The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - August 17, 2021


105. Why You're Failing to Attract Anyone ｜ Dr. Robert Glover


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per minute

191.79

Word count

12,453

Sentence count

490

Harmful content

Misogyny

15

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 When I tell nice guys, you need to make yourself your number one priority in life, they get
00:00:04.560 a deer in the headlight looks.
00:00:05.680 Oh, no, that'll make me a bad person. 0.99
00:00:07.400 That'll make me like my father or all those jerks I've heard women complain about.
00:00:11.780 But no, a true sign of maturity.
00:00:14.160 In fact, I think the number one characteristics of a mature adult is a person who takes full
00:00:19.260 responsibility for both their actions and their needs and their wants.
00:00:23.420 Now, we can't get all of our needs and wants met by ourselves.
00:00:26.680 Now, we can get a good start at it.
00:00:28.540 We can get up and drink water and do some exercise and do some meditation.
00:00:33.180 We can do a lot of things to nurture ourselves, but we need a lot of people around us.
00:00:39.000 We need a posse.
00:00:40.060 I call these cooperative reciprocal relationships.
00:00:43.340 We need a lot of both friends, professionals, practices, different things that fill our bucket.
00:00:50.580 From there, we can give from the overflow.
00:00:56.840 What's up, guys?
00:00:57.960 Welcome to the Michaela Peterson podcast. This is episode number 105 and I'm hosting Dr. Robert
00:01:04.320 Glover. Yes, this was a doozy of an episode, a doozy. He's a marriage and family therapist,
00:01:11.700 although he mostly focuses on coaching men. He's the author of the bestselling book,
00:01:16.500 No More Mr. Nice Guy. We had some very interesting topics to cover. We talked about what the issues
00:01:23.400 are with being a nice guy or nice girl, for that matter. We talked about his experience learning
00:01:28.940 how to be compassionate but not resentful, discussed his book, Relationship Advice Expressing
00:01:34.720 Inner Emotions as Men and Women, for that matter, and more. It was a good one. If you enjoyed the
00:01:41.240 episode with Adam Lane Smith on relationships, you'll love this one. Dr. Robert Glover is a
00:01:47.060 really smart guy. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, please don't forget to subscribe.
00:01:53.400 dr robert glover welcome to my podcast how good to be here i've heard of the book no more mr nice
00:02:08.640 guy for years and years and years and i'm very excited to get you on here i think i had one of
00:02:15.420 my other guests tell me about you although i'd heard of your book so i think my audience is
00:02:20.860 is very interested in this. So I'm excited to be here. And actually, I just have to say that I
00:02:26.780 yesterday, I listened to a few of your previous podcasts just to get a flavor. And I listened to
00:02:32.520 a previous guest who mentioned my name. And I thought, wow, that was kind of nice. When he
00:02:39.020 dropped the G bomb on me, I thought I don't hear that very often, but it was nice. Oh, that's
00:02:44.440 weirdly coincidental. Yeah, it's just weird. Well, you know, he was talking about relationships,
00:02:49.360 and I'm all about relationships so I thought I'll listen to that that podcast and okay fair enough
00:02:54.700 that was Adam Lane Smith yeah it was okay well yep he's the one who told me to get you on and
00:03:01.740 so now you're here before we get started could you give just a brief background about who you
00:03:06.300 are and what you do for anyone who doesn't know who you are or what you do yeah I'm that's a good
00:03:12.340 question. My background is that my training is in marriage and family therapy. I was a marriage
00:03:20.660 and family therapist for a number of years in private practice. And about close to 30 years
00:03:25.980 ago, while I was struggling through my own second marriage, basically my second wife said,
00:03:33.060 you need to go get some help or I'm leaving you. And I thought I was a nice guy. I was treating
00:03:37.600 her well, treated her better than her ex, was raising her kids. And so I decided, okay, I'll go
00:03:44.560 figure out what she means when I'm saying, when she says I'm passive aggressive or I'm this or I'm
00:03:48.820 that. And I had a PhD in marriage and family therapy and didn't even know what passive
00:03:52.840 aggressiveness was. So I joined a 12 step group, got into a men's group, got into therapy and
00:03:59.260 started realizing that I had a internal life paradigm that if I was a good guy, if I treated
00:04:04.880 everybody well did everything right people would love me like me i'd get my needs met without having
00:04:09.900 to ask and um and realize that wasn't a very effective life paradigm and so in my counseling
00:04:17.440 with other men and women i'd started noticing a lot of guys coming to me with their wives or
00:04:22.180 girlfriends saying the same things i was saying i'm a nice guy i treat her better than her ex i'm
00:04:26.560 raising her kids i give her everything she wants i try to make her happy she's never happy she never
00:04:31.260 wants to have sex anymore uh blah blah blah and i thought i can finish these guys sentences for
00:04:36.040 them so 25 plus years ago i started my first no more mr nice guy men's group and uh soon added a
00:04:44.480 second and i just started writing little chapters to give to the guys and they started saying robert
00:04:49.760 you should write a book you should go on oprah and uh i kept writing and wrote a book never got
00:04:54.360 on oprah not yet uh but but i'm on the michaela peterson show so you know that that's like i'm
00:05:00.700 there. So, um, and so that's been about 25 years. I've been working with men. I, I no longer do
00:05:07.940 private practice. I have an online university. I do workshops and seminars. I do some consultation.
00:05:14.780 Um, I write books and I now live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and, you know, have a great life.
00:05:21.360 So that's, that's the nutshell of me and probably how I ended up being, uh, talking to you today.
00:05:27.020 okay so what does what does a nice guy look like like the wit the one that you write about in your
00:05:34.860 book okay and and i'll talk about specifically nice guys but i'll also say that a lot of things
00:05:41.920 i talk about a lot of of your women listeners will probably relate to as well because there's
00:05:46.380 been nice girls around forever okay so it's the same it's the same problem for men and women
00:05:51.820 at its at its base it is it then manifests often in a little bit different ways for men and women
00:05:58.160 but the base core paradigm is a nice guy or a nice girl doesn't believe they're okay just as
00:06:04.900 they are and you know we mentioned adam lane smith and he did a really good job talking about how
00:06:09.180 children internalize at a very young age any negative painful experience as being caused
00:06:15.100 about them all children are very narcissistic they're the center of their world and so when
00:06:20.380 something painful happens, we believe I must have caused that, which then turns into a grandiose
00:06:26.240 belief system that has two sides to it. One is that I'm so bad, I cause people to leave me,
00:06:31.900 hurt me, cry, be depressed, drink, yell, scream, whatever. And if I am that powerful to cause that,
00:06:38.920 I also must be powerful enough to prevent that or fix it. So there's these grandiose beliefs
00:06:45.200 that there's something so bad with me that I cause people to leave me or hurt me.
00:06:50.020 And I must be powerful enough to prevent that from ever happening. So, so nice guys and nice
00:06:55.380 girls basically then grow up. And by the way, this belief system is recorded in a very deep
00:07:00.860 emotional part of our brain, uh, is recorded in our, in our amygdala where our emotional
00:07:05.320 operating system is. So this isn't like words we have. It's not an intellect intellectualization.
