The Skill No One Teaches Us About Love | Baya Voce

- We've grown up on a diet of Hollywood romcoms and Disney, so you see kind of hashtag couple goals online, and it just doesn't map on to your internal experience. We think that relationships should be going to the spot, but healthy relationships feel way more like going to the gym.

- We had this fantasy where all of those are reality world, and they don't match up, and so we end up being disappointed to solution discouraged, frustrated, and actually don't know how to navigate through the landscape of a relationship, and to add up for filling happy partnership.

- The goal of healthy relationships is not to fight less.

If a couple comes into my office, and they never fight.

I am always more concerned. Honflict in relationships is healthy. The problem gets to be where we're going to hyper-marousal or hyper-arousal, we've lost choice. How I think about repair actually,

like what is repair is the ability to have choice, but when we're hijacked, we don't. - May of O.J. is a relationship repair expert with a master's degree from Columbia University. His work helping couples reconnect after conflict

and disconnection has reached millions, including through a widely viewed TEDx talk on loneliness. - Repair is actually not first and foremost, a communication skill. Repair is a capacity skill.

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That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com/highmancode DR Mark. - B-O-N-C-H-R-G-E. - Wow. You're here. - Wow. - I'm so excited. - So for those listening days when my closest friends, we're gonna get deep in personal about life and love,

and what goes right, and what goes wrong, and what to do about it. 'Cause we both have had a storied history of relationships. (laughs) And hence, we're relationship experts. That's what I say.

I've been married four times, so I'm a relationship expert. (laughs)

All I always talk about, I did not get into the line of work

of repair, because it came to me easily. I have fought to the nail. I still fight to the nail to figure out how we do this. And I think it's one of the most important parts of relationships. That frankly, it gets kind of blown over by a lot of teachers.

It's like it becomes this one part in a four-part process. And for me, looked way easier on the outside, and then when I practiced it in my relationship, I said, "Why did this feel so much harder "than the teachers say that?"

- Yeah, like, relationships, one-on-one. That was a good course. I learned how to do it, and I learned how to do the math. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It doesn't quite work like that.

- Which, I wish. - You know, as you're talking, it's something you're occurred to me, and we haven't really talked about this, so I'm just gonna throw it out there. You know, for most of human history,

you know, we've been in functional relationships, basically in the sense that, you know, the guy had to go do the providing, and the woman had to take the babies, and it wasn't necessarily a love-based thing.

It was ranged, or it was just to structural, but it wasn't like we actually deal with two independent, human beings who had to navigate how to be together in a very new environment. Like, this is kind of a new human environment

that we're living in in the 20th century, and even when my parents were married, it was still pretty traditional roles, and structures, and all those things have kind of gone

“out the window, and that's why so many people,”

men and women, are disoriented about relationships. Is that right? - I mean, listen, I think we have more expectations today of what a relationship should be than we ever have in human history. I mean, for many years, relationship was a business institution.

It was, you know, you got married to someone in your same class,

We had very particular roles.

Now, listen, it's not like those didn't come with struggles, but the expectation today is that one person will fulfill the role that a community has previously fulfilled. And so you're asking, and this is what my colleague and supervisor Esther Perl talks about all the time,

which is, you know, we want them to be our lover, our best friend, our confidant. That's a lot of things for one person that are play made in our best friend and/or the whole thing. And if they're not, not only do we become dissatisfied,

“we think something's wrong, and then what do we do?”

We have this, we live in this frictionless virtual culture that says things should be easy, right? We're online being fed everything that we want. It's like an Amazon package comes to us a day late and we're like, that's a two-day shipping.

I'm used to, you know, I mean, it's coming to my door in 12 hours, we have online virtually this experience that's handing us algorithmically, exactly what we want to be fed. I can literally think of a brand. I don't even have to say it out loud,

and it shows up on my feet somehow magically the next day. And then we expect our relationships to map onto that. So we have this frictionless experience that by the way is becoming more and more frictionless, our expectations are now higher than ever.

And now the experience we're being fed virtually and most of us live in a pretty virtual world is not mapping on to what happens when we get home from work and we're now in a bunch of tension with our partner. And so we think that's wrong, and what do we do?

Most of us, most of us fall into one of two camps. We will either stay and work and work and work

and never give up and lose ourselves,

or we go into this, we go swipe. We're like, great, this is too hard. I'm out because I have endless-- - Oh, we go numb. - Oh, we go numb, yeah.

- And just stay and endure. - And endure, right? So it's we leave and then we have tons of options and then the options are dating, like, come on. The options are endless.

So you go on a first-second-third date and you're like, this thing, we don't really get along here. I bet I could find somebody who I could. - It kind of reminds me when I was, my daughter, she was about nine years old

and Rachel, she's not worth being surged your residence. She said, Dad, how come, like, on the commercials,

things seem one way, but in real life,

they don't really seem like that, and they're not as good. - What did you say? How'd you answer it? - Well, it's marketing, you know, it's like, it's all fantasy.

“It's all fantasy, and I think that's what you're talking about.”

You have this fantasy world in this a reality world, and they don't match up, and so we end up being disappointed to solution discouraged, frustrated, and actually don't know how to navigate through the landscape of a relationship

to have a fulfilling, happy partnership. - But it's not just fantasy, this is what we've been taught. I mean, think about it. Okay, so it doesn't matter if I'm literally speaking to an audience of 50 people or 5,000, I could ask some,

I could ask the audience, how many of you grew up with models from your caregivers or parents that you look at, and you want to emulate, and like pretty much two to five people raise their hand. - Yeah, out of 5,000.

Literally, like, so few people are sitting there, some people think they did because they didn't see their caregivers fight, and so that modeling of no fighting, which is usually sweeping things under the rug, or hiding it from them,

all of a sudden, now we're expecting perfection, or we grew up in households where there was a ton of fighting and no resolution, or someone wasn't saying something, and there was all this resentment,

and we're feeling it energetically, right? So we have the models that we grew up with, who, by the way, no fault to them, they had no idea what they were doing, none of us do. (chuckles)

Then we've grown up on a diet of Hollywood romcoms, and social media, and Disney, and so you see kind of hashtag couple goals online, and you see a family of six who's looking all put together, and you're there, you may not even have a kid,

and you're barely getting out of bed in the morning, you're like, I barely functioning, and it just doesn't map onto your internal experience. And so this idea, while it sounds kind of silly and trait of Prince Charming and Prince, this is,

this is in grand, insider subconscious for what we should expect, and by the way, if we're not studying relationships, if we're not in therapy, if we're not going to workshops or reading the books, where are we learning? What it actually means to be in a healthy, long-term,

secure functioning relationship. We're learning from all of these outside forces, and none of those actually resemble what a healthy, long-term relationship looks like, unless you were very, very lucky.

“- I think that's so true, we just don't have models,”

and I can't find one, and my life is a few couples

or I love how they relate. But I certainly have that growing up, and I didn't know how to navigate love,

“and I think most of us probably find it fairly easy”

to get into a relationship, but staying in it, and navigating it is really hard. And so you talk about how love is, and it's like about avoiding conflict, it's about learning how to repair and reconnect, right?

And just repair that disconnection that happens is that natural part of two people being in their relationship. And you kind of explain how you came to understand that this was sort of a missing piece, this whole idea of repair, which, by the way,

is this how to live your new book, I think, which has come out soon, not that soon, but it'll come out and we'll have her back on. So this is really an important framework, because conflict is easy to enter into,

but it's hard to get out of, and people disagree, and sometimes, by the ways, there's often contempt, there's judgements, there's criticism, there's blame, there's shame, there's all these ways of fighting, they're kind of dirty fighting, you know?

