009 Lasting Love with Luis Congdon

From the creators of Lyme Voice and Disappearing from Society comes a brilliantly simple idea, but this time it comes as a book. Imagine a world in which birds can talk like people. You'll get a bird's-eye view of life with Lyme disease as one bird family must unite to overcome the obstacles of life with Lyme disease. Guaranteed to make you laugh and cry. Written in a way that helps you articulate the losses you are experiencing as a household while simultaneously empowering you to keep fighting. Little Bite, Big Trouble is available today at Amazon.com.

Really getting in touch with yourself and saying, you know, I feel this pain and it's there. And even though I want someone else to acknowledge it and they're not, I have to acknowledge it. And it's important to me to acknowledge that I'm in an incredible amount of pain and that this hurts and I don't know what to do about it. I would love to have my partner believe me and support me. They're not doing that right now. So how do I meet that need for myself?

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Here are your hosts, Aaron and Sarah Sanchez.

Hello friends, thanks so much for joining us today on Lion Voice. Aaron is dealing with some major allergies today, so you get me all to yourself. This episode really required me to stretch as a podcast producer. As we are gaining a broader audience base, we are starting to interview people who we don't personally know. This is of course very good, and that was the plan all along, but I feel very protective of you all as our audience and the content that is coming out of this podcast is like a little baby that I am trying to grow and shape. And so I want to make sure that each and every speaker can contribute to you all. So I'm very protective of who and what we talk about. When we were thinking about interviewing Luis, my big concern was that he may not be able to understand the intensity of living with a chronic and often debilitating disease because everybody goes through hard times in their lives. I get that. But very few people can offer valuable advice when the suffering and the losses span a decade or two decades or even three. And that is a big part of what we want to accomplish within this show is how do we keep our lives and our relationships afloat when the losses don't stop, when they span decades. And so I want to go back to our mission statement. Our mission statement for this podcast is to serve the afflicted, the weary, and the weak. I'll say it again because it's awesome and totally worth repeating: to serve the afflicted, the weary, and the weak. And I use this mission statement as a guideline for structuring the episodes. So throughout this interview, Luis is able to take his experience and articulate some really valuable things. And I think that just by listening to shows shows like this, we gain understanding, which is huge, because as we gain understanding, understanding leads to empathy, and empathy often leads to action. So another really important thing that we discuss throughout the episode is compassion fatigue or self-care. This is really important because if you do not take care of yourself, you cannot take care of those around you. But this is also very difficult to implement when you already feel like you're drowning. So whether you are the healthy spouse who carries a heavy load, a sick person trying to figure out how to stay engaged within your own relationships, or maybe you're blessed with really good health and you wanna come alongside someone who is sick and help support them, there is something within this episode for everyone. So I hope you enjoy it. I, I enjoyed producing it for you.

Hello everybody, we have Luis today.

Luis has worked with hundreds of couples, been a keynote speaker at international conferences, and interviews the top experts to help you have a lasting love connection. Luis, thank you so much for being with us today.

Honored to be here today.

Luis, I have a question for you. Are you ready to help us put the puzzle pieces of Lyme into place?

I'm as ready as I can be. Let's do it. All right.

Luis, why don't you tell us your story of how you came to be doing what it is that you are doing and how you arrived at, at this place where you can speak to people, um, whose marriages are affected, especially within the chronic illness realm, really affected by our circumstances?

Definitely. Definitely. First, let me start off just by again saying thank you so much. And for anybody that's listening, I want to let you know that I myself have suffered ever since I was 8 years old with allergies, and that began when I was adopted from Medellín, Colombia, South America. I came to the United States when I was 8. Prior to that, I had no experience with food allergies. I had certain disdain for foods, but no allergies that I was aware of. Within my first few months of being here in the US, I started getting incredibly sick. Dizzy spells, tonsils swollen to the point where they were nearly touching each other, you know, and just having a hard time breathing. I had a hard time walking around sometimes. Just the nastiest phlegm you can think of. I just needed things to help me go to sleep. I'd have to lay around. I was pulled out of school. You could pretty much guarantee around Christmas time, I was out of school for at least a week or two from being sick. When the weather changed, whether it was summer, spring, fall, I always got sick when the weather changed. And here's the thing is that lasted for close to a year until my mom just said, you know, we need to try something different. We've tried a variety of different methods and they're not working. So she took me to a naturopath and It was a really interesting experience. The naturopath had me take my socks and shoes off and she had this little machine that had a little like speed tachometer, like, you know, in your car it tells you how fast you're going.