00:07:11.200 it's not even like visual memory it's just an emotional belief system down at our operating
00:07:16.520 system that then affects every other part of our brain and so we grow up to be children adolescents
00:07:22.960 adults with a belief system if i can just be good enough and become what i think other people want
00:07:29.820 me to be then i'll be liked and loved and get my needs met and if i can hide anything about me
00:07:36.020 that might get a negative response from other people then i'll never get abandoned so men and
00:07:41.780 women both that if they if they have these nice guys internalization or attachment issues as as
00:07:48.280 adam smith called them um they might manifest differently for a guy than they do for a woman
00:07:53.700 but the core belief system is the same is that there's something wrong with me i'm not good
00:07:58.920 enough that's typically called toxic shame i have to become something different become what other
00:08:03.940 people want me to be and hide those whatever that bad thing about me that I think is and you for
00:08:10.260 most nice guys what we tend to hide is our needs our wants and our sexuality so we keep that all
00:08:16.580 under wraps so we don't get a negative reaction from anybody okay so would that kind of would
00:08:24.580 that kind of nice person arrive from a childhood that was like overly stressful is that where it
00:08:31.120 comes from or could it be a regular childhood and then you end up like that anyway you know the word
00:08:36.020 stressful is probably a really good application because what happens and i write about this in my
00:08:41.480 book is when i first started looking at nice guy syndrome i was looking at me right so i thought
00:08:46.260 i'm a nice guy uh how did i become a nice guy well it's probably because i had this interaction
00:08:51.780 with my this type of interaction with my father this kind of interaction with my mother i was
00:08:56.500 brought up in a fundamental christian church that had a lot of you know hellfire and brimstone 1.00
00:09:00.940 messages, uh, just grew up in the sixties and seventies with angry feminism. Uh, every man's 1.00
00:09:07.920 a rapist and erections, a sign of aggression. And so I, all these got internalized into my
00:09:13.080 emotional brain and I thought, okay, maybe all other nice guys are just like me, but I quickly
00:09:17.880 came to realize they weren't, um, there's a lot of different factors. And, and the, this, you
00:09:23.740 mentioned stress, however, we might experience stress. And a lot of this has to do with temperament
00:09:29.940 because you can have two children born into the same family with very different temperaments and
00:09:34.880 they handle the stresses very differently and develop different survival and defense mechanisms
00:09:40.300 so a lot for for what i found with nice guys and nice girls for many it partly is just do our net
00:09:47.180 to our natural temperament i'm a fairly easygoing you know don't rock the boat want to make everybody
00:09:53.920 happy kind of guy it's my basic temperament yeah okay yeah so that's part of who i am and then
00:09:59.540 when you add those stresses, as you speak of, and those stresses would be anything that's painful,
00:10:04.840 uncomfortable. You know, you, you, you went through a lot of painful things as a child.
00:10:08.680 I had surgery at five days old and I can just imagine emotionally what that felt like to have,
00:10:14.760 you know, back then, you know, parents didn't come to the waiting room. It wasn't nurturing
00:10:18.460 and soft. And, you know, I probably would just taken away from my parents, put on a cold table,
00:10:23.320 put a mask over my face and wake up in pain. And, you know, how, how does a child at five days old
00:10:28.660 internalize that information. It's not going to be done logically. It's done emotionally.
00:10:34.320 And so whatever those stresses might be, it might be, you know, our parents don't get along well.
00:10:40.720 It might be that, you know, that they repress their feelings. It might be that sexuality is
00:10:47.320 repressed in the family. It might be that mom and dad fight a lot. It might be our, you know,
00:10:51.900 maybe our father was never there. It could be any number of things. It could be that we were
00:10:58.160 hungry and didn't get fed quickly or we you know wet our diaper and didn't get changed quickly
00:11:04.020 those kinds of things are the stresses that a child internalizes i've got to find a way to not
00:11:10.720 keep experiencing these these painful experiences and all children do this not just nice guys or
00:11:16.140 nice girls all children develop defense survival mechanisms to try to do two things number one
00:11:22.820 cope with the uncomfortable feelings they're feeling in the moment so i sucked my thumb
00:11:27.740 until I was in kindergarten. That was a coping mechanism. Some children become needless and
00:11:32.040 wantless. Some cry, some fight, some please, some smile all the time. That's how we try to manage
00:11:40.400 the uncomfortable feelings. The second thing that we try to do is try to prevent the things that
00:11:45.660 cause these uncomfortable feelings from happening again in the future. Now, take all of that bundle
00:11:51.460 of stuff that we just talked about. Fast forward that into adolescence and adulthood. We all have
00:11:57.620 that emotional operating system, we formalized at a very immature, helpless, dependent stage of
00:12:03.260 life. And we assume that's the way the world works. And we go out into the world functioning
00:12:09.340 from that emotional operating system. And even if, for example, we can't find any big trauma in our
00:12:15.420 life or our parents are still married and have a good marriage, anything uncomfortable or painful
00:12:21.620 is stressful to a young dependent child.
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00:13:38.540 make a plan stop being useless etc enjoy the rest of this episode what's the opposite of the mr
00:13:46.720 nice guy? If your coping mechanism isn't to be nice, like you're explaining, what's the opposite
00:13:52.880 that can happen? Well, what I call in the book is I call them an integrated male. Now, there could
00:13:58.560 be any number of names, an authentic male, authentic person, integrated person, but basically
00:14:04.460 it's a person who's comfortable with their own feelings. They don't feel like they need to hide
00:14:09.320 anything about themselves. They're open and visible and transparent. They're able to soothe
00:14:15.820 their anxiety and take action rather than trying to manage their anxiety by medicating it away or
00:14:22.360 managing people in situations outside of them. They're honest. They'll tell you what they think,
00:14:28.180 what they feel they want. They're not pursuing external validation or recognition. They're
00:14:36.140 self-validating through their own actions, through their own sense of integrity. The term,
00:14:44.020 differentiated. And differentiation basically is the ability to ask yourself, what do I want?
00:14:50.900 What feels right to me? What does my gut say? And then to follow through on that, even when
00:14:57.280 there's resistance, either between your own ears in terms of neurotic guilt and anxiety,
00:15:01.760 and or change back messages from the people around you. That's a differentiated, authentic
00:15:09.080 person that basically lives life on their terms is a what you see what you get kind of person
00:15:14.460 can be open and available to relationship can be giving and generous but they're not giving to get
00:15:20.440 they're they're they're just giving as is needed rather than what they need to get validation
00:15:25.800 so there's there's a lot of different features that that would go with this more authentic
00:15:30.420 integrated person okay so i'm probably more on the nice spectrum than the authentic integrated
00:15:36.400 person okay i'm fairly i'm fairly disagreeable but i think being sick as a kid and trying to
00:15:42.960 avoid being depressed and trying to avoid stress like just stressful situations i'll do things
00:15:48.340 like try and manage situations so i i can see where you're coming from how do you know like
00:15:53.340 isn't there a isn't there part of okay let me just give you an example let me try and word this
00:15:59.940 properly if you're in a situation where you're trying to take care of a family member
00:16:04.520 doesn't it sometimes benefit to be the nice person or is that just always not a good thing
00:16:13.740 to do because there's you know guilt wrapped up in it like isn't there some point where you kind
00:16:18.280 of need those kind of people yeah that's a good question and and you found yourself in that place
00:16:23.400 in life i have as well probably we all do it sometime here's the perspective of that is that
00:16:29.140 i don't use the word codependency in my book and i did that on purpose mainly because when i wrote
00:16:35.120 the book uh 20 something 25 years ago the term codependency was primarily only used with women
00:16:41.620 and with like family members of alcoholics and um and so i wanted to talk about the dynamic of
00:16:48.520 this giving to get or covert contracts as i call it without people getting a predetermined idea of
00:16:54.740 projecting their own pre-idea of codependency. So the nice guys I talk about, it operates,
00:17:04.940 like I said, from what I call covert contracts. They're if-then propositions. And there's three
00:17:10.400 primary covert contracts of nice guy syndrome. Let's be true for guys or girls. One is that if
00:17:16.440 I'm a good person, then I'll be liked and loved. For most men, that also manifests, and the women
00:17:23.280 that I desire to have sex with will want to have sex with me. If I'm a good guy, they'll want to
00:17:28.420 be with me. Second covert contract is that if I meet everybody else's needs without them having
00:17:34.500 to ask, then they will meet my needs without me having to ask. Now, as you can imagine, that's
00:17:40.780 not a very functional way of relating to other people. Third covert contract of nice guy syndrome
00:17:46.100 is if I do everything right, then I'll have a smooth problem-free life. And this is kind of a-
00:17:53.760 That's what gets me, I think. Yeah, I do too. I fall, hey, I did everything right. How come
00:17:57.760 you're upset at me? You know, you should do nothing but make my life easy and praise me
00:18:02.040 and appreciate me. I'm the same way. So, but it's a very immature Peter Pan-ish, oh, if I get
00:18:08.600 everything right, everything in my life will work well. But a couple of problems with that is nobody
00:18:13.200 ever gets everything right we're human we're we're we're we're we're flawed you know we're
00:18:18.600 imperfect and the other part of that is we don't live in a smooth problem free perfect world we
00:18:24.460 live in a chaotic world and and accepting that the world is chaotic is one step towards maturity
00:18:30.540 because then we quit trying to manage the chaos um and so going back to your question then
00:18:36.340 if you are not operating from covert contracts if you're not giving to get and in the way i often
00:18:42.900 put it if you're not giving from an empty bucket where most codependents nice guys nice girls are
00:18:48.880 because we're not good at making our own needs a priority our bucket's empty we give to others 0.65
00:18:54.820 hoping that they will then give back which means that our bucket doesn't usually get filled and we
00:19:00.400 often have a lot of guilt around taking good care of ourselves or meeting our own needs or making
00:19:05.220 ourselves a priority when when i tell nice guys you need to make yourself your number one priority
00:19:10.660 in life. They get a deer in the headlight looks, oh no, that'll make me a bad person. That'll make
00:19:14.760 me like my father or all those jerks I've heard women complain about. But no, the true sign of
00:19:20.300 maturity, in fact, I think the number one characteristics of a mature adult is a person
00:19:25.380 who takes full responsibility for both their actions and their needs and their wants. Now,
00:19:30.620 we can't get all of our needs and wants met by ourselves. Now, we can get a good start at it.