And when you talk about it's a different way of engaging with conflict, that's actually a positive.

“Here's the thing that I think most of us get wrong”

about relationships, which is that the goal is to fight less, if we fight constantly, that something is wrong,

and if we never fight, that that means we're doing well,

I will tell you, if a couple comes into my office and they never fight, I am always more concerned than with a couple who does, because I'm like, something's going on under the surface, someone's not speaking up, conflict in relationships is healthy. It's not like, if you are fighting, and listen,

I'm talking outside of manipulation, abuse, coercion, power, like, normal messed up people, just people, or does kind of messed up, like the rest of us? Like, we, this is part of relational dynamics. Now, I actually think about it in a few stages,

and you could talk to different professionals and some will say, there are five stages, so I'm just going to map it as simply as I can. So the first stage of relationship is what we all know as the Honeymoon Stage or the Merge. This is where enmeshment happens, where the two eyes sort of, or more eyes disappear,

and you start to merge. You're like, this feels so good. I finally found the missing piece, and here we are, and we think we're supposed to stay here forever. And then what happens, disillusionment falls upon all of us.

And all of a sudden, that creative habit that we thought was just so amazing,

turns into the fact that they're kind of messy and disorganized. And so we enter into the second phase of relationship, which is what I might call the Power struggle. So research has shown that the Power struggles basically were most of us end up. This is where most, it's not the final stage,

but it's where most of us end up. This is where you were, you were, you entered into relationship as two individual people. You came into relationship, you merge, you're one. It feels so good to be with this person,

and then all of a sudden, something happens. You get into your first fight, you realize that, that yellow flag, that you decide not to look at, looks a little more like red flag, and you start to have tension.

This can show up in a lot of different ways.

“I think about, I think, just such a common example.”

For that, I think most of us can probably resonate with something that has happened similarly, which is like the couple who moves in, and one person either likes the thermostat, one temp, and the other person like, and or someone like's background noise on all the time. They're listening to the podcasts, and the audiobooks, and music, just all the time,

because it calms them down.

And then the other person is like, "Wait a second, I need silence."

Like that helps my nervous system regulate. And now all of a sudden, this couple is starting to fight about something that's happening on a day-to-day basis, that seems kind of small, maybe mundane, like these sorts of things, that all of a sudden start to, like, just not at you.

And when we stay at the content level of argument, we don't, it's really hard to get anywhere, because you don't actually know what's happening under the surface. So if I'm saying, turn the music down, turn the music off, and you're like, "I just need, give me a break.

I just got home from a long day. Like, let me just have one at right." If you get under the content and understand, understand, this helps me regulate, this way helps me calm down. Now you're at the point where you can actually negotiate.

That's an easy example. But let's try headphones. That's my headphones. But I had both have a room in the house that's dedicated to being quiet or have times that you're listening, like, "Now you can problem, so."

But that's kind of easy for some of us, but then we're talking, then we're talking about things that show up in every relationship dynamic. Are we going to have kids or not? Where are we going to live? What does our social fabric look like?

What kind of place do we want to live in?

that 69% of our relationship issues are unresolvable. They will be perpetual throughout our relationships. That's a lot.

That's a lot that will never get resolved.

And if we don't understand that-- 69, that's 68.

“Nope, definitely 69, that's what they say.”

I've always wondered about that number. Like, how do you get to 69? Could we just round up to like a solid 70? But to me, this is a piece of what we get wrong. We think the goal is fighting less.

But actually, there are going to be tons of problems in our relationships that we never quite get over. Over the years, I've worked with many trekkers, athletes, and even Olympians, people who consistently push their bodies to the limit. One thing I always recommend to keep their energy up,

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Use promo code "Hiamen" to check out to say 15%. And if you subscribe, they are currently offering free gifts while supplies last. I'll just actually speak personally here. My wife, M&I, we, one of the things that we came up against early on, that we still work on navigating, is I was coming out of a relationship

where we did not really have a social life. He was quite an introvert. We were in COVID, it was fine. By the time I got out of that relationship, I was starving for community, and I was starving for going to events and going out.

I meet my now-white wife, M&I, who is opposite. The total, and she is social butterfly, has all the stamina in the world, and at the beginning, that was awesome because I was starved for it. I was like, but little by little, we get out of the merge phase, and all of the sudden, she now wants to be way, way more social than I do.

She wants to stay out, way later than I do. I am, and we're trying to figure out how to navigate this. Now, part of why this is tricky, and this is the under, like this is the underneath of the underneath, that's happening for a lot of us that we need to sort of, that we need to excavate in our relationships.

“But the truth is, a couple of relationships ago,”

I was engaged to a man, and he broke off our engagement out of nowhere. Like, I was completely blind, maybe I should have seen a coming, but I didn't. And after he broke up with me, all of these lies started to come out. I started to realize, wait, he didn't go to school where he said he went to school. He didn't have the job. He said, yeah, I mean, like massive lives.

And so, before that, there was like a before baia, and an after or before that relationship, and an after that relationship, version of baia, and I was pretty trusting before that relationship, some might even say naive, and after that relationship, something happened in that shock where I ended up being around every corner,

I started to be like, wait a second, what am I seeing? What am I missing?

How, because I was in this industry, I was a professional, how did I miss it? And so I was like, what am I missing? So that became kind of a central question, and my body went into such shock for like the next, oh my god, it was wrecked, my confidence was wrecked. So anyway, fast forward to two relationships later, when I meet Emmy, Emmy wants to go out, she's done nothing wrong, and her staying out,

and every time she wants to go out, now I don't know this at the beginning.

This isn't what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, I can blame it on Emmy, like why did she need to go out, whatever, I can like have a whole bunch of reasons, but we were in so many fights about this, about like me wanting to go home, or like can we just compromise and go home, and it just didn't work. It was really, really hard for us until we started to get underneath the surface underneath her real value and desire for freedom and my real value and desire for safety.

Those are things that we are going to deal with for the duration of our relationship, but once I started bringing to her that this is what's happening for me when you leave. And this, it was, it started to change the game for how we did social events. She started to feel more compassion. I started to be able to, I saw her coming home every time I didn't go home with her. I saw her coming home and not springing something on me, which was my biggest fear that

all the sudden I was going to turn around. She was going to say, hey, just have something to tell you and I would be like, how did I miss it? What did I miss, right? Are you a constrictor?

“Yeah, but it wasn't necessarily about her and the truth is with in relationships,”

we bring in all of the baggage from every single relationship leading up to that relationship that hasn't been healed. Whether it's from our family of origins or the relationships before we bring all of that into our partnerships and what we're really saying is on a totally unconscious level because it's not like we're most of us are having these conversations. What we're really saying is, here is all, here are all the places that I'm still unhealed.

My hope is that in this dynamic, I offer things these things to you. On the altar of our relationship, I offer these things to you and that you can help me heal them. I'll do my part you'll do, but nobody's having those conversations consciously and by the way, vice versa. So we're both just dealing with a bunch of all of us are just like two little kids in our little kids cells having the fights, not our product out of higher self, right? 100% and those are very

hard-wired automatic responses that we can change, but we have to first identify them.

