Alex Howard┃The Stories That Shape Your Relationships (and How to Rewrite Them)

The stuff that we learned to do, the beliefs, the stories, and so on, that allowed us to survive— it's like the walls of defense that we built to survive our childhood often become the walls of the prison that trap us in our adulthood.

What if the arguments you keep having with your partner aren't really about what's happening now, but about wounds, beliefs, and survival strategies formed decades ago? Today I sit down with author and integrative health expert Alex Howard to decode the hidden forces shaping our closest relationships. We explore the 3 emotional needs that begin shaping us in childhood, why the stories that once protected us can later become prisons, and how 2 people who genuinely love each other can still find themselves reacting to completely different versions of reality. Alex also explains how to break the anxious-avoidant relationship dance, why curiosity can be more powerful than defensiveness, and what it takes to build a relationship where 2 well-resourced people come together from choice rather than need. If you've ever wondered why the same relationship patterns keep repeating, this conversation may completely change the way you understand love.

I'm really happy to be here today with longtime friend and colleague Alex Howard. Welcome, Alex.

Hi, Fleet. Thank you for having me. It's always a joy to be together.

Oh, absolutely. I always look forward to our conversations. So I'm gonna first share a bit of your background and then we'll jump right in.

Right.

So Alex Howard is the founder and chairman of the Optimum Health Clinic, And the creator behind the therapeutic coaching methodology. He's a prominent figure in integrative medicine, serving patients across 50+ countries with a team of 25 practitioners. Optimum Health Clinic, or OHC, is distinguished for its unique blend of therapeutic coaching and functional nutrition, reflecting Alex's commitment to holistic health. Since March 2020, Alex has been documenting his therapeutic work with real-life patients via his— YouTube channel. In Therapy with Alex Howard YouTube series. His efforts have led to the creation of some of the largest online conferences in the health and mind-body markets, including the Trauma Super Conference, reaching over a million attendees. An accomplished author and researcher, Alex has contributed to prestigious journals like the British Medical Journal Open and Psychology and Health. His literary works include Decode Your Fatigue, Why Me, And his latest, It's Not Your Fault: Why Childhood Trauma Shapes You and How to Break Free. And his work in these books offer deep insights into the underlying causes of chronic conditions and the pathways to recovery. And like many influential people in integrative medicine and mind-body health and so forth, your work began with healing your own situation. And I think that always lends a lot of weight and credence to practitioners' work. And so maybe you can touch on that a little bit. And your work at the Optimum Health Clinic, as I said in the bio, includes both therapeutic coaching and functional nutrition, which is a unique approach to integrative medicine. And I would imagine this had something to do with how you healed yourself from sort of chronic fatigue-related immune system challenges. So how do these elements of therapeutic coaching and nutrition intersect and interconnect and kind of integrate, or what's the mutual beneficial relationship there? And so just contextualizing your work in this whole kind of body-mind spectrum.

Yeah, well, I think my— a lot of my realizations around this were through my own healing journey, which, which you mentioned. Um, I had, uh, ME or chronic fatigue syndrome for 7 years and spent the first couple of years waiting for someone else to find answers and saw many different, um, sort of mainstream medical, uh, practitioners and didn't go anywhere with that. And I can look back now and realize that, of course, part of the problem that conventional medicine approach has to really all chronic illnesses is it's still approaching them using germ theory, like the idea that you're looking for a single pathogen, like a single cause where you can find a single test, like a biomarker, which is going to define whether or not that someone has that cause. And then a single intervention, like a thing that you can do about that pathogen or that issue. The problem with chronic illnesses is they normally affect multiple systems. There are normal different, often different stages to the illness recovery process, and different interventions often are helpful or not helpful at those different stages. There are often multiple factors that cause someone to become ill in the first place. And so If we're looking for a single cause, a single test, and a single intervention, we don't find it. And this is also why you have, I would argue, often quite a fragmented approach also in the integrative medicine world, that you have a practitioner which specializes in a particular intervention. And they will likely be understandably very vocal about this is the answer, this is the thing that helps because Practitioners, like all humans, we can suffer from a confirmation bias where we're looking for a certain thing to be true and then we gather the evidence that that thing is true. And so many, many very well-intentioned, competent, effective practitioners that do the thing that they do and maybe they see, I don't know, 100 patients, maybe 30 of those patients do really well. Maybe 30 don't have any benefit. Maybe 30 get worse, maybe not because of the intervention, but are certainly not helped. Inevitably, the 30 that do well are the ones that keep going back to see the practitioner. So the practitioner builds the evidence that this is the approach which is effective and helps people. So on my own healing journey, initially I was constantly looking for the magic pill. like the intervention, like be it a drug, a supplement, a protocol, whatever it was that was going to be the answer. And then, along the way, what I came to realize was there is no one cause, there is no one test, and there is no one solution. And for me, what was helpful was both recognizing the relationship between my mind and my body, to look at that from another perspective, to understand the impacts of childhood trauma and things that happened in my kind of early life and how that was impacting my, my body at, at that point. But also recognizing that a lot of my symptoms were— I had a lot of gut-related symptoms, I had a lot of brain fog, I had a lot of kind of muscle pain-based symptoms. And coming to realize that not just what we eat, but also looking at the balances of all kinds of different bodily systems is another piece of that jigsaw. You can't often just work with a chronic illness just by cultivating a healing state and calming the nervous system, although that piece is very important. And so, along my own healing journey, I think I saw about 35 different practitioners. I think at one point I was taking 70 supplements a day, which is not something I recommend anyone does. And what I effectively discovered is there is not one answer, but there are many answers. And really the central thrust of my work over the sort of 25-plus years since then has been to, to decode these complex areas. Decode Your Fatigue was the title of one of my books. I have series on Decode Your Nervous System, Decode Your Attachment Style, Decode Your Trauma, and to help people map what's happening, what's causing what's happening, but then to have effective paths to intervention. And that, that's what the Optimum Health Clinic does. So as you mentioned, we have a team of therapeutic coaches, but we also have a team of functional nutritionists or practicing what we call therapeutic nutrition to make sure we're working with the mind, with the emotions, and also with the body.

