce is very popular.
Penny Tremblay: Unfortunately, when I do coach people, I don’t coach them into divorce. I try to help families stay together. I do some family intervention work. You won’t find that option on my website because I’m just trying to focus on a certain lane, but I do do family intervention work and I do do couple counseling and I help bring people to the edge of making that decision, the grass isn’t always greener.
Penny Tremblay: And either way you’re still carrying around a suitcase packed full of past experiences and pains and burdens that you’re gonna have to work through whether you jump or don’t jump, right? So anyway, you’re right. There’s a lot of people that hear this story and say, “I’m in that same situation.”
Penny Tremblay: And I think one of the most powerful ones was a young lad came up to me one day after I told that story and said, “I’m that kid.” “I’m that kid,” who’s alienated his parent. And so that inspires me to keep talking, to keep telling the story.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a very impacting, deeply inspiring story.
Barbara La Pointe: And thank you for sharing it with us. Obviously you went through a big transition, a transformation you could call it. And I was wondering how you emerged through your personal conflict on the other side as a stronger person. What are some ways you became a stronger or more resilient human being?
Penny Tremblay: Well, I think Andrew was talking about this when he was mentioning the different people that he’s read about along the way. That you exercise muscles that you didn’t even know you had. You wanna talk about resilience?
Penny Tremblay: I actually have somebody who just came home who’s a speaker on the topic of resilience. I’d love to introduce him if we’re ready for an impromptu podcast guest. And if you are, just nod and I’ll signal him... to come and share. Yeah. I say it’s his topic because he’s just so darn good at it.
Penny Tremblay: But how I emerged stronger on the other side, the way that I explain it is these are muscles and the more you work them, the stronger they get. If you don’t work these muscles, they don’t get strong. I think one of the strongest muscles that I’ve grown into as a mature, young 50-year-old woman is that I have learned the importance of speaking up. I probably wouldn’t be a divorced woman today if I had the courage, or I’ll say if I had the balls to speak up more through my whole life.
Penny Tremblay: To my father, to the boyfriends I had when I was younger. I teach young women how to say no, how to say, go, I’m... You’re gonna bleep out what I have to say, but you know it’s... GFY. How to teach women, because nobody taught me those skills. And when I was growing up and experiencing my puberty and my sexuality, I didn’t understand boundaries like I understand them today, and I wish I did because I’ve had to undo a lot of hurt and pain and things that happened to me that wouldn’t have happened if I woulda just had a stronger voice, if I would’ve just known that it was okay for me to really be authentic and really let you know what I thought, right?
Penny Tremblay: And so I think that’s definitely something that I would really like to continue teaching. And I’ll say women. It’s not that I don’t wanna teach men, but I’m a woman and so I think that if I have to pick a target market, I’m gonna pick women or like me or like women, young women who are my daughters’ age, who are 20 years old, who are dating and experiencing men, or partnerships, relationships, and really giving people an understanding that they get to choose and decide.
Penny Tremblay: And there’s consequences for those choices and I think that somewhere in my upbringing as a Catholic that I was... And I’m not blaming any religion or... But I’m just saying somehow in my upbringing I understood that I had to please people, that it was really more important to please people than it was to please me, and I’ve reversed that now.
Penny Tremblay: It’s most important to please me first, and then to please my family, and then to please my customers, and then to please my friends, and so on. So I have a hierarchy now of just who I’ll please. And my spirituality, by the way, sits at the top of that hierarchy. So I don’t feel that I can be guided too far off the path...
Barbara La Pointe: That’s beautiful and so empowering.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s very empowering just to know to please yourself first.
Barbara La Pointe: To be able to say no. Resiliency, letting go, building trust, your spirituality.
Penny Tremblay: Yeah. Yeah, I think Andrew was about to ask something before you asked your last question.
Andrew Folkler: Pretty much what I was gonna say was I was gonna kind of really wrap up the power of what you were saying before, especially the three insights that you had.
