How To Fight Well

You know, for most of my life, anytime that I would imagine an amazing relationship, the first thing that I'd think of, or the first image that would come to mind is like an elderly couple sitting in the park, sweetly holding hands, seemingly on the other side of whatever challenges life brought them. And just being there with each other. And as I started to have relationships of my own, they were typically anything but that, except for maybe in some of the early, early parts of the relationship where it's just like, oh wow, everything's going so perfectly because we're being exactly who we think the other one needs us to be, for as long as that will last.

Right, exactly. With a little help from some love chemicals thrown in the mix from the from that first 3 months of euphoria crushing us. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and also, you know, we, we start to recognize that there's, you know, some of the best sex we ever have is like after a good fight and like, what the hell is that about?

Yeah. Yeah.

And so, yeah, you just recently recorded some YouTube videos, a series basically about relationships and how to fight well. In relationships. And I'd love to go into that today.

Yeah, that would be fantastic. Yeah, that journey with the YouTube was quite a thing. You know, we decided to do this YouTube channel and so I did it the way that I normally do it is I research how do you do a YouTube channel? And I spoke to all these people and we were lucky enough to know some YouTubers who'd, you know, done a tremendous amount. And they all told us how to do it. And these are the ways to make the videos and here are your options and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and what I normally do is I just follow everybody's advice until we, we, we kind of nailed it enough to go, oh, this is what they meant. We're doing it. And, and then I usually say, oh, now what do I need to do to make this feel like it's really good for me? Not for anybody else. Not for like, what, what would I be really proud of? And that's when it dawned on me, uh, this summer in August, actually, it dawned on me what I would like to do is really do a teaching in a video that is not like a listicle, right? Usually YouTube, a teacher is like, hey, here are 3 things that are gonna make you more productive, you know? And, and I was like, what if we just talk about all the things and we take our time with it and we do like 5, 6 minutes on each of the things. And I think we did how to fight. We did. I know we did how to fight and there's 20, maybe 22 teachings of just about how to fight on that YouTube channel. And then it was really cool because once that was done, we said, oh, we could make a course out of this. Like, so anybody who's done the Connection Course could do this course about how to fight for free. As long as they had this tools of the Connection Course, we could just give it away and, and like, create exercises that flow into it. So anybody who's done the Connection Course could watch these videos and then have these exercises and they could do it as a couple. And we thought, wow, that's, it was such a neat thing when you find that expression that feels fully yours. And I don't know if YouTube is gonna like it at all, you know, like YouTube might hate this, but I, I, I was so proud of it watching it. I was like, this is, this is what I want to be doing. So that was, that was a really cool experience. Yeah.

Well, let's find out.

Yeah.

Endless perfection.

Let's find out. Yeah, exactly. Let's find out. Anyway, so yeah, so I totally diverged there. What was your question? You—

Yeah. So what made this something you wanted to talk about in the first place? What made, what made this the topic of this whole YouTube project, for example?

Yeah. Well, the thing that brought it top of mind to remember how important it was, was recently, it was right before Groundbreakers. We're doing this really intense thing, Tara and I, you know, it's, there's always some tension. And we had this fight in front of a couple of, of the co-facilitators. And Tara and I, we don't hide our fights. We're just going to have a fight. We're going to have it. And so we finished it and took about 5 minutes or something like that. We looked at them, said, hey, well, we're really sorry that you had to sit there through this with us or something. I don't know. Sure. We even apologize, but we said something to like, wow, that was, must've been intense or something. And they were like, that, that was a fight. What, what, what? And that brought it top of mind how important it is to, to learn how to fight really well, how to fight in such a way. And when I, yeah, when I say really well, what I mean is that you're fighting in such a way that every fight brings you closer and you're fighting in such a way that, that you feel stronger, better. Your personal growth has happened after your fights, that it's not something that is just a release of tension. It's not a sports game, right? Oftentimes people have tension. They go to a sports game, they yell, they scream, they feel better. And there's some benefit to that, but the, to do that in a fight can have a lot of destructive, uh, a lot of destructive consequences. And what's far better is to know that every time you fight, you get closer together. Every time you fight, you get closer to yourself. Every time you fight, you know how to be together in a way that's what is, is more loving. More yourself, more connected. And, and then the relationship itself becomes this growth opportunity, becomes a spiritual path, it becomes a self-development path or whatever you want to call it.

Yeah. Before we get into more of how to fight well, I'm curious, what is— how do you distinguish between fighting well where the relationship gets closer afterwards?

Yeah.

Or during the fight from something like recreational fighting or cycling in it, or fighting because we've learned that that's what love looks like. So if we're not fighting, there must be something wrong. How would you clarify that distinction for us?