I mean, here's what I would say. So there's also funny enough,

research that talks about how it doesn't actually matter so much, how we fight, even though it's important, but some people yell, some people are going to go quiet, some people are going to want to process more, some people are going to avoid, and we can find couples who are just as happy actually with those kinds of, with that kind of tension in the relationship, but they have to come back together. So we might always be fighting

“with the five-year-old version that shows up. And the truth is, as long as we come back together,”

we'll likely be okay, but most of us don't know how to do this. Now, when we think about why we know so much information about relationships like using eye language and active listening, but then we cannot practice that in the moment, because we're hijacked. We're completely hijacked. So to me, 90% of what we're doing in repair is building our capacity for tension. The nervous system regulation. Yes, but it's not just nervous system, right? Of course,

we have to have nervous system regulation, but it's also nervous system expansion capacity. Where you're window of tolerance. If you have a window of tolerance and you generally go into hyper arousal, those are my friends who are like, you know, you might yell, you might get hot, you might say too much, you want to process forever and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, those are them. That's me. And then on the other side of that window of tolerance,

this hyper arousal. Those are the people who overwhelm looks like they completely leave the building. They kind of shut down to associate, yeah, literally leave or figuratively. What we're trying to do with repair, the key scale here is expanding the window, and then understanding little by little, how we can start to notice in our bodies, what comes up before we're 90%. Before we're almost tipping over in a hyper arousal or in to hyper arousal. The problem gets to be

where we, if we're in, if we're going into hyper arousal or hyper arousal, we've lost choice. How I think about the repair actually, like, what is repair is the ability to have choice. But when we're hijacked, we don't. And so we might know the tools. We might have read the books. And when we're in the heat of the moment, we have no ability to use the tools that we actually have because we're completely hijacked. I mean, and your audience knows this better than anybody,

just like you trained to go into a cold plunge. And you don't, you're probably not going to

“start at three minutes. Like you're probably just not, you're, you need to build up. You go to”

the gym. You need to build up to the weights that you're going to, that you, you cannot go in there

and lift a hundred pounds if you have never lifted before. That's just literally not going to happen.

of my Annie Lola, I love this line that she says. She said dojo. Well, yes, that. But what she says that I just feel it, I just, she said this and I was like, that is brilliant. That we think that relationships should be going to the spot. That's our orientation towards relationships. If we're in a healthy relationship, it will feel like the spot. But healthy relationships feel way more like going to the gym. And then maybe that gym has a spa attachment. But you're not going to the spa.

“You're going to the gym. And then you get to Steena after. That's right. And I think that really”

oriented can help orient because so many people come to me with what is too hard. How do I know if my relationship is too hard? You told the real court exactly. And part of that is, this is going to be a simplifying whole thing. But to ask yourself, can you kind of like, get the noise out of the way to ask yourself, am I shrinking inside of this relationship? Am I disappearing? Am I watching myself go away? And I banning myself. 100% or betraying myself. Yes,

and little by little, all of the sudden, like, you don't feel quite as you as you used to. Like, maybe you don't do the things that you used to love as much as you do. You're not as you don't have that kind of spark you used to have. You've given up some of your friends. You're like a dollar version of yourself. Or am I becoming more of who I want to become? And part of how we do that is by building capacity. So even through fighting, even through tension. Am I starting to be like, oh, wow, I

brief just a little bit longer there. I had between stimulus and response. I had just a nanosecond more of time and space. Let's practice to get there. Well, it's training. This is, it's practice is training. This is what I'm saying about the cold plunger. You cannot, you're just, it's going to be so unrealistic. And if you do go into the cold bunch for three

minutes the first time, you're probably holding your breath and freaking out and just want to

“show off for your friends. It's probably not sustainable. But you have to practice. I actually”

think a lot about cross-training here. And I think about mapping this onto other relationships. And like most of us, what we're doing is we're training in the hardest environments possible. One, both of us are super-trigger. And we're not, we're not training out of that. Are you saying that people should learn tools to help regulate their nervous system like that they're breath or separating until you kind of are resourced and regulated? Because you talk about how you're not

resourced and regulated. It's not a time to have a conversation. Yeah, fight. But sometimes, but this is what generally happens. Of course, it's not the time to have a fight. But what do we do? For some of us, it feels good to expel. And so we just say the thing, because in the, in the heat of the moment, it's like, it's just like, ah, that felt really good. Or it feels safe to close down. And so this is what I mean by the window of tolerance. But if we don't know what our

physiological cues are before we go into the place of complete shutdown or before we say the thing that we might regret, it's going to be really hard to train that at 90% arousal, right? So absolutely, this is physiological. And I think what the relationship space is missing right now is a lot of the conversations are around the communication skills of repair and less about the physiological. To me, repair is actually not first and foremost a communication skill. Repair is a

capacity skill. Because we are going, I mean, I could say this a million times over and it probably won't

be enough. We're going to lose our skills. We're going to lose the tools in the moments that we need the most if we're not training, if we're not actually building the capacity. And this is what I mean by cross-training. This is what I mean by setting ourselves up for how we actually practice repair when we don't meet it. Instead of practicing repair instead of me giving you a laundry list of scripts here about what to do when you're fighting because you're going to forget them. You're

not going to use them. So how do people navigate to build the capacity? A why I use a gym, which I know is kind of cliche, but it's just easy for all of us to understand. It is because we know we have to start with lower reps, lower weight to build. If we don't want

“to get injured, to start with the easy stuff. You have to. Like the dishes. Exactly. Exactly. You”

start with the things or say your partner sends it, okay. So here's what I want you to do for your

audience. I want you to think about right now. Your hardest relationship. Maybe it's your romantic relationship. Maybe it's a relationship with a parent or a sibling or a boss or a coworker. And think about something that they do, that if you're talking about a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being like the highest trigger, it's like a five or lower for you. That could be something like the dishes. It could be something like they leave a mess on the counter for you to clean up. It could

be that they send a text that usually they use an exclamation point and an emoji and today they

Do you know what do you know? I text trauma. It's like a thing now. It's like a new thing. I don't

worry about him. I get an exercise. It totally exists. If you say good morning and it doesn't have an exclamation point versus good morning with an exclamation point, like we've read into that. That's language now. That's like the way we communicate. If you do one heart and not four hearts, like you know, this is, I mean, this is real language. This is how we're communicating to start actually practicing. So you know that the, so I'm asking everybody to think of the thing right

now. Think of it for you, too. What's a five or below? For me, it's something, it actually would be something like a, like a text where, oh, no, you know what, it would be for me. It would be my wife comes home and she's on her phone when she walks in the door. It's like a five or to me transitions

are really important and I get really impacted by like, how did we wake up today? How are we coming

home from work? And it did something happen. And is it about me? And anyway, I'm still in my own work. But, but so it would be something like she comes home. She's on her phone and she doesn't immediately say hi. And she doesn't look up and she's kind of distracted. So what I might do is all the sudden, like my, my kind of initial response might be to, in my head, it's not, it's not actually something

“I would say aloud. It would be like, oh, great. Something I haven't worked or what did I do?”