Wow. So today our theme is rewiring our brains, rewiring our nervous system for love and relationship to optimize that part of our life. And as you mentioned, childhood traumas can impact every aspect of our body-mind system and then can show up in our relationships in not so helpful ways or prevent us from developing healthy, nurturing, positive relationships. And, you know, we develop certain stories and narratives to make sense of our childhood experiences and the best stories we can come up with when we're little tykes and having these very unfortunate experiences of either overt abuse of some kind or danger or threat or just neglect, not getting the love and attachment we need. So, you know, we can talk about this at a neurobiological level and around attachment, which I know you do a lot of work with. We can talk about it also at the level of psychology. And I do think given that this is about rewiring, changing our beliefs, and of course when we change our beliefs, we change our neurobiology. So it's not, it's all intertwined. But nonetheless, maybe we could talk about these narratives and then, you know, you could go further into maybe some of the neurobiology of that, and we'll just see where this goes. Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

One of the ways I think about this is that we have all— if we take a broad definition of trauma, we've all experienced trauma in some way. That might be, as you say, the more overt traumas, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or so on. But often for many of us, it's not the things that happened, it's maybe the things that didn't happen. Like the things that we needed that we didn't get. I talk in my body of work around we all have 3 core emotional needs. These needs are as important as the physical needs for food, oxygen, and water. So we have a need for safety, to feel safe in our nervous system, safe in our environment. We have a need for love, not love for what we do and what we achieve, but love for who we are and as we are. We have a need for healthy boundaries, the ability to say no, and that no to be honored and to be respected. And when we don't get those core emotional needs met in the ways that we ultimately need them, we have to figure out how to make meaning out of that and how to navigate the experiences of our childhood. And so we create a series of beliefs, defensive strategies, ways of relating to ourselves, ways of relating to other people, ways of relating to the world around us. And Whatever we did, it worked. May not have been optimum, maybe causing all kinds of challenges in our life now, but it ultimately worked because we're here to tell the story. It might not be a very pleasant story, but we are here to tell the story. In a way, though, the stuff that we learned to do, the beliefs, the stories, and so on that allowed us to survive It's like the walls of defense that we built to survive our childhood often become the walls of the prison that trap us in our adulthood. And so being able to map and understand what those beliefs are, what those narratives are, what those stories are, can allow us to at least begin to question whether they're really true. I was saying to you just before we started recording that a way that I'm thinking about it these days is actually there's 3 different stories. There's the stories or the story that we were told. What were the belief systems, the narratives? What have we learned from our caregivers and the people that were around us? What did we learn from culture? What did we learn from our teachers and from our community? So, there's what we were told. There's what we came to believe. For some people, that's the same thing. For other people, it can be completely the opposite. It's like we swing to another extreme. For other people, it's somewhere on, on that spectrum. But there's what we were told. There's what we came to believe. But then there's what's actually true. Now, we are a very fortunate and blessed human if what we were told and what we came to believe is all totally true. For most of us, we were told a bunch of narratives and stories which were basically the ways that our caregivers, our ancestors, and so on, that they'd figured out to make sense of a super complicated world. And just like in history, there's all kinds of beliefs, cultural beliefs and narratives that we look back on now and we sort of realize that, you know, they were complete nonsense. Like, you know, for For millennia, it was believed that the Earth was flat, completely reasonable at the time. But now, apart from a very, very, very small pocket of people on YouTube, it's pretty widely accepted that the world is not flat. And so the same is true of the things that we come to believe about ourselves, about what we need, about what is important to cultivate healthy human relationship. And It's a brave person that questions the stories and the narratives that they were told in childhood, because to do that, we have to separate, like we have to push away. And that can be frightening. Now, sometimes what, what we grew up with was so oppressive and so much suffering that we couldn't wait to, to break free of that. But that's often when we overswing and we often just go to another extreme in terms of the beliefs that we have. And one of the things that I've come to realize working as a clinician now for, you know, 20-something years is most people's stories about themselves are woefully inaccurate. Most people's stories about what they're capable of in their life, most people's stories about what's possible for them in terms of intimacy and relationship, are just not true. And I don't particularly believe in sort of positive thinking. I think positive thinking is a little bit like overinflated stocks on the stock market. What goes up in a way that's not based in reality, at some point, it's going to come crashing back down again. And so, when people go and do sort of workshops and programs, they come out with these kind of overinflated opinions of themselves and they sort of celebrate their own sort of narcissism and their sense of self-importance because they've got these new wonderful positive beliefs. But unless those beliefs are grounded in fact, at some point the universe is going to smack us in the face pretty hard and we're going to come back down to earth of what the reality is. But most people's story about themselves is far more negative than the truth about who they are and what they're capable of. And so a shift from that negative self-belief to the truth, to the reality, might look like positive thinking, But actually what it is, is it's an embracing and accepting of our actual potential.

