Breaking the Cycle: Moving from Fear to Love in Relationships

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0:44 Denzel Washington, welcome to Inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you to do the same. Larry, Welcome to the show. Thanks Doctor doug Hey, I'm I'm excited to have you on this show. Y'alling interesting topic that we're going to talk about today, and I'd love for you to kind of share with the audience who you are, what your background is, and how did you end up and what was your journey to bring you to this point in your life and doing what you're doing. So I had no idea that my life was in the advertising world. That's why I spent my career. And in the advertising world, you have to communicate by shorter words and simpler words, because that's what it takes to survive in advertising. If you don't have shorter, similar words, nobody's going to listen to you. And so that's where I was actually started my life in the advertising business, but through the nineties, and actually, if I go back to the nineteen seventies, I married a woman who is the toughest roughest woman in the world in my life, and she became my wife, and that's Marcia, and Marcia made my life very, very hard. The reason it was so hard is because that marriage was a woman who was raised in a home of strong people. The mother and father were very strong and when they got when they wanted to make their point, they got angry. And

2:14 so that's what she learned. She learned anger. In the meantime, I have parents who were very quiet and subdued and didn't share their feelings. They didn't do anything mean to each other. They were very nice people, but privately they were not happy. And because they were not happy. One was an alcoholic and one was a gambler. So that's my so. My parents were shut down experts. They shut down, that's what they did. So when the woman who was angry marries the man who shuts down, what happens, Well, she gets angry and he shuts down just so predictably. But that was at the very beginning, and I didn't see any of that, didn't know any of it, didn't have any idea. So I spent forty years with her, and so for the first twenty seven years that was the hardest time of my life because the so, just to give you some historical perspective, when they impeached Nixon, that's the year we married, and when they elected the second Bush, that's when I ended my twenty seven years of hell. And the reason I ended by hell is because I didn't divorce her. What I did is I finally realized I could love myself. And when I could love myself, I changed all kinds of things. So the reason she was so angry is because I was so angry.

3:32 The reason she was so reactionary to me is I was reactionary to myself, and so all the stuff that I learned I learned through pain, and in that forty years to the first twenty seven years was the most dramatic of that pain. And so that was really you know, people will say, well, are you a psychologist? I said, no, I had Marcia. I was raised by a marsha. And so let me interrupt you for a minute, because you brought something and I don't want to forget. Talking about it real quick. So after twenty seven years you said you started to learn to love yourself. What gave you that awareness? What came up or what happened that you ultimately said to yourself, Oh, my goodness, this has a lot to do with me, not her.

4:20 Yes, well, that didn't come easy at all. And if you could picture the portrait, the portrait is a mad, angry woman storming around and attacking me in every way she could. And what I was doing was reacting to that and shutting down. And in the shutdown, I was learning something. And so I used to take out yellow pads and paper and I would write curiously for pages and pages and pages of what am I learning? What am I discovering? Because I was trying to become a learner, because if I didn't become a learner, I would become just a person who had collapsed into some kind of depression. So I couldn't have that. So I had to spend all my energy learning from what she was providing. She was providing pain, and a pain provider is a very good thing in life. When you have a pain provider, whether it be a professor, whether it be an army drill sergeant, whether it be a bad boss, no matter what it is, it's going to teach you something. And that's where you're going to learn to be really who you really are. And so that's really what happened to me.

5:22 I had to learn who I really was. And so in the twenty seven years that started in the seventies and I went through that whole twenty seven years getting closer and closer and closer to discovering who I really was. And so when we look at me as a I use a scale called the Chaos to Purpose scale, and so I was raised right in the middle of that scale in the Twilight Salt. The middle of the scale is the place where they don't really raise you. You raise yourself. And the reason you have to raise yourself is because they're not teaching you they're not guiding you, they're not giving you principles, they're not saying anything to you. Really, So what my mother father were doing is they were trying to live their own lives. And because they were trying to live their own lives, they weren't raising us because that wasn't their passion. Their passions with their own self pursuits. So that was my discovery process. And so as I started to learn that more and more, I had to decide, like what do I know about myself?