Andrew Folkler: And I think, if I remember correctly, the first one was don’t hold on too tight. Learn to basically put your energy out there and let it go. So for the religious people, put it in the hands of God. For the atheistic people, doesn’t really matter. You just put it out there.
Andrew Folkler: You put your energy out there and let it manifest in the ways that it can. And then the second one, if I remember correctly, was the journey. That we’re all on our own separate journey, and sometimes the people we love most are going through a journey that will not have you there present in that moment.
Andrew Folkler: And then the last one, if I remember... Might need a little help here, Penny. What was the last one?
Penny Tremblay: Well, there was a lot of nuggets in that tip, it was the feeding. It’s like feeding...
Andrew Folkler: Yeah. Being the person that people will be drawn to.
Andrew Folkler: Those three lessons I had to learn myself in my own story, just being estranged from someone that I care about. And that took even over the course of many self-help books and a lot of self-reflection and a lot of personal failure, that those three lessons really stuck out to me and were just really powerful things to include and share with the audience.
Andrew Folkler: And I think it takes a lot of strength to learn those as we go along.
Penny Tremblay: Well, what I’ve learned from my partner, Trent, who’s a speaker on the topic of resiliency because he was the survivor of a boat accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
Penny Tremblay: And we met a couple of years ago, and I heard Trent’s story, and I fell in love with Trent within seconds of meeting him and his story. I wrote a book called Give and Be Rich, and one of the very first things that Trent told me was that he turned his tragedy into a foundation where he raises money as a swimmer, and donates back to a program called Rise Above Paralysis where he can help pay for durable goods for people who have had spinal cord injuries.
Penny Tremblay: The story of resiliency is really powerful. And maybe people would like to find him through me. But resiliency, he says, is not something that we go out and seek. It’s something that we grow by... because it’s been thrust upon us. Something has happened to us that we must press through, and because of that, we become resilient.
Penny Tremblay: Just having said that, what it makes me understand is that we can appreciate, we can be very grateful for some of these intense challenges that are presented to us through our lifetime because if we can embrace them, we become stronger. And that’s what I say about workplace conflict as well with teams.
Penny Tremblay: I say the strongest, healthiest teams embrace conflict. Not personality based conflict, but more like conflict about systems and processes and how to sit and hammer it out and work it out, and how to have healthy debates and that it’s okay to disagree. So what, sometimes people raise a voice or sometimes people curse or whatever.
Penny Tremblay: I don’t know, it’s not up to me to say that’s wrong or that’s not right. But it’s just really, it makes us resilient to be able to handle the things that come up on a regular basis. And there’s always gonna be things, like COVID. We have all... I’m going to go out on a limb and say a lot of us who are thought leaders, influencers, people like you, like the three of us on this call who are continuing to do our work despite COVID, we have become more resilient, right?
Penny Tremblay: And so we can appreciate the adversities that we go through. I know that conflict is not an attractive word. It sounds a lot like combat. Sounds like we’ve got our boxing gloves on. It’s a prickly topic. But through the Play Nice in the Sandbox brand, I make it playful.
Penny Tremblay: I make it fun. I help people really get lit up. I say high, but I mean that in the most natural sense. I help them really get reaching for high thoughts and reaching for what they want, and stop bellyaching and what they don’t have and what they’re lacking and missing and so on. And for the families out there who have estranged members, I know it’s tough.
Penny Tremblay: I know it’s hard. I know from experience that there’s nothing more painful than having a loved one that is still alive and well and capable and is just not showing up to the party, and feeling that rejection. It’s very, very difficult and hard. And one of the things that I hadn’t mentioned yet, but I think it’s really something I want to stand in so firmly in this lifetime is that the absence of face-to-face communication is really detrimental to our connectedness as humans.
Penny Tremblay: So what gives us a bypass to face-to-face communication is digital communication like cell phones and not just the technology, but the media, right? So for example, I heard from one of my kids that they were at a party and that somebody broke up with somebody else in a text message in the same room at the same party.