Well, there's a lot to explore there. So you mentioned these 3 core needs we have growing up, safety and love and having healthy boundaries so we can have the integrity of our own being, our own space. It seems to me there's another kind of need of a sorts, and that's the need for an identity and a self-structure. Like, who am I and how do I navigate this crazy world with these big powerful people when we're little? And, you know, the alternative is the actual groundlessness and impermanence and fluidity of life and consciousness. But when we're 2 years old, we have no way of relating with that, obviously. So we need to form some self-structure. And that self-structure can be built around these narratives, these adaptations, some necessary adaptations, some eventually maladaptations, but we build it. And depending on how benevolent and secure our childhood is, we have a relatively high-functioning self. It's still, I think, essentially in some ways fear-based because we're trying to ward off the experience of reality as it is. But if we don't have such a benevolent childhood, that self-structure can have a lot of gaps and holes and kinks in it. And we're not so functional as adults. We can really struggle. There's everything in between. So part of that self-structure is identity. We really identify, so we get very identified with these narratives you're talking about. Even the narrative we were told, which can be full of all kinds of falsehoods and often has built a lot of unworthiness into it, a lot of not enoughness and a lot of scarcity thinking about the world, a lot of fear-based beliefs. And then there's the story we told ourselves, which could be explaining traumas and neglect and all that and can be even a more negative, more debilitating, more disempowering story, but nonetheless, it's all we got. We really identify with it. And, uh, and so to move closer to the truth— and I like the way you spoke about that— and it seems like in the therapeutic process, part of what would be helpful to people would be being able to move from seeing the falsehoods in what they were told, and maybe some of the best stories they could come up with when they were young, uh, but rather than moving to sort of pumped-up version to replace that, to develop an ability to have a realistic self-assessment of who they are, how they show up in the world, and then from there maybe actually being willing to improve some of our, you know, the way we show up in the world. And, but I'm wondering if it's helpful along the way there to distinguish between the truth of who we are on a relative level, you know, how we show up in the world and the skills we have, our you know, even our ethical principles or, you know, how we really show up, how much integrity do we have, how much, you know, and distinguishing that from maybe some deeper ultimate level, if you will, which kind of goes into some of the spiritual traditions, or where there's some kind of innate unconditional goodness, innate worthiness. So there's the self-worth we can build through developing integrity and so forth. And then there's this underlying unconditional worthiness, that our being on some level is ultimately worthy. And this really gets into attachment issues and how we heal all that. So I'm just curious where— I realize it's kind of an elaborate question, but I'm just wondering where that kind of consideration takes you.

Yeah, I want to speak to some of that before we come to the attachment style piece. I think the question here really is, how do I know myself? Like, how do I identify who I am? And unless we've had a very, very blessed and privileged childhood, which most people— I don't mean privileged in terms of, of, um, sort of—

Economically, but—

Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean by that. Um, or unless we've done significant inner work, the chances are that we know ourselves as all of the stuff that we learned, right? Those defensive strategies, um, the belief systems that we've created, the stories that we've told ourselves about that, and that, that becomes our identity. But As you eloquently made the point, that is quite shaky ground upon which to build our sense of self.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's not built upon solid foundations of truth. It's built upon stuff that we figured out when we learn, often at a young age with a relatively inexperienced kind of understanding of the world to survive moment to moment, the experiences that we were having. The, the place that if we do significant inner work, that hopefully we start to get to know and we start to reach is who we are that isn't all of that. And to speak to that place a little bit, that place where our self-worth is not dependent upon what other people think, when ourself— and I don't mean that in an avoidant way, like I don't care what anyone thinks. I mean, it's just unhooked from, from, from what other people think.

Right, right.

You know, our sense of morality— use that, I think you as well, like kind of our morals— our sense of morality is not driven by a fear of consequence of doing the wrong thing. Our sense of morality is driven by a sense of innate goodness and a wish to treat other people from a place of goodness. Again, not because we're hooked onto the outcome of that, but because we're connected to the place within us that that is the right way to live. And we feel more open and more alive and more connected when we to live our life from that place. I think it's also, it's, it's an interesting, um, place to, to make another, another point here that I think is important to this, which is what is the goal of therapeutic work? Because often the goal of therapeutic work is to try to simply make those beliefs and narratives and stories work a little bit better. And there's not that that's wrong, that does have a place, and I think that can be helpful. The philosopher Ken Wilber spoke about this very— I think you know some of Ken Wilber's work— spoke about this very well. He talked about that as translational change, where you're retranslating the narrative and the story that you have. But that's different to transformational change because transformational change is we're letting go of the whole story in the first place. We're not trying to change or rewrite the story. We're no longer needing to identify with having a story because we're allowing what's actually true to arise often in the void of that. That kind of change is often terrifying, right? It's like, who am I? Not who am I if I change the story, but who am I without having a story in the first place?

Hmm.