00:19:35.340 We can get up and drink water and do some exercise and do some meditation.
00:19:39.980 We can do a lot of things to nurture ourselves, but we need a lot of people around us.
00:19:45.820 We need a posse.
00:19:46.860 I call these cooperative reciprocal relationships.
00:19:50.160 We need a lot of both friends, professionals, practices, different things that fill our
00:19:56.640 bucket.
00:19:57.320 From there, we can give from the overflow and we can be generous and we can bless other
00:20:02.640 people's lives. And we can give to them what they need to receive, not what we need to give
00:20:08.320 out of our covert contract coming from a place of emptiness. So to come back to your question,
00:20:14.020 if you are taking good care of you, which is essential, if you're going to give to anybody
00:20:18.860 else, if you're filling your own bucket in a consistent way, that makes you feel loved and
00:20:25.600 lovable. And then you can give from the overflow with no strings attached, no covert contracts,
00:20:31.200 and give to people what they most need to receive, not what you most need to give
00:20:35.660 to get your covert contracts met. So, yeah, you know, I think I heard you mention you have a
00:20:42.040 young child. Yes. Okay. Scarlett, she's almost four. Okay. So here's an example of what I call
00:20:48.920 two levels of differentiation. First level of differentiation is where you ask yourself,
00:20:54.360 what feels right to me? What do I want? What do I need? What's important to me? And then you take
00:20:59.000 action to do that. And again, you do it even when you experience resistance of neurotic guilt or
00:21:05.040 change back from the people around you. Now, there's a second level of differentiation that
00:21:10.080 can only occur after you've achieved first level differentiation. And then you can also ask what
00:21:17.300 is in the best interest of the people I love? What is in the best interest of the planet that I live
00:21:22.680 on, right? And now from that place, you might actually make some sacrifices. You might actually
00:21:29.080 put yourself second in order to put somebody you love first that needs to, especially a child or
00:21:34.640 an ill parent. My mother's 86 and had a stroke coming up on three years ago. She lives alone,
00:21:41.760 she can still drive, but she's fairly disabled physically. And, you know, I live in Mexico.
00:21:47.060 She lives in Seattle. I get up there at least every other month and people, oh, you go up to
00:21:52.000 see your mom a lot. They go, yeah, I go up because she lives alone. You know, she, she doesn't have
00:21:57.540 a lot of social connections. She can't get out a lot. Um, I go up and make sure, you know, it's her 1.00
00:22:02.160 during COVID, you know, her pantry is well stocked and that she doesn't have to do a Costco run by
00:22:07.320 herself. And so I can take care of my mother in differentiated ways. Now, as a child, I tried to
00:22:14.520 take care of her in codependent ways because I thought my, my, uh, my ability to thrive and
00:22:20.400 survived depended on me sacrificing me to take care of her. I'm now a differentiated adult and
00:22:26.220 I can make sacrifices or I can go out of my way to do things for her. Now with your, with your
00:22:31.520 daughter, I remember my son's 36 when, when they're small, you think they're never going to
00:22:36.520 grow up, but you know, I've got a 14 year old granddaughter now, so they do grow up pretty
00:22:40.880 quickly. And I remember, you know, when he was a baby that at times, you know, he'd be up all night
00:22:48.260 And, you know, my, my then wife would come in and say, I can't take it anymore.
00:22:51.900 I can't handle it. 0.87
00:22:52.820 You've got to go be with them.
00:22:54.420 And at that time I was a minister.
00:22:56.120 And so like, you know, if it's a Saturday night, I had to get up and preach Sunday morning
00:22:59.880 and, you know, and I'm thinking, oh, I don't want to go be with a screaming baby.
00:23:05.600 I need my sleep.
00:23:06.720 I got to be good in the morning.
00:23:08.400 And, but you know what?
00:23:09.680 I got up because it was in the best interest of my, my then wife to let her not be with
00:23:15.400 a screaming baby when she was at her wit's hands.
00:23:17.460 and for me to go be with my son. And, you know, believe it or not, some of my fondest memories
00:23:22.860 are of those years when he was a baby, be in the rocking chair. I'd be holding him in my arms,
00:23:28.680 rocking, talking to him, singing to him. And I could give to him because I was already taking
00:23:35.640 good care of me. And we can make those sacrifices to give to others if we're not sacrificing
00:23:41.520 ourself. So fill our own bucket and then give from the overflow. And at times we do put ourselves
00:23:47.900 second to make somebody else who needs our attention. Number one.
00:23:55.020 Okay. That totally makes sense. So you can end up doing, you can end up, well, you end up being a
00:24:01.760 better person, right? If you're just giving and it's making you resentful and angry and isolated,
00:24:07.060 then you're not a nice person. Really? You just think you're a nice person, right?
00:24:11.200 And that's actually, that's a good point because that's the way, because like people will say, well, how do I know if I'm a nice guy? How do I know if I'm using covert contracts? The way you usually know it is that you feel resentful and victimized. You're not being appreciated enough. You're not getting back as much as you give. You're not being noticed. You're not being thanked.
00:24:30.400 And if you, if you're kind of ruminating about those things and feeling bitter and resentful, and if that starts manifesting in either passive aggressive behavior, which is, I, I, I actually did learn what passive aggressiveness was, you know, it's when you express your anger in indirect kind of ways, like instead of saying, I'm mad at you, or I'd like you to do this, or I'd like you to stop.
00:24:50.380 we we poke at them we jab at them we we embarrass them in public we shut down we don't follow through
00:24:56.540 on our commitments whatever those are passive aggressive behaviors or nice guys often can go
00:25:01.940 into what i call a victim puke where the stuff just builds up builds up builds up until boom
00:25:06.580 it you know everything we've ever rehearsed in our head that we wanted to say because we're so
00:25:10.860 resentful yeah just comes out and and i remember um when i was doing most of my work and when i
00:25:17.060 wrote No More Mr. Nice Guy. I was in my second marriage. And I mean, I had to learn a lot. I had
00:25:22.080 to grow up a lot. And I remember I'd have one of these victim pukes with my then second wife. 1.00
00:25:27.700 And when all was said and done, she said, like, how long has this been bothering you?