Or now we're going to be here all night. That might be my automatic response. It's not necessarily towards her, but it's a thought for me. Maybe for you, it's something physiologically that happens. It's like, you're, you can feel your heart start to race or you can feel yourself start to sweat a little or you get cold or you start to, but you shall agree. Right. So you start to track these little responses. If you don't know what they are now, you literally from this moment on, you start to track

what's that little thing. So for me, the queue is, ah, I can feel this thought loop coming on. So the goal is this is a five or under and now I start to disrupt the pattern. So instead of, instead of, oh, that thought is wrong. Now I'm saying, okay, what's my one practice? For me, it might be literally breathing for 30 seconds, extending my exhales and starting to just

come for 30 seconds, maybe 60, maybe 90 if I'm lucky. But it's powerful when you do that.

“And I don't think we understand. I think we, I think we, because we're starting, we've, the”

conversation for so long has been about trauma and about using iLanguage. And what's the thing we're going to say? And it's not actually, what's our physiological response that is going to completely derail the conversation after this? I mean, what, what you're talking about is it's very specific, which is when we have a stress. And it could be, you know, you think your partner came home half an hour late because they were having an affair with somebody or maybe they were

on their way to buy you flowers. Yeah. But like you're going to have the same physiological response regardless of the insult, if you have an interpretation of that as danger, right? It doesn't matter. If it's a real or an imagined threat, it could be, you know, really, you know, a tiger chasing York, it could be you think, you know, your partners having a affair because they stayed late. Going got to find some people who are going to buy it again, right? So like, and it's the same

physiology. And so the stress responses what you're talking about when your heart be quickins, your breath becomes shallow, your chest tightens up, your gut tightens up, you can't think clearly.

“And all of a sudden, you know, it's like you're in this cute stress response. And that's what we're”

actually engaging in relationship with. And that's, that's very dangerous because in, that's when we were hijacked by what we call our migdala, which is our fighter flight, our fear, our feeding, our finding center in our brain that keeps us stuck in these ancient limbic lizard-like relationships that aren't very mature or because they don't allow us to sort of wake up to what it's like to actually be in a, an, an, an, an, an adult awake person. You're in this sort of hijacked state. So

I think you're, you're talking about is, is asking people to stop when they start to feel those sensations and tune into those sensations. And then do something to interrupt that pattern. That's right. That's your breath. Because the, the, the thing is, we probably won't be able to stop the physiological response from happening. That physiological response may be it get, it decreases over time, but get used to it. Like make that response your friend because that, that's not necessarily going anywhere.

What we do after is the thing that we can control. Now, maybe it goes away. Maybe our partners can repair with us and all of the sudden, like, over time, that's, that's, oh, you're diving in. Yeah, I did it. Well, I've did it. It changed everything. And our conversation, our, and our ability to regulate in a conversation is really dramatically. It was like so noticeable for both of us that our ability to stay in a grounded resource state in a conversation where

maybe we wouldn't have been able to be for was really, it was interesting. It was like a nervous system reset. And I don't know for the last, but it's good to all the last. Well, it's such, I mean,

Is I listen? I don't think it's a panacea. I don't think it's for everybody. I have a whole, you know, I do a lot of research in that space, so I'm not, but, but I also, I think I, you know,

I have my columns about it. But, you know, we have this critical window that opens up this

critical period that opens up after different psychedelic experiences. And I'm pretty sure and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I, I've again, has one of the long-

“The 90 days, at least that's what they'd be. They stopped measuring after 90s. Yeah.”

Yeah, so with something like MDMA, it's two weeks with psilocybin. I think it's a little longer, but this window is what allows you to start to retrain habits. And so it would make sense that you're able to practice regulation in a very different way. And then the hope is that translates over time, not because you did this one time peak experience, but because you've integrated it and then practice practice practice practice practice. And then it becomes habitual.

And this is, I think, a really big piece here is that the goal, so the goal of healthy relationships is not to fight less. It's not to not fight. That's not the goal. The goal is how do you come back to that? You're not fighting dirty. That's right. How do you come back to how do you learn to come back together because most of us are fighting and not actually coming back? Well, let's talk about this, because you do talk about this whole repair framework that you

use to approach with your own relationship and with your clients. And there, I think there's

some really powerful things in there. Like, my friend of mine went said, you know, only one crazy

person in the room at the end of time. Yeah, that's great. That's kind of the first one. Like, one person to talk about that. And what is that? And take us through this framework. Yeah,

“yeah, the one person at a time, I think, is again, we're a lot of us get into trouble. Because”

think about how many fights you have gotten into, where they're talking and you're talking over them. And you just want them to hear you. But obviously, they just want you to hear you too. Like, there, it's like, it's a hot mess. We know that doesn't work. But it's really hard not to do. So, and we're not going to be able to do it if we're not regulated. That's just the true. So, the first step I actually talk about is to do nothing. That's where we're practicing. We're

practicing with a five in below. We're literally starting to expand our tolerance for attention. Then we get into it. At somewhere we're going to have to come into a conversation and start to ask something's out. I learned this from my teacher Terry Real and colleague Terry Real who's a fantastic couple of therapists. And what he talks about is one person goes at a time.

And why this is so important, which it's, it is critical, is because if both of us are going,

nobody's listening. That's right. No one's listening. But we have to, this is, I'm just going to go back to differentiation and the power struggle because what's happening here is if somebody is speaking something that hurt you, right? They might not be using iLenguage. I actually, I actually have the more I understand repair, the more I think it's a one person job. I used to say, okay, so your partner has to talk to you this way and you then you go, it's like,

kind of the frameworks that we hear about, right? Which is, you talk this way, you speak,

“you speak from, the I perspective and without blaming, and listen, in an ideal world, that's what”

we're doing. We're speaking without blaming, we're talking from the eye, we're, but like, we're not living in an eye world. And if you're talking to your boss or your mom, the idea that you're going to say, hey, mom, we'll use iLenguage with me and that's going to work is like zero. And you're not going to hand your boss a worksheet and say, hey, let's practice nonviolent communication, like that's just totally unrealistic. So I've started to think about it. Well, maybe not

about it. Maybe not about it. Yeah, but most of us are probably not going to have a luxury to get that. So if you're just a normal average, every day human, like most of us, and that's just not on the table, then I like to think about repairs a one person job. Again, hopefully your partner shows up for this. But if they can't, you're owning your side of the street. So first step, one at a time, right, you have a speaker, you have a listener. There are many frameworks that that people talk about.

You can use a mogo. You can use Ellen Bader's developmental model. You can use Terry Reels RLT. Like, there are lots of ways that you can have this conversation. So the idea of what I'm talking about is you could basically map what I'm talking about with any tool scale set that you already have. One person goes out of time. What does that mean? That means one person. By the way, I only been most people to know how to actually properly listen to somebody. Oh, I think it's a totally

underdeveloped skill. We'll talk about why. Well, I'll get there because it's real, it's not because we don't want to, by the way, it's because it is freaking hard. So I'll talk about that. So one person is speaking. We'll call, and the other person is listening. We'll call this speaking partner, the hurt partner, not that you're not both hurt. You just, it's just for right now, just for right now. So you'll both get a turn, but you're not going to go at the same time. So the hurt

partner is speaking. The hope here, if this is you, the skill that you are building is you are building enough differentiation. And I'll talk about differentiation in just a second to be able to say,

In order to do that, I'm not blaming you because I am different than you because I am literally