Yeah.

And attached to it was a little wire with a little metal piece on the end. And on this machine there was a little area where you could put a vial in there and each vial contained a certain substance, whether it was gluten, a feather, pollen, different things. So she placed different items in there. So like a piece of an egg, she put that in there. Then that little wire that ran, she connected, touched me, touched my toes, in between my toes with that little metal piece, and that techometer just went, you know, as fast as it could go. Yeah, okay, he's allergic to eggs. And we kept going down the list. We found out I was allergic to processed sugars, eggs, pollen, pineapple, gluten, cat hair, slightly to dog hair, not that— not very much, grass.

Wow.

And those were all my allergies. Oh, and also dairy. So take out most of the kids' staple foods. We tend to eat eggs for breakfast, cereal for breakfast, and all the pancakes for breakfast. Those are the things that my dad made. So we really had to change my diet dramatically. When I saw your guys' show and I saw what you guys are doing for people, I knew I wanted to come on the show because I'm a strong believer that life is like one big giant pie and you want to slice that pie into sections. And relationships happens to be one, and health in the way that you're eating happens to be one. And if you don't have those dialed in, you're not going to experience the full level of success that you can. Yeah, for anyone that's suffering and from some sort of chronic allergy or illness, you are not going to have the full level of success until you get that dialed in. You know, health is nothing when you have it, and it's everything when you don't.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up about your allergies, uh, because a lot of times with Lyme patients is they often develop especially gluten allergy, but a lot of other allergies can come up along with. So I mean, like you're saying, with the right foods, controlling your allergies, it's total life shift. But when you can put those puzzle pieces or those pie pieces together, um, that's when you experience real effective healing, right? So I'm excited to hear about the relationship part next.

Yeah, Luis, marriages are hard for couples who are healthy, especially when they have a chronic illness that is spanning a decade and/or two decades. And they live with excruciating amounts of pain for the most part and fatigue. How do you, how do you focus in on your marriage when there's just not enough like energy to go around?

Definitely, that's an excellent question, and it's definitely one that I've encountered repeatedly, not always pertaining to some sort of chronic thing like Lyme, Lyme disease or something like that. But I will tell you that, you know, you guys asked me about how I into this work and I wanna rewind just a moment and say that at the age of 24, I was heartbroken. I had fallen in love for the very first time and she broke my heart and I was just shocked. Like, okay, how could I be so in love and have this not work out and have it just totally like a carpet pulled beneath my feet? I have no idea what makes love last and why was I such an idiot that I didn't know how to make this work? And so I just said, God, universe, whoever's listening, please help me understand how to make love last. And literally, like, pretty much a week later, I was hired to coach and work with married couples as part of the nation's largest research project looking at marital success and how the courses that were created at the University of Washington and backed by research— how can these courses impact low-income families and more so really impact their children? So that's, that's, that's a little bit of my background. And then in that time, I got to work with nearly 200 couples and be trained by PhDs from all over the United States. So I had some really intensive insight into relationships. I recall one couple where the husband was on all sorts of pain medication. I mean, when I first met him, he was a fairly quiet guy. He seemed to be kind of a little bit slow when he thought. But always, you know, had intelligent things to say. He was a nice guy.

Yeah.

And over time I got to know him more and more, and what I discovered is that he got injured at work, had been unemployed for some time and living off L&I, and was on some really heavy dose medication. The wife said, I know that this may be unfair for me to complain that he's just not showing up happy, he's not participating in our kids' lives, he can't get down and with them. He doesn't hold me or make love to me in the way that I want. He just doesn't show up in the relationship the way that he used to and we're struggling. And he just kind of sat there and you could feel that he was just in pain, just sitting there, just not emotionally, but physically in pain. And he just responded. He said, I'm really sorry, but I don't know how to be with you because my body constantly hurts and I don't know what to do. And on top of that, they had all sorts of bills piling up because L&I only covers a percentage of, of your normal living wage. So how do couples work through that? You know, one of the first things is that if you're in that type of relationship and your partner has some sort of chronic illness, a lot of the responsibility falls on you if you don't have that sort of illness to how am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to be even healthier for the relationship? And how am I going to support my partner back to health?