00:25:34.340 I'd go, I don't know, six months, maybe. And she'd go, it never crossed your mind to say
00:25:39.180 something about it? And I'd go, no, not really. And really, it hadn't. It never crossed my mind
00:25:44.580 that maybe I could say, hey, this bothers me, or hey, can you do this different? Or hey, can you
00:25:48.480 stop doing that? Or hey, can we talk about this? It's just built and built and built. That's a
00:25:53.300 pretty clear sign that you're a nice girl or a nice guy, that all these things you do for other
00:25:57.680 people actually start taking a toll. They start building up in terms of resentments and perhaps
00:26:02.820 rage and frustrations, and they get manifest in those passive aggressive ways or in the occasional
00:26:09.380 victim puke. Okay. So say somebody's listening to this and is realizing that they exhibit some
00:26:17.060 of these traits of a overly nice person. What are the first steps in figuring out how to,
00:26:24.560 I guess, start expressing healthy emotion? Okay. That's a good question. And I'll tell
00:26:28.920 you how I started. And I found that this seems to be a pretty good starting place. And I mentioned
00:26:35.540 that I went to a 12 step group and I didn't know where else to go, but my wife was telling me you're
00:26:40.060 a sex addict. And so I thought, well, I don't think so. I'm not having very much sex. I'm not
00:26:44.860 sure how you fall. But so I went to this 12 step group for sex addiction and it was all met. And
00:26:49.940 it met like 6 AM in the morning. And I was in my early thirties at the time. And I went and I did
00:26:56.740 quickly find out I wasn't a sex addict, but for the first time in my life, I had a safe place to
00:27:03.480 just open up and reveal me to talk about me both my hurts my pains anything that i repressed
00:27:10.420 behaviors i'd never told anybody about thoughts and impulses i never told anybody about and i
00:27:16.080 actually got excited about getting up once a week you know to be at this meeting at 6 a.m in the
00:27:20.740 morning to to to just reveal me and talk about me and soon at right at that same time i also got
00:27:27.780 with a therapist that i started working with maybe six months or so later i got with into a
00:27:32.780 men's group that I was in for four or five years, and I'm still today in a men's program. I've been
00:27:37.240 in for three years, and the number one place to start is go find a safe person or a safe place
00:27:44.620 and start revealing you. Now, this does a few things. One, it lets you start releasing that
00:27:50.280 internalized unconscious toxic shame, that core belief that I'm not okay, I'm not good enough.
00:27:56.660 Now, I found, I'll just distinguish, I found in nice guys, and I'm sure it's true in nice girls
00:28:01.480 as well there are two types of nice guys one is the i call it i'm so good nice guy the other is
00:28:07.200 the i'm so bad nice guy i fit and i'm so good nice guy category i think i do everything so well
00:28:13.660 everybody should think i'm great now deep down inside in this really dark tightly locked box
00:28:22.600 is my toxic shame that i work really hard to avoid ever having to feel or experience the sense
00:28:28.060 that i'm not okay that's why i work so hard to be good is because deep inside i don't feel okay
00:28:33.480 that's the i'm so good nice guy if everybody got to know me everybody would love me now i'm so bad
00:28:38.320 nice guy is often the guy that started rebelling or acting out oppositionally defiant behavior at
00:28:43.880 a young age maybe start drinking doing pot dropped out of school you know fucked up a lot and then
00:28:49.580 maybe you know got married or had a kid or found jesus or got in the military and they got their
00:28:54.740 life in order. But now they're trying to be a nice guy, but deep inside, they still think if
00:29:00.820 anybody gets close to me, they're going to find out how messed up I really am. So that's the I'm
00:29:05.500 so bad, nice guy. So by finding a safe person, a coach, a therapist, a group, a 12-step program,
00:29:14.200 a minister, rabbi, whatever, and beginning to reveal yourself, you begin to release toxic shame.
00:29:20.640 and that that is so so unburdening so liberating and you start getting more accurate feedback
00:29:28.140 from a safe person as to who you really are yeah and you know you might say i'll give you an example
00:29:34.300 i was leading a men's workshop several years ago and there's a guy in there um early 40s african
00:29:41.200 american um and he just carried so much toxic shame and so during this workshop i just asked
00:29:47.700 him what what what is your deepest shame shameful thing about you and he told a story that when he
00:29:55.040 was like 14 he stole a car stereo and because of that every since he's just believed he's the most
00:30:01.400 terrible human being and like all the other men in this workshop looked at him it was a small group
00:30:06.500 about eight ten guys and they said really that's it we all did stupid stuff when we were 14 you
00:30:12.360 know that that's that's like probably small change and like he got accurate information
00:30:16.780 that doing a stupid 14 year old thing did not make him a horrible person and that was that one thing
00:30:23.160 was just liberating to him that he could quit beating himself up for being this terrible person
00:30:28.820 so we get more accurate feedback as to who we are by by revealing ourselves to say people we also
00:30:36.180 get to practice being honest and that was such a big thing for me nice guys think we're you know
00:30:40.840 we're so great. We're so this, we're so that, you know, we, you know, give us a parade,
00:30:44.640 give us confetti, whatever. But the truth is most guys, most nice guys are extremely dishonest.
00:30:50.420 We only reveal what, what we think, you know, you want to hear. We hide anything that might
00:30:55.400 get the negative reaction. We, we, we twist the truth. We leave it out. We embellish it.
00:31:00.200 We misdirect your attention. And so one of the first things I realized I had to do
00:31:04.860 was just start being an honest person.
00:31:07.500 So being in a safe environment
00:31:09.120 let me practice telling my entire truth
00:31:12.580 with people that weren't going to like overreact
00:31:15.460 or abandon me.
00:31:17.100 That then let me begin practicing it
00:31:19.560 with the people who I was most afraid
00:31:21.200 of overreacting or abandoning me,
00:31:24.080 family, partner, close friends.
00:31:27.760 And so having that safe place
00:31:29.620 lets us release shame,
00:31:31.160 get more accurate information of who we are,
00:31:33.200 and Alyssa's practice being a more honest person. So that is where I recommend people start.
00:31:39.340 This is so interesting. Okay. I'm very glad I had you on. I had a great time with like Adam
00:31:45.060 Lane Smith. I was like, this all makes sense. It's so interesting. So this is very cool. So
00:31:50.580 that's why Al-Anon is such a huge thing, right? Because you connect with somebody and who cares
00:31:57.040 if like, what's the risk of telling them your deepest, darkest secrets? It's not like your
00:32:02.500 family right they're not necessarily going to care yeah and you know and i'll tell you a short story
00:32:08.740 um when i was like early in this process i i was in this 12-step group and i had a therapist a
00:32:16.120 female therapist and um pretty early on i i had a dark sexual impulse i didn't act on it but just
00:32:25.080 the fact that i noticed myself having this dark impulse really scared me now the old previous me
00:32:31.960 probably never would have let that impulse even get into conscious awareness but when it did
00:32:36.800 because i was practicing letting stuff come into conscious awareness it scared me it scared me i
00:32:42.620 didn't act on it and that felt good but it felt bad that i even could think something so dark
00:32:47.540 and so i went to my 12-step group and told them this dark impulse that i had and you know the
00:32:55.160 only reaction you ever get in a 12-step group is you know thank you for sharing you know that's it
00:33:00.100 you know, nobody goes, Oh, you're a horrible human being. How could you even think of something?