6:19 What do I like about myself? And this is not like that simple, it's like what do I like about myself? You don't ask yourself that question when you're going through pain, but a whole I like to say, it's a very convoluted, distorted learning process, and you can't duplicate it. You can't duplicate that learning process because it's in pain. You were in pain every day, every month, every week, every year. You're always in pain under some kind of new event. It's always causing you trouble. So I really couldn't do anything but stick to it and keep on learning. The other reason I kept sticking to it and not leaving, quitting divorcing is because I was programmed to stay married and miserable, and that's how my per parents were, that's what her parents were. They were married and miserable. And by staying married and miserable, you have to not quit.

7:07 And so that kept us together and that allowed the learning to continue. So the sticking to the big sticking point for me was saying, I either have to go ahead in learning or I have to go backwards and collapse. Ahead in learning or backwards and collapse. I couldn't decide, and so I had some pressure event had to do it. And so when I finally had that pressure event, that became my snap line. I really decided that I'm going to be a learner. I'm going to use all this trouble to learning. So that's what the twenty seven years like. Somewhere in the early part of it, I had to make the decision that I was going to stay and learn.

7:49 And so that meant a lot of writing, a lot of journaling, a lot of discovery. And my little format was my yellow Legal Paths, where I had them all stacked up with all kinds of ida is and tools and discoveries and all those things. But why did I learn it? All that way. I learned it because I was in pain, and so I always like to say when people are in pain, when they're like, the most common one is really tough marriages. But what people want to do is they want to leave bad marriages. And so in my discovery process of working with marriage all these you know, fifteen years, I realize these patterns that people have, they have a chaos childhood, and so they like, what will happen is the high side of the scale.

8:33 They're raised on the high side of the scale. They marry a person raised on the low side of the scale. And the reason that's so important is because the scale represents values, so values of commitment, loyalty, honesty, commit joy, communication, comfort, likability, all those values that you're given in a ten side of the scale at the high side. What you learned in the low side is dysfunction, debate, arguing, fighting, criticism, blame, defensiveness, confrontation. You learn all those things in the lower side of the scale. And that's what it is. It's a value system, a value of the high sight, a value of the lower side. And so that's actually what I discovered slowly going through this is I really was raised in the middle of the scale what I called the twilight zone, because they didn't really raise me. I had to figure everything out myself. That's why when I got married, I had no idea what was happening, Like, I don't even know why I'm married or how it happened. It just wasn't just a strange thing that was. It didn't even have anything to do with falling in love. It had to do more with interest. I was interested in her, right, It was not like I fell in love with it.

9:47 I didn't really have that. So I didn't love myself, so it made sense that I would get married to a person who couldn't love me. That would make sense, right, So now that I'm living that way, I had to finally decide, through a lot of trouble that I had to be a learner. And becoming a learner is a decision anybody can make, but they can't make it unless they have a pain source. So what happened after is they can't what happened after twenty seven years? And you know you talked about forty years now, So what happened after twenty seven and how did you ultimately start to develop a different relationship with your wife. So when SO think about this, I'm learning from her because she's providing pain. She's not providing teaching or instruction.

10:34 She's providing pain. What I'm providing is discovery, and I'm discovering things about myself and about her and about childhood and all the stuff that's being taught in psychology, and all that information is out there. You just have to go find the pieces of assembly. So I was motivated to do that, and that's why I talk so much about chaos kids, because what chaos kids are people who are raised at the bottom of the scale and they get married as adults and they expect they're going to have a marriage. Well, a chaos kid can't even stay married longer than twenty seven years, and the ones that go beyond twenty seven years are held by some other kind of glue that keeps them together that they don't even understand. So I realize that chaos kids are really the reason why marriages collapse. So I've spent time with people both raised at the top of the scale, and I've seen their dynamics, and their dynamics are they have goodwill, they have kindness, they have a sense of humor, they have likableness, they have forgiveness. That's the stuff that two people at the top of the scale are like. That's what they're like.