Penny Tremblay: I said, “What? How does that happen?” “Oh, that happens all the time, Mom.” And I know that it’s happening because the younger generation is born with this technology in their hand. I watch one-year-olds swiping on an iPad to turn the pages. They know how to use this, this innate ability to use this technology.
Penny Tremblay: In my generation growing up, we had to call our friends. We had to call them up. We had to see them at school. If we weren’t talking to people, we were isolated. We weren’t using technology, and I think that we’re losing this very important art, and it’s the art of face-to-face.
Penny Tremblay: And virtual is fine as well. Phone is second best. But if we’re trying to resolve conflict with texting or text messages or email, it’s hazardous. We can’t convey our emotion in text, and we can’t connect as humans in text. Right now we’re connecting as humans far better than if we were all just on the phone ‘cause we can see each other.
Penny Tremblay: We can see when somebody’s talking about something that’s delicate or they’re getting a little upset or we can see hand gestures and body language and so on. That is so critical and vitally important to connection. And it’s really hard to be vulnerable. It’s hard to be vulnerable in a text message.
Penny Tremblay: Oftentimes people can feel more vulnerable by writing a letter and writing things down, and I get it. I get that that can kind of help you choose your words and rewrite them or get things ready and prepared. But when you just send that off in the mail or in the email or whatever, you don’t know how somebody’s gonna be receiving that.
Penny Tremblay: Part of the family I was raised in had a division as well. My mom had a son before she married my dad, and as that son got older, he went and spent some time with his biological father, and it created this division in the family, and there was letters written, and my parents were receiving letters in the mail.
Penny Tremblay: And you just can’t beat face-to-face communication, and people are afraid to do that, but it really is the shortcut. If there is a shortcut, which I don’t believe there are, but it really is the most efficient way to communicate through challenging times and conflicts. When we’re in conflict and we show up face to face, we don’t always show up lovely, right?
Penny Tremblay: That’s why I say playing nice doesn’t always mean being nice. What would you rather? Would you rather have somebody sitting across the table from you being really lovely, and meanwhile... They’re not really being honest? Or would you rather somebody sitting across the table from you who’s just being honest and not necessarily having a filter on how the words are coming out and how they’re gonna make you feel?
Andrew Folkler: I’ll take honesty any day.
Penny Tremblay: Me too.
Barbara La Pointe: Absolutely. There’s a freedom of liberty to be found in just being authentic.
Barbara La Pointe: Where you can become liberated in your communications or liberated from conflict.
Penny Tremblay: Yeah. And it requires a safe space to do that, right? I wouldn’t ever want to coach anybody to go into an aggressive situation alone.
Penny Tremblay: If they were afraid of what might happen, if they felt that there was any possibility of physical harm, or even verbal abuse, okay? Then I wouldn’t encourage them to go and venture down that path on their own. They might wanna have some assistance or they might wanna have a guide, right?
Penny Tremblay: Like a mediator. I’ve learned to do my mediation work. As I mentioned, I studied at Harvard’s Program on Negotiation with an advanced mediation certificate. But really, I got so much learning from Indigenous people who use a circle, as a way of communicating. And even when I do my mediations with three people, we kinda sit in a triangle where there’s nothing in between us.
Penny Tremblay: There’s no desk, no tabletop. There’s just blank space so we can connect energetically. Connecting. And I’ll make sure that that is a very safe space for people by negotiating the negotiation before we even get started, talking about a few ground rules about respect and confidentiality. And one of the things about mediation is that as a mediator, you’re not making decisions for people.
Penny Tremblay: You’re just guiding the conversation. You’re facilitating an authentic discussion. People really have to want to work it out. If two people don’t wanna work it out, mediation’s not gonna work because mediation is helping two people come up with a solution better than each one of them could’ve come up with on their own, right?
Penny Tremblay: But it’s that face-to-face that’s required and can I do mediation virtually? Yes, I’ve learned to do that in the last year. If a situation is getting hostile, it has to stop. It has to be managed. But allowing people... And there’s a fine balance on what I’ll allow.
