The Skill No One Teaches Us About Love | Baya Voce & Dr. Mark Hyman

We're taught how to fall in love but not how to stay there.

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

We have this fantasy world and there's a reality world and they don't match up, and so we end up being disappointed, disillusioned, discouraged, frustrated, and actually don't know how to navigate through the landscape of relationship to have a fulfilling, 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. Conflict in relationships is healthy. The problem gets to be where if we're going into hyperarousal or hypoarousal, 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.

Baya Voce is a relationship repair expert with a master's degree from Columbia University whose work helping couples reconnect after conflict and disconnection has reached millions, including through her widely viewed TEDx talk on loneliness.

Repair is actually not first and foremost a communication skill. Repair is a capacity skill.

Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. But before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button. Whether you're watching here on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, it truly means the world to me, and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus, I don't want you to miss a thing, so thanks Thanks so much for being part of this community, and I'm glad you're here. Baya, wow, you're here. Welcome to the podcast.

I'm so, so excited.

So for those listening, Baya is one of my closest friends. We're going to get deep and personal about life and love and what goes right and what goes wrong and what to do about it, because we both have had a storied history of relationships, and hence we're relationship experts. That's what I say. I've been married 4 times, so I'm a relationship expert.

I mean, I, I always talk about, I did not get into the line of work of repair because it came to me easily. I have fought tooth and nail. I still fight tooth and nail to figure out how we do this. And I think it's one of the most important parts of relationships that frankly gets kind of like blown over by a lot of teachers. Yeah. It's like it becomes this one part in a 4-part process and for me looked way easier on the outside. And then when I practice it in my relationships, I was like, why does this feel so much harder than the teachers say this?

Yeah. Like Relationships 101. That was a good course. I learned how to do it. I learned how to do the math. Uh, it doesn't quite work like that. Wish I wish, you know, as you're talking, it's something occurred to me and we haven't really talked about this. So I'm just going to 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 arranged or it was just sort of structural, but it wasn't like we had to 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 21st 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, arranged marriages to your point. 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 Perel 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 to provide.

And our playmate and our best friend and our—

The whole thing. And, 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 2-day shipping? I'm used to, you know, I'm used to this coming like to my door in 12 hours. We have online virtually this experience that's handing us algorithmically exactly what we wanna be fed. I can literally think of a brand. It does. I don't even have to say it out loud and it shows up on my feed somehow magically the next day. And then we expect our relationships to map onto that. So we have this frictionless experience that we are, that by the way, is becoming more and more frictionless. Our expectations are now higher than ever. And now the, 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 work and never give up and lose ourselves, or we go into the, we go swipe. We're like, great, this is too hard. I'm out because I have endless options.

Or we go numb.

Or 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, I mean, dating, like, come on. The options are endless. So you go on a first, second, third date and you're like, mm, this thing, we don't really get along here. I bet I could find somebody who I could get along with.

It kind of reminds me when I, when I was, uh, with my daughter, she was about 9 years old and Rachel, she's, uh, non-orthopedic surgery resident. 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. We have this fantasy world and there's a reality world and they don't match up. And so we end up being disappointed, disillusioned, discouraged, frustrated, and actually don't know how to navigate through the landscape of 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. I, okay. So I, 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 in your, from your caregivers or parents that you look at and you want to emulate? And like pretty much 2 to 5 people raise their hand.

Yeah. Out of 5,000.

Literally like so few people are sitting there. Some people think they did. Because they, because they didn't see their caregivers fight. And so they, 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. Then we've grown up on a diet of Hollywood rom-coms and social media and Disney. And so you see kind of hashtag couple goals online and you see a family of 6 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 barely functioning and it just doesn't map onto your internal experience. So this idea, while it sounds kind of silly and trite of Prince Charming and princess, it's, this is, this is ingrained inside our 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, you know, 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 in my life. And there's a few couples that I know that I'm like, wow, that's a great couple. Or I love how they relate, but I certainly didn't have that growing up and I didn't know how to navigate love. And I think, you know, 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 isn't necessarily about avoiding conflict. It's about learning how to repair and reconnect, right? And just repair that disconnection that happens as a natural part of two people being in a relationship. Can 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 the title of your new book, I think, which is coming 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 in sometimes violent ways. There's often contempt, there's judgment, there's criticism, there's blame, there's shame, there's all these ways of fighting that are kind of dirty fighting.