You know what, that brings up a huge point, even in the whole self-care realm, um, because that was one of the things we would go back and forth on. I needed so much help because we had 5 little kids, and we also have 2 adopted from Ethiopia, and But they have a lot of special needs. They need more time. They need more talking to. They, they just need more. And Aaron never felt the freedom to go and take care of himself. And we'd try to kind of figure it out like, okay, well, let's see if you can go run in the morning. But ultimately, like, it would come crashing down because he felt so tied to taking care of all of us. Which he was.

Yeah, and it's an incredibly destructive thing to do to yourself because, you know, I used to run marathons and was in fairly good shape.

Yeah.

And when I started not taking care of myself, it just compounds off of each other. And before you— and, and I was, uh, 80 pounds overweight and totally out of it, totally consumed by not taking care of myself in a way.

Yeah.

So how do you do that? How do you prioritize that time?

Right. Another little story too that I want to throw in here is one of the couples that I work with had a teenage son who is a narcoleptic and also has some sort of severe autism on top of that. So whenever I met with them, the child always had to be with us in the room. And he's kind of always twitching a little bit. He also wore a football helmet because he could pass out at any moment. The wife complained, she said, you know, I can't sit down and read the newspaper next to him because if he's eating, like for example, if he's eating cereal, which he can do on his own, if he falls asleep and his face goes into that cereal bowl and I'm not looking at him, he could literally drown himself in the cereal bowl.

Yeah.

I've had a lot of discussions with couples about self-care. It's incredibly important. I've definitely been guilty of doing too much taking care of in my work as a social worker in the past. The number one thing that I think that people who need self-care can do for their lives is find a community around you that loves you and care about you. By having that community, they're gonna call you out when you're not taking care of yourself. It might take them some time or you might be fighting them, It sounds like you guys kind of had that where it was like, Aaron, I want you to take care of yourself. And Aaron's thinking, I need to take care of this home. I mean, we have 5 kids. I want to give you some time to take care of yourself. You're very— my sense of you, Aaron, is you're very strong. You have a very strong loyalty and commitment to the people around you and making sure that they're safe. And you will make sure to put that mask on them before yours.

Yeah.

And it takes a lot of work to educate Aaron or anybody who's an archetype of Aaron, that learning how to put that oxygen mask on for yourself is also a way of taking care of other people. Because when our kids or our partners or our coworkers see that we're happy and that we're taking care of ourselves, it inspires them. It draws them closer to us. I had a coworker who just felt consistently exhausted, and I was a director of a nonprofit that housed and sheltered homeless women primarily. She was exhausted and beat down. Down when I came on the job. And first thing I did is I said, I'm enacting a mandatory 2 or 3 days off for you, vacation time, and I need you to choose those days this month. She did that right away, and she came back and she seemed more rested. And then we continually followed up, you know, by having more specific meetings together. That's kind of the same thing that we can do with our partners. Hey, you know, you're getting exhausted. I noticed that you're working really hard. I appreciate trying— you trying to take care of everything. "but right now you're spread so thin that I'm demanding that you take an afternoon to yourself and there's no choice about it. What day are you going to do it? Let's look at the calendar and make that happen." That would be my first thing if I really needed my partner to do that. And by doing that, we're telling them, "Your health is important to me." Right.

Because yeah, that person's keeping everything going.

Yeah, right.

And now that you say that, reminding me that probably the best time for that conversation to happen is not in the heat of the moment.

No, it has to happen before.

Yeah, because when you're in the heat of the moment— because I mean, with Lyme, you know, with it, felt like we were just one tragedy to the next, one fire to the next, and it was hard to, to get in even those conversations. But you have to do it you know, not when you're stressed or, you know, when you have the plan ahead of time, you can follow it.