Penny Tremblay: Sometimes somebody’ll go on a bit of a rant and emotions’ll flow and there’s tears and I say there’s tears and snot. There’s Kleenex involved and there’s... And I’m totally okay with that because I say what’s coming up is coming out.
Penny Tremblay: At least they don’t have to whack it down in that game of Whack-a-Mole that I talked about earlier where things can come up and out, and if they’re... And if that’s their process of venting with me one-on-one, that’s great. If that’s their process of venting with me in a mediation or in front of their whole team in a workplace restoration, I welcome that and I encourage people to just breathe through it.
Penny Tremblay: Just breathe. A lot of people are uncomfortable with tears, and they’ll stop talking if the other person starts crying. Or they’ll feel like, “Oh, we failed because somebody cried.” No, that’s just emotion. It’s like me telling you a joke and you laugh. That’s just emotion. We’re not gonna stop the meeting ‘cause I told a joke and you laughed.
Penny Tremblay: So we’re not gonna stop the meeting because I poked a button and it’s a soft spot with you and you cried. We’re just gonna keep on breathing through it and talking through it. And every time we get through a mediation, a conversation, a workplace restoration, people have this huge sigh of relief, and they say, “Thank you so much.
Penny Tremblay: That was so important. We should’ve done this a long time ago.” And that’s another thing about conflict. The only thing worse than being in conflict for 16 years or six years or six days is that much time plus one more day. Plus one more day, right? Because the highest stress is not once you start moving through conflict.
Penny Tremblay: That’s actually not the highest stress point. The highest stress point is before you start moving through conflict. Yeah. As soon as two people connect face-to-face, everything changes. There’s just something magic. I’d love to learn more about what that magic is, but it’s always there. It’s about human connection.
Penny Tremblay: It’s about empathy, compassion. It’s about watching and seeing how you have affected somebody else and how that somebody else has affected you and really seeking to understand the bigger picture. It’s not really about agreements so much as it is about understanding.
Barbara La Pointe: There’s a lot a lot of good stuff to moving through conflict.
Andrew Folkler: Of that... Absolutely.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah. Well, we’re a little over an hour now. Penny, is there any last statements that you would want to say to the audience, to listeners, to people who might be in your shoes right now and just don’t know what to do?
Penny Tremblay: Well, this is a Broken Families podcast and considering that all families have worked through conflict, whether they’re stuck in it, all families have conflict.
Penny Tremblay: One of the things that it was so influential for me one day, I heard an interview of a couple married for 75 years, and somebody said to the woman, “What’s your secret?” She said, “My secret? Well, when we got married and things were broken, you didn’t throw them in the garbage. You fixed them.” And the way that I thought about that was back in the day, if you pulled a nail out of a board and it was bent, you straightened the nail and you kept it.
Penny Tremblay: We didn’t live in such a disposable society where everything just got disposed in hopes of going out there and finding something new and better. And that was really transformational for me because like I said, given the chance, I would highly recommend that families stay together to be healthy, to seek healthy relationships.
Penny Tremblay: That could mean that mom and dad or mom and mom or dad and dad or whatever, live in different houses. But children need collaborative relationships. And this is why you guys have such a great podcast, and I listened to your first podcast and I know that your mission is to help families understand the value of coming together in unity.
Penny Tremblay: Because as you said, Andrew, half of you belongs to your mom’s DNA and half of you belongs to your dad’s DNA, and if one of the parents hates the other parent, then half of you feels like half of your DNA is unaccepted, rejected, and there’s a whole thing about that. And I could point lots of people to your podcast, and I will.
Penny Tremblay: Ginger Gentile’s Erased family documentary attracted me because it was about erased mom and I’ve been an erased mom for a while. And that manifesto video when I asked my son to watch it with me, ‘cause I had his permission to have it done in the first place, but when he watched it with me, it opened up a beautiful conversation as to what happened and a lot of truth came out and I don’t know.