And what you talk about is a different way of engaging with conflict that's actually a positive Here's, here's the thing that I think most of us get wrong about relationships, which is that the goal is to fight less. That if we fight constantly, that something is wrong. And if we never fight, that something is like, that, that, that means we're, 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. Like 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, just people who are just 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 5 stages and So I'm just gonna 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 I's sort of, or, or more I's disappear and you start to merge. You're like, this feels so good. I finally, 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, and so we enter into this second phase of relationship, which is what I might call the power struggle. So research has shown that the power struggle is basically where 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 a 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 decided not to look at looks a little more like a red flag, and you start to have tension. This can show up in a lot of different ways. I think about like, this is 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, and the other person like, and, and, or someone likes background noise on all the time. Like they're listening to the podcasts and the audiobooks and the 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 gnaw 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, gimme a break. I just got home from a long day. Like, let me just have one night, 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 talk about— buy headphones, have a room in the house that's dedicated to being quiet or have times that you're listening. Like now you, now you can problem solve, but like that's, you know, 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 gonna have kids or not? Where are we gonna live? What does our social fabric look like? What kind of place do we wanna live in? I mean, these are things that, that Gottman's research shows 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, not 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? I honestly have no idea. But to me, this is, 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, in our relationships that we never quite get over. I'll just actually speak personally here. My wife, Emmy, and 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. And that we were in COVID, it was fine. Like it, but 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 wife, Emmy, who is the total, and she is like 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 a 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 relationships ago, I was in, I was engaged to a man and he, he broke off our engagement out of nowhere. Like it, it, I was completely blind. Maybe I should have seen it 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 he had. I mean, like massive lies. And so before that, there was like a before Baya and an after, or before that relationship and an after that relationship version of Baya. 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 like, around every corner, I started to be like, wait a second, what don't I see? What am I missing? How? Because I was, I was in this industry, I was a professional. How did I miss it? And so I was like, what did, 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 2 relationships later when I meet Emmy. Emmy wants to go out. She's done nothing wrong. And her staying out kicks up this, this piece of me that just had not been healed from this last relationship. 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 does 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 early. Can we just, 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 of a sudden I was gonna turn around and she was gonna say, hey, just have something to tell you. And I would be like, how did I miss it? What did I miss? Right?

Well, you couldn't trust her.

Yeah, but it wasn't necessarily about her. And the truth is with 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, cause 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 kid selves having the fights, not our grown-up adult higher self, right?

100%.

And those are very hardwired 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 gonna go quiet. Some people are gonna wanna process more. Some people are gonna 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 5-year-old version that shows up. And the truth is. As long as we come back together, we're, 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. It's, but it's not just nervous system reg— of course we have to have nervous system regulation, but it's also nervous system expansion, capacity, capacity where your window of tolerance, if you have a window of tolerance and you're, you generally go into hyperarousal. And those are my friends who are like, you know, you might yell, you might get hot, you might say too much. You wanna process forever and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Those are, that's me. And then on the other side of that window of tolerance is hypoarousal. Those are the people who overwhelm looks like they completely leave the building. They kind of shut down, dissociate. Yeah. Literally. Literally leave or figuratively, what we're trying to do with repair, the key skill 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 at 90%, before we're like almost tipping over into hyperarousal or into hypoarousal. The problem gets to be where we We, if we're in, if we're going into hyperarousal or hypoarousal, we've lost choice.

Yeah.

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 train to go into a cold plunge and you don't, you're probably not gonna start at 3 minutes. Like you're probably just not, you're, you like need to build up. You go to the gym, you need to build up to the weights that you're gonna, that you, you cannot go in there and lift 100 pounds if you have never lifted before. That's just literally not gonna happen.

The love gym.

That's right. Actually, one of our, one of our mutual friends and a colleague of mine, Annie Lala, I love this, this line that she says.

Relationship dojo.

Well, yes, that, but what she says that I just feel it. Like I just, she said this and I was like, that is brilliant. That we think that relationships should be going to the spa. That's our orientation towards relationships. If we're in a healthy relationship, it will feel like the spa, but healthy relationships feel way more like going to the gym. And then maybe that gym has a spa attached.