Yeah. And actually, I think what you were saying, Luis, about involving some type of a community, I think that would have been huge because I talked about it even amongst my family and different things, and we talked about trying to give you a break. If I would have handed that responsibility to them, I think it would've gone better.

Yeah, totally. And not being afraid to tell the people in your life, we're really exhausted, you know, going to your parents or to some of your friends and just saying, you know, we've been incredibly exhausted lately. I've been really struggling with finding a way to have my partner take some time off. I really need some support. I'm not asking for anything in particular, but I'm letting you know that I need support. Can you help me? People will jump. At the opportunity to support you if you ask for it. Yeah, it's, it's scary, but it really— when you do it, it's amazing. When, when I teach relationship courses and I have parents in the courses, what always happens is parents see each other and they go, hey, we should, you know, have an exchange day where I'll take your kids and you take mine. And that creates a really amazing, amazing— and fosters an incredible community of caretaking with each other. It takes a village not just to take care of kids, but to also take of us.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. So, and that's compassion fatigue, isn't it? That's like the term.

Yeah. Compassion fatigue is something that people who are social workers or RAs or caretakers of the elderly, anyone that works with people in the caretaking kind of field, and that includes teachers as well. When we are so involved with empathizing, caretaking for other people that we forget about ourselves. Not only that, when you're hearing somebody consistently stressed out, overwhelmed— I worked with— when I worked with homeless people, I ran— I helped run two shelters for homeless people as well as a housing program that, that got homes for homeless people. And there was days when I just come home exhausted. It is incredibly hard to listen to some of the stories you listen to. This is very similar in our families, in any any aspect of life where we're all caretakers. And if your partner's suffering some sort of chronic health thing, you're going to be listening and taking in that pain. And there's no way that you as a loving and caring person aren't absorbing some of that with the hope that, okay, if I just feel this for them, if I just listen enough, if I just help enough, they'll get over it. And that's not going to happen. Probably it will help, but ultimately your giving will be impacted if you're also not taking enough time for yourself.

And that's where community is incredibly essential, which is unfortunately the sicker I got, you know, because my process was really a 7-year downhill fiasco. The sicker I got, the harder it was for us to have community.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's kind of the key component with anybody who's suffering chronic illness or depression is getting them to have community. A woman one time called me a little bit after she divorced her husband and I knew both of them as a couple and they got divorced in my office and then they disappeared for a while. And eventually she realized, I can't handle this divorce and co-parenting 2 kids with 2 different men. I can't do this anymore. So she called me and she said, Luis, I'm severely depressed. You know, can I see you for an appointment? I said, sure. She didn't show up for the appointment and I called her and I said, what's going on? And she said, oh, well, I'm just really tired and, you know, maybe I just don't need it. And I said, You get over here. You called me and now I'm your coach and you have to get over here. I was so committed to her. I said, you just get here. We'll do the session. If it doesn't work for you, then it's free. Right? So she drove over, we did the session. She, during our session, she said, Luis, I want to kill myself. I really, I feel unmotivated when I wake up. I think about my kids and I barely desire doing anything, but I do it because I know they're there. And I just latched onto that for dear life. I said, "Okay, so you have some motivation and it's your children." And she said, "Yeah, but I wanna die. I think about it constantly." And I said, "But you think about your kids and you don't do it?" And she said, "Yes." And I said, "In this session, we're gonna bring that little focus of wanting to live for your kids and expand it." By the end of the session, she was laughing. Wow. And she signed up to do 6 sessions with me and at the end of those 6 sessions, She quit her job and got a different job where she was getting paid more. Her other coworkers who she was friends with said, "What's changed? You seem different." She started dating some different people. She referred one of her friends that couldn't afford my services. Her friend came to me, we started doing sessions, and she said, "My friend who saw you before me paid for me to come to these sessions and she bought all my packages, the whole package with you because she said he will help you." And so getting that community around you, whether it's a coach or listening to the show, but finding some sort of inspiration.

Yeah, that's a great suggestion. As you're talking, Luis, I seriously feel like you're casting insight on even some of the stuff we've gone through.

Yeah.