Penny Tremblay: It’s hard for me to answer in a summary. But in summary, I guess what I would really like people to leave this podcast with is that the only way through conflict is through it. This is not comfortable. It’s not intended to be comfortable. It’s the opposite of comfortable.
Penny Tremblay: It’s the contrast, and we need contrast to keep growing and moving through. So embrace it. And if you’re struggling, reach out for help. Reach out to me. I’ll be happy to help people. I’d be happy to help families connect. I’d be happy to help families have the conversations that they need to have to become what they want to become, whatever definition that is for them.
Penny Tremblay: And keep talking about it. Talking, not texting, but keep talking about it. Be open. Be open to trust and I think for some parents, they really could let their kids be the guidance system because kids are very resilient, and they’re very playful, and they don’t really hold grudges, especially when they’re little and they haven’t been taught that skill yet.
Penny Tremblay: One day I heard somebody at Harvard actually, I studied with a bunch of lawyers there and one lawyer said that one strategy he uses when parents come together to talk is to bring pictures of the children and put them on the table, and recognize that that’s what you’re seeking resolution for, is for those little people, right?
Penny Tremblay: It’s like if you’ve decided to move on or somebody’s decided to move on against your choice, that’s something that you need to work on to accept. But don’t play your kids like pawns in some sick game of chess. This is not healthy for anybody. And recognizing that the greatest value of a family for all involved is that everybody can be accepting of everybody else’s choices and decisions.
Penny Tremblay: And that’s really where families are going to be best situated for long-term growth and health of everybody. And our kids are watching us, right? I understand that hurt people hurt people, but we certainly don’t want our kids to be... We definitely need to stop the cycle of hurt and help our kids really accept the fact that families don’t have to look like the old-fashioned ones, the...
Andrew Folkler: The nuclear family.
Barbara La Pointe: Family.
Barbara La Pointe: Lini, I just want to say I feel like we need to invite you back to this podcast again. You have so much to share. If you’d be willing to visit with us again and talk.
Penny Tremblay: With us again. I certainly am. I certainly am. Definitely. And you.
Andrew Folkler: Know... It definitely went by very fast...
Penny Tremblay: If you want to have some guests who are struggling on.
Penny Tremblay: That we can maybe just give them some guidance and help along the way, I’d be happy to do that too. So thank you for letting me talk a little bit about who I am and what I do, why I do it, what helps. And I’m so supportive of the work that you’re doing.
Penny Tremblay: And it’s just very important work. Very, very important. And I wish you both all the best with connection in the relationships that really matter to you, right? And I think that that’s another really important piece. We can talk about that. We don’t have to have relationships that don’t matter.
Penny Tremblay: We don’t. It’s true. One of the greatest nuggets I’ve learned about forgiveness in the last year is that you can forgive somebody and still choose not to have a relationship with them.
Andrew Folkler: Penny, if people wanted to reach out to you or connect with you or even partake in some of your programs, where would they best go?
Penny Tremblay: It’s my website, pennytremblay.com. It’s P-E-N-N-Y-T-R-E-M-B-L-A-Y.com. And that would be about the best place, the starting point. I do have a YouTube channel, and I do have social media accounts. But I would really welcome people to help influence me on what they would like to see me sharing.
Penny Tremblay: On my Instagram feed, I’m kind of new to that. I’d like to know what people wanna know. And I guarantee you, I am an open book. I’m exactly what you see. And I’m willing to share, warts and all, all of the mistakes and struggles and challenges and successes and really help people live into peaceful, happy, connected relationships.
Andrew Folkler: All righty, guys. And that is all we have time for today. Once again, if you have... Thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or to our podcast through iTunes or Spotify. Be sure to also subscribe to Penny’s YouTube channel as well.
Andrew Folkler: And don’t forget that we’ll have a downloadable document below to help you and your loved ones deal with these different conflicts and all the traumas that come with it. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to reach out to you?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: All righty.
Andrew Folkler: And if you wanted to reach me, you can email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, thank you for taking the time to be with us today at the Broken Families podcast where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. Have a wonderful day, everyone.