00:33:04.260 You know, it just, thank you for sharing. And most of the guys in this group, their lives were
00:33:08.740 so frigging out of control. They're probably thinking that's it. That's the worst. That's
00:33:13.040 the worst you got to bring to us. So I told them, and it was such a relief to just speak it out loud
00:33:18.860 and just not carry it around inside of me where eventually it would have either kept fueling a
00:33:23.960 lot of shame for having the impulse, or perhaps it might've even gotten acted on, right? If I
00:33:29.040 didn't deal with it and bring it out in the open so i went to my 12-step group told them
00:33:33.240 no big negative reaction so i actually had a an appointment with my therapist like an hour after 0.95
00:33:39.520 the group so i drove over to her office and i'm thinking same thing i'm going to tell this female
00:33:44.360 therapist this dark sexual impulse she's going to think i'm a terrible human being blah blah blah
00:33:49.540 but i told her and just you know i told her the impulse and she just looked at me with compassion
00:33:53.900 and said well let's explore what that story's about and like i'm going that's it that that's
00:33:59.780 as terrible of reactions i'm going to get so i get done with the therapy session i'm driving home
00:34:05.040 my my second wife i used to tell her that her middle name ought to be overreact because that's
00:34:10.680 what she did in every situation and so i'm driving home to to miss overreact to tell and i'm thinking
00:34:17.420 i gotta tell her i gotta tell her uh you know i think i already told my 12-step group i already
00:34:22.540 told my therapist i'm batting a thousand if i tell her and she overreacts and has a terrible
00:34:27.520 reaction to it i'm still 666 great batting average no problem and so i'm driving home soothing myself
00:34:34.520 right and not rehearsing the story because if i'm just going to tell her the truth i just got to
00:34:40.080 tell her the truth and um i get home and i say i got something i got to talk with you about took
00:34:45.840 her back to the bedroom we sat on the bed and i said um here's the thing i said i want you to
00:34:50.700 already talked to my 12-step group already talked to my therapist but the thing i want to tell you
00:34:55.460 about is i had this impulse i didn't act on it but i had it i've talked about it i've gotten it out
00:35:01.120 i needed to tell you about it and she just looked at me and said that kind of scares me it doesn't
00:35:08.160 surprise me and i'm glad you told me and she never brought it up again never reacted never used it
00:35:15.860 against me. And I'm sitting there thinking, this is like magic. You know, all you have to do is
00:35:21.580 just reveal, just tell. And, and, you know, it's when we're keeping the secrets and hiding the
00:35:27.140 things that people sense something is wrong and out of whack. That's what most people are reacting
00:35:32.360 to is what, what doesn't seem true or aligned. And me just sitting down and saying, here's the truth
00:35:39.180 after having already practiced that with safe people, let me then do it with somebody that I
00:35:45.280 I did have fear that she might have a negative reaction and,
00:35:49.240 and I'm grateful that she didn't. And that,
00:35:51.040 because that helped reinforce I can keep revealing myself and I can handle
00:35:55.460 whatever the reaction is that people might have.
00:35:58.820 Yeah. That's very interesting. I like that you pointed out.
00:36:02.440 It's the hidden things that create fear that people are reacting to.
00:36:07.120 It's like, what are you not saying? How bad could it be?
00:36:09.680 And I guess if you shove something down in yourself and you think it's that
00:36:13.280 bad you're going to give off those i don't know that energy that people around you like look how
00:36:18.440 bad a person i am yeah even if it's not necessarily that bad yeah they and they do sense it i mean
00:36:24.020 i tell men that for example that um and i found that women are especially sensitive
00:36:29.860 to to this energy to to repressed energy they they get it that now i know a lot of women will
00:36:36.860 like then project what they think it's about but yeah oh guys i'll tell guys for example let's say 0.94
00:36:42.080 you're driving down the street with with your girlfriend or your wife or whatever and and
00:36:45.780 you've got gas and you don't you don't want to rip one right there and so you're repressing you're
00:36:50.140 holding the gas back you're being a good person a good citizen right by by not ripping a fart
00:36:54.480 you know while you're driving down the road but you're repressing something and not saying anything
00:36:59.000 about it your woman is sitting there next to you going there's something up there's something going
00:37:03.960 on with it he's holding something back he's repressing something oh i know he was looking
00:37:08.260 of that woman's breasts on the corner back there and he's still thinking about her breasts he's
00:37:12.420 thinking you know and then the woman will create this big story yeah all of a sudden they're having
00:37:16.820 some big fight because she'll accuse him of the thing that she projected and he was just trying
00:37:22.300 to be a good guy and you know holding hell and gas back and that goes on all the time in
00:37:26.720 relationships uh is is one person holding back and the other person sensing it having some visceral
00:37:33.620 reaction to it and often creating a story to go with it that's usually a projection of their own
00:37:38.780 personal story from their own past experiences and now all of a sudden you know they're often
00:37:42.980 fighting about something that didn't even happen but something was happening that never got spoken
00:37:48.880 of it's the meta thing most people never really fight about the thing they're fighting about
00:37:53.920 they're fighting they're fighting about some meta type thing but now they're talking they're
00:37:59.200 arguing about this, but it's usually something different than that. Okay, this is good. I'm
00:38:06.180 going to get some practical advice then. What should people who, let's do it for the parents,
00:38:14.160 say you're a single mom or single dad, which is already like there's going to be some stress in
00:38:20.800 that how do you help your kid to not develop this nice guy syndrome the best way i know to do that
00:38:30.060 is through modeling and and probably you're aware of that that you you know if your daughter if your
00:38:34.840 daughter sees you doing certain things she'll probably model it you know mostly they say for
00:38:39.340 example yes most most children that smoke grew up seeing adults smoke or you know most that develop
00:38:45.780 drinking issues saw adults now that's not always the case but our children model our behavior for
00:38:50.620 good and for bad. So if going back to what I was talking about of you filling your own bucket up,
00:38:57.160 for example, if your daughter sees you consciously surrounding yourself with lots of resources,
00:39:02.900 those cooperative reciprocal relationships I was talking about, whereas you and your friends,
00:39:08.000 it's you and professionals that you have in your life, your doctor, your dentist, your chiropractor,
00:39:13.060 your accountant, your co, you know, coworkers, and you are consciously getting what you need to
00:39:20.220 fill your bucket from those resources as you also give. You and I right now have a cooperative
00:39:25.160 reciprocal relationship. We both agreed to be here. We both assume we'll get something of benefit out
00:39:30.500 of being here together. And, you know, if afterwards said and done, if either one of us
00:39:35.400 decided that wasn't worth the time or investment, we probably wouldn't do it again. But if both of
00:39:40.500 us felt like, hey, that was worthwhile, that was beneficial, we would very definitely consider
00:39:45.720 doing that again. That's what a cooperative reciprocal relationship is. So, if your daughter,
00:39:51.380 for example, sees you spending time with your girlfriends, exercising, eating healthy,
00:39:59.340 meditating, going for walks in the park, laughing, having fun, surrounding yourself with goodness
00:40:07.320 that fills your life, fills your bucket, then you're giving to her from the overflow,
00:40:13.040 and she will then model those same behaviors um a good a good model for this is um a guy named
00:40:21.380 m scott peck wrote a book called the road less traveled uh it's probably 40 years old i've heard
00:40:27.800 is the all-time best-selling self-help book and um there's a whole chapter in there on discipline
00:40:33.660 i'm a whole section the whole section on love and he says love i'm gonna paraphrase it
00:40:39.280 is the giving to oneself or to another in a way that promotes one's or another's spiritual growth.
00:40:48.800 Now, you could also just say well-being, okay? And he says, and I teach this in a lot of my
00:40:55.240 programs, he has this really cool model that I've expanded on. He says, if the parents are meeting
00:41:01.780 their needs in a timely, judicious way, filling their own bucket up, if they have healthy,
00:41:07.160 differentiated relationship with each other to where mom and dad aren't in what I call an
00:41:12.560 ownership fused relationship, which is you belong to me, therefore you should constantly fill my
00:41:18.220 bucket up because I feel so empty. That's how most of us do our intimate relationships. But if our
00:41:23.480 partner is just one more of our cooperative reciprocal relationships, just one of many
00:41:29.100 bucket fillers that we have in our life, and we're one for them as well, both mom and dad's buckets
00:41:35.340 are going to be filled. And then Peck says, if the parents can then, um, take the time to pay
00:41:42.600 attention to each of their child's needs and respond to their needs in timely and judicious
00:41:48.660 ways. And I add consistent to that list because I think consistency is a real important key.