Even though I feel like we've talked it through and, you know, we are both giving 100%, I just feel like all of a sudden I'm even seeing things like that we could have done differently that really would have helped us tremendously. Even as far as like self-care.

Yeah.

You know, that was huge. And I would, you know, I would come at different times throughout the years and be like, hey, this isn't working. Like, how do we make this work? And one of the things that he would say is he, you know, because the illness was so consuming is, well, if the doctors can't figure out how to make it work, how can I figure out how to make it work?

Love it.

And I was trying to say like, no, our house, our family, like, how do, how do we keep this ship afloat when we feel like we're just like bailing water all the time? But enabling that community, because we did, as the years went on, we just couldn't keep up with our community.

Yeah, you know, one of the— yeah, go ahead.

I think, I mean, your point about getting into the community is, is, is excellent because I think if I could go back and tell myself back then, you need to get in a community, put that priority number one. So if you're in the middle, if you, the listener out there in the middle of your fight, get into community like Lewis suggested. Even Sarah and I sitting here are like, the light bulbs are going on. I'm like, we should have been in a tighter community, we should have put that more of a priority. It would have made—

it would have. And really what we ended up doing, and honestly we didn't know anything else to do, was we started functioning very reactively instead of proactively because, because the crisis just went on for so many years.

Yeah, it gets to a point where the wave overtakes you. Yeah, wave of chaos, and, and it wasn't letting us be— act proactively.

Yeah, that's how we felt. Like, yeah, we felt tied.

And, and so it's easy— it's an easy place to be, but you can't be okay with that. You can't sit in the tide of, of just reactive. You have to make— you know, even if it's the smallest thing as a chore chart or a date night night, once a week, once a month, whatever.

Yeah, so Luis, what about, you know, I felt like as the sicker I got, I really changed as a person. I was not like— I'm not a real high maintenance, I'm pretty happy-go-lucky. And, and the sicker I got, you know, the movements in the car would hurt me, and, and so I would react to the bumps in the car, which just created tension that we had never experienced before. Am I saying that right?

Yeah, for sure.

So how do you— you know, you get married and you marry the person that you want to be with, and then that illness changes that person. And I think now coming out of it, there's always good aspects of it, but how do you navigate that? Like, as your spouse is changing, like even that couple you were talking about He wasn't able to engage, and I felt that way so many times. I wanted to engage, but— and I did. I felt like I hung on for a really long time. But there comes that point where I felt like I didn't even know who I was.

Hmm. Hmm. So what's the question?

As the illness seeps in and literally like takes away who you are, I didn't feel like I had anything to give. Like, how do you move beyond survival and into that place of like, as this broken person, I still have something to offer? Does that make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. And my first response is someone married you because they're in love with you. And the number one thing that you offer is that they're in love with you. And that is not— that is beyond anything that you could ever tangibly go, well, I'm bringing money to the table, or I'm doing this or that. They're, they're in love with your essence. And essence is not something that you can really give. It's just who you are. And people are drawn and in love with that. Second, is that it's like our children. With our children, we're in love with their essence. I don't care what my child does, I will always love him. That's kind of the thoughts of any parent. So I relate it to that. That's the first base that I would start with anybody who's feeling that way. And then the second thing is I would really want to focus on, let's talk about you and helping you feel good and great and loving about yourself, because when you feel that way, you will know your value. If we start from the premise that it is my job to provide value for you and I'm not doing it, it's very flawed. The flaw, the flaw in that is that there is something wrong with me and I need to compensate for that. We want to really reverse that. It's really natural to feel that way. Relating that to my work with poor couples, because again, when I worked for that research project, everybody who entered that research project had to be at or below the poverty line. And 90% of my clientele or the people that we served were immigrants, many of them undocumented in the country. So, you know, afraid to drive in the car, afraid that they might lose their job, buying fake Social Security numbers or waiting outside of Lowe's or Home Depot large retail stores and picking up day jobs for the day and living somewhere with either a large group of people or renting out a place and having some sort of weird deal going on where if they got evicted, they'd have no rights whatsoever. So I worked with people who lived in that sense of constantly under stress.

Yeah.