11:40 That's why they can go to a marriage seminar, learn whatever's being delivered and suddenly get better and like you think, wow, look at that marriage. And I really turned them around. Well, the reason they turned them around because they were both purpose kids. So I actually spent some time in a seminar with a guy who is teaching these kinds of ideas, and so when he would find people who really were trouble right, agree with a lot of trouble, I meet with them at the back of the room. And when I meet with them in the back of the room, you know what I found every time one or both of them were chaos kids. One or both of them were at the bottom of that scale, that really troubling value system. And so every time I found that, and the guy on stage would say, hey, if you really are having some real serious trouble, go see lyrics very back of the room. Right. So now remember this group a seminar like about seventy to eighty people, and the people who came to the back of the room were really hurting. Why were they hurting because they had chaos in their childhoods. And that means the chaos is in that big vat below the conscious mind. Right, that big vat holds all the instructions from the fifty five thousand hours of our waking days. For ten years, we spend that kind of time with our parents. Those parents are they call them programmers, but what they are is they're people who give instructure and they get instruction because of what they don't do. They give instruction because of what they do do. They give instruction by how they hurt.

13:13 They give instruction by how they support. So all the things they give out are some kind of instruction in that big vat below the conscious mind. And so what goes into that vat is actually what runs your life. That's the reason psychologists say most of your life is actually run by the subconscious mind. I've never met anybody who really understands that and really can explain it, right. But the idea is, there's this big vat below in the bottom, and that big vat holds the fifty five thousand hours of messages, and that's really what it is. It's messages because they're live they're living messages, and they're active, and they're always ready to be shot up to the conscious mind and take you over. And because that's always waiting for you at any time here, subconscious actually runs your life. And most of us who live in the world of society and pop culture, we don't want to know that. We don't want to know the subconscious because the subconsciousnes is a weird, weird place. We don't want to think about. What we want to think about is that little jar at the top of that conscious mind.

14:10 Okay, so twenty seven years, I'm going back to my original question. Twenty seven years what did you start doing not for yourself, but how did you start communicating with your wife? What was the element that brought about the communication I guess to where you were able to start to change that relationship with your wife. Okay, So with being two opposite systems, right, the fighting and the shutting down, what ended that is really your question? How did you stop living as a shutting down person with a fighting person? And it had to do with me in my own energy, and so my own energy was fear that was actually governing me and I couldn't see it was fear. I didn't want to admit it was fear, but it was there. And so as I was living in fear so long and she kept pummeling it and stirring the fear, actually increasing it, I had to decide what am I afraid of? And that was a very hard question to answer. What am I afraid of?

15:12 What is my fear made of? And so as I started to dig deeper and deeper into that, I started to And this is we're talking years, by the way, this is not a week's it's years of slowly realizing that I was afraid of a lot of things, not just of her, but I was afraid of what I might think, about what I might do, about what I might destroy. Right, so all of this is starting to meet, causing me to realize that my fear is made with me. It's not made of anybody I'm married. It's made of me. And so I bought into the fear idea. And the reason I bought the fear idea is it made me come up with an analogy. The analogy is called the cruise ship. And so what the cruise ship says is you're a cruise ship in the analogy, and you have a rat on your ship. And you marry somebody and they have a cruise ship and they have a rat on their ship. Now the ships don't know they have rats, right, but the rats have radios and they're sending a message back and forth called against energy, and it's so severe.

16:11 The ships are separating and they don't know why. So your ship, the person who's aware goes to the seminar and finds out they might have a rat. So they find out they have a rat, they get it off the ship. Finally, now we have two ships, but this time we only have one rat. Now that one rat is still mad as ever, but it can't do anything because there's no second rat to push back. Because that's really what created the tension in me. I had this rat that was creating this big problem with her rat, and our ships were separating. Our ships were separating, and that's really what made me discover, oh, I can stop. I can get this rat off the ship. I can do something about my own rat and get it off the ship. And that's going to allow me to start to feel less fear. And that turned out to be what started to change me, because now I didn't have to shut down so much. Now I could ask questions. Now, I could talk. Now I can speak calmly, and maybe I can calm down. And so as I started to lose my fear, everything started to change, including the way she treated me. She treated me a whole lot better because my fear was gone and I didn't have to do with her. It had to do with me, right.