Yeah, there's a lot of ways. If you are fighting over the same thing over and over again, then your fighting isn't healing, then you might fight over the same thing 3, 4, or 5 times as you're working it out. But every conversation is a little different. Every, every fight is— the fights aren't abusive is another one. You're not going to make progress if you're retraumatizing each other. So oftentimes, I'll give you a personal story about this. Tara and I, I remember we went to our therapist early on in the relationship and we were describing our fights and she's like, yeah, that's verbal abuse. And we're like, that's not verbal abuse. That's just what people do. We saw our parents do it. You know, like that, you just yell at each other like that. And she was like, no, that's verbal abuse. And we looked into it. We're like, oh fuck, we're verbally abusing each other. And there's a, you know, there's semantics with that and everything. But what the way I would take it now is that we were trying to control each other with our anger. So anytime that you're trying to control somebody with the threat of something, I would call that abusive. And so we were, we were abusive to each other. And so that's another way to just know. And abuse would look like, like things like taking anger out on one another without permission.

It would—

excuse me, anger would look, uh, things that would be done, things that are abusive would be things like yelling at each other without permission, getting angry at each other without permission, threatening, threatening divorce, threatening something in the future. It would look like, um, any kind of physical violence, obviously. Uh, it would look like any kind of, uh, the way I would say one way to think about it is if you've lost yourself in the fight, if you, if at the end of the fight, You're like, what happened? Or that's not how I want it to be. Or, and I don't mean right after the fight, I mean 2 days, 3 days after the fight. If you can't look back on that fight with pride, then you're cycling and you're, you're, you're retraumatizing. Because what's happening in the fight is typically when 2 people fight in a relationship and we go into this in other podcasts, I know you're both in your trauma, right? So if A human being fought in Fallujah and they're back in Ohio and, and a car backfires. They think they're in Fallujah again. If they have PTSD, if they're in their trauma, we think that we're kids again. We think that we're in old relationships again. We're not in that moment. And so we are wildly reactive to one another's statements. I was just talking to a a person and they were talking about how they have two marriages. And I think this, a lot of people would relate to this. One marriage is between them and one relationship is between their parents, except for their— so let's say them is John and Nancy. So one relationship is John and Nancy, and one relationship is the father of Nancy and the mother of John. And they've, they're literally seeing each other's mother. They're seeing their own mother and their wife and seeing their own father and the husband, they're just in their trauma. They're not even in the reality that they, they live in and they're reacting that way. And so if you've lost yourself like that, if you've lost yourself in your trauma, then you're not, you're not fighting in a productive way. Those are some of the easy ways to know.

Yeah. So it sounds, it sounds like some, on some level it is that you're actually here in the fight. You're not back there.

Correct.

In the trauma.

Correct.

There's some way that what is happening now is actually registering as a new experience with some neuroplasticity, some window of tolerance, whatever allows it to transform and allow one another to see each other more clearly, to see themselves more clearly.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be 100%. It can just be, oh, I'm in my trauma right now. Like, I can't be trusted in this fight right now. I'm in my trauma. I've said that dozens of times to Tara. She said it to me, oh, I'm in my trauma right now. And then the other one can say, oh, right, this isn't you. This isn't actually, how do I hold you? How do I love you? How do I, how do I be with you and your trauma so it doesn't retraumatize and you can actually see what's really going on? And so it doesn't have to be, oh my God, I'm starting to go into my trauma. I have to run away from this fight. That can be quite avoidant. Oftentimes the way that we heal in the fights is by actually going into our trauma with somebody loving us. And that, that's the opportunity in almost every major fight and almost every major fight. One of the biggest opportunities that you can have is, is somebody there loving you and your trauma, someone there giving you what you couldn't get when you, when you first received that trauma. That's the opportunity. That's why so much fucking growth is possible.

Yeah. So you pointed to the possible avoidant way of saying, I'm in my trauma right now. And you know, this is, this can be a common pattern of when there's a difficult conversation to be had, I am just going to state that I'm in my trauma and avoid it. And, and there's different ways we can avoid. We can also avoid with, when you said X, I felt blank. And I made a story that whatever, in such a way that is actually taking me away from my emotional experience rather than like inviting, inviting the exploration of it. Yeah. Uh, there's lots of formulaic tricks and tools for relationships that can be helpful and can also be defensive. Yeah.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen like what I call the new age fight. Do you know what the new age fight, right? It's they, they've learned some, even it could be view, it could be. Any nonviolent communication, it could be anything. And they've, they're fighting using it such as nonviolent communication, where it's really important to state your needs. Somebody might be saying something like, I really need you to stop right now. It's like, that's, that's not nonviolent communication. So you can take any series of, of protocol and you can turn it into ways of fighting. That are not productive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how, how would I, I think there seems to be kind of a, a journey that people follow through in their development where maybe they're fighting unconsciously, they're not aware of the way that fighting can lead to growth, or they're, they're, they're just in the trauma. And then there's a stage where they're like, oh, there's actually, there are practices, there are tools, there are frameworks, there are there are ways that we can relate to each other that lead to deeper connection. And that may even be a fight that leads us to deeper connection, not the only thing that leads us to deeper connection.

