When Values and Actions Don't Say the Same Thing

Moral panic spreads fast, but I’m more interested in something harder and more hopeful: alignment. When our actions don’t match our values, it can feel like humanity is falling apart. I’m exploring a different read. What if the chaos is bringing our collective shadow into the light so we can finally recognize the pattern and choose something better?

I'm Susan Sutherland, and intuitive guide and happy to have you on this journey with me.

In this episode of The Remembrance Codes podcast, I talk through what’s been stirring me, including how easy it is to fixate on public hypocrisy and how uncomfortable it is to notice my own. I unpack a personal pattern I’m trying to catch in real time: the more certain I feel, the less compassion I tend to offer. That dynamic shows up everywhere, from the way we judge strangers to the way we speak to the people we love most.

From there, the conversation turns practical and intimate. I share a parenting framework for the transition to college, including why some teens “beat up the nest” to make leaving easier and how naming that ahead of time can build emotional capacity and safety at home. Then I bring the same lens into marriage: money fears as an identity shift, compassion that isn’t evenly distributed, and the unglamorous work of honoring each other’s love languages with equal diligence.

We also zoom out to collective values and civic integrity. America’s ideals have never been perfectly embodied, and pretending otherwise keeps us stuck. The opportunity now is to define what we truly value equality, education, health, justice, transparency and then align our choices accordingly, even when it costs time, comfort, or belonging.

If this resonates, subscribe for more reflections, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with integrity, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What belief are you most certain about, and how does it affect your compassion?