17:19 And so once you have once you've isolated that it's the problem's not out there. It's not out in there in the world and all the characters that are out there, The problem is always in yourself. It's never out there. And once you realize it's never out there, now you've got to look inside and find your answer. And your answer is you probably have a rat on your ship. And the rat on your ship is the pain of your childhood. And if you've got a lot of pain in your childhood, you've got a bigger rat. Wow. Okay, So you know you talk. About the chaos kid phenomenon, and chaos includes I would assume a lot of things, whether you have angry parents or parents that are really not really parenting. As you say here, maybe one is and one isn't. Obviously, there's a number of people that go through both emotional, physical, abews that type of thing. All of those things are there and you know, for you it took you twenty seven years, but also a very inquisitive mind to be able to start, you know, doing what you were doing, going to workshop, going to seminars, you know, journaling, doing all of those type of things. So how do people that are in a relationship that is just not working for them? How does one of them actually what are some of the key elements of their personality?

18:37 What do they need to be able to do? If they say, you know what I really want to I want this to work, I want to stay married, what do they do? So if we simplify this a lot, Yeah in the podcast you have to because you don't want to get into the weeds with ideas. But if we simplify it, I start to tell you that will changed the whole marriage. I realized that I was living in fear, and that's what And that took a long time because somebody didn't mentor me into did you realize you're in fear? No, that it wasn't like that. I had to slowly discover it. But when you when you're thinking about the two worlds, we could live in we live in the world of fear, or we live in the world of love. And so when we wanted like fear and love, that's really kind of out there and weird and I don't even know how to apply it. But let's think about it differently.

19:26 If we think about fear and say, fear is made of a thousand words in the English language, and they're negative and a thousand words. That's a lot of words, right, and those are words like anxiety and doubt and frustration and hate and just all the words, a thousand of them. Okay, that's the world of fear, that thousand words. Because it's not just the word, it's the energy of the word. So we have a thousand words, We've got a thousand energies. And now we got a lot of negativity there, right, So now we go to the world of love. What's that? That's a thousand words in the English language that we love, kindness, forgiveness, thankfulness, beauty, joy, Right, a thousand words. Right. When you think about a thousand words, now you start realizing, oh, that's the world of love.

20:08 But I can't comprehend a thousand words. So what I teach is an assignment that I give people. I said, what you do is go on the Internet and enter the words negative words. And when you enter the negative words, the internet will give you back lists, list and lists of words. And so what your job has to do is to go through those words and find twenty five that's it, twenty five words. And so when you have the twenty five words, you now have fear for you because the twenty five words are words you relate to, words you understand, words that mean something to you. And now you've got a personalized list of fear. And so now when you have it, to kind of relate to it because it's your words, right, And that's the fear assignment.

20:51 The love assignment is to find twenty five words on the internet. By entering positive words on the internet. Now you're going to get lists, right, but you go through the words to words that really means something to you, that's something you understand, something value makes me feel like Christmas, you know, you feel really good. So when you've got this twenty five words of love, you've now got a feel for love. And so what I started to do when I first did this, I had my two words, and I just want to show you what my original list looks like. That's my original list right there. Wow. Okay. So so when I looked at the two lists, I started to glance at them, just back and forth, two three, four times a day. And as I started to look the Fear list, which I relate to because there's twenty five that are part of me, I started to feel something.

21:33 And what I started to feel is I don't want this be a thing. I want love. I don't want fear. I want love. I kept choosing it over and over and over again, and I started to realize that if I choose it, I'm moving that in that direction, my choosing is moving. So I'm choosing it and I'm moving, and I'm choosing it and moving. Every time I glance between the Fearless and the Love list, I start moving. Now. I don't see it, I don't feel it. I don't even know what's happening. But I started to do that for two three weeks and one day I had like a difficult thing. I was facing a difficult personal relationship and I had to decide whether I was going to live in fear or live in love. And I had a choice. I have choice to make and I what's really amazing is I automatically chose a love response instead of a fear response.