You get a steam after, right?

But you're not going to the spa. You're going to the gym and then you get a steam after. That's right. And I think that really orients, 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?

When do you pull the ripcord?

Exactly. And part of that is, are you— this is going to be simplifying the whole thing, but to ask yourself, and you can 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?

Am I abandoning myself?

100%.

Betraying myself.

Yes. And little by little, all of a 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, you're, you're a little, you're like a duller 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 breathed just a little bit longer there. I had between stimulus and response, I had just a nanosecond more of time and space.

That's practice to get there, right?

Well, it's training. This is, it's practice, it's training. This is what I'm saying about the cold plunge. Like you cannot, you're just, it's gonna be so unrealistic. And if you do go into the cold plunge for 3 minutes the first time, you're probably holding your breath and freaking out and like just wanna 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 when both of us are super triggered and we don't, we're not training outside.

So are you, are you saying that people should learn tools to help regulate their nervous system, like with their breath or separating until you kind of are resourced and regulated? Because you talked about how if you're not resourced and regulated, it's not a time to have a conversation or a 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 'cause in the heat of the moment, it's like, there's just like an, 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 gonna 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 gonna lose our skills. We're gonna 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 need 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 gonna forget them. You're not gonna use them.

So how do, how do people navigate to, to build the capacity?

Why I use a gym, which I know is kind of cliché, but, but it's just easy for all of us to understand, is because we know we have to start with lower reps, lower weight to build. If we don't wanna get injured, to build, start with the easy stuff.

You have to, like the dishes.

Exactly. Exactly. You start with the things or you, so, so say your partner sends it, say, 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 on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being like the highest trigger, it's like a 5 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, that, you know, usually they use an exclamation point and an emoji, and today they didn't, and you don't know why, and now you're in your head. So I want you to pick one or two of these. Do you know?

Do you know? I text trauma. It's like a thing now. It's like a new thing. I don't worry about it, but I get it.

It totally exists. If you say, if you say good morning and it doesn't have an exclamation point versus good morning with an exclamation point, like, we 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, that, so I'm asking everybody to think of the thing right now and think of it for you too. Like, what's a 5 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. That's like a 5 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 did something 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 of a 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 out loud. It would be like, great, something happened at work 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 shallow breathe, 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 cue is, ah, I can feel this thought loop coming on. So the goal is this is a 5 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 calm 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've, I think we, because we're starting, we've, the conversation for so long has been about trauma and about using eye language and what's the thing we're gonna 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, what you're talking about is, is 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 cuz they were having an affair with somebody, or maybe they were on their way to buy you flowers.

Yeah, totally.

But like, you're gonna 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 you, or it could be, you think, you know, your partner's having an affair because they stayed late going to find something beautiful for you to buy as a gift. Right? So like, and it's the same physiology. And so the stress response is what you're talking about when your heartbeat quickens, your breath becomes shallow, your chest tightens up, your gut tightens up, you You can't think clearly. And all of a sudden, you know, it's like you're in this acute stress response and that's what we're actually engaging in relationship with. And that's, that's very dangerous because that's when we were hijacked by what we call our amygdala, which is our fight or flight or fear or feeding or fawning center in our brain that keeps us stuck in these ancient limbic lizard-like relationships that aren't very mature because they don't allow us to sort of wake up to what it's like to actually be in a, an, an adult awake person. You're in this sort of hijacked state. So I think 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 right.

Because the, the, the thing is we probably won't be able to stop the physiological response from happening. That physiological response, maybe it gets, 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 a sudden, like over time, that's, that's, or you do Ivy Game. Mark's favorite topic these days.

I did it. My wife did it. It changed everything in our, in our conversation, our ability, 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 before was really, it was interesting. It was like a nervous system reset. And I don't know if it'll last, but it's good while it lasts.

Well, it's such a, I mean, this is part of why psychedelic therapy is such an interesting modality to explore, right? 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 qualms 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 ibogaine has one of the longest.

90 days, at least that's what they, they, they stopped measuring after 90. So who knows how many it is?

Yeah. So with something like MDMA, it's 2 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 practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced. 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 together?

Learn how to not fight dirty.