“differentiated. I am saying to you, I'm saying, I'll just use, I mean, as a example, we'll do”

the night out thing. What I used to say is, hey, it's really hard for me when you go out because I don't trust you, right? That would be like kind of undifferentiated. Now, I say, it's really hard for me when you go out because I actually feel quite lonely. I've now done the digging inside of myself to say, like, we're different. I'm responsible for what I'm feeling and experiencing over here. And you can help me, like, you can help me with that if you want, but ultimately,

we can't control another person. The other person's job, the listening partner. This is critical

and hard to your point. Most of us don't know how to actually listen. Part of why it's hard to listen is because if you're not differentiated, it's very hard to not take what your partner is saying personally. What do you mean by differentiated? The idea of differentiation is that we are two eyes, we're two individual people, and we're also caring for the we, which is very different than individuation, which is, I'm going to do what I want. I'm an autonomous human who can

it's going to make my own choices and it doesn't actually matter how that's going to land on you, or how it will hurt you, or I'm just like, I'm going to do what I want. That's independence. I'm going to do what I want. Co-dependence is that merge face, right? Then you don't have to call

it, but that's just to help kind of identify. Where you do it the other person wants. Yeah,

so when a hundred percent of my colleagues say knitters become skiers and skiers become knitters. I mean, it's like if you're skating, you know, like the knit, but you're partner skis, you're in what I was being. Tell you, you're done with that. That's exactly right. So differentiation would be I'm my own autonomous human and I care about you. In fact, one of the one of the highest predictors of relationship satisfaction is the ability to accept influence from your partner. So if I say to

you, hey, Mark, when you talk to me like that, when you talk to me like that in that tone, it's really hard for me to hear and you might be thinking in your head, what tone? Like, I'm not talking to you anyway, but instead of saying that out loud, you can think it all you want. You can think of your crazy. You say, okay, here, let me actually try and change that. Not because you agree with them. This is where also we get into a lot of trouble, not because you

agree with them. You might literally be in your head like that person is crazy. My tone is fine, but because you love them because you love this person. And so what do you do? You shift for them. You accept their influence so that you're building a relational habit and foundation here. Now, when we think we have to agree with our partner, this is again the listening person,

“when you think you have to agree with them. So they come home and they say,”

we just went to dinner tonight and you made front of me in front of all of our friends and you're over here being like, what are you talking about? I definitely didn't remember what I said or I said that and I didn't like you totally took it the wrong way. You're not saying that out loud. You can think it. Think it all you want. But you're listening to the person, like you're a researcher being like, oh, or like they're an alien. I like actually thinking about

them as an alien. Like, you're an alien creature who is so different than me, who I would never think

the same as and who's like, like, I would never get hurt by that thing that you like if I said, if you said that, I would literally never get hurt. But if we assume sameness, which is agreement, if we assume we need to agree, we're on losing ground. We're on losing ground. So if I know I don't need to agree with you and I can literally look at you like you are a fallen alien from another

“planet and be like, oh, what's that like to live in your alien planet? I think that's a really useful”

construct that you've written about, which is this idea of perspective over perception and how to become an anthropologist of your partner's inner world, which is getting curious. Well, like you like, you don't have to agree that you want to be a cannibal any, you know, a dead people, but you can be curious about that culture that does that, right? Exactly. And so I think I think that's a really important framework because, you know, most of us are operating from these

automatic childhood wounds and patterns in our promise, big trauma through a promise. And so we bring that into the relationship and the conversation. And unless you get curious and listen, realize, well, that person's really just in this moment of being a mood five year little girl or a ten year little boy. And you're going to have compassion for that and know what's not about you. This is differentiation. Literally, that's the work of differentiation, which in order to do that,

might be saying some stuff about you that you really don't want to do. I want to share an example.

“Okay, great. Because it's, it's happened to me and it was like a magic trick. I was my”

ex-wife and I was still great friends and we, you know, went to my best friend's 60th birthday. Now, she didn't know a soul that she said to me before Mark, which you please make sure that you introduce me to people and include me in the conversations and do all this. Sure, no problem. Now, I just had heart surgery and I had an atrial fib and an underblation and I was a little comfortable and I was on a pain pain pill. So I was like a little gonso. And we walk into the, to the

party and my best friends, girlfriend at the time rushes up to me and I was like kind of overwhelmed. And I just like my wife was standing there and I didn't stop her and after like five minutes,

I did, but by the time it's too late, my wife was just so upset and she went out of a 10 out

of 10 reaction and probably triggered by something, you know, I'm not being taken care of by her family or father who knows what was going on there underneath the service, but it didn't really

“matter. She was in her, she liked stormed out and went to the parking lot. So I was like, oh,”

shit, this is my best friend's birthday. And so I, and I obviously didn't do what she asked me to do. And so I, I understood that I kind of screwed up after a few minutes, I went to the parking lot and we really found her and we sounded like her, but I said, so I said, okay, tell me everything. Like, what are you feeling? What's up for you? Like, I'm here to listen. And I just let her rant and like, you didn't do this and you didn't do that. No, just like, just it was intense.

And I had to sit there and I had to take it and not take it personally, but just

receive and hold my presence and breathe and stay grounded in my body and not be able to do this. And not be about like my, my point of view, or God, don't be such a, you know, don't be so annoying. This is my best friend's birthday. How could you do this? Like, whatever, all this stuff, you know, I could have said that. That's going on in your head problem. Yeah, like, like, come on, like, yeah, get your shit together. It's crazy. And, like, and, but, but she legitimately felt that way.

So I wasn't going to say, don't feel that. And I just listened. And then after she was going to say, there's already more is already more and later get it all out. And then I, and then I just said, let me get this right. Let me see if I understand. I didn't do this. And I heard you this way. And I did this. And I just kind of laid it all out. And she was like, yeah, and the next minute, she was in my lap. And I was like, wow. And so I was like, oh, this is an magic trick.

It's magic trick. But it took, it took an enormous amount of, like, I would say, like lifting weights. Like, it's that same analogy. It's like, it was hard to hold myself still. And just listen without having my own narrative of trying to argue with her in my head while she's talking. But actually, to just listen to her and be the anthropologist to the last. What the hell is going on with you? And all people want is to be seen and heard and understood. If you get that, it's like,

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I love that you shared that. I love that you said that. Part of what you were doing that you probably didn't know you were doing at the time. This is from former CA agent Andrew Boost of Montana. You mentioned it a little earlier, which is the difference between perception and perspective. So most of us spend all day in our own perception. We are looking out of the world from our eyes through our lens, and like I'm over here thinking, okay, it's the micro arcane,

as I would have in my thirsty, right? Those are things. And we are not spending even a fraction

“of time visiting perspective, which would be what's it like over there for you? How are you feeling?”

Is it temperature okay for you? Right? That's another muscle to train. That's actually what you were doing when you were able to be like, it's not like those thoughts go away. It's not like you're not thinking, this is crazy. This is my friends birthday. How could you be doing? You're thinking those thoughts. You just don't say them out loud. They didn't say them out loud. And I was like, they don't really matter because she's having her experience. And I'm not going to convince her otherwise.

So all I could do here is just like listen to what she's suffering with. That's right. Because I love her. And I don't want her to feel this way. So I care about her. And she's having a moment. And you know, yes, I did something that I said I wasn't going to do. I didn't include her. I didn't introduce her. But I was like, you know, on drugs and out of it and kind of overwhelmed, then I just lost it for a minute. But it didn't matter. Like, all she needed was to be

seen and heard and felt. And to not have me, even I didn't even need to present my point of view. It was like, OK, now I need you to get me and hear what my perspective is because it didn't matter in that moment. And then we've had a great time in the party. I mean, this is this is one person

goes at a time. And maybe you never need her to hear your perspective. But for some of them.