Right.

Yeah. And then sometimes in that process, people can get kind of stuck in sort of like a cycle of forever processing.

Yeah.

Where sometimes they feel like any time they're interacting with a partner, they need to basically point out the most uncomfortable thing they can notice in the relationship at any time. And then that ends up leading to focusing on little tiny things.

Yeah.

Yeah. That make the relationship feel like discord all the time.

Yeah.

But somehow it feels like processing because we're talking about it all the time. We're stating our feelings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're, it's like you're looking at my photo album. I don't know if you mean that. That's like you're describing the history of, of the way we fought.

So how did, how did you and Tara move through that? How did, how did that, if I were just, if I were just describing the first part of an arc, what is the rest of the arc of a relationship that learns to fight well and transforms through it?

Yeah. So they can start a little differently. Some people start the arc with, we don't fight at all. And, and we're happy. Look, we're happy. And it's very Stepford Wives. Is that what that, you know, that very fake plastic watering plant kind of world. And so there's, and then some can start with like violent, mean, abusive fights. So if we start with the mean abusive fights, it's usually, it starts that way. And then there's some tools that they learn and they kind of start working a little bit. But they really want to get that fight out. And, and the reason that that's happening is because they're not really addressing the underlying trauma. They haven't really seen what it's like to heal. They might have felt a resolution once or twice, but they haven't really felt what it means to feel. So they're using the tools, but they're starting to co-opt the tools. And then there's this constant processing, as you talked about, and that one usually involves trying to be each other's therapist. And you're still trying to fix one another. And one of the main things that you learn in fighting well is that you can only fix yourself. You can put zero attention on fixing the other person. You can put zero attention on their health, their wellbeing, their— how do they, how did they get better unless they ask you. You focus fully on yourself. And that's a really important part of fighting is that full focusing on yourself. And then, and then you start to have these moments where you can see through the fight and show up in a loving way, which is the best way to be the therapist is being a non-therapist is just being loving and to be there loving with them. And that's when you start to realize that the that you're dealing with trauma, that you're dealing with old patterns and conditionings, and that your relationship is this opportunity to see through them and to heal those. And then it's game on. I can't fucking wait to fight. I can't wait to have a fight because every one is this way of, of, of opening and becoming more of ourselves. And it requires each person to learn how to fall into non-defensiveness quickly. How do I go from defensive to non-defensive really quickly? And when you've done it 2, 3, 4, 5 times, it's really easy because it's so fucking cool. It's so good when you can move from, no, that's not, yeah, yeah, you're right. I see that. I see, or you're right. I see how you can see that. I see how that reality is true for you and, and mine is true for me. And I'm not saying yours is wrong or mine is right. So that's, that's the trend. Yeah. That's the trend line.

Yeah. How about the people who don't fight?

Yeah. Well, unfortunately the most common trend line there is don't fight, don't fight, don't fight, don't fight, divorce. Don't fight, don't fight. I don't know what happened. I thought we were totally happy and she just walked out. Uh, is a lot. You hear that story a lot. Um, but if it's, if it's going into healing, it just has the first step of we don't fight. And then, then the fights are, we're having the fights, but we're not fighting about the real thing. We're fighting about the dishes or the coffee machine, and we're not saying our full truth. And so this is a really critical part is You have to say your full truth in a relationship. You do it with an open heart. You do it with kindness. This isn't, I've got to tell you my truth so I get to be right to be a complete asshole to you. It's not that. It's undefended, open heart, full truth. Even if it brings a fight, because those are the fights that heal. The one, the part of yourself that you're holding back from the relationship is a part of yourself that needs to be healed. In the relationship. And so, so that's the next step. So they do these small fights, they're squirmishes, and they're, they're, but they aren't about the real thing. And then they start to learn how to speak their truth. They speak their truth. Some of those fights might get a little wild, but that usually doesn't last long for folks like that. And then they go into the, oh, I can heal it. Maybe they'll learn some skills. Maybe they'll do the same thing where the skills are weaponized as the other group. And then eventually they'll see that the trauma is healable. And then once you feel that, once you see that 3 or 4 times, you're addicted. It's just, it's the best thing ever.