And you try to come to a country and you don't speak the language and have kids in that country and then try to provide for them and be this is, you know, you want to be super dad and super mom, right? You want your kids to see you as that. And when you're not living up to that, it's incredibly painful. And then on top of that, your relationship is also there. So the thing that we really focused on is helping the individual feel good and helping the partnership really get tight to where I— it's okay for me to say I'm in pain and it's hard for me to be in this pain and your partner can say, I hear you and I want to join you. I want to help you. But first, let me just listen. Let me get good enough that I can hear your pain and you can tell me about it so clearly that you can relax for a moment. Relax because I'm gonna hold a really big container for you just to drop into and for you to cry, for you to feel angry, for you to feel sad. And from there, we'll work on the support piece.

Peace.

But first you need to be— you need to be and feel held and supported by me, by the partnership. Yeah. I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

Yeah, I think, um, as a guy, the mistake I've made is in those times, like you're just saying, where she's expressing herself, not wanting to fix it immediately. I think I've succeeded in that when she's telling me how much she's suffering, and to be able to sit there and listen to her, acknowledge her, instead of, oh, well, you need to take this medicine, or, oh, have you— you know, the guy's perspective a lot of times is, oh, well, you need to do this, this, and this in order to fix it, when that's not really what she's needing at that moment.

Well, you were really good. You were really gracious about that, right? I always felt like you listened to me. But you know what, a lot of our listeners— because I take calls for people who are thinking of going out to the treatment center that I went at out in Scottsdale. And so I talk to a ton of people every week who are trying to make these decisions. And one of the questions that I wanted to ask you, because it's just so heartbreaking, is there's a huge percentage of people out there who their spouse or significant other or parents— and, you know, these are all adults— they don't believe the pain is real, or they don't— and Lyme pain is so deep, like it's, it's indescribable. It's, to me, it's far worse than death. It's just this bone pain that is so constant. How do you function within a marriage or a relationship when you are dependent on people who don't believe you? Because I never had to deal with that. We didn't know what to do, but everybody believed me. But I feel like I'm, I'm fortunate in that sense because people with a history of depression and other things, they don't get believed. So how do you reconcile that, even in like deciding to stand up for yourself, if the people who should be supporting you don't trust you or don't believe what you're saying is true?

Definitely, definitely. It kind of makes me think of the work that I do with couples around infidelity and cheating cheating. Because when that happens, when a partner admits that they've been cheating and lying to their partner, what happens is that they all of a sudden— that person that admitted is, I'm free of the guilt, I'm not lying anymore, I told you the truth, I put it out, so you should trust me. You know, the partner who receives that news goes, oh my God, how could you lie? That puts everything that you've ever done and will ever do into question. And then there's a long process of ruminating over that revelation. Now I can't trust you. Why weren't you home at 6:30? Were you off doing this or that? And it's a very lengthy process to rebuild that trust. And there's one partner that says, you should believe me, you should trust me. And there's one other partner that says, you should trust me and believe me that I'm in an incredible amount of pain. And you need to believe that you need to do some work to make up that pain. Maybe it's not quite exactly a matchup the way that I intended, but the idea is that we can have a pain pain, and our partner will not understand it or will not connect to it. And it is incredibly— it just adds burden to the pain. And really, the first solution around that usually is really getting in touch with yourself and saying, you know, I feel this pain and it's there. And even though I want someone else to acknowledge it and they're not, I have to acknowledge it. And it's important to me to acknowledge that I'm in incredible amount of pain and that this hurts and I don't know what to do about it. I would love to have my partner believe me and support me. They're not doing that right now. So how do I meet that need for myself? So often we go to someone else hoping that they'll give us the support that we're really wanting. And if they don't give it to us, then we just get angry at them. And then we try to drive the point home to them. And that only really just exacerbates the pain. You know, I wanted to say enhance, but enhance is such a positive word. It really exacerbates the pain because now we're in pain, and now we're in pain about our pain, and we're suffering because someone else doesn't understand us, right? So we need to take that other person out of the equation as much as possible and acknowledge ourselves. I'm in pain, and I know that I'm in pain. And I want to do something about this. My partner's not listening. I need to find someone else that understands me. That's, that's why people generally end up cheating, and that would be why someone in an incredible amount of pain would shut off in a relationship, stay in it, and not be happy in it. We don't want either of those situations. So try to find someone else that understands your pain, whether it's through the community, whether it's listening to this show. There's other people that have been through what you're feeling, and they'll help help you get the resources and the connections of people that will guide you towards wellness. But don't focus on the fact that your partner doesn't understand you. It's not going to help you.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in talking even to the people that I'm talking to as I've been in these situations, I've had to just say, you know what, I have no idea what's going to happen with your marriage, but you have to take care of yourself. Like that's all you can do, really. It's all you can do to try to fix yourself, do the nutritional things that you need to do, whether or not you have that support.