That's right. How do you come back? 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, 'cause you do talk about this whole repair framework that you use to approach with your own relationship and with your clients. And, um, and there, I think there's some really powerful things in there. Like a friend of mine once said, you know, only one crazy person in the room at a time. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great.

That's kind of the first one, like one person at a time. Talk about that. And what is that? And like, take us through this framework.

Yeah. Yeah. The, the one person at a time, I think is again, where 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 they're, it's like a, it's a hot mess. We know that doesn't work, but it's really hard not to do so. And we're not gonna be able to do it if we're not regulated. That's just the truth. So the, the first step I actually talk about is to do nothing. That's where we're practicing. We're practicing with a 5 and below. We're literally Starting to expand our tolerance for tension. Then we get into it. At some point, we're gonna have to come into a conversation and start to hash some things out. I learned this from my teacher, Terry Real, and colleague Terry Real, who's a fantastic couples therapist. And what he talks about is one person goes at a time. And why this is so important, which it, 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 gonna go back to differentiation, um, and the power struggle because what's happening here is if somebody is speaking something that hurt you, right? They might not be using I language. 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 back. 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 I, but like, we're not living in an I world. And if you're talking to your boss or your mom, the idea that you're going to say, hey mom, will you use I language with me? And that's gonna work is like zero. And you're not gonna 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.

Wait, well, maybe not a bad idea.

Maybe not a bad idea, but most of us are probably not gonna have the luxury to do that.

Yeah.

So if you're just a normal, average, everyday human, like most of us, and that's just not on the table, then I like to think about repair as 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 Imago, you can use Ellen Bader's developmental model, you can use Terry Real's 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 skillset that you already have. One person goes at a time. What does that mean? That means one person goes—

by the way, I don't think most people know how to actually properly listen to somebody.

Oh, I think it's a, it's a totally underdeveloped skill. We'll talk about why. Well, I'll get there because it's, it's real. It's, 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 the 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, here's what's happening from my perspective. Here's what's happening over here in my world. 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 Emmy and I as an example. We'll use the, the night out thing. What I used to say is, hey, it's really hard for me when you go out, um, 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, 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 are not differentiated, it's very hard to not take what your partner is saying personally.

And what do you mean by differentiated?

The idea of differentiation is that we are two I's, we are two individual people, and we're also caring for the we, which is very different than individuation, which is, I'm gonna do what I want. I'm an autonomous human who can, who can, um, is gonna make my own choices and it doesn't actually matter how that's gonna land on you or how it will hurt you. Or I, I'm just like, I'm gonna do what I want. That's independence. I'm going to do what I want. Codependence is that merge phase, right? Then you don't have to call it codependence, but that's like just to help kind of identify.

Where you do what the other person wants.

Yeah. So 100%.

I had a friend of mine call it, say knitters become skiers and skiers become knitters. It's like if you're a skier, you know, like to knit, but your partner skis, you're going to want to ski and vice versa until you're done with that and then it'll be over.

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 be like, you're crazy. You say, okay, here, let me, 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, they come home and they say, we just went to dinner tonight and you made fun 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 like, I didn't, I don't even 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 are listening to the person like you're a researcher being like, huh, or like they're an alien. I like actually thinking about them as an alien. Like, huh, you're an alien creature who is so different than me, who I would never think the same as, and who's, who, 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 full-on alien from another planet and be like, huh, what's that like to live in your alien planet over there?

I think that's a really useful construct that you, you, 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. Like you don't have to agree that you want to be a cannibal and eat dead people, but you can be curious about that culture that does that, right? And so I think that's a really important framework because most of us are operating from these automatic childhood wounds and patterns and our traumas, big traumas, little traumas. And so we bring that into the relationship and the conversation. And unless you get curious and listen and realize, well, that person's really just in this moment of being a wounded 5-year-old little girl or a 10-year-old little boy, and you can have compassion for that and know it's not about you.

This is differentiation. Literally, this is, that's the work of differentiation, which in order to do that, we have to expand our tolerance for tension. We have to expand our capacity because your partner might be saying some stuff about you that you really don't want to hear.

I want to share an example.

Okay, great.