Yeah. We've talked a little bit about how a lot of relational skills can be weaponized. Uh, I'm also curious how, like, how could, how could being a loving presence itself be weaponized or be a defense. And I ask this because I've had experiences in fights where I'm like, okay, I'm going to be a loving presence and my partner will be like angry or express something and I'll just be like, yeah, I'm here with you in it. But there's some way that I'm actually not. There's some way that I'm actually like in that place, I'm sort of a vacuous, amorphous non-entity not meeting the person with my, with my feelings, with my truth. And I'm just, I'm here to hold space. And it can be like the most frustrating thing. It can be maddening to be in a relationship with somebody and really be showing up vulnerably, which is what anger really can be, and feel unmet in it when someone says, yeah, I'm just here and I'm loving you. And there's a difference between when that actually is real. It seems like there's like a difference between when someone's like, I'm going to practice being a loving presence and my muscles are all tense and I'm holding them really tightly and I'm not feeling what I'm feeling right now. And I'm smiling versus like fully allowing the heartbreak.

That's beautiful. Beautifully said. I think you answered the question. The nuance is it can get a little confusing because there is a natural response to loving presences to bite it, to get like, to test it. Are you really gonna fucking love me? Fuck you. You're not gonna fucking love me. Fuck you. Like, they say something different, but that's really what's happening. They're poking and testing to see if that love's real, if they're really gonna be loved.

And so sometimes you're just gonna be just like before, just like the others, just like— exactly, Mom and Dad.

Exactly. So there's sometimes where you show up in that loving presence And exactly what does exactly what's supposed to do, it brings all that shit to the surface to be loved, which is the trauma because they're in their trauma and they're like, oh, there's love, I can, I'm safe enough to go into my trauma and be loved here. And I, and I'm testing it. Both of those things can be true. And so if you're a person who disassociates normally, you can be pretty convinced, wait, I'm not loving them right. So the first thing I would say is if you're in loving presence, it's you to decide if you're in loving presence or if it's, it's not them to decide it. It's, you know, do you feel like you're in your body or not? And that's the difference. Are you in your body or have you left your body? Are you fully in your head saying, I'm loving presence? Are you tranced out? And then you're being present in a way, but not embodied. And so it's a very love— to love somebody is a very embodied thing. It's literally to feel. We've all had that moment with our Maybe not all of us, but many of us have had that moment with our wife or our husband or our boyfriend and girlfriend where you look across the table and you're just like, oh, whoa, just fucking love you. That's how it feels. That's how it feels when they're raging. That's how it's like, it is an embodied feeling. It is, it is a pleasurable feeling that's happening and you can't force yourself into it. What you can do is go into your trauma, respect each other, learn how to fight. And then some trust builds. Something happens where you realize, oh, this is trauma. This isn't us. This isn't personal. This is just weeding a garden and I can enjoy weeding a garden or I can fucking hate it. It's my choice. And then, then some, once it's, it's a blessing. It's, uh, Blessing's a weird word cuz it has a, a connotation of, of religion, but it's a gift. It's a gift when that happens. It's not something you can particularly control. You can just set the conditions for it. You can just tend your soil.

Yeah. And speaking to that gift, you were talking about how when, when you are deeply loving the other person, it is natural that more of their trauma will come up. To test it, to see if that love is real. And so there's a way that this can happen where you get deeper into a relationship and you find more and more love for one another, and it seems like things are getting worse on some level. You know, like, "You used to see me as like, I couldn't do anything wrong and you loved all of my quirks, and now you see me as this like, as your avoidant dad, or you see me as something to fix, like some problem, like I'm just a project, or all like— and so there's a way that that can be registered intellectually, or even emotionally, as the relationship is getting worse, something's falling apart, when in reality, something that can be happening is you're going from talking about the dishes, from fighting about the dishes, to fighting about what's actually real in your relationship, to actually surfacing the fight that never got to be had in your early life, and finally, like, finding a place, a relationship where that can be seen and actually loved in the way that it needs to be loved, not in a prescribed way, but in in an emergent way that shows up in the relationship.