Yeah, I, I love that suggestion, Luis, just because it seems to me logical that if you're focused on the pain that you can solve or that you can deal with, um, it would enable you or empower you to move forward where you're not focused on something that you can't control.

Oh yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, yeah, I like it. Thank you so much.

Yeah, we're just sitting here nodding our heads in agreement as you're talking. So finances are a huge thing, um, like when you're dating and you have money, or even when you're married and you have money and you get go out on dates and get dressed up and go have fun. It's awesome. And then for so many people in this realm, eventually all that money and all that energy goes into the illness. Yeah. So one of the very few things that we did that worked really well for us was we did room dates because we couldn't afford to go out. I didn't have the strength or stamina to go out in the evening, and we couldn't afford a babysitter, so we would put all our kids to bed early and watch a movie or something. That was one of our saving graces. But what do you do when— how do you get past that hurdle of really when there's no money to— there's no money to put into it? It just adds an element of restriction.

Money is a problem for rich couples almost in the same way that it is for incredibly impoverished couples. Really? Because, because couples constantly argue about money and how it should be spent, what it means. I mean, if you're like insanely rich, then okay, it's not a problem. But if you're doing well financially, but maybe you're saving up for some sort of project or there's something going on and your partner wants to spend that money for something else, and then they do it, right? So for me, money issues with couples is not so much about money. Most often cases, it's actually a symptom of something deeper, and it's about how they communicate about money. I've worked with couples that had— really didn't have any money, and they figured out a way to, you know, work, work through things. And I've worked with couples that had plenty of money and their number one argument was around money. So, right, right. But how— so really the question is, is how do you create connection? Right? When we're connected, we can talk and we can work out the money thing a lot easier. So I've worked with couples where they both had insane work schedules and they just kind of cross paths. Or, you know, when the husband comes home, he's exhausted, the kids are asleep, or he has to spend a little bit of time with the kids. And then he's super beat and he wants to fall asleep right away, but the wife wants to talk about what's been going on because she's been home all day, or she wants him to help out with some other chores, whatever it might be. One of the things that I've suggested, and I love, love, love your, your idea of room dates. I've never titled it that way, but I just love it, and I should add it to my list of 47 awesome date nights. Cool. And, and that is all about cheap date nights, you know, things that are very simple. But one of the things that I used to advise and still do is that if you have these crazy schedules or you're tight on money, is figure out very simple ways to have date nights. Walk around the block, pick some flowers for your partner. Your neighbors might not like, like you doing that, so do it a few blocks away. But grab a few little flowers, right, and make a little bundle, you know, and bring them home. Or go buy a card or make your own card. There's all sorts of ways to show appreciation to your partner, and that's really at the core of creating intimacy. One of the things that I've advised for couples that have crazy work schedules is at the end of the night, reserve 10 minutes, leave the lights on, and just have a short little pillow talk. Hey babe, it was wonderful to see you. How was your day? And then the husband can listen for a moment. She can ask, how was your day? Or, you know, can I massage your head or just put my hand on your chest and just, you know, can we hold each other for a moment while you fall asleep? I've suggested that to couples and they've come back and said, we did that for a week and now we've built that 10 minutes up to a half hour. Somehow when you're happier together, you will find more time to be together. So starting small and simple is great. I'm more than happy for your audience, if anyone's listening And if you two want to offer it, I'll send you my list of 47 awesome date nights, as well as a simple game that couples can play that has been shown by the research of the University of Washington. It's just kind of my own little spin on the game, but it's pretty much the exact game that they use, and it's been shown to help couples improve their love maps. And a love map, put very simply, is a map of your partner's internal world— their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their best friends, their dislikes, how they're changing. And this love map works exactly like your Google GPS. Now the thing about Google, when I first started using it, is I typed in an address and I ended up like miles away from where I wanted to be. I used to see these pictures on Facebook and it'd be like, Google did this to me, and it'd be a picture and they were at a dead end, you know. So very much like Google when it didn't work, if we don't update understate the map of our partner's internal world, we'll end up somewhere where we didn't mean to or in a dead end. We don't want that. We want to know how to navigate our partner accurately. So when they're upset, we know exactly what to say, how to touch them, how to greet them, how to meet them, what is it that they need, and then we can target very specific behavior to our partner. We don't want to treat people the way that we want to be treated. We want to know how they want to be treated and then do that So we want to keep that information up to date. The problem is once we've been with someone for a long time, or even a matter of months, their best friends change, their favorite food changes. Recently I went out to— was just out hanging out with some friends, and I came home and I brought what I thought was my partner's favorite food, and she said, "Oh, I don't really like that food anymore." And I bought a lot of it, and she— and I was like, "Oh, well, what happened?" Well, you know, I think they changed the chef or something, but it just— I don't know. I think they're using a different oil and seasonings and I just, I don't want to eat it. That was an opportunity for me to update my love map. Now let's say, you know, we're in an argument or something else a little bit more intense was happening. It would be really a huge asset for me to have that information up to date. So I'm offering all you listeners, you can just go over to the Lime Voice website, and you can download the 47 date nights and make it 48 if you want now with room dates, and that game that you can play. And all of these ideas are either really cheap or completely free.