22:22 And as I happened, like boom, all of a sudden, like wow, I'm choosing the love response. That feels really good. Right, So now I'm being encouraged that my love list is where I'm moving to. I'm going there. I'm leaving fear, I'm moving the love. I'm moving right. So that little assignment has been a really key Like the course I teach is called the environment Changer. It's called the environment changer because I'm changing the environment of my mind. That's actually how this marriage went. I was changing the environment of my mind. Well, it turns out that everybody, some way, somehow needs to change the environment of their mind. And so now everybody does it a lot of different ways. But the way I do it as a teach it in this course is really to actually get people to leave the world of fear and move into the world of love.

23:09 Well, and let me let me ask you the question on that. Then, So as you look at those words and you said, when you responded to that particular situation, you decided to move into the love or the positive rather than the negative. What was the response to the other individual, because obviously they were having those emotions, they were feeling those things. And I don't know what that situation was, but if you know, it was coming that way, and you could have responded negatively, but instead you responded with words that were positive. And then what happened. So you want to know what happened? And you think, well, you said something, you did something.

23:50 That's what you did. You said something, you did something, and it must have been really really good, right, that's what you want to say. But it turns out I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I did is I change the energy of my my my output of the energy that's going out of me changed. That's what love does. Love changes your energy. It doesn't change your words, It doesn't change what your body does. It changes what you feel and what you give off. And that's really where the change is. And that's like real, not worldly, because it's so not sensational. Your energy changes. Well, wait a minute, we change, we change our bodies in our models. That's what we do. Well, I know that's what the world does, but that's not what works. What works is change your energy, and that's what people change from they change from a feeling they get they get a feeling and they change their decision.

24:41 Well, and if we if we look at that in a more you know, different way that I what came to my mind was communication. And obviously we're talking communication here and you're suggesting energy. What what I would suggest and what your input on this is. You know, there are there are three ways in which we communicate. We have the words, which research shows is a small percentage of communication. We have the tone, which creates a much higher percentage of communication. And we also have the bodily response and how we act, which also is higher on that level. So from what you're telling me, because when we talk about tone, when we talk about you know, the body and how we look and you know, so on and so forth, that's energy that words or words.

25:38 But that's the smallest part of communication. You know, doctor Doug. I'm really glad you're bringing that up that way, because a lot of people are not good with words. They don't have the words, they don't know what the words are, they don't know how to use them. They just don't communicate very well because they just don't have that makeup to be good with words. And so when we think about so don't help us. Know the way you feel does help us because if we can start to live in an energy of a higher vibration, that's what love is. It's a very high vibration. And the higher you go, the higher that is. Because when you think about living in the world, it's a very low vibration. This place is a very low vibrating place.

26:21 Yeah right, But when you go into love, love is a very high vibration place. And so this little exercise of coming up with the two lists. Of these two lists, nobody can give that list to you. You can't give the two list to anybody. And the reason you can is because it's got to be so personal. It's got to belong to the person. That means they have to come up with the list. I have a list on the list, I have out the word crazy. You know why crazy is on the list because in my younger years I used to say the word a lot, like that's crazy, Oh, you're crazy, right. I used to say it over and over again, and somebody actually had to call me out on it, like why don't you say crazy all the time? I didn't know another word that's on here? Is the word impossible? Why? Because I always said it. I said, oh, that's impossible. Nobody can do that.

27:08 That's impossible. I would say it, right. So that's the reason why my list has the Fearless has those words on it. But when you're talking about the ways we communicate, the word version is not very good, and we can goof it up quite easily. And so if you're not good with words, that's really a good thing to learn. Like, oh, so my energy can change what I'm giving to be people. Energy can change how they're feeling. Energy can change what decisions they make. My energy can change what decisions they make. Yeah, and you don't make those decisions for them, They make them themselves, but your energy changes what they decide. Now, I've seen this in couples. As a guy starts to get better and better at moving the love and his veribration is higher and higher, his wife starts making different decisions. Why, because she's picking up the energy of his I call it the waterfall because it's like mood and attitude and frequencies and vibrations. So when she feels those things, he can't explain it. She can't say I'm doing this because she doesn't use words. In fact, there's no words exchange at all. And so what she's doing is like should I go out with my girlfriends or should I spend some time with Jeremy? You know, like now she makes the decision, now I should spend time with Jeremy. Why because he feels better than my girlfriends do. Right? How does she make that decision? Energy? Energy does that? Right?