Exactly. I can't tell you how many times the following has happened. I'm working with a couple, or I, I, I know more than one person in a couple, and they tell me something that happened in the relationship and they're so distraught. And I'm like, oh good. I cannot tell you because I see the progress that they're making, even though it feels like shit in that moment. It's it's very much as if somebody is running a long marathon race and they're saying, I am tired. It's like, yeah, that's what happens when you're running a marathon race. That's a good, that's good. That means you're on mile 24. You know, that it means you're, you're making progress. You're there. Um, and so it's very, it's a very similar thing that there's a, there are certain things that are challenging in the fighting that are progress and you can't see it until afterwards. I was just saying this to Tara the other day. We had— I don't know, I can't remember, 7, 8 years ago now— we had a really bad moment in our relationship and we had had these really amazingly healing fights for years. We— years. Like, I thought it was all behind us. I hardly had a memory of our, like, vicious fights. And all of a sudden they came back with, with like vengeance for the 6-month period. And I was like, what the— and we both for years, uh, wish that hadn't happened. Not quite that. It's not, I wish that hadn't happened, but it was that, that thing, that incident happened. We could have handled it differently, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and I was saying to her, just, I think it was just last night, I was like, it was just last night, and I said, you know, I think that, that series of fights is what destroyed my narcissism. And it wasn't, I mean, there's no narcissism that isn't all completely destroyed ever, but the, there was a way in which I was subtly holding myself above Tara. And it was that set of fights that destroyed that. My brain can't conceive comparing myself to Tara anymore. And, and, and I, like, as I'm talking about it, I literally just— you can see I'm— I, like, I well up. That was, like, such a fucking huge gift for me to feel to have that fucking thing gone. That was so painful to hold myself slightly above in, in even a fucking subtle way. And it was a horrendous set of fights, and I would not give it up for any— the, the amount of peace and love that it brings to my heart on a daily basis today. And I thought at the time, I was like, fuck, maybe our marriage is over. Maybe I, I fucking don't know shit about what I'm talking about. Maybe like I, I questioned everything during that. And, but we just kept doing what we do as far as being there for each other. And it was in that moment, I remember in those fights, there came a place where I, I learned to just, or we learned how to just sit there in loving attention with each other. Just in the face of absolute bullshit from one another. Yeah, I got, I gotcha. I'm right here. I gotcha.

Yeah. When you said it made me question everything.

Yeah.

I, a memory comes to mind of in my relationship with Alexa, which we've been together now around 5 or so years and a half or something, not nearly as long as you and Tara. But a couple of years ago, we had a kind of a similar, similar thing where we were just having this, this series of really big fights. And, you know, I had been trying to do basically what I talked about earlier as I'm in loving awareness, I'm here for your anger, but I wasn't really showing up until eventually something switched. And I got like right back in her face with my anger. And it was like, It was measured. It wasn't at her. It was actually just like being in my anger and she felt met in it and it, a whole lot changed in the relationship. But what required me to get, what was required for me to get to that point was that I was forced into actually questioning everything, questioning all the assumptions, which it's like a gift for something to bring you into a place where you actually question all of the assumptions, just the way that You know, in extreme sports, we've considered being close to death a gift because it makes you close to your mortality and that helps you refine your values and what's important to you. There's something about the being near the death of a relationship that really crystallizes and clarifies. And in that moment, I also, you know, I, I got it wrong. I was, I like went off the handle and I screamed. At her, and not to manipulate her or change anything, but just as an expression of— like, I think I said something like, "I am actually here. I am here." And it wasn't until I actually let myself express that instead of being like, "I'm here. I'm here for you," that she actually felt it. And it's kind of tricky to talk about because I don't want people to hear that and be like, "Oh yeah, let me just go yell at my partner now." And that'll be healing because there was so much more context to it. And even in the moment, I would, it wasn't exactly how I want it to be.

Right. Yeah. It's an interesting thing that we talk about in VIEW. We talk about how we talk about open-ended questions and things that help you get to VIEW, but VIEW is something that can happen. And even when you're yelling and it sounds like that's kind of what happened, you were, you were so frustrated there. There's your whole, body, but the unconditional love that is view showed up with the anger. And it's, it's not— I've seen that. It's rare, but I've seen it. I've seen that moment of so clear, it's so boundaried, it's so— yeah.

And she had the capacity for it in that moment.

She had the capacity for it in that moment.

Because it could have gone very differently had she not. Which brings me to another question.