Wow, that is awesome. Thank you so much.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

We'll definitely have that in the show notes and where you can get that on, on our podcast episodes.

Yeah. All right, Luis, let me ask you a couple personal questions. Questions here. Can you share with us— I know you talked about changing your diet and stuff, but as an adult, can you share one of your personal health habits that contributes to your success now?

I talked about it at the very beginning, and that's finding community. You know, recently, for the past week, I think I've been sleeping an average of anywhere from 3 hours to 6 or 7 hours a night, and I haven't woken up tired a single day. And it's because I've been focusing really, really powerfully on my community, fostering that community, and taking care of that community. So that is my pers— one of my favorite and most loved habits for health.

Huh, that is interesting.

Yeah, there's some research. I, I just want to add, my friend who is— he's at pretty much the most well-known university in the field of psychology and research, and unfortunately I can't think of the name of the university, but he's getting a PhD there. Full-ride scholarship. They're paying for everything plus paying him to do research while he's getting his PhD, and his work is really around resilience and what makes people that come from incredibly hard lives and hard backgrounds, like what makes an Oprah, what makes an Anthony Robbins, what makes these types of people incredibly successful. One of the things that he's found is the people that they gather themselves around. If you're a follower of John Maxwell, the pastor who's just incredibly famous, one of the things that he talks about is if you want to be a powerful leader, you need, you need to think of it like a vehicle. And first you need to get all the right people on that vehicle, right? And all of those people are essentially the wheels that will make that vehicle move. And if you don't have all the right people in there— well, first, if you're not executing and being a success yourself in that field, you probably won't be able to get the right people on that bus. But once you're doing pretty good in that field or doing great, you need to get the right people on your team, otherwise that bus won't move. Those are the wheels. So for me, community is a huge aspect of having success in any area. So wherever I want to find success, I find the people that are doing it and I try to become their friends.

Hmm, I love that.

Yeah, Luis, I feel like we've just scratched the surface of what you have to offer. For you listeners out there, you got to go check out his podcast, Lasting Love Connection. It's awesome. There's topic after topic. How many episodes do you have now?

I think I have close to 20. I've had people like Dr. John Gray, Harville Hendrix, anybody in the relationship field, I've had them. Or they're scheduled to come on the show. People are also welcome to check me out at lastingloveconnection.com. They can see my coaching services, tons of free stuff, and my partner does