And that kind of work is not work of our brain working harder to rethink about things. It's actually our brain and our nervous system relaxing enough that we can actually drop more fully and more deeply into what may feel like an absence, a nothingness, a void, or whatever. But then truth can start to arise in that space, not from our mind, but from somewhere deeper inside of us.

Absolutely. So, um, and ideally, I think therapeutic work would sort of work with both of those in some ways. It may be about— it may be translational, and that can be very helpful, but at least be open to— and I mean, even Carl Rogers' work of just providing that unconditional positive regard as the space in which therapy happens, I think, can be that maybe lighting the pilot flame or something of that kind of deeper transformational work. So let's begin to talk about how this shows up in relationship. So obviously, our level of healthy attachment, you know, the early bonding we form with our caregivers, our lack of health, our healthy attachment or lack thereof really influences our ability to form healthy relationships. And often, the unmet needs of our childhood, we seek out partners that we idealize and project, you know, the perfect parent onto, and we set them up to fail. And we set ourselves up for disappointment, right? And so, you know, it's all kind of amazing with the, in some ways, the complex— there's some simplicity in these things, but there's a lot of complexity. And it's amazing that as many of us succeed as well as we do in the relational field, because without really doing some deep work, some inner work and some therapy work, some psychological work, we're kind of walking through a minefield with a blindfold on and stumbling into other people and hoping for the best, right? So, and probably the extent to which that's true does work out more or less okay sometimes probably has to do with having healthy attachment to begin with. So I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about the attachment issues. And then let's talk about how this moves in a relationship and how those of us, you know, who would like more love in our life of, you know, healthy love in primary relationships, but just in general with the world, but also have, you know, positive nurturing primary relationships as well as good familial relationships, social relationships, professional relationships. Let's talk about, you know, how, how do we get there? And, uh, what are— what's the pathway?

Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm still sat with your statement. I really like it. Relationships are like walking into a minefield with a blindfold on. That's gonna, that's gonna make me chuckle into the evening. So thanks for that. In terms of answering your question, um, let's take attachment styles back to childhood trauma, because Well, one of the things that, that, um, I feel quite heavy-hearted about is that I feel like the original work on attachment styles has, has, is a little misused in, in sort of kind of popular psychology because it seems to have become a set of labels that people use to sort of, um, victimhood themselves. Kind of like, oh well, I'm an anxious attachment style, so that means this, or I'm an avoidant attachment style, so that, that means this. And actually, the original research on attachment styles is that We can change our attachment style. It's not, it's not a defined thing. And the, the ultimate work on attachment styles shouldn't just— yes, it can, can be this, but it shouldn't be limited to just learning to adapt relationship dynamics to accommodate someone's attachment style. It should be working to cultivate a healthier and more secure attachment style. So I want to make this connection between how childhood trauma effectively shapes our attachment style, but also how that then, I think, becomes a pathway towards, towards healing. So let's firstly, let's just talk about the 4 basic attachment styles. I'll try and keep— I'm going to make this a bit overly simple, but I think that that's important to make this land. So 4 attachment styles. We can have secure attachment. Secure attachment is when we feel well regulated in our nervous system in contact with another or with other people. We also feel well-regulated by ourselves. And the early research on attachment styles, you'd see this with children sort of 2, 3 years old. They'd be, you know, around other people, other children. They'd be with, with mom or dad or whoever the caregiver is. Typically in that research, it was mom. And they'd go off and they'd play. They'd hang out with the other kids a little bit. And then maybe they'd, you know, one of the kids would snatch a toy or they'd, they'd kind of bump their, bump their toe or something. They'd be upset. they'd look for mum, they'd run towards mum, they'd get nurturing, they get love, they get safety, they get holding, they become okay again, then they would be happy to go off and play. So they were secure with mum, but they were also secure by themselves. That healthy secure attachment in adulthood, what that looks like is when we're with an intimate other, assuming it's the right intimate other, we are able to feel Open. We can be vulnerable. We can be connected. We feel secure with them. But also, when we're not together, we're also okay. It's not that something's missing and we have this sort of neurotic need to be with them, but we're happy with ourselves and we're happy in relationships. So that's what secure attachment looks like. If we go to anxious attachment, the second of the— so we've got secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. So anxious attachment Is when that child is clingy. It doesn't want to separate from mum, and when it's away from mum, it's distressed and it's needy of mum. How does that manifest in adult life? That manifests in someone that is anxious in relationship. When that person's away, they're constantly thinking about what are they doing? Are they being disloyal to me? When they're with that person, they need a lot of reassurance. They the other person often feel a bit suffocated and a bit overwhelmed by the the neediness of that person. How this relates to the nervous system, which I think is the really important piece here, is the secure attachment nervous system is well regulated by oneself and it's well regulated in relational connection. The anxious attachment is looking to the other person to provide the safety for their nervous system to regulate. If we look at the opposite of an anxious attachment style, it's our 3rd style. It's an avoidant attachment style. Avoidant attachment style in those childhood studies doesn't want to be close to mom. Mom comes in, they push mom away. And not in— I don't mean in the sort of typical sort of 2-ish thing where one's starting to separate, but that becomes like the default that they're pushing away. How does that show up in adulthood? That shows up as someone who's always a bit distant, always a bit aloof in relationship. that they struggle to commit to intimate relationship. What they've learned is being close to the other, they don't feel safe. Their nervous system's not well regulated. They've learned to find that nervous system regulation through isolation and through, through separation. So that for the avoidant attachment style, their work— so the anxious attachment style is to learn to regulate their nervous system away from contact. For the avoidant attachment style, it's to learn to regulate their nervous system whilst in contact. Our 4th attachment style, which is the disorganized attachment style, oscillates between the 2. So it can be anxious and needy and clingy, and then it starts to get its need, and then it pushes away and it becomes avoidant. And it's a constant movement between those 2 places. So to balance or to heal one's attachment, to cultivate a secure attachment? It's learning how to regulate one's nervous system. It's learning how to regulate one's nervous system if you're anxious when you're away from that other person, and when you're avoidant when you're in close proximity to the other person. And if you're disorganized, it's actually working on both of those pieces. And when we learn to do that, when we learn to, how to regulate the nervous system, our attachment style can start to change. We may still have some underlying tendencies maybe that are there, but it is a changeable thing. But it's not changed just by habit or behavioral change. It's changed by learning how to cultivate that sense of safety which may have been missing within ourself. Because ultimately, our intimate partner should be the icing on the cake of our— of the joy of our life, or the cherry on the top of the— of our life. It shouldn't be the building block upon which our psychological structures are built. Because if it is, that is the, the absolute definition of a codependent relationship, that we are dependent upon another person to be psychologically well-functioning.