Because this happened to me and it was like a magic trick. I was, uh, my ex-wife and I were still great friends and we, we, you know, we went to my best friend's 60th birthday. Now she didn't know a soul and she said to me before, Mark, would you please make sure that you introduce me to people and include me in the conversations and do all this? I'm like, sure, no problem. Now I had just had heart surgery and I had I had an atrial fib and a deblation and I was a little uncomfortable and I was on a pain pill. So I was like a little gonzo. And we walk into the party and my best friend's 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 5 minutes I did, but by that time it was too late. My wife was just so upset. She went out of a 10 out of 10 reaction. And probably triggered by something, you know, not being taken care of by her family or father, who knows what was going on there underneath the surface, but it didn't really matter. She was in her tent. She like stormed out and went to the parking lot. So I was like, oh shit, this is my best friend's birthday. What's happening? And so I, and I obviously didn't do what she asked me to do. And so I understood that I kind of screwed up. After a few minutes, I went into the parking lot and we found her and we sat on the curb. I said, so I said, okay, tell me everything. I'm 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, no, 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— you were able to do this and not be about like my, my point of view or God, don't be such a I said, you know, don't be so annoying. This is my best friend's birthday. How could you do this? Like, what did I, all this stuff, you know, I could have said.

That's going on in your head probably. Yeah.

Like, like, come on. Like, get your shit together. She was crazy. And like, and, but it, 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 done, I said, is there any more? Is there any more? I let her 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's like, yeah. And the next minute she was in my lap and I was like, wow. And so I was like, oh, this isn't a magic trick.

It is a magic trick.

But it took, it took an enormous amount of like, I would say like lifting weights, like 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 like, what the hell is going on with you? And all people want is to be seen and heard and understood.

And if you get that, it's like, it is kind of like a magic trick.

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I love that you shared that. I, 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 CIA agent Andrew Bustamante, and 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, is the mic working? Is it, am I thirsty? Right? Those are, 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 the 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 friend's birthday. How could you be doing? You're thinking those thoughts. You just. Don't say them out loud.

I 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 I know she's having a moment. And it, 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. And 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 present. I didn't even need to present my point of view. I wasn't like, okay, now I need you to get me and hear what my perspective is, because it didn't matter in that moment. And then we went back and had a great time at the party.

I mean, this is one person goes at a time. And maybe you never need her to hear your perspective. But for some of us, we might.

Now she will probably 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 do exactly what— 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. That makes sense given your world, your history, your traumas, 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 at 90%. So here you are, you're starting to like, you know, maybe she's, she's saying all these things and I had to just breathe. Totally.

Ground. I literally had to just like force myself into the earth.

But you have, you have to train that.

Yeah.

Not all of us are Jedi ninjas like that, Mark. Like that.

Trust me, this wasn't, I had practiced this skill. It was something we have practiced. but it was, it was like in a 10 out of 10 environment. So we, we practiced it in, 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 off. 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 the repair. Is so critical and it's physiological first and then it's psychological.

Yeah, that's exactly. But we've been taught the opposite. The opposite. Exactly. Um, and I just want to say, just to wrap that up for people who, who are starting to lose stamina in those conversations where you're the listener and your hurt partner is saying some shit that you're like, okay, that, that stung. 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 dysregulated? 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 gonna be able to do that if you're dysregulated. 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's 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 you're in containment work. You're in nervous system regulation, or you're saying, hey, I actually need to go practice. I need to contain.

What does that mean?

So you set a boundary. We get boundaries really wrong. We think boundaries—

Oh, okay. Let's go into boundaries.

Yeah. Well, we think boundaries is gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna like, hey, this conversation so far, I haven't been, 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.

Asking the other person to change.

Yeah. 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 and attune to you like 70% of the way, that's pretty good. I like the 70%.

68?

I don't think 68 is enough. You know, I'm not like the Gottmans, you know, 69 is just not gonna cut it for me. I like a solid 70 heuristic here. So you're, you're literally either practicing expanding your, your capacity for tolerance, extending that window, or practicing boundary work. And none of this requires the other person.

That's what I found in that, 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 that's, and even though in my mind, I could 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 a relationship?

Who's right? Who's 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 rightness of our perspective or our opinion or what they didn't do or what they did do. And there's just kind of no point in that. It doesn't serve anything.

There's another great line by Terry Realhood 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 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 meant 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 that night. Like you're both losing.

That's right. Right. So in this repair process, like the first step is sort of one person at a time. Second step.