00:41:54.280 So if you as a mom are filling your own bucket, you're surrounded with good resources to keep
00:41:59.780 your bucket full, to keep you energized. You can then pay attention to you. You'll have time to
00:42:04.400 pay attention to your daughter you'll see what her own particular needs are in any given moment
00:42:08.880 you'll give to them in timely ways you'll give to her in judicious ways and as i'm sure you've
00:42:13.780 already found out giving judiciously to our children requires the wisdom of solomon you know
00:42:19.980 you know do you give your 11 year old wait till she's it'll probably come before 11 it'll probably
00:42:25.740 happen at 9 maybe it's already happened she comes home says mom i need an iphone you know i you know
00:42:30.320 I need an iPhone. I need an iPhone. And you know, your 11 year old doesn't need an iPhone
00:42:37.140 because it's probably not good for her to have an iPhone, but maybe every one of her friends
00:42:41.640 has an iPhone and you don't want her to feel left out and not apart. And, oh, what do you do with
00:42:46.720 that? I mean, those are, it seems like a, not that important decision, but those are the important
00:42:50.860 decisions of judicious giving to your children. So, so you, if you, if you're giving to your
00:42:56.200 child judiciously and consistently, Peck says that a child internalizes at the emotional level.
00:43:02.480 So we're going back to talking about our emotional internalization, our emotional operating system.
00:43:06.760 The child will internalize, I am important, I'm lovable, I'm valuable. That's number one. Number
00:43:13.140 two, my needs are important. And number three, that the world is like my family. Now, if that
00:43:21.460 doesn't happen, if children don't get their needs met in timely, judicious way, they internalize
00:43:26.080 the opposite. I'm not, I'm not lovable, valuable, or important. My needs are not important. And the
00:43:32.840 world is like my family. So they're going to go out into the world treating, interacting with the
00:43:36.300 world. Like nobody's going to love me or meet my needs unless I like give to them first or, you
00:43:41.240 know, use whatever my survival mechanism is. But there's one more internal belief system that
00:43:46.900 children develop if their parents are not doing a very effective job of meeting their own needs
00:43:51.680 and then giving to the child in time, the judicious, consistent ways. Often a parent will
00:43:56.300 use the child to come meet some of their needs, emotional needs, social needs, needs for physical
00:44:02.520 connection. And when a child is used to meet a parent's need, it's called parentification.
00:44:08.280 The child will always believe that they're not good enough. Because remember, children are
00:44:13.800 grandiose and narcissistic and egotistical. If mom is sad and leaning on their child,
00:44:20.680 The child thinks I should make mom not sad, but because mom is sad and sad in ways that a child
00:44:26.820 can't fix and continues to be sad, the child internalizes, I'm not good enough. I can't make
00:44:32.920 mom be not sad. I can't make dad not be angry. So the child also develops that fourth belief system.
00:44:39.360 I'm not good enough. And then goes out into the world and interacts with the world thinking I'm
00:44:43.920 not valuable. I'm not lovable. My needs aren't important and I'm not good enough. But going back
00:44:49.320 to your question if you've been consistently judiciously timely meeting your daughter's needs
00:44:55.660 not perfectly by any means but just you know shooting for you know being good enough your
00:45:01.560 child will internalize the belief system i'm valuable i'm important my needs are important
00:45:06.100 and as i go out into the world as i go to preschools i go to kindergarten as i go to
00:45:09.960 school as i start dating in junior high as i you know on and on i'm going to believe that i'm
00:45:16.580 valuable, my needs are important, and the world is going to respond in kind. And I don't know about
00:45:23.080 you, but I think about that at times. What would it have been like to have been in junior high
00:45:27.100 thinking, I'm valuable, I'm lovable, my needs are important, and everybody else recognizes that?
00:45:33.460 Thinking how powerful that would be. And so that's how we raise our children to develop
00:45:40.260 this internalized system where they don't have to be using their defense mechanisms,
00:45:45.080 their survival mechanisms, their covert contracts. Now we're not going to get it perfect. None of us
00:45:49.640 do. We all had imperfect parents. We're going to be imperfect parents. We're going to raise
00:45:54.020 imperfect children. And in fact, giving yourself permission to be an imperfect parent and letting
00:45:58.980 your child be an imperfect child, it's one of the greatest gifts that you can give them. Because I
00:46:02.540 see a lot of parents nowadays wanting their children to be perfect so they can feel like
00:46:06.740 perfect parents. You have these helicopter parents that go, you're going to study this. You're going
00:46:10.780 to go to this camp and this camp and this camp, and you're going to make these grades. And you're
00:46:13.900 going to go to this kind of college you know that helicopter parent that's a burden on a child it
00:46:18.260 doesn't let the child differentiate and just be who they are maybe the child just wants to be an
00:46:23.220 artist or play music or travel the world but no you're going to get into mit you're going to get
00:46:29.200 into stanford you're going to make the good enough grades to get that that that creates also that
00:46:33.460 belief in children that they're not good enough and and they've got to be perfect to be loved
00:46:37.440 so letting your child be their imperfect self is also a great gift to give your child
00:46:43.900 Okay, so how about this? And I'm what I'm trying to do with Scarlett is exactly what you're saying. And so I've been, you know, interviewing people and learning a lot. And I've seen a massive difference in our relationship, relationship in the last, like year or two. So things are going really well. But just to play devil's advocate, if you raise your kid thinking, and I'm not going to be doing this, but if you do raise your kid, and they end up thinking they're not good enough.
00:47:10.260 does that lead to individuals who try and be better and are more motivated and end up
00:47:16.400 being more successful? Well, it depends on our definition of success.
00:47:21.700 Yes, not happy, like maybe from the outside looking successful.
00:47:26.740 Yeah. And that's a good question. And of course we can look around and see that. And maybe we
00:47:30.880 see it in ourselves is that, yeah, there's a part of me that wants to achieve a certain degree of
00:47:36.860 success so that you know I can feel good about myself and people will value me and there there's
00:47:43.240 there's a difference and and I think the difference is is you just have to feel the difference
00:47:48.720 um for example I got a PhD at 29 years old and I think I was motivated number one I almost
00:47:56.920 dropped out of high school high school just bored me I was just totally lost and uninterested once
00:48:01.620 I quit playing sports, I lost interest. Luckily, I got with some really good teachers. I got into
00:48:07.600 debate and got into some stuff that energized me. Then all of a sudden, studying and making good
00:48:14.720 grades felt just internal. It felt interesting. I wanted to apply myself. Now, you could try to
00:48:22.960 make good grades by trying to look good or get approval or validation, or by the time I got to
00:48:29.580 college then and through college and then through graduate school, I maintained about a 3.8 grade
00:48:35.380 point average. And I think there was some part of me that was, yeah, look at me. I made these
00:48:40.060 kinds of grades, but not, not a very big part of me. Most of it just was, I can do this. This
00:48:45.100 feels good. And that's what, that's the difference of how it feels. And where I'm at in life right
00:48:50.440 now, I'm 65 years old. Most people start like thinking about retiring at my age. I have no
00:48:55.920 interest in retiring and i i don't even know what that would look like i'd still get them do what i
00:49:00.340 do um and i i got i got nothing else that i have to prove to anybody or accomplish and so i'm purely
00:49:08.980 motivated by the love of doing what i do it just it just excites me i mean just two experiences
00:49:16.800 that you know before you and i started your call your your producer said robert i read your book
00:49:23.000 it was really powerful at an important time in my life i said thank you for telling me that that
00:49:27.760 feels good right that that that my ego isn't built on that but it felt good knowing that i made a
00:49:33.060 difference and and it felt good when i heard adam lane smith somebody that i don't know personally
00:49:37.700 say a really nice thing about me on your podcast i thought i i had to turn the podcast off and just
00:49:44.680 sit with it and just sit with it and think that that was so out of left field i didn't see that
00:49:50.900 coming and it just, cause I didn't. And I just thought, wow, that felt really good. Now I don't
00:49:57.040 do what I do to try to keep getting that, you know, those nice words and nice things. I do what
00:50:01.780 I do. Cause I love what, what I do. And I'm glad that it makes a difference and has an impact on
00:50:07.200 people's life. So for example, with you and your daughter, you could try, well, I'm going to do
00:50:12.180 this and do this. And then she'll be a happy child and I'll, I'll, I'll look like a good parent and
00:50:16.360 you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's that external validation kind of thing that's driven
00:50:21.480 from not feeling good enough inside. But if you just enjoy the experience of being a mother with
00:50:28.400 your daughter and just love to death, just being a mom with her, then you're just going to be you.