28:30 So it's almost like, so are you talking to me to like live this on faith? Is that kind of what you're saying, live it on faith? Well, you kind of have to have faith because you have to have faith because you don't know anything about energy. You don't know about frequencies, and you don't know what about what a vibration is. You don't know whether an energy is, what a sensitivity is, You don't know those things at all. So you really can't look and quantify anything in any rigid way. So the only way is to practice changing your energy. And so move from fear to love is really the easiest thing I've ever seen. You know, I've been teaching this course for fifteen years and I've never seen anything that easy. I've got a lot of well, a lot of tools. You know, and it's interesting. I've always I've always suggested, and this is a concept that I came up with a while ago, and you know, a lot of people understand this, but I've always said, you know what, even in my own life, my behavior is merely a reflection of who I am, and in my mind, part of our whole purpose, even being on this planet and being in this physical forum, is to be able to learn how to become, as you say, that love and become an individual that is full of love, because then your virtu will reflect that. Hopefully your energy definitely will reflect that, and your behavior will reflect that. And as you say,

30:03 I talk about magnets and the fact that when we put out a certain energy, we receive that magnet energy back. And as you say, as you were putting out that energy, affair and frustration and whatever that happened to be, and you have twenty five words that describe that, your wife probably just automatically was giving that back to you because you were the magnet that was attracting it. That's right. Now, that's another way of talking about magnets, right, because magnets pull, and so the idea of something pulling an invisible energy pulling like that's you actually have to experience it yourself to actually feel like a lot. Something pulled it, something pulled me there. And so if you don't have any of those experiences, you don't know what magnets are like in your own personal life. But that was a lot like how I was able to go through that twenty seven years that what I called help seven years a hell. But in twenty eighth year, that's actually the year that I started to realize I could live.

31:07 I didn't call it this at the time, but I could live in an energy of love, and I could like myself and I could feel good about her. I could feel good about me. And as I started to feel good about all that shutdown, fearful drive that was actually born into my childhood, that beer based shutting down didn't help me at all. And so I was able to do something new. And I was able to do something new because I had the pain motivation to do it. Okay, so here's my question, at what point in time did your wife finally realize If she ever did that, she also had to do some of that introspective work and start to become more of that love rather than the anger for her as you put it, at what point in time does you have to do that? And how many times? So too questions as you've worked with people, do you find that if one person is totally not willing to do any of that work?

32:13 Ultimately, what happens when we're talking about not willing And I've seen couples that the man of the woman has an anger and the determination that were born into them from a family system. So fear and anger and selfishness. That's like a system thing that's got all kinds of related fear ideas in it. Right, if a person has that, that's their only way of living. And when you become this what I call environment changer, when you become this person who changes the environment in your mind, why are you doing it? Are you doing it so you can get that person to stop being this way and stop being this way? Is that way you're doing it? Well, if you're doing it for that reason, you'll never have anything happen that you really care about. You're not going to like it. So the way you have to think about it is, I'm not going to live in this better condition than this love condition because I'm trying to get anything to happy I'm living because it makes me happy.

33:11 That's the reason you do it is it makes me happy. And as you start moving more and more to love and you're more committed to it, because there's something in your idea of moving to love and out of fear, there's something that I can really write about that. It's like, oh, I like that. I like it religiously, I like spiritually, I like everything about that idea. Right, Well, if you're going to do it, you don't do it for any kind of cause. I want to make this person stop being this way and start putting it that way. Forget that it's never going to work, it's going to backfire. All kinds of things are going to happen that are really bad, and you're not You're not going to want that. So what you want is I'm living in my. Form. You called it in this form I'm in because I'm trying to get to happy. I want to be a happy person, and so the only way to be a really truly happy person is to leave the world of fear, which is a very complicated, very horrible place, and you don't want to stay there at all, but you don't.