So this is really incredibly helpful to see those 4 attachment styles and then how that can show up in relationship and imagining the healing work that a couple, for example, could do in their relationship with support of first understanding something about each other's attachment styles and then having the intentionality to to do the self-regulation and co-regulation work to heal that. So it's not just adapting, but actually transforming. And just to put this in kind of common sense language, I think what a lot of people experience in relationship is this dance that goes back and forth of like, I want more connection when the other person's going, no, I need more space. And then the other person, no, I want more connection. Now the other person, I want more space. And you get this dance back and forth between this desire and need for— And that could, You know, I mean, that could happen even with people with secure attachment. I think just in it, you know, the needs of our life and things going back and forth, sometimes we may need a little more space. But when— but, you know, if you imagine that, you know, anxious attachment styles, or one has anxious and the other has, uh, um, avoidance, right? Or, or 2 people with, you know, uh, confused or disorganized attachment styles, you know, I mean, that dance is going to be— all over the map and incredibly confusing for people. The signals we're gonna be sending to each other. Interesting, you know, in Stephen Porges' work, I know you've interviewed him and polyvagal theory to talk about the way that our— that what we're signaling can invite others to have their social engagement system online. In other words, we're signaling safety, we're signaling connection, right? But if you can imagine some of these mixed attachment styles in a relationship, the signaling is just all over the place. It's really noise. And so how do you navigate that?

Yeah.

Well, I think if we take that back to what we were saying a little bit earlier about these different stories, right? What's the story we were told? What's the story we've become to believe? But what's actually true, right? And so, so much of what we react to in the other person in relationship is not their intention, it's the story we've told ourselves about what their actions mean. So if we are with someone in relationship who fundamentally doesn't— is not loving, does not love us and does not wish good for us, we should leave that relationship.

Absolutely.

That's a pretty clear definition of a relationship we should leave. So let's make the assumption that the folks we're talking to, that's not the case, because if it is the case, what they need to do is actually— the path to it might be very difficult, but the actual direction is clear. But normally what's happening is we are— I'm going back because I'm still tickled by it, to your analogy about walking into a minefield with a blindfold on. In a way, that's part of what's happening here, that we've got a blindfold on, or to mix metaphors a little bit, or to change the metaphor, we're seeing their behavior through the lens of our past, through the story that we're telling ourselves. And so, to bring that to life a little bit, let's say that we— let's say it's, I don't know, it's 9 o'clock in the evening. You know, we've got kids, kids are in bed, and we think it might be time for a little bit of sexual intimacy. And we reach out and we initiate that with our partner. And for some reason, they don't reciprocate or they reject. That reason could be one of 100 different things. But, Our story is that people reject us, that we're not lovable, that we're not enough. So what their reason for for not wanting to be intimate with us in that moment likely has actually nothing to do with whether or not they love us or they care about us. It's likely something else, and it could be one of a hundred different things that are going on. It could be they're just really tired. It could be they have a headache. It could be they have low libido that that evening. It could be they've got to be up early for a meeting. There could be a hundred different reasons why. Why that may be going on. Then the way that we respond is maybe our sort of emotional immune system comes up and we start to try to defend ourselves, and maybe we make an unkind comment towards them because we're trying to protect the fact that that really fragile part of us just got poked. And then we say something towards them, and what we're really saying is, I feel rejected and that hurts. But what they hear is the story that they have about their history. And maybe their story is that their needs are never acknowledged and other people always kind of, you know, push them around to get what they want. So now we've got a situation where we've got 2 people that love each other with 2 completely different stories, not based upon facts of what's happening. And here's, here's the real rub. They're now both responding to the story they've told themselves that isn't true. So neither party feels seen. Neither party is getting what they need relationally in that moment. All they're doing is it's like when someone throws a punch, you really have 2 choices. You can block the punch or you can throw a counterpunch. So they're both being defensive and they're both also then being potentially threatening in the way that they're either with their words or whatever. So to really, to break free of all of this, my experience clinically is that first of all, we have to really decode what's happening. Like, what are the stories? What are the patterns? What are the reactions that are happening? And are they actually true? Now, we are in those situations, it's much easier to decode the other person's story than it It's to decode our own story, right? I'm trying to remember who it was, but I was interviewing a couples therapist at some point, and their point basically was that no one decides to go to couples therapy because they think they are the problem. Everyone goes to couples therapy because their other half is the problem and they need the therapist to help them to realize that they are the problem, right? And so, almost inevitably when we're in conflict in relationship, We are not our grown-up self taking responsibility for our own stories and our own narratives and our own reactions. We are wanting to point out to our beloved, which is ironic because this is the person that we supposedly love most in the world, all the reasons why they're wrong and all the reasons why they're flawed. If we can decode that and we can start to map some of what's happening, That's an important first step. Now, it's not enough because you could do that and it all still is happening. But if we can do that and we can start to bring some nervous system regulation on both sides into what's happening, to use Stephen Porges' framework, as you mentioned, of polyvagal theory, if we can both come back down to safe and social and we can actually find a place of regulation, We've got a chance of starting to actually write a different story together and to start to build some different dynamics of what's happening. But that takes— it takes a certain courage, takes a certain willingness, and it takes a certain humility. And it's not an easy thing to learn initially that when we feel defended and we feel we want to attack, to not go with that impulse, but to actually look for what's missing in us and to take responsibility for that, not to make it the other person's responsibility to give us what we need.