Transcript

Welcome And The Values Question

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Hello, my friends, and welcome. Today we are going to talk about morality and humanity and when your actions are not in alignment with your values, when you have not created the embodiment for what you say you believe in. And I will tell you that I don't have any notes. We are winging it. I recently started a Substack where I hope to offer written pieces there. And I want to start trying to give my written voice and my speaking voice a different platform. So we will see how it goes. Maybe that is code for I Am Unprepared, but we're just going to be talking about some things that I have been watching and I am sure you have been watching too. But it is important for us to not just watch and witness, but allow it to be a mirror for our own transformation. So that's what I want to invite you to today, which is the practice I'm working with as things stir in me. So yesterday I did watch a video and it was a really good video, but the presenter says that humanity is at its lowest moral, it is at moral decline. We are at the bottom of the morality barrel. And I hear that from others, and I want to offer a different perspective. Because when I coach people, when shadows come up, that's a good thing. When we are working together and we start noticing patterns that have been happening over and over throughout somebody's life or throughout their relationship, when we are able to recognize that pattern and then make a choice from that awareness to move forward differently, that's growth. That is that's the whole work. And so I realize that humanity is offering a lot of shadow right now. We are seeing the corruption in plain sight. We are seeing the lack of transparency that has allowed power and money to consolidate. We are seeing the discrepancy between what we say we value and what our actions are. And instead of seeing that as the absolute decline of human morality, I offer you to see it as we would our own personal journey in that these shadows are coming to the surface because now we can start recognizing those patterns. And from that recognition, we have the choice to change. And we're only at the point now where we have that awareness, where we're like, oh, this keeps happening. And I am going to challenge you to see that as a as a good thing. And as a because what we do also have collectively is the choice to change, to demand accountability, to demand justice, to demand transparency. We have that choice to change the pattern. So instead of seeing it as, oh my gosh, humanity is absolutely disgraceful, see it as a lot of these patterns have been operating under the surface for so long, and we have not been in a position to recognize them. And now we are. And that is a powerful place to be. So that is what I have been looking for in myself. I'll I'll tell you. I, like everyone else, saw some very disturbing Truth Social posts, not posted on Truth Social because I don't have it, but everything gets reposted. And I did see that the president of our country was excited about genocide, threatening the wiping out of an entire civilization, and also posting a picture of himself depicted as a savior, as Jesus. And all of these things were just like stirring me up, first of all, in disbelief that that anybody could support someone whose leadership style is to threaten the demise of an entire people, especially while claiming to be pro-life or to be pro-anything. But that's not the point, y'all. The point is not for me to take the low-hanging fruit and be like, oh, but look at your hypocrisy. The point was then to look at myself and to find it and to really see where I am not showing up as the embodiment of the values that I claim. Now, when I talk about misalignment with regard to my love of the earth, because I love her, I love her and all of her precious wonder. I speak to the plants and I am grateful as I step out on the earth. And I also love Amazon to bring things quickly and conveniently to my house. I understand that misalignment. But I am using what is available out there to find where I am still saying this, but not embodying the full, the full truth behind that value. And for me, I found that a lot of it is when it cost me something, when it cost me time or convenience, when it cost me belonging, when it cost me relationships, when are we willing to stand up for the little guy unless the little guy is on the other side? One of the things that I am reckoning with through this thought process is that sometimes my extension of compassion to others is not equal. And it seems to be what I have come up with, the examples that I have found when I was thinking about this, is the more certainty I have about something, the less compassion I have. I understand this, I believe this, I hold this in truth, I am okay with this. So I can't comprehend how you're not. And I hold less compassion. So let me walk you through this. Let me ride you through this because I'm gonna take you on our car trip home from Easter. What I realized when we were away at Easter, Mark and I went on some long walks, and he and I have been talking about the future. We've got a kid going to college, we have another kid on deck, and then a third coming. So we are financially planning the future. Also, he is early 50s. We would like to have the trajectory that includes his retirement at one, at one point or another, and having these conversations about money and our financial stability as we walk through these changes. What is it going to look like? And I guess I just trust that we have enough and that we will have enough and then that be okay. And he doesn't. He doesn't trust that. And it created some not fights, but tense, tense conversations. And I had to sit with that and figure out something that was really important. And when I did, this is the conversation I had on the way home from Easter with my kids, because I led into it and explained to them that this coming summer, Dashell may show us all sides of himself. You know, he is going to be experiencing a lot of emotions, joy, excitement, fear, nervousness, all of it. And a lot of times we haven't at 17, he only turns 18 in July. He is still learning emotional capacity to hold that and, to hold the complexity of the emotions that he is going to have and not be confused by them, not be scared by them, and not react in a way that pushes us away. It is a very common theme for graduates going into college to essentially take a bat and beat the nest up so that the mom is like, get the hell out of my house, and they're like, bye, I'm done. And this is a way of creating friction that allows moving to be easier. I am testing a theory right now that says by talking about this in advance, we are going to hopefully disarm him. I'm gonna take the bat out and say, I understand that you have a lot of complex emotions. I want you to feel the spaciousness in this home, the spaciousness in your relationship with me that says I can be afraid, I can be scared, I can be happy, I can be excited, I can be all of those things. The nest can remain and I can fly away from it. We're gonna see if it works. I'll report back. But that is the theory that I'm testing. And I wanted my other kids to be aware of it as well, to say, hey, what we're gonna do this summer is give him space to have these feelings. And how we're gonna do that is not taking the little moments personally. If he feels combative, recognize that he's going through an emotional experience. This is also not the same, but I have taught my boys to give my daughter space when it seems like her emotions are flaring, not to be like, oh, isn't that time of the month? No, screw you, but to honor the cycles of womanhood that all that force us to experience a huge range of emotions and highs and lows all at one time. When we can bring awareness to that, when we can respect that somebody is walking through something that makes them particularly volatile, it becomes less personal. We we are less hurt by it, and hopefully we are creating almost a padded room for him to explore those emotions and hopefully speak with us about them. I don't know that he's not that guy. We will see. But I am trying to navigate that in a way that honors him. What I found was after reflecting on Mark and I, our heated conversations at the beach, is I was not offering him that same grace, that same compassion, that can't that same space to explore his identity, to explore. Okay, as we start talking about the next chapter, we've been doing that book, Messy Love, creating goals together, envisioning the future together. When we're doing that, that shifts him into an identity that he's not comfortable with because he has been the boss for a long time, he has been a provider for a long time. It is not just a financial consideration that he has, it is an identity shift. And so while I was creating the padded room for my son to engage with his identity in a new way and say, we support you, we see you, we recognize that this is a hard practice for you to go through. I was basically telling Mark, we're gonna be fine. I know it's fine, get over yourself, and not offering him any bit of the same compassion for exploring his feelings and his emotions. I may see it as ridiculous, but it's valid and true for him to experience and for us to allow him to experience. And so I saw so much hypocrisy in how I was handling one with soft golden gloves, and how I was essentially putting on boxing gloves for another and saying that doesn't make any sense to his experience. He has never walked through this transition. And while I was allowing my son to walk through his experience and to to allow it to shape him and change him and to be comfortable doing that in our presence, I was not doing that for Mark at all. So I was able to witness how hypocritical I was being in my marriage because the certainty that I felt removed my compassion. And so now I am looking when I lack the compassion for somebody else's experience. I'm trying to call myself on it. I am trying to call myself on it and not just witness other people's hypocrisy of them saying, you know, I'm pro-life, but I don't want to feed this child, I'm pro-life, but it's okay if we bomb a school. Not just seeing other people's hypocrisy, but seeing my own. Back to my marriage. You can tell we've been doing a lot of deep work, but here's another hypocrisy for me is I require this connection time with him. If we are not going to show up in a way that is meaningful and purposeful and feels like growth, not just as individuals, but as a couple, this relationship doesn't feel whole to me. This is what I require. Y'all, he requires physical touch. That is his love language. Am I being as deliberate and diligent in providing his love language to him as he is to me? I'll tell you no. So I have called myself out on that and I'm gonna be working on it. Why is it always that theirs is physical touch and ours is like acts of service? Like, do the things, do the things, clean the house, it's foreplay. But it is really important for me to start not using my eyes to land on everybody else's shortcomings or where their actions and embodiment are not in alignment with their values, but where it is it, where is that showing up in my world? Because there's plenty of opportunity for me to start my inner transformation so that that experience, that coherence is what I am offering to the collective. Collectively, we have work to do. When I have seen people post about the falling of America and that recently we are now in embarrassment because we are acting this way, I am reminded that our embodiment has never been in alignment with our values. The ideals that we were created with, that were spoken, were never embodied. You guys, the land was taken from indigenous people. Women had no rights to vote, people were enslaved. Let's not have some rose-tinted glasses that make us think that it was perfect until now, and now it is distorted. It was distorted, and now we are realizing how distorted it was. This is opportunity for us to collectively define our values and say this is what's important to us: equality and health of our citizens and education, freedom of speech, of religion. What are the things that truly matter to us and how can we align our actions to ensure that moving forward we are moving in a rhythm with those values? It's what I am doing personally, it's what I invite you to do as well. And it's what we have to do collectively, not to sit here and think that the world is over, but that our chance is new to really reassess what our values are and to move forward step by step in better alignment with them. It is easy to live your values when no one is challenging them. But in your relationships and in your community and in your country, we have challenges. Can we still live our values when they have to be offered to everyone? Can we live our values when it costs us something? Can we live our values when we are challenged? All right, that was my ramble for today. I hope it allows you for a moment or two of reflection. What are the things that prickled you this week? What was your initial reaction? What got you fired up? And how does that invite you into your own story? Shadows are not a problem, you guys. It means you have the awareness for change. And that's that's the journey. Thank you for walking it with me. Thank you for listening, even when I ramble. I love you, and I'll see you next week.