Potentially, potentially. Potentially. Her capacity to be there for it was greatly enhanced by the actual state you were in, which was like, I fucking love you. You know, like you said, I am here, but you were saying, I fucking love you. I can, I can feel, I can say with the way you talk about it, I can feel that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, so I am curious to talk about kind of the window of tolerance, like when, when you're having a fight, how, how would you How would you talk about how people can track or pay attention to the capacity that they're available for, the capacity their partner might be available for, recognizing when we've gotten out of that tolerance, whether seeing it in a partner in subtle trauma that we're not noticing, or in ourselves? You spoke earlier to you and Tara saying, "Oh, I'm in my trauma right now." And that sounds like kind of a later stages of a long-term practice that probably went through a lot of different iterations.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

You're putting me in my trauma right now. It was probably the first stage of that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, it's a great question. The, the main thing is you're responsible for your own window of tolerance. You can't be responsible for the other person's. You just can't. And the other thing to really know is that it's projection. If you're thinking to yourself, they're not in their window of tolerance, then best thing to do is say, I'm not in my window of tolerance, because most likely you're projecting it. Um, and if you're holding somebody responsible, you didn't see that I had my window, if I was outside of my window of intel— you know, then sorry, if you can't— you didn't see that I was outside of my window of— that's absolutely bullshit. It's not, not your job. And at the same time, it doesn't really matter if it's yours or theirs. If you feel like they're outside of their window of tolerance, then just say it. Just say, I don't want to fight like this. And that was a big one for us. It's just, I just don't want to fight like this. The other thing to really know, and I want, I think I want to define what we mean by window of tolerance here. Window of tolerance means that the nervous system, they're in their trauma so bad that they can't see outside of it is one way to say it. The other way say it is their nervous system is so amped up that they've lost themselves is another way to say it. And so, or yourself. So the other thing is it's all about their window of tolerance. Like you always respect their window of tolerance, whatever they claim it to be, even if it's avoidant, it doesn't fucking matter. You, you, you, you do it. So I remember early, early, early on in our relationship. I felt the same thing that Alexa felt, which was, I'm angry. Why don't you meet me in my anger? This is, this is my form of vulnerability. Why are you running from me when I'm like this? And, and the more that she ran, the more I felt abandoned, the angrier I got. And so there was this whole thing that was happening. It was very, very common dynamic in relationships. And So, and she would say, okay, if you treat me like this, I'm going to go, or I can't handle this, I'm leaving. And I thought that it was about me. And what it was really about was she needed to know she could leave. She needed to know that she didn't have to put up with it. And as she stopped putting up with it, as she saw that she could leave, It wasn't about me telling her what was right or wrong for her. Then she could more and more show up for my anger and show up as herself. So if they have it, you just give them the time that the, the most important thing, however, is that if you are leaving because your window of tolerance isn't good, then it's really important to say when you're going to be back, how to re-engage. Because if you don't give that to the person, then it's abandonment and there you're just going to push them deeper into their trauma typically. So it's really important to just be able to say, I am going to go now to take care of myself and I will be back and this is how I will be back, or this is when I'll be back, or these are the conditions under which I will be back. But some way that they know I'm not leaving you permanently, because when you're in your trauma, when someone says I'm out, it's forever. It's just how it works. So those are the important pieces.

Yeah, and again, as you just said, being able to know you can leave. Yeah. Like being able to question the assumption that you're stuck, that, oh, we have kids together, we have house together, we have, we'll never find another love that is like this ever. These beliefs can really constrain the space and make us feel trapped. And then we fight like caged animals rather than fight like—

that's right. Yeah. That's a, that's a really great point is I say this a lot. It's really hard to love something that you think is oppressing you. So the other way I say this, the same thing slightly differently is there is no unconditional love without empowerment. There is no real empowerment without unconditional love. There you have to know that you are empowered to leave to be able to love. You have to know that you're not trapped, or you, beautifully said, fight like a caged animal. And that, that, that is not fucking pretty in a marriage.

Okay, so a little earlier you, you said that nobody's right and nobody's wrong.

Yeah.

And I can just hear the collective hair bristling in maybe two-thirds of the audience right now.

Yeah.

So what do you have to say?

The easy version of that, which is a little, I think maybe more of how I was saying it, and then I'll go into the hard version of it, which is what you just said, is that you see that their perspective is, there's truth to that perspective. So You and I both look at the Bay Bridge and you're in, um, the Salesforce Tower looking down on it and I'm underneath it looking up and I take a picture and you take a picture and then we argue over, is this the Bay Bridge or is this the Bay Bridge? No, this is the Bay Bridge, but they're just different perspectives and they're both true. And so the, the main piece there is to See that there, that's a perspective and there's truth to the perspective. And so there's no right or wrong. There's no, there's no, this isn't the Bay Bridge. This is the Bay Bridge. There's really learning. And, and, and that's really important because what we really want is to be seen in a fight. What we're really looking for is to be seen.

But Joe, they really hurt me.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

I'm traumatized now.