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Yeah, and what you're describing there, I mean, it seems like if we want to be successful in relationship and we want to really want to optimize our relationships, not just kind of cope and hope for the best and, you know, deal with, uh, disappointments and I mean, there's always gonna be disappointment, but I mean, you know, just settling, not settling for kind of sort of mediocrity in our relationships, but we really wanna optimize our relationships. There's a kind of self-education and coeducation that needs to happen. We need to learn about all this, right? And, you know, we could be in therapy with a skilled therapist and they could help us get a start, but ultimately we're gonna have to learn about this so that we can do the work together. And just stepping back from it, really understanding what we're up against, you know, we've been talking about these stories, these different attachment styles. I imagine you're familiar with Virginia Satir's work, you know, around sculpting. And what, you know, they'll often find that couples often find themselves getting in the same conflict again and again, or, you know, chronic arguments, chronic conflicts. And so Virginia Satir would work with them and others using her methodologies and get clear with one person. Like, when you're in that conflict, what's your posture? What are you doing? What are you saying? What's your frame? And then work with that one person. Once they get really clear, both people agree that, yeah, that's the posture, that's exactly the energy, the therapist would then say, and turn to them, okay, where are you? And almost immediately the person will have, or maybe they ask 'em to close their eyes, but most immediately they say, I'm with my father, he's yelling at me, I'm, you know, 4 years old or whatever. And they do it with both of them. And the sense you get is that a lot of the conflict that's going on in our relationships is like the ghosts of our parents and the ghosts of our interactions with our parents being played out, right? And a lot of the things our parents weren't able to resolve, so they got passed on to us. And then we have all these, you know, whether we look at it in terms of stories or energies or even epigenetic environments. If we wanna get down into the neurobiology of it, we could talk about that in a moment. But we're up against all this stuff playing out and it requires a certain, as you said, humility and benevolence. But I think some kind of self-education and like a real curiosity. It seems like curiosity, you know, when things are not working well, our instinct is usually to blame the other person, as you're saying, but have a really curiosity about, Okay, I'm curious about what's going on for them, but I'm also curious about what am I doing here and curious about how the whole dynamic is interesting. It requires some real curiosity and sort of an interest in becoming better educated and even an interest in kind of self-mastery and relational mastery if we really wanna have good relationships. I think a lot of us have a sense of entitlement that it's just supposed to happen. Right? You're supposed to fall in love and they're supposed to have a great relationship and live happily ever after, and that's just not the case.

You know, um, couples therapist once said to me when my wife and I were doing some, doing some work together— it was a she actually— and she looked at me and she said, she said, okay, you've got, you've got, you can have got 2 choices here. You can only have one of them. You need to pick which one it is. Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? It's like, because you can't have them both. Because one of, one of my sort of defensive strategies is, is I like to— I don't like to argue. My wife and I don't particularly argue, but I like to— I like to be right because I can stack it all up and I can figure out what's happening. I can decode this and this and that and that and that and that. But all that does is, is in that moment push my wife away. She's like, you're analyzing. I don't feel connected to you. You're just being defensive and doing the thing that you did to survive your childhood, which was to try and make sense of the whole thing. Right? It's like— and that is the— I think that's the courage. That's the humility. That's the curiosity, to use your word. Yeah. That you can't have it both ways. You know, we can't hang on to the old story and hang on to our defensive structures and expect to be in a connected, loving, intimate relationship with somebody else. Because the only person we're going to be in any kind of connected, loving, intimate relationship there is, is someone that has no sense of self and someone that's just going to completely acquiesce to everything that we say is true. But if we actually want to be in a reciprocal power-balanced relationship, then we can't have control. We can't have it the way that we want it all of the time. We can some of the time because that should be part of the balance. But I think it's also one of the things that I'm sort of pondering out loud a little bit at the moment. I'm interested to get your thoughts on this. One of the things that I've certainly seen over the years is I remember when my wife and I met, um, in, um, in a spiritual sort of meditation group that we were both very, very, um, committed to at that time. And so a lot of our mutual friends early on in our relationship were all doing a lot of inner work and all in therapy and all, you know, a lot of them doing couples work, a lot of very sincere commitment to that. I remember thinking at the time, I was in my kind of— what was I in my sort of around 30 at the time— and think— and thinking, well, you know, We're all so lucky that we're doing all this work so young, and, you know, we're going to have a much better, better shot at like a loving, lasting relationship than, than others. And if I track back now, so what's that, sort of 14 years later, I would say the divorce rate amongst my spiritual friends is higher than the divorce rate amongst my non-spiritual friends. I'm interested in your thoughts on that, but, but part of, part of my conclusion of this has, has been That a lot of those folks have done a lot of inner work, which potentially has actually made them a little more narcissistic.