34:05 You have to learn that yourself to live in fear and think you can have a life there where you can actually solve problems. You can't solve problems in fear. There's nothing to solve in fear. And no one can solve problems in fear. And there's like thousands about thousands of stories how fear does not solve problems. Right, it looks like it does, but it doesn't. So the only way you can make a decision is I want to live happy. I want to be in a happy place. I want to live happy, And so why do I do it? Because I want to be happy? And now, if I'm in the environment of a person who is determined to fight and be angry and right, that person is choosing to leave your life. They're choosing to not feel the energy that you're giving off. But that's okay, because you feel good, you feel happy, you like yourself, and if you have kids around you, they're going to pick up that energy. And I've seen that it's happen over and over again where that parents actually change and the children feel happy. I see it happen at all ages sixteen, twenty five, twelve two. Right, kids get happy because when a parent, a biological parent, now this is not an adopted parent, but a biological parent. Whether that person has a great power as a biological parent, they really do amazing things for kids. So if they have a spouse who wants to stay angry because they come from a very angry family, then they may not change.

35:26 But you have to allow that. You have to allow them to do whatever it is they want to. Do, because you have to make your own decision to be happy. And in your case, something happened with your wife because as you said, she grew up in that chaos situation also, but something happened because you stayed together for forty years. Yes, yes she did. So she died in my presence in twenty nineteen, and it was a very moving moment, you know because by the way, we just didn't talk a lot. So talking was not a big part of our relationship really ever, because it was no talking. The only way to change in the relationship is I had to change my energy. And as I started to change my energy, she started to change what she was deciding.

36:11 Her decisions were different because remember we're not leaving. She had that, like the wall was in the background, there was no leaving, So she had decide that she had to feel differently. And so what she did is she started to give a little more peace to our relationship because she could. She could because I made that possible. So I was leading where we were going. And that's really what people, especially men. I just came up with a new book this month published called This Is Not the Woman I Married, And so that book is everything I've ever tried to tell men about marriage. Right, So all the things are in there, like twenty five signs that you're losing her heart is in there, and that's a really important piece of work because that twenty five signs is a great way to learn what have I done wrong? Well, twenty five signs you're losing your wife's heart? Well, how do you lose your heart? Well? These all make it happen, These all make them disappear. And so I point that out because when you don't have clear and I've talked to I talk to guys every week that you know, come in ont of the internet and they talk to me about where they are right now. And I just talked to a guy just a couple of hours ago. He said, you know, I think I've just lost myself. I don't even know who I am anymore.

37:31 I hear that a lot because they don't have a thought system that really kind of says I'm leaving fear. They don't have something that definite. They lose themselves. They lose themselves because they're paying attention to children, paying attention to the working, tat to paying attention to making money, paying attention to you know, everything else. And so they get so caught up in what they call life that they can't remember what they believe in. They they don't know because it's all gone so interesting. So what do you do? What do you do when someone has experienced betrayal because that adds an additional issue to a relationship. Yes, so what is betrayal? Betrayal says I don't trust you anymore. That's a betrayal. Now who cares what the betrayal is based on? It? Just we know what betrayal is.

38:21 Betrayal is you lie to me, and when you lie to me, when you cheat on me, when you don't do things that say I'm important, I'm valuable, and now I got to do something right. So if I'm betrayed, what happens to me? What's the first thing that happens to me, I don't want to trust you anymore. I want to live on edge. I want to live in fear. Right away, I'm going to live in fear. And once I go there, I can't get out. I can't get out because I'm attached to fear. I'm attached to betrayal. Betrayal is fear right, It's another version of fear. Right. So now that I'm there, I can't get out because I've got an agenda. You hurt me, you wounded me, I'm now I'm against you, all right, So all that's building up, piling up in a big pile. But I can't get to love because I have to live in fear.

39:09 And now that I have to live in fear, how am I going to solve my marriage problem? How am I going to even Like I have a hint of that famous word. Everybody uses reconciliation like a massive word, you know, for a simple idea. Right, how's that going to happen? It's not going to happen. You can't have anything better happen because you're living in fear, and betrayal is one of the great fear producers, right, because you know you you chose another man you you fell in love with our kids and not in love with me. You know this is who cares what the betrayal is. It can come in all kinds of forms, but it still comes back to the sublicity of living in fear of living in love, and that's a decision that every person has to make for themselves, someone to make.