Exactly. And so it's very much about that. It's very much about feeling that deep, feeling seen. And the way to do that is to realize that there's truth in every perspective. It doesn't mean that you have to act a certain way because of their perspective. And that's where I think people get confused. They, you really need a perspective to be wrong if you think that you have to act a certain way because of it. Oh, this is the Bay Bridge. Then I'm going to have to swim because there's nowhere for me to drive a car. But if this is a Bay Bridge, then I'm going to have to fly to get to it. So that's a critical piece, but the harder version is literally there's no right and wrong. And so this is about a contextual awareness as well as something else. So the contextual awareness part of it goes something to this effect. Water boils at whatever, 100 degrees Celsius, whatever. I think it's 100 degrees Celsius. Yeah, depends on the altitude, so it doesn't actually boil. Okay, but at sea level, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. On what planet? At sea level 10,000 years ago? At sea level today? Because there are different sea levels. So there's always context to whatever truth— there's no truth without that context as, as far as a human's perspective goes. And so there's definitely things that are gonna create more pain for us, ideas that'll create more pain for us or less pain for us. And there's more valuable ideas. And, and in math, there's clearly, this is an answer that's gonna build a stable bridge, and this is gonna be an answer that Right. But the, as far as the human condition goes, as far as psychologically, right and wrong is something that we do to create separation and create judgment. And so, and thinking that you're right, thinking that somebody else is wrong, thinking better or worse, all of those things are incredibly painful, not just for you, but for the other person. And so oftentimes, it was something that I see in a relationship which I, I was caught in and fascinated. Oftentimes there's an emotional person in the relationship and there's a logical person in the relationship. This is a really common dynamic, and it's a really common dynamic in like every single kind of couple that I know, you know, lesbian couples, gay couples. Queer couples, straight couples, like, I just see this. It's not all relationships, but it's many relationships. It's this very common thing. And typically they have this agreement, especially when they are early in their fighting, where the logical one is right and smarter, and they know somehow they know more, and the emotional one is more likely to be wrong. And what's actually happening there is that there's an empathetic response going on. So that the one who's more emotional is more empathetic. And so they're feeling, oh, they're right. They feel right. You know, and it's not really ever about the logic at all. And, and there's usually a, a better and a worse feeling, the conviction.

And then, you know, exactly. There's conviction here. We must, this must be the truth.

Exactly. And, and the person who's logical isn't feeling their emotions. So they're repressing their emotions through judgment. Of you're wrong or I'm better. So there's all like, it just feeds in perfectly to one another. And this is a, uh, something in a relationship that really seen through totally will change the dynamic. And you can't make the other person see through it. You can only see through it yourself. You can only say, oh wait, no, I'm not going to buy the story that I'm wrong. I'm not going to buy the story that I'm right or I'm better than. I'm not going to buy this story that I'm somehow more advanced or something like that. I guarantee you, I can say this with absolute certainty. If you've been with a person for more than a year, you are equally advanced. There's, you are on wonderfully equal ground. Your trauma is so fucking well-matched. It's unbelievable. Your lessons to be learned are so equivalent. You are an algebraic equation that has an equal sign between the two, two parts of it. That's, it's just, it's always that case. And it's funny, even today, Tara and I will be talking about a couple that we're working with, or we'll see it like couples that are friends and we really want to side with one of them. We really want to say that, that, that person's more calm. So they clearly understand that it's always the case that if you look long enough, you're like, nope. Perfectly fucking matched. It's a perfect match.

And going back to, you know, the fight that you described with Tara, where afterwards you were like, oh, that actually like destroyed a whole bunch of the ways that I thought I was better. Similar in my case, where like after that one fight with Alexa, I realized that, oh, I actually had been thinking that I was more calm and therefore better. Better regulated, better something. And it was such a relief for that to fall away for both of us. And so I want to go back to the truth piece because it's an interesting way how in English we have the same word that can mean a lot of different things. So when you say a story is true, that's a philosophical statement. And when you say there's truth to any perspective, It's more of like a contextual statement. Like you said, it matters— the context is what matters. So because we're still using the word true in each of those phrases, it might seem like both are actually about what is true, when seeing the truth in a perspective is actually really about being curious about the context. It's less about finding that the story is true and more about where is my partner coming from. What is their context? How is it that they see it the way that they see it? And what can that illuminate from my own perspective to broaden it, expand it? And also, what emotions would I have to feel to consider that perspective? What emotions am I avoiding by collapsing that perspective into right or wrong?