Actually, I'm a part of listen to the podcast. But for some of us, we will want our perspective to be heard. So the key here is your perspective matters. You're putting it over to the side just for a minute while your partner gets to exactly, I mean, this was such a good example mark. And then you get a turn. It's just not at the same time. And if you start to lose your capacity to be with the other person, to be in their perspective, to be like, oh, this is making sense to me. I mean, I don't agree with it.

But like, cool, I make sense given your world, your history, your trauma, your wounds, your patterns. It makes sense that that would hurt you. If you start to get out of that, right? You're now getting out of your window of tolerance. This is what I mean by starting to track it at like 20% versus being 90%. So here you are, you're starting to, like, you know, maybe she's taught she's saying all these things and that of really totally around. I like to just like force myself

“into the earth. But you have to, you have to train that. Not all of us are Jedi ninjas like that”

mark it like that. Trust me, this wasn't, I had practiced this skill. It was something we have practiced. But it was, it was like an 10 out of 10 environment. So we practiced it in moments where it wasn't so activated and that's easier. But when it's so, when it's a 10 out of 10 emergency, you know, lights are on. And so I, you know, I think what you're, what you're talking about in terms of this, this, this ability to actually regulate and to get your nervous system in a place

where you actually can have these conversations and then do their prayer is so critical. And

it's physiological first and then it's psychological. Yeah, that's exactly. But we've been taught the opposite exactly. And I just want to say just to wrap that up for people who are starting to lose stamina in those conversations where you're the listener and your her partner is saying some shit that you're like, okay, that, that's dumb. Like, I don't know if I can be here anymore. Your training ground is how can I start to notice when I'm starting to get disregulated.

And then you set boundaries. This is what I mean when I mean repair can actually be a one person

“job. So if your partner is talking to you in a way that doesn't work for you, what do you do?”

You say, hey, can you actually say it this way? That would be really helpful. There's no way you're going to be able to do that if you're disregulated. You won't be able to say that. But if you're regulated, you can actually help your partner help you. If you start to lose it, if your partner is talking and you're just like, okay, this is way too much for me, then this is where boundary practice works. So either you're in repair work or your in containment work, you're in your

in nervous system regulation or you're saying, hey, I actually need to go practice, I need to

Okay, let's go into boundary. Well, we think boundaries is going to be pretty simple. We think boundaries

“have to do with someone else changing. Like, I'm like, hey, stop talking to me like that. That's my”

boundary, right? But actually, my boundary is you're going to talk to me like that no matter what, because I can't control you. Again, if you care about me, hopefully you won't, but I can't,

I can't ultimately control you. So if you keep talking to me like that, I'm going to, like,

hey, this conversation so far, I haven't, I'm like, I'm about to hit my edge. I actually need to leave the room and I need 10 minutes. And I'll be back. But that's a boundary. The boundary is a way to take care of yourself. It has nothing to do with what you do over there. Yeah, ask the other person to change. Yeah. As if we have way more power in repair than we think we do. We have, it doesn't, our partner, it would be great if our partner can show up. Yes. But if our partner can't,

we can make requests. And then if they meet those requests like 70% of the time, that's pretty good. If they can get you in a tune to you like 70% of the way, that's pretty good. I like the 70% 68. So I don't think 68 is enough. You know, I'm not like the gotmans, you know, 69 is just not going to cut it for me. I like a solid 70 heuristic here. So you're literally either practicing expanding your capacity for tolerance, it's sending that window, or practicing boundary work,

“and none of this requires the other person. That's what I found. In that moment, she didn't have to”

do anything except vent and be, you know, completely activated. And I could just hold space. And that's, that was enough. And even though in my mind, I can think she's wrong. It doesn't matter who's right or wrong. Like someone said to me, do you want to be right or do you want to be in relationships? Yeah, it was right. It was wrong who cares. And we, yeah, we get in this sort of rigid view that we have to be right, or we have to convince our partner about the brightness of our perspective,

or our opinion, or what they didn't do, or what they did do. And this just kind of no point in that. It doesn't serve anything. There's, there's another great line by Terry railhood that I just think I think he nails it with this one, where he says, there is no such, there's no such thing as objective reality in a relationship. There are just two subjective truths happening at any given time. So there's my experience over here, which is, hey, that thing that you said at dinner,

really hurt my feelings. And that was messed up that you said that I can't believe you said that. And then there's the other person who's like, I just made a joke. I did, like, there was nothing personal about that. That met nothing. Nobody's right. And as long as we're fighting for that, we are going to get nowhere. There is no quote-unquote truth in that experience. There's no, and but if you're on that plane, if you're fighting on that plane, you're both going to lose.

“Because by the way, if you win, and your partner loses, you both lose. You have to go to bed with”

them, not that night. Like, you're both losing. That's right. So in this repair process, like,

first episode of one person at a time. Seconds. Well, do nothing. Do nothing is actually the

first. Like, you want to just, you got to regulate. This is the capacity building. This is where you're not, you're not bringing anything until hopefully you're regulated. So then you're regulated. Do you come back? One person goes at a time. Then the being curious part. Then there's the colleges. Yes. That's right. This is where you're literally practicing differentiation here. You're practicing. You are a separate person with separate ideas, beliefs, values, wounds,

traumas. And because of that, I can look at you like an alien species because we're very different from one another. And I can learn to not take that personally. In order to do that, I have to expand my capacity for tension because you might say some shit that doesn't feel good. Right. And if you say that, I want to be able to to either be with that and have it kind of roll off my back or ask you to say it differently or maybe that hurts so bad. And it just pings something in me

that I can set a boundary and I can walk and I can pause and I can come back. I mean, it's the guy. When I was 18, I don't know if they were telling the story, but I, I was bullied a lot of the kid. And, you know, it was this sort of nerdy kid to read a lot of books. It's every well of the kid. But it was fine. I'm good now. When I was, I was traveling at West House 18, I was camping in this kind of campsite outside of Bamp, which was like the Siltown in Alberta and the Canadian Rockies.

And there was this British guy, kind of older like probably 40s or maybe early 50s. It was just kind of a deck. And he kind of was making fun of me. And I was like, and I just kind of felt initially, I'm like her and upset. And then I had this insight that really helped me navigate my life, which is when someone is saying shit to you. That's mean or hard or difficult or whatever it is. It's how they want to do things. Either it's their issue and they're projecting

on to you and they just, you know, you can have curiosity and compassion for them. Or two, maybe there's some nugget of there, even though it's coming out in a messy package that is worth

you looking at yourself for. So it's always a gift. In other words, it's always a gift. And it's hard

to hold that. But you know, you kind of start out early on talking about this that relationships

where we wake up, where we learn about ourselves, where we can't do it on our own. You know, we can be very happy alone, but the minute you know, they're in a relationship, all of a sudden,

“you kind of have to deal with things you haven't dealt with. And I think that's the beauty of it.”

It's also the hard part of it. But it's actually, it's actually what makes relationship so amazing is that they're a vehicle for waking up. Yeah. And it does mean you're just going to stay together. But it means this is a vehicle to wake up and help each other evolve and grow. And if that could be your North Star as a couple, I think then you you have an anchor that you're all both working towards. And it's not me against you. It's we're holding hands together, walking towards a place that's

better for each of us either together alone. It's so beautifully put. I mean, this is to just make a real roundabout way here and to the third, the third state of relationships, right? You have the merge of the honeymoon stage. You have the power struggle. I mean, what you're painting a picture of is interdependence. This is this is it's so hard to get to that stage. That place of I can exist fully and we can exist fully. I don't lose myself in you. I can appreciate you for your differences.