00:50:35.760 It's going to feel good. It's going to feel natural. You're going to make mistakes. You're
00:50:38.900 going to snap at her occasionally. You're going to let her hear things you didn't wish you didn't
00:50:42.880 here but you know what it's okay because you know you know you're open-hearted and loving towards
00:50:49.920 her it just feels different than that feeling of my child's got to get good great she's got to look
00:50:55.420 good she's got to make a good impression she's got to make me look like a good mom it just feels
00:50:59.760 different and and you can just check inside to feel the difference in it yeah so you have to
00:51:07.260 start being like brutally honest about that underneath all the all the lies you've told
00:51:12.760 yourself or the stories you've been brought up with or something feel like it's a good thing or
00:51:17.100 a bad thing and you can start that like you said by starting to be honest with people that
00:51:23.620 that if they respond negatively it doesn't really matter in your life I guess because then you're
00:51:29.400 more open to talking to them and I love the idea of just being brutally honest with yourself
00:51:33.480 because that's where it has to start and you know as i said i i've got a son i've raised step kids
00:51:38.760 as well um my son's a good kid and i'm proud of him and i love him to death and um and i i can
00:51:45.800 remember because both he and my stepson we're about the same age and they're both really good
00:51:50.300 in sports and i love going to their games and being the proud papa and i almost always made
00:51:55.880 sure the people around me know oh a quarterback that's my son you know or the guy that's hit the
00:52:01.080 home run that's my son and i'm thinking that that was me um parentifying my child that was me in a
00:52:08.600 sense using my children to feel like a good person now i'm human i did it and i it wasn't a terrible
00:52:15.080 thing but i'm also honest with myself that that was that was me parentifying my children that that
00:52:21.540 was not letting them just be them for the sake of being them and me being happy for them right i was
00:52:28.020 feeding off of it in some kind of way okay we're all probably we're all going to do some of those
00:52:33.620 kind of things and you know what it's okay we're imperfect but if we're brutally honest with
00:52:39.720 ourselves we notice ourselves doing it and we go uh i'm gonna try not to do that in the future
00:52:45.560 because i don't think that's probably the healthiest thing for my child and and we work
00:52:49.940 on it so it does begin with being brutally honest with ourselves that's got to be tricky to figure
00:52:56.020 out exactly like where you're coming from when you're displaying some sort of emotion because
00:53:04.240 there are i mean there's there's got to be couldn't you be couldn't you have been saying
00:53:08.240 the same thing on the sidelines but it wouldn't have been parentifying that's what you said
00:53:13.940 yes and i'll go back to the difference of the two examples i gave of your producer and adam
00:53:20.020 lane smith yeah i didn't go out seeking their approval right i don't i don't know either of
00:53:25.500 them and they both said some very kind things to me and about me and and it felt good now i could
00:53:32.880 then go out and try to keep getting other people to say those same kind of things about me because
00:53:37.380 it felt so good or i could just soak it in and let it be there so yes you can be proud of when
00:53:43.660 your child excels at something and just smile and soak it in and go i'm so amazingly proud of this
00:53:49.820 human being that i call my child okay you again you notice the difference you notice when i'm
00:53:57.020 hoping this person next to me knows that's my son out there playing quarterback because then
00:54:01.560 they'll be impressed with me you know and i i've done the same thing with my dogs you know i've got
00:54:06.560 a right now a one-year-old pit bull and i just want everybody to think i've just got the coolest
00:54:11.060 dog and it's the same kind of thing it's that external validation i used to have a weimer
00:54:15.400 Mariner years ago. Same thing. Everybody thought my dog was so cool. I loved walking down the
00:54:19.940 street. Oh, that's a cool looking dog. And that's that external validation that you can get addicted
00:54:24.800 to, right? And we can do that with our kids. We can do it with our partner. We can do it with
00:54:29.380 our successes in life. Oh, look at the things that I've accomplished. You know, look at the
00:54:34.520 car I'm driving. Look at the house I live in. Look at the boat I have. And it's great to have a great
00:54:40.140 car. It's great to have a great house. If you like boats, it's great to have a great boat,
00:54:43.580 but do it because you love the car you love driving the car you love driving the boat you
00:54:48.680 love living in your house not because look what i've attained look what are people going to think
00:54:54.120 of me you know when i drive up in my great car in front of this great house i mean that's a
00:54:58.560 never-ending addictive cycle and um you know i think it all goes back still to just filling our
00:55:06.600 lives with those cooperative reciprocal relationships who are filling our own bucket
00:55:11.440 up, which makes us feel loved and valuable and that our needs are important. And then we don't
00:55:16.340 need all the external stuff to get some sense of validation. Do you think a lot of the reason that
00:55:23.320 marriages don't work is because people don't have enough friendships as well? And they're looking 0.99
00:55:28.400 for their partner, looking to their partner for everything. And it's just not possible.
00:55:33.800 You teed that one up for me nicely. Thank you. I think there's a number of reasons relationships
00:55:39.540 don't work. Um, I I'm not sure they're meant to work. I'm not sure they're part of our human
00:55:44.840 evolutionary DNA to have pair bonded, lifelong intimate relationships with the opposite.