Mm-hmm.

And a little more, I figured out what my needs are, I figured out— and actually has sort of, has almost enabled a more, I don't know if childlike's fair, that's probably slightly unfair, but If I put it slightly differently, the, the— we, we have a number of our friends in, in recent years have been people we've met through the kids' schools and so on. And so we've more become friends because of mutual interests and because of kids, not necessarily because of that sort of spiritual and psychological work. And actually, those friends often seem more willing to compromise and more of a recognition that actually relationships do sort of take work and they're hard. And actually, you do have to, you know, you have to find the path that works for both of So it's just an interesting reflection that, yeah, I'm curious as to your thoughts, Fleet, 'cause you've been around the block plenty of times as well.

Yeah, no, that's a really important insight on many levels. Just to say to that, what you talked about, that couples therapist, I've been leading a very intense kind of group process training for many years, not since the pandemic start, we haven't gotten back to it. But, and that's people doing individual work, but sometimes there will be a couple come to the training or sometimes someone with their adult child and they'll be in there and they'd just be locked in combat. you know, neither one of them wanted to give an inch. And very often myself or my co-trainer would say to one of them, what do you want? Do you want to be right or do you wanna have a relationship? Choose, you can't have both, right? The same distinction, it's a really important distinction. And another thing that came up for me around this curiosity piece is once interviewing, I believe it was either Gay and Katie Hendricks.

Mm-hmm.

Or the other really famous couple who are in couples therapy, Harville—

Harville Hendrix and—

Yeah, yeah, Harville Hendrix and his wife. His wife has a different last name. But it was one of those 2 couples, and they talked about how what they've developed together, and when one of them voices some kind of displeasure or discomfort or anything like that, or, you know, They've really trained themselves to have their first response be, tell me more about that. Which seems pretty enlightened, I come in, 'cause often we're so naturally defensive and we all, you know, being right is a really kind of addictive emotional payoff. But to be able to, you know, relax around somebody's voicing something, maybe just that they're struggling, which sometimes we can take personally, just the fact the other, even if they haven't made it about us. Or maybe they are saying something about us and how we're showing up. And to have our first reaction instead of being to defend ourselves, to invite them to share more, right? That kind of curiosity seems to be a very necessary structure. But to what you were just referencing, you know, one of the shadow sides of spiritual work is this potential wrong turn in a greater narcissism. And, you know, Well, we all have these deep identity needs and self, you know, kind of what I spoke about before. We start off in this very fragile circumstance. We have to build some kind of self-structure. So we're all a little bit inherently narcissistic on some, at least on a relative level. And so then when we're suffering and we wanna begin doing spiritual work so we suffer less or whatever we're doing, the pathway is always focused on yourself to do the work, right? And so that can tend to exacerbate the narcissism. And I think it's one of the great challenges of spiritual work not to get lost in that, overcome that, which is why I think the importance of, in spiritual communities, of sangha and relationship and being challenged and all this kind of things and get a lot of feedback and so forth. So it doesn't take us into greater narcissism. And it's really interesting that among your earlier peers in these spiritual groups, you're seeing a higher divorce rate. I mean, on some level they may be developing, you know, there could be a problem with narcissism and there could be a higher expectation in terms of the quality of relationships.

That's true.

Which you could call narcissistic. or you could call healthy. It could be either way, right? And there's a lot of folks in the world that probably stay together and accept a kind of mediocrity in relationship because they just don't think it gets better than this, right? This— that's as good as it gets. Or people will stay together who probably really would be best not staying together in some cases. Or like you're saying, people who haven't developed that, you know, there may just be a more willingness to compromise. It's a bigger question in spiritual work because I've often— I've been involved in spiritual work in communities for a long time, and I've also thought those ordinary people people out there just living their lives look saner than people.

But I, I think you and I could go deep on this one. It's an interesting one because I, in a way, you know, the very reason that, you know, I speak for myself here, that one can end up doing a lot of sincere inner work is because one is probably more dysfunctional than, than the average population. And so, you know, that I think that there's some truth to that. What is also true, I would say, is that when I see those more— someone once described it as wizards and muggles, if people know Harry Potter, sort of kind of more muggle kind of focus. What is true is that when they hit those big life crisis moments, they may find they have a lot less resources to meet them. And certainly, one of the things that I feel has been a great blessing, certainly in my life, has been going through some very hard times a number of times and having to figure out how to navigate through hard times and develop the resilience to do that, but also the resourcefulness and And to know when to ask for help, to where to go to ask for help. And that's, of course, the blessing of doing inner work that, you know, one might go down some deep holes that they might at some points wish they hadn't started going down. But once you really go down those holes, of course, there's an enormous payoff and there's an enormous— there's great blessings that come from that too.