“I can allow you to have the freedom that you want while also feeling the safety that's here, right?”

And that's interdependence. That's the stage that most of us never make it to because we get

so stuck in the power struggle and my hypothesis here is part of why it's hard for us to have that North Star and make it there is because we aren't practicing capacity building, which is the thing that allows us to get there. It's a thing that allows a really shitty fight to end up with, okay, wait a second. I can self reflect. I can take ownership that is mine, but not more than what's mine. And I can see the value in it. That's hard to do. We have to have healthy and

self-esteem that we're not pointing the finger and blaming outward or we're not pointing the finger inward and blaming ourselves in order to get to a place where relationship to your point earlier around Annie Lala's dojo, right? This relationship dojo. In order for a relationship to deeply be a dojo, we have to be able to look inward. And then we also have to be able to say just as much as we say my neighbor's shit stinks too. We have to also say, and I'm human just

like the rest of us. Like we have to be able to hold both of those pieces in order to get to the place where we can actually fulfill on that North Star. Yeah, and it's something that, you know, that just we don't have any guideposts for in this society. And I'm kind of excited for your bunch of come out because I think people are going to eat it up. I hope, I mean, the hope here is that we normalize how hard relationships actually, actually, let me just say what I actually want to normalize.

Another colleague and mutual friend of ours, Jennifer and Brian Russell, they have a line that I think

is phenomenal where how they hold relationships is that it's not that we we always say relationships

are hard, but it's not that relationships are hard. It's that our personal work is hard and we get to do that inside of it. And I think that's such a beautiful way. So opportunity versus a burden. It's and so many of us won't actually be fortunate enough to find somebody who to do this work with. There are people who are looking all over and haven't felt so if you're fortunate enough to be in a relationship and to be in it with somebody who's willing to do the work with you, that's a gift,

even if it is a pain in the ass. It's also this deep gift. And so I really want to normalize that it's okay to be in the thick of it. That is part of relationship. It's not outside of it. It is part of what love is. So just getting kind of looped back it for a minute on this capacity piece because this

“seems like a core skill. Like if you want to be in relationship, it's like if you want to run a”

marathon, you have to actually train for it. You know, you know, this many miles every day and it's like there's all the ability to build the capacity to be able to do that. How do you build the capacity to be in the heat of a relationship and to do the work without causing more harm and actually

both of you progressing towards waking up and healing? So we talked about two critical pieces today.

One is building these, I call them kind of micro repairs, which is building a space where you're a fiber below where you're practicing this daily. You are literally like something comes up that just kind of stings and you consciously start to take a few breaths or notice what your body does or take yourself on a walk or do what you need to do to start to take care of yourself to be able to come back. You do those daily reps and it doesn't need to take long. But like if you do

those daily, you are in, I mean, that's huge. Five breaths, great. And another way to practice is perspective versus perception. So you're littered, your partner is talking to you. They're talking to you about their day. They're not even bringing something that, you know, you're not in a fight.

what would it be like to think about my boss that way?" I've never thought about my boss that way.

That's been, "What would it be like to think about my mom or my dad or my sibling that way?" I get along really well with my sibling, but if I were in their shoes, so you're literally practicing putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. If you practice just those two things, you are in really good shape. And then what I'd like to add on to that is once a week with your partner, set up a time where you two are literally practicing doing this work together, where one

person is the speaker or the her partner, and one person is the listener, and you're doing it outside of a level 10. You're bringing up something that's like once a week, like again, we're in the middle of the scale here or something that's around a five that's not nothing, but isn't your, this, you literally consider this practice, so that when the inevitable, big fights hit, you're not sitting there, being like, "I have no idea what to do, and now all

of your mechanisms take over." I imagine being like, if you do this consistently in a relationship over time, that the whole volume comes out and everything, and then you're capacity to do this much more, fluidly, easily, quickly without the level of activation, without the nervous system getting out of control without your mental hijacking your entire body and brain, that actually, even though these little maybe irritants or things won't go away, how you navigate them changes,

and it becomes almost kind of like just a very soft part of the relationship, not like this thing you're just fighting is every day. You will completely change if you take this on. This is if you take on building your expansion for capacity, you will be more confident, you'll be more self-assured, things will more easily roll off your back, and I don't mean roll off your back like you're rolling over, and you're like, "This is, that's not this because you're also

learning to set boundaries." You're also because you're building the capacity to be brave enough

to actually say something out loud that you would never say before because you're too scared of what

they're going to think, because you don't think you can handle them leaving or them, you're building all of this capacity. This, there is not to mean nothing more important. There's also something in

“here that you're, we haven't really explicitly named, I think it's so important, which is”

honesty in a relationship, because it's those small things that get buried, never get said, never get shared that eat away in a relationship. And even if they're a little bit sticky to deal with in the moment that ultimately that brings more clarity and connection by actually being honest. This is why you take one day a week to practice. So you're literally, you're like, it's like you're cleaning the dust off of a table every week, right? Once a week, you both go,

do it on different days. And it's a 10-minute conversation. You keep it short. You keep it time bound. So for my avoidance friends or my people who don't love to process as much, you still... They mean no name. They mean no name. They mean no name. That you can actually stay in your window of tolerance and you're not thinking this is going to go on forever. So if you create a structure where it's time bound, one person listens, one person's response, the only job

of excuse me, one person speaks, one person listens. The only job of the person who is speaking is to just name what hurt and try and own your side of the street. The only job for the listener is to get their world understand their perspective. And again, you could put any framework inside of this if you already use a framework. But it's not just listening and being silent. It's actually

“letting the other person know that you got them. Yes. And here's the thing, if we're practicing,”

sometimes we're starting at square one. Sometimes we're literally starting at, I can listen and I can repeat that your words and that's about all I can do. Yeah. Like that's some people we're just starting there. That's not bad. That's just lack of practice. Yeah. Some people are going to be able to repeat back your words and do it with some puts but, right? Like you can actually feel them and you're like, oh my god, I get where you're coming from. Some people it will sound like you're

we're irritating. It's going to be terrible. It's not like it's not going to be. But you're, this is a practice ground. This is literally a practice ground where the her partner says, hey,

here's what I'd like for you. I'd like for you to repeat back. I'd like for you to ask an open

question. I'd like for you to give me a hug after. I'd like for you to respond with one thing that makes sense to you. Right. So you can think about what you want and ask for it in a conversation. This is such a beautiful reframe of relations from the fantasy, love story. You live happily ever after. Disney land kind of romance to understanding relationships as a vehicle for growth and evolution of our souls and our emotional psychological state. Right.

And it not ultimately is going to get us happiness. This other thing just kind of hijacks us. And then we, it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.