Well, do nothing. Do nothing is actually the first, like you gotta just, you gotta 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. You come back. One person goes at a time.

Well, then the being curious part.

Then, then there's the—

The anthropologist part. 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. Cuz you might say some shit that doesn't feel good.

Right?

Right. And if you say that, I want to be able 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 pinged 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 interesting. I, I, when I was 18, I don't know if I ever told you this story, but I, I, I was bullied a lot as a kid. And, uh, you know, I was this sort of nerdy kid who read a lot of books. It served me well in the end.

I hate thinking about you being bullied.

But it was fine. I'm good now. When I was, I was traveling out west, I was 18 and I was camping in this kind of campsite outside of Banff, uh, which was like this little town in Alberta and in 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 dick. And he kind of was making fun of me. And I was like, and I just kind of felt initially I'm like hurt 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 either one of two things. Either it's their issue and they're projecting onto 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, like it's always a gift and it's hard to hold that, you know, but, but you know, what you kind of start out early on talking about this, that relationships aren't this kind of fairy tale. They're a place for growth. So they're a place where we evolve, 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 are in a relationship, all of a sudden you kind of have to deal with things that 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 what makes relationships so amazing is that they're a vehicle for waking up. And it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to stay together, but it means it's a vehicle to wake up and help each other evolve and grow. And if that can be your north star as a couple, I think then you have an anchor that you're 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 or alone.

It's so beautifully put. I mean, this is to just make a real roundabout way here into the third, the third stage of relationships, right? You have the merge, you have the honeymoon stage, you have the power struggle. I mean, what you're painting a picture of is interdependence. This is, this is because 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? Um, 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 the 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 enough self-esteem that we are not pointing the finger and blaming outward, or we're, 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 the society. And I'm kind of excited for your book to come out because I think people are going to eat it up.

I hope so. I mean, the hope here is that we normalize how hard relationships. Actually, actually, let me, let me just say what I actually want to normalize. Uh, another, another colleague and mutual friend of ours, um, 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 our relationships.

That's right. That's right.

And I think that's such a beautiful way.

It's an 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 found. 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 It's not outside of it. It is part of what love is.

So just getting kind of looped back for a minute on this capacity piece, because this seems like a core skill. Like, it's like if you want to be in relationship, it's like if you, if you want to go and run a marathon, you have to actually train for it. You know, you know how to do this many miles every day and it's like there's a whole thing 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 out, 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 5 or 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 a huge 5 breaths. Great. And another way to practice is perspective versus perception. So you're literally, your partner is talking to you. They're talking to you about their day. They're not even bringing something that, that, you know, you're not in a fight. They're talking to you about that. This is your practice ground where you're like, huh, what would it be like to think about my boss that way? I've never thought about my boss that way. That's 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 onto 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 hurt 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, something that's around a 5, that's not nothing, but isn't— you're 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.

But I imagine, I imagine, Baya, like if you do this consistently in a relationship over time, that, that the whole volume comes down and everything, and that your capacity to do this much more fluidly, easily, quickly, without the level of activation, without the nervous system getting out of control, without your amygdala hijacking your entire your 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 very a soft part of the relationship. Not like this thing you're just fighting against every day.

You will come, you will completely change if you take this on. This is, if you take on building your, 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, right? 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 me, nothing more important.

Well, there's also something in here that you're, we haven't really explicitly named, which I think is so important. 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 at 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, 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 avoidant friends or my people who don't love to process as much, uh, you still—

naming no names.

Yeah, naming no names. No names. Um, that, 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. What sometimes we're literally starting at, I can listen and I can repeat back your words. And that's about all I can do. Like that's some people we're just starting there. That's not bad. That's just lack of practice. Some people are going to be able to repeat back your words and do it with some chutzpah, 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 regurgitating. It's going to be terrible. It's not like it's not going to, but you're, this is a practice ground. This is literally a practice ground where the hurt partner says, hey, here's what I'd like from 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 relationships from the fantasy love story, live happily ever after Disneyland kind of of romance to understanding relationships as a vehicle for growth and evolution of our souls and our emotional psychological state. And that ultimately is going to get us to 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.