Absolutely. And I think one of the antidotes to, you know, narcissistic tendencies or just kind of selfishness, self-focus at the expense of relationship, for whatever motivations, uh, is really beginning to value kindness and compassion. And, you know, I think that's been part of my path of maturity in relationships, is just to really value and really want to train myself to be kinder.

Yeah.

Be kinder to myself, but also really be kinder to the people I'm in relationship with. And realizing early on in my life that for whatever reason, it kind of wasn't my instinct. My natural tendency was to be acquisitional and defensive and combative. And, you know, and my first instinct wasn't kindness. And so I really, you know, have worked hard at that. And kindness goes a long way in relationships. I mean, I think when people, even if they haven't figured out all these, you know, all this shadow stuff and all the ghosts of their parents and all the rest of it, if they really value kindness and kindness with each other, that can can go a long way to soften the environment, I think, and really support people. I'm curious about, since your work integrates both therapeutic coaching and the nutritional work, optimizing our relationships. If we're really interested in really optimizing our relationships and showing up in relationship with a lot of kindness and compassion and skill and resilience and having done a lot of our own healing work around our traumas and holding space for others to do the same, requires a lot of energy. And, you know, your nutritional work, I mean, even at the level of today, we're learning a lot about even just fundamental mitochondrial health at the cellular level. And we're also learning about how various meditative practices and various body-mind practices can also improve mitochondrial health at the basic level so that we have the energy to show up in relationship as our best self. 'Cause often people So, you know, with all the challenges of life, some of the conflicts that arise in relationships have to do with people being exhausted and not at their best and react— and really reactive because they're, they're not at their best.

Yeah.

Well, let me—

I'm going to give a live example of that. I, um, I, I would now argue that any man past the age of 40 should get their testosterone levels checked. It's something that, um, I did, um, around the time I hit 40, was a bit reluctant to Um, take— I mean, when I talk about taking testosterone, I don't mean like injecting, like trying to become like some big kind of like gym monster. I mean, people have low normal or, um, low levels of testosterone. To bring that into normal balance can have an enormous impact on one's energy, one's vitality, and so on. And I found in my— um, I'm 44 now— I found in my early 40s that, you know, I work very hard in the week Um, doing my sort of kind of work, work job. And I'd get to weekends, I was just tired. Like, you know, I got 3 kids currently between 7 and 13, 3 girls, and they'd want to go off and do stuff and do this. And my wife would, you know, been sort of doing a lot of the carrying, a lot of the weight of the parenting through the week. And at the weekend was like, you know, come on, like, we need you. You've been— you haven't been around much in the week. And I was just like, it was an effort, you know. Since I, a couple of years ago now, started taking a low dose of, of testosterone to come back to normal range. Because I should say that testosterone for men diminishes every year after the age of 40. That was a game changer. It's probably the single biggest impact in recent years of my, what I would argue, my goodness as being a husband and a father, which is that I get home from a long day at work and I'm not knackered. I get to the weekend and I want to go off with the kids and let's get the kayaks out and go kayaking down the canal. Let's go on a bike ride. Let's go and do this. I've got the vitality and the energy that I want, not that I'm sort of dragging myself to because I don't want to let anyone down, but actually having the vitality to do that. And, I think people often normalize to energy states that are not their optimum and they get used to kind of going, well, all my friends are tired all the time as well. I'm like, there's no reason that one should not have optimum health and vitality. There's lots of reasons why they may not have it, but there's no reason why they can't address those things. And, I was fortunate I had a lot of other pieces well lined up. And so, just correcting that one piece had a big and significant impact. But if we want to have healthy vital relationship, we need to have the energy to bring to that relationship. Otherwise, if you've got 2 deficient people looking to the other person to fill them up, you've got a recipe for conflict. If you've got 2 well-resourced people that are coming together because they want to be together, you've got a recipe for love and joy and connection.

Absolutely.

Well, this has been illuminating as always, and we could, we could just keep going. There's so much to explore here. I always so enjoy our conversations, but I think this has really been illuminating and I think points in a lot of directions that all of us can explore and continue educating ourselves to you know, to really optimize this really important part of our life. And, you know, it's, there's, the importance of this is that the, at least one marker, I mean, this is kind of, we know this, but the Harvard Study of Adult Development that's been going on for almost 90 years now, you know, and tracking initially a group of men, both a group of privileged men and a group of underprivileged men. And many, most of 'em who are gone, I think there's a couple who are still alive, but eventually started tracking the spouses. and the children and so forth. But they've really determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that the leading determinant of health and longevity and healthy lifespan, healthspan, and all these kind of things is the quality of our relationships.

Yeah.

And having relationships we count on. They don't have to be perfect, but relationships where we know they're there, they have our back ultimately, we have, you know, and it's so important, such an important part of our overall resilience and so worth investing in. And I think this conversation has pointed in a lot of good directions for people to explore.

Wonderful, Fleet. Well, it's always a joy. I always, I always have fun together. And thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to yourself. Take care.

Take care.