“So we have this fantasy and that's why we're always struggling relationship. This is such a beautiful”

framework. I want to spend a couple of minutes now after we've sort of gone through the, this, this repair framework and there's a lot more to come in. Everybody can, we're going to talk about how to find more about it in a second. You, you also work in psychedelic assisted

Netflix or red microphones book understands that there's a lot of therapies out there that are

being used to help people deal with trauma one and one. But you're talking about relational psychedelic therapy, which is a very different understanding of how to use these compounds to help change dynamics. And Rick Doblin, who was a friend of both of ours and you work with said to me, "I wouldn't still be married if I didn't do MDMA therapy with 911." So can you kind of talk

“to us about what this promise is of this potential, what the limitations are? I think it's going”

to be probably soon approved by the FDA as a therapeutic modality for trauma and maybe for relational therapy, I don't know, but talk to us about the promise and the pitfalls. Yeah, so to clarify, I do MDMA assisted couples therapy research. And I do that in conjunction with Columbia University

and Maps. Right now, a lot of what's been researched is MDMA for PTSD and trauma. And what we're

looking at is what's happening in the underground, which is the practitioners who have been doing this for many, many years, some of whom have been doing it before it became illegal. What practices are they using and how can it actually benefit couples? So we're looking in the underground to give us some answers about what are best practices, what are protocols, what are how are people dosing, how are people using the therapy process within a couple's setting? The hope is that, I mean,

“listen, what we understand about MDMA and I do research with MDMA specifically. What we know about”

MDMA is that it takes away our, our, our MDELO's response, which to your point earlier is going to be the response that is putting us into fight flight freeze, et cetera, puts a lizard in a cage. That's great. Yes, especially for people with entrenched, really tough relational dynamics or trauma, if we can just get a little space from that, if we can just get our MDELO quiet and just a little, it helps us do everything that we talked about today. It helps us listen to the other person's

perspective, which puts an entirely new lens on what's happening relationally. It can change an entire dynamic. So what we see is because, because MDMA lowers the MDELO response and it's dumping all these feel good chemicals, the hope is that what we're starting to see is that couples can use this in a one to three time session and with the right integration that they can actually reset their relationship and then start to learn new patterns. For some of us, the work that I'm talking about today,

it's just, it's too entrenched. It's too hard. Our brains just cannot. And so for those people,

MDMA assist a couple of therapy when it's legal, like it will be an amazing resource. But again,

I want to say it's not a panesia and I have seen many people, I know so many stories about people who do it and then they go back to their patterns because they think that they do the the drug wants and all the sudden it's going to ever be. And I've just seen it over and over. But it's been in a way. It allows you to be in that dynamic conversation that we're talking about for repair in a way that's down-regulated. And it's sort of visilogically changes you so you can

actually be present and be curious and have an open heart and not shut down and not when you're action and not going to your fear. And that really helps with understanding and compassion and healing, knowing of it. And if you can do that in a couple of sessions and you start to bring to light, you sort of lift the baseline where now you can now you can see each other a little bit differently. You have a different understanding of the patterns that have been happening in your relationship

before. If you can do that and then you layer in practices, tools, integration, right? Then all of the sudden, like we're in a different place. And so there's a clinic out of San Diego called Annamory and they're working on a protocol right now with Rick around doing a pilot study to put couples through six to twelve couples through a protocol for this. So we'll start to understand a little bit more. I mean, we don't have a lot of couples research. The only person really researching

is Anne Wagner out of, there's a couple more. But she's done a lot of research, but right now, and she's out of Canada, but right now, a lot of the research is focused on PTSD, even in a diatic approach. One person has come in with PTSD or only one person, the PTSD partner is the one taking it. And so we haven't done this with quote unquote healthy normals, which what does that even mean? But with somebody who's who's undiagnosed, and that's the hope is that this can also

translate to people who don't have to have a diagnosis. Yeah, I hope you just want to enhance their dynamic and understanding of each other or improve their relationship. I mean, there's so many ways

“that this can be used. And I think, you know, I'm glad we're starting to have these tools because”

you know, historically we just had to, you know, white knock, white knock. We've been talking about breath, and I think it's hard to know your mind. It's hard. I mean, that's why I think

And when meditation is a simple practitioner, you sit there and you observe your thoughts and try to quiet your breath and quiet your mind, but inevitably thoughts come and go, and you realize, wait, they're just like clouds floating on the horizon, these are just the chatter that isn't some substantive. It's not real. And so we de-identify with our thoughts,

and that's a very powerful thing. I remember when I was 19, I did a 10-day meditation retreat,

and we meditated for like 12, 14 hours a day. And at the end of that, you know, I just realized, wow, you know, like, there's my whole inner world that I constructed that I thought was, you know, concrete and real, but it's just, it's just like clouds, and I don't have to attach to them. I don't believe them. My friend, Daniel Amin says, don't believe every stupid thought you have.

“That's okay. That's okay. And I think, you know, that's the power of this practice.”

So when we're talking about capacity, you know, that's a tool like meditation or other things that can be helpful, or even, like psychedelics and mirrored power. Absolutely. There are so many ways to build your capacity. Meditation is a great one. I mean, all what you're doing is, again,

putting more time in between stimulus and response, and you're practicing that out of a level

10 trigger outside of a level 10 trigger, which is so unrealistic for us to be able to do anything inside of them, do anything differently inside of. So I imagine people, you know, okay, this sounds great. I don't know how to do this. Help. The good news is you've created a web app that allows you to take people through a process. So to unpack what you've done, what you created, and what you've been available to people, because I think everybody's flailing around searching,

and we feel like an Instagram, it's like, all this relationship advice. It's like,

“and I don't know how much of it's could have passed. I mean, I tune in to your Instagram, which is”

Bavote, A-A-A-A-V-O-S-E. Yeah. So I've already checked that out for all of that, but in addition to that, she's got,

and by the way, she does these amazing little brilliant clips that are just like little

nuggets of gold that you can listen to in very short time, and I feel better afterwards, because I certainly do, and I know you're my close friend. I still, like, listen to them, like, wow, that was good. This person actually my friend, she's so cool. And then tell us about this platform that you created for the school. So it's called the Repair Lab, and the idea is I do, listen, I was getting so many DMs being like, help, what do I do? And I was like, I need to figure

out how to work with more people and my private practice is full. I need to figure out how to work with more people. And so I launched this membership program where you do, we do monthly Q&A, where you can literally write in, and I'll answer questions, and we'll go live, and we'll talk about it. And then it also has a platform that will have all this content about the foundations of repair, around practices, around boundaries, around forgiveness, around all these tools that we need to build,

to build our capacity to learn, repair, and then I've developed a repair AI app. So you can literally get on at any time, and you can, if you're in the middle of freaking out, you can be like, what do I do? And it can help you, and that's built off of my, you know, my work, a lot of other professionals work, and I'm just kind of combined into this repair app to help you, because what I found was that, you know, maybe you don't have therapy booked until next week, or, you know, and so in the

heat of the moment, it's really hard, you just need something to, so you can call it or text it, and it will help you get through. And, and it's a membership program, and we're launching it right now, so it's brand new. So it's exciting, because the people who are getting in on the ground floor, like, I'm getting feedback work, you know, that we're helping me build it, because I want to know how to build it with you. So you can just go to bayofoj.com, bayofoj.com, which is just bayofoj.com,

which is just bayofoj, and you can find it in sign up. And we'll put in the show notes and put the link, and, you know, your website has a beautiful quote in the front, which is, "We're taught how to fall

“love, but not how to stay there." And so if you want to stay there, check out bayofoj, check out her”

repair lab, check out her Instagram, and her new book, stay tuned, because that's coming out. It's going to be a blockbuster, I know it is, and hopefully she'll let me write the fart. I love you, thanks for being on the podcast, and I hope you all this thing got some useful information about how to stay in love, not just fall in love. What if the greatest threat your health wasn't bad choices, but bad design? In America, chronic disease isn't accidental.

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