00:55:49.980 I mean, our, our ancestors did not do that for a million and a half years. We've been trying to do
00:55:56.220 it for less than 10,000 years and it's never really worked real well, but that's why, that's
00:56:01.600 why we have religion and a lot of rule systems to say you have to do it. Uh, and, and if you don't,
00:56:06.420 your failure, uh, kind of, you know, shaming people into trying to make it work. So I don't
00:56:10.960 believe that they, that they actually are meant to work in the way we think that they are. I mean,
00:56:15.500 even the whole idea of, of romantic love, I heard sometime that, you know, that's only been around
00:56:20.800 about 200 years that we're going to get with somebody because we love them. And then I heard
00:56:24.700 that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet to show the extreme fallacy of romantic love. Oh, we love
00:56:30.740 each other so much let's kill ourselves you know it's it's it's silly but i do believe that
00:56:37.000 relationships can be powerful personal growth machines i say that all the time if we approach
00:56:42.360 them consciously and realistically you know if i get with my partner and think oh because i think
00:56:47.940 you're beautiful and because i think your body's hot therefore you're going to be an amazing partner
00:56:52.080 to me we're in trouble right or if you get with a guy because you think oh man he's he's six foot
00:56:58.240 too. And he's got a nice build and, and, you know, he makes a lot of money. He'll make a great
00:57:02.880 partner. No, the things we base our decisions on for getting with people often, you know, I, I tell,
00:57:09.300 I tell men all the time, cause I mainly work with men. Now I say, you know, everything your male
00:57:12.920 brain thinks that a woman can do for you is wrong. And I tell women the same thing. Everything your
00:57:17.620 female brain thinks a man can do for you is wrong. But if two conscious people are willing 1.00
00:57:24.380 to accept the challenges, the difficulty of trying to create an intimate pair-bonded relationship
00:57:31.120 with a member of the opposite sex, with all of our baggage from childhood, with all of our
00:57:35.680 relationship fears, with all of our defense mechanisms, with all of our projections,
00:57:40.500 with all of society's unrealistic expectations of how they should work, this, as I said, can be a
00:57:46.260 really powerful personal growth machine. So there's a lot of things that cause relationships
00:57:50.260 not to to go long term one is that they're probably just not meant to um number two is that
00:57:58.300 the the unrealistic expectations we have of them is another one how we be how we form these
00:58:04.380 relationships at least for me i'm a terrible picker when it comes to relationship i bumbled my
00:58:08.940 way through every relationship i've got um i think it was pia melody who wrote a lot about
00:58:15.100 codependency, I read this years ago, said that we tend to be attracted to and marry a person who has
00:58:20.960 some of the worst traits of both of our parents. Oh my God. Yeah. Let that sink in. That means
00:58:28.080 unconsciously we get attracted to people that, that are giving us the opportunity to work out
00:58:33.360 our dad issues and work out our mom issues. And that person picked us because we're giving them
00:58:39.440 the opportunity to work out their dad issues and their mom issues. And then we expect that's going
00:58:44.580 to work for a lifetime and we're going to be happy the entire lifetime. Okay. But if we know
00:58:49.400 that, if we can be conscious of those pieces, we can actually watch that stuff coming up and work
00:58:56.200 with it, especially if we have help, if we have, you know, coach, therapist, good resources. So
00:59:01.360 back to your question, and it goes back to the whole differentiation thing.
00:59:05.900 I think this idea of this pair bonded, lifelong, intimate relationship with a member of the
00:59:10.980 opposite sex, like I said, it's only existed. We've only tried to do it for a few thousand years.
00:59:16.500 And what does happen is that a lot of people who are not filling their own buckets up with a lot
00:59:22.280 of cooperative reciprocal relationships come into relationship feeling needy. We find somebody we're
00:59:28.020 attracted to and is basically come fill my bucket, meet my needs. Now, what makes this even, what
00:59:34.500 makes this worse is that when most couples get together, they start giving up whatever they had
00:59:40.740 going on in their life that made them who they were when they met. You know, maybe they start
00:59:46.340 demanding that of each other. Well, you need to quit hanging around with your guy friends. You
00:59:50.180 need to quit hanging around with your girlfriends or, you know, you need to spend more time with me
00:59:53.880 or you need to not go out as much at night. Years ago, I knew somebody is actually a friend of a
01:00:00.620 friend. But when this couple met, the guy played on three softball teams. So he was playing softball
01:00:05.460 all the time. They met, dated. He continued to play softball. They got married. They got married
01:00:09.900 And his wife said, now that we're married, you have to quit playing on so many softball 0.94
01:00:13.080 teams.
01:00:13.900 And, and I'm thinking that's not a fair request.
01:00:16.560 You know, they met when they, you know, and she never said ahead of time, if we get married,
01:00:20.600 I expect you to play on fewer softball teams, but here's the deal.
01:00:24.400 It's just an example of, of we, we do this in spoken or unspoken ways.
01:00:28.840 It's kind of like, you're my girlfriend.
01:00:30.740 Therefore you should, you're my boyfriend.
01:00:33.080 Therefore you should, you're my wife. 0.77
01:00:34.520 Therefore you should, therefore, that's why I call them ownership relationships.
01:00:37.680 This is the definition of a fused relationship.
01:00:40.660 I don't have all these other things out here filling my bucket up.
01:00:43.720 So therefore you should, and you better, because I've given up all these things to be in a
01:00:48.500 relationship with you that I did have when we met, I'm even emptier now than I was.
01:00:52.800 So I expect even more, you should fill me up and they're not the same person that they
01:00:58.180 were when you met.
01:00:59.040 You're not the same person.
01:01:00.200 So we've increased the odds of this not working well by giving up the things we did have in
01:01:05.640 our life.
01:01:06.120 So to answer your question, when I was doing marriage therapy, almost religiously in the first session with a couple, I would tell them, usually before the end of the session, the best thing both of you can do for your marriage is develop good same-sex relationships.
01:01:22.880 The guy needs to have good guy friends.
01:01:24.820 The woman needs to have good girlfriends.
01:01:26.960 Now, what I found working with a lot of nice guys is a lot of men at work that don't have many good guy friends.
01:01:31.980 And I tell men, having good guy friends is the foundation that you're going to build a healthy
01:01:36.120 relationship on with a woman. And so what happens is they meet a woman and they make her their best
01:01:41.840 friend and they, you know, want her to be everything for them. And many women do the same
01:01:46.560 thing as well. So yes, I agree that the best thing we can do with our marriage in the beginning is
01:01:52.520 if we don't have them already, develop good relationships. Now I take this seriously. I
01:01:58.160 mention, I've been in a men's program for three years. I've been married to my present wife
01:02:02.540 over four and a half years. She's Mexican. We live in Mexico. She doesn't speak English. I've 1.00
01:02:08.640 had to learn Spanish in my fifties and sixties. My stepkids don't speak English, even though
01:02:12.880 they're supposed to be learning. And so here I am kind of isolated, you know, because my Spanish
01:02:19.300 has gotten better, but I'm not, I'm not fluent Mexican style fluent. I can't swear as good as
01:02:26.540 the average mexican uh even though my wife does her best to teach me um and i didn't have many
01:02:31.620 guy friends down here um you know i'm now raising kids again i work at home uh my gym is in my house
01:02:39.060 you know so yeah i i just didn't have many male connections and i knew i knew the well-being of
01:02:46.640 my marriage was dependent on me having good guy friends and so i was actually in a work leading
01:02:52.360 a workshop talking about this cooperative reciprocal relationship idea and had some
01:02:57.180 handouts that I was working with the guys. And I told them one of the things I need to add to my
01:03:01.700 list that I need to add to my list of cooperative reciprocal relationships is a men's program. I
01:03:07.900 need to be with Met. And then when I got done, one of the guys in my program said, Robert,
01:03:12.540 I'm in a men's program. You know, we meet two or three times a year for retreats. We meet online.
01:03:17.660 It's really great. And he told me who the coach was and who he trained with. And I love the
01:03:22.340 guy that he trained with and I said I'm in and so I joined three years ago I'm about to start my
01:03:27.180 fourth year every year there's about 35 to 45 of us we have retreats and wow it's just blessed my
01:03:35.320 life and it's improved my marriage and it's made me more grounded my my wife has has either met or
01:03:42.980 gotten to know a number of the men that I know some have been to my home you know if I'm on zoom
01:03:47.560 talking to them I'll say come on come here say hi to you know this particular friend um and so
01:03:52.320 me, even in my sixties, still trying to bumble my way through, through marriage and relationship.
01:03:58.720 I just know if I don't go spend time with men, if I don't have the support of men,
01:04:02.560 if I can't be revealing myself to men, I'm going to go downhill and my marriage is going to go
01:04:07.760 downhill with it. So yes, I agree with you. We need good same sex friends and we need to take
01:04:13.660 the focus off of our partner that he or she should always be there to meet all of our needs. They 0.98
01:04:19.380 can't. Okay, Robert, thank you very much for coming on. I asked about two of the questions I
01:04:27.620 had. I had a list of them. That was very, very interesting. That was very interesting. Thank you.
01:04:34.440 If people want to follow you or find out more about you, where should they go?
01:04:39.320 Just drglover.com is to find everything I've got. If they Google my name or Google no more Mr. Nice
01:04:45.180 sky i've got all the top spots but yeah drglover.com and yeah come find out who i am okay well
01:04:52.100 thank you for coming on you're welcome thanks for the invitation this was fun