39:52 Have you found though, that when someone experiences that you talk about how they move over into the fear if they move back into love, do you find that betrayal sense ultimately starts to subdue so that you can start to experience in something different. And as you've worked with couples, how many times have you worked with couples where there's actual true betrayal going on that they have been able to restore that relationship and actually get back into a very healthy relationship. It has to do with the individuals. There's no just mass. Ninety percent of the people who do this solve that, and it's not like that. It's really up to the individual because when that person is going to live in a choice where they live in something that resembles love versus the fear life that they used to live. The reason I talk about fear so much is fear is so complicated Once you go in there, you just picked up a word, can pick betrayal and what is betrayal? Well, it's another super complicated soap operated mess of ideas people hold on to and they can't let go because once you get into fear, that brat I was talking about grabs you and holds you. There's actually something there that grabs you and holds you. And so that's what holds you is an idea. An idea is you cheated on me, you wrong me, you hurt me right, And those kinds of things are once you attach yourself to. And so when the person starts to see that this like, if

41:24 the person represents doing what I was doing, they are living in a place where I want to be happy. I don't want to live this way. I don't want to live in betrayal. I don't want to live and I was hurt, I was wounded, I was you know, kicked out. I don't want to live like that. I want to live in a place where I want to be happy. And that what is that? That's a mission a decision. I want to live here. I don't want to live over there. Right, Once you're really clear that you really want to live there. Now, what's going to happen is the betrayal is going to start to weaken. Just just a decision to love is going to weaken. And because it weakened, now the momentum is gone. Because fear takes a lot of momentum, right, You've got to have a lot of negativity building all the time in the background for you to keep in that place. But once you just make that one decision, I'm going to live in love. I'm not going to live in fear.

42:14 You may not know how to get out, you may not know in the moments, but something is going to get you. Something is going to call to you. Something's going to reach out. A book, a friend, a coach, to somebody is going to appear just because you made that one decision. And it's like, it's a real big thing. Because if you think you're going to sit in fear and solve anything, you're not. This is never going to be solved because you can't solve anything. One of the positive words that comes to my mind is forgiveness. And do you find that forgiveness is one of those positive behaviors elements of who we are that ultimately creates that happier relationship.

42:54 Yeah, forgiveness is a value and once you if you were raised with that, baby, I wasn't raised with that value. But if you're raised with that value, that's going to be a go to the first place you're going to go, You're going to go to forgiveness. Right. So you know, there's a book called Radical Forgiveness which actually gives a two sheet process of getting out of out of fear and it's really helpful. Right, So radical forgiveness is really what we're talking about. Why is it radical? It's radical because when you leave here and go there, you're doing something radical. You're doing a big thing. You're doing a big healing thing. But I'm simplifiving even further. If you just make the decision to love and leave fear. If you say I'm doing it, I'm leaving. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm leaving. That decision is enough to get you moving.

43:41 That's going to start that momentum I love that. Can you believe that time has gone by? We are having this wonderful conversation and it's like, oh my goodness. All right, So as we close. What would be a message that you'd like to share with the audience. Leave fear, move to love. That'd be the simplest, and maybe make the decision. Don't just tinker with it, don't just use your your your intellect to debate, Oh what should I do? Uh? Make the decision, Make a decision that I am leaving fear and I'm moving to love. And once you make the decision, a whole lot of things are going to happen. And you're not even going to see there because not going to be obvious. They're going to be subtle. They're going to be small, little changes, small realizations, small ideas, small conversations, all going to be small.

44:27 But if you pick up that change in your in your environment, in your in your world, in your physical world, as you pay so much attention to, you're going to start to see little things changing because they're all calling to you to leave fear and move to love. And and it's the simplest thing I've ever seen, you know, love it, love it, love it, love it. That's a great message. Well, Larry, thanks so much. This this has been fascinating and it's certainly it's certainly a different approach to relationships that are struggling versus what you usually here about. And I love what you talked about. You know, the energy that goes forth and how change can be in the other person if they're willing to recognize that energy and all of a sudden they start to respond differently. And so anyway, thank you so much, wonderful message, Thank you very much, and folks, thanks for listening. I hope you've really enjoyed this and look forward to having you join us again soon. So this is doctor Doug saying, no Mista