Yeah, I think that's the most important thing. We could argue over the semantics of truth, but what you just said is absolutely the most important thing, which is what do I have to feel if I can't collapse my partner into wrong or right? Yeah. That's a, that's, that's the, that's, that's the profound bit. As far as the truth part of it, I like thinking about it as in there's truth to every perspective. Like there is a truth in the picture of the Bay Bridge from the bottom or the picture of the Bay Bridge from the top. Both are true. They're just true from a point of view.

Yeah. So their, their truth speaks to the perspective it's taken from.

And both of them are incomplete. I think it's just as important of a realization, but to realize your perspective is absolutely incomplete, or I would say wrong. If you like need to put a fine point on it, there's something that I absolutely am not seeing. There's something I am missing. And that's, that's really important to see as well, because that makes a fight really, really simple. Oh yeah, there's something I'm not missing. There's some way I'm wrong. Guarantee. I guarantee that like I can only look at this thing from this angle and therefore there's an angle I'm missing. There's something I am missing there. There's some way in which I don't get it.

Yeah.

Not, and that one's a little fine too because it's, not wrong like I'm bad wrong, it's just like, yeah, I'm not right.

So one more thing I want to cover before, before we go.

Yeah.

You know, it's, it's been said that the, the sign of a dead relationship is apathy. So we were talking about how, you know, some couples they don't fight, they start out by not fighting. Some couples they start out with these big raging fights and maybe they progress through a transformation into deeper connection. Through the conflict. And, you know, we also have relationships that are— there's just a whole lot of passive aggression, and then passive aggression slowly turns into apathy. And I'm curious, if you find yourself in such a relationship where it's getting to the point of apathy, how would you recommend— what would you have to say to someone who wants to try to bring it back from the brink, or if there just seems to be no fight available because the, the fucks have all been given.

So I find that the, the true sign of a dead relationship is disdain. When one person feels disdain for the other person, that seems to— and the apathy is part of it, right? They say It's almost like apathy. It's not apathy like I don't really give a shit. It's apathy like you're gross and not worth dealing with. Like, it's like a little, there's some, there's an underlying anger to it. That's not no longer wishes, wishing to be felt. I think the, so the, and the, if I recall the, the, the the studies on this, if a couple's still willing to fight, it means that it's not lost. But if the couple's, you know, in these tests, it's like once they have said, I'm not going to fight anymore, somewhat apathetic response, then that's when the relationship is pretty much gone. And what I would say, there's 3 things I would say to answer that question. The first one is speak your truth. With an open heart. You want to save a marriage, speak your truth with an open heart. Speak your truth with kindness. Say what's true for you. Um, the second thing I'd say is listen to them with view. Let, let all of it be heard. Let connect, move to connection and, and, and see them fully without, without, without taking it personally. Yeah. Just, just Yeah, I'm going to repeat it. Yeah. And to see them as they are without needing them to change without any kind of management of them. So again, it's a view. It's, it's having them feel seen and not taking it personally. So yeah, I see that you disdain me right now and you wouldn't put the words in your mouth, but just, oh, I see you right now. I see you're really frustrated with me right now. I see that you want to give up on the marriage and I get why that would be the case. Let's talk about it. So it's really allowing their truth to come out and having a really safe space for it. And it's really about speaking your truth in a way that makes it as safe as possible to be heard. If the person you're with doesn't want to work on the relationship, then grieve. Then you're not— nothing's going to happen. You can't chase somebody into loving you. It doesn't work that way. So usually the person who would ask that question, the reason I say it is usually the person who would ask that question is the person who chases the love. And, and so you can't, you can't chase somebody into loving you. You can stop being reactive, but if they've given up, that's, that's their business. You can't, you can respect them. Enough to just let them have that moment. I had a phone call just yesterday from a person who's running a business with two co-founders, and at some point she was talking about how ways she could fight, ways that she could leave, all these things. And I just said to her, do your partners want to work on it? And she was, nope. I'm like, okay, so What does that tell you? And she was like, yeah, it means that like we have to not work together. Like just that quickly. And so that's, that's, that's what I would say to folks who ask that question.

Awesome.

Cool.

We talked about the, the YouTube videos that you just filmed on this topic. Where can people go to find those?

Yeah, so you can go to the YouTube channel, Joe Hudson YouTube channel, and then you can go to our playlist. We'll have a playlist. We'll be releasing one every once in a while. Once they're all released, uh, we will have, uh, available exercises to go with them. And anybody who's done Connection Course can have those exercises for free. And I really highly recommend that you watch them in order, uh, because they're designed to be that way. Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thank you, Joe. And thank you everyone for listening. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you, man. What a great conversation. Appreciate you.

Yeah. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please share it with a friend and remember to follow us and rate us in your podcast app. The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Monique Kelly is our production coordinator. This episode was edited by On Replay.