And so we have this fantasy and that's why we're always struggling in relationships. 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 and everybody can, we're going to talk about how to find more about it in a second. You also work in psychedelic-assisted couples therapy. So people understand about anybody who's watched How to Change Your Mind on Netflix or read Michael Pollan's book understands that there's a lot of therapies out there that are being used to help people deal with trauma one-on-one, but you're talking about relational psychadelic therapy, which is a very different understanding of how to use these compounds to help change dynamics. And Rick Doblin, who is 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 my wife. 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, you know, the promise and the pitfalls.

Yeah. So to clarify, I do MDMA-assisted couples therapy research, and I do that with, 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 the 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, and I do research with MDMA specifically, what we know about MDMA is that it takes away our amygdala's response, which to your point earlier is going to be the response that is putting us into fight, flight, freeze, et cetera.

Puts the lizard in a cage.

That's a great— yes. 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 amygdala quieted just a little, it helps us to 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, it can change an entire dynamic. So what we see is because, because MDMA lowers the amygdala 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 1 to 3 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-assisted couples therapy, when it's legal, like it will be an amazing resource. But again, I want to say it's not a panacea. And I have seen many people, I know so many stories. Stories about people who do it and then they go back to their patterns because they think that they do the drug once and all of a sudden it's going to, everything's going to be, and I've just seen it over and over where people—

But in a way it allows you to be in that dynamic conversation that we're talking about for repair in a way that's downregulated. It sort of physiologically changes you so you can actually be present and be curious and have an open heart and not shut down and not go into your reaction and not go into your fear. And that really helps with understanding and compassion and healing.

100%. Well, so, and, and if you can do that in a couple session 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 a sudden, like we're in a different place. And so, um, there's a clinic out of San Diego called Anamory and they're working on a protocol right now with Rick, uh, around doing a pilot study to put couples through, 6 to 12 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 it is Ann Wagner out of, um, there's a couple more, but, 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 dyadic approach. One person has come in with PTSD and, 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, who's undiagnosed and that's the, the hope is that this can also translate to people who don't have to have a diagnosis and who can just want to enhance their dynamics or enhance their 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 historically we just had to white-knuckle it.

Yeah, totally.

Which is what we've been talking about, breath and re— it's hard to know your mind. It's hard. I mean, that's why I think meditation is such an incredible tool because most of us think we're our thoughts. And when meditation is a simple practice where you sit there and you observe your thoughts and You 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, just chatter that isn't so 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, like there's my whole inner world that I constructed that I thought was, you know, concrete and real. but it's just like clouds and I don't have to attach to them. I don't have to believe them. My friend Daniel Amen says, don't believe every stupid thought you have.

That's great.

That's great. And I think, you know, that's the power of these practices. So when you're talking about capacity, there's lots of tools like meditation or other things that can be helpful, or even like psychedelics can be very powerful. 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, do anything differently inside of.

So I imagine people listening, 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've created and what you've made available to people, because I think everybody's flailing around searching. I mean, if you look at Instagram, it's like all this relationship advice. It's like, And I don't know how much of it's good or bad. I mean, I tune into your Instagram, which is Baya Voce. Yeah. So everybody check that out. Follow Baya. 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 could listen to in a very short time and feel better afterwards. Because I certainly do. And I know you're my closest friend. I still like listen to them like, wow, that was good.

Is this person actually my friend?

She's so cool.

I love you.

And then, and then, and then tell us about this platform that you've created for people.

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. My private practice is full. I need to figure out how to work with more people. And so I did. I launched this, this membership program where you do, we do monthly Q&As where you can literally write in. and I'll answer questions and we'll go live and we'll talk about it. Um, 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, um, 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 just kind of combined it 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, we're like, you're helping me build it because I want to know how to build it with you. So you can just go to bayavoce.com. B-A-Y-A-V-O-C-E. How do they find it again? So you go to my website, bayavoce.com, which is just B-A-Y-A-V-O-C-E, and you can find it and sign up.

And we'll put in the show notes, we'll put the link. And, you know, your website has a beautiful quote on the front, which is, we're taught how to fall in love, but not how to stay there. And so if you want to stay there, check out Baya's work, check out her repair lab, check out her Instagram. 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 foreword. Anyway, love you. Thanks for being on the podcast. And I hope y'all listening got some useful information about how to stay in love, not just fall in love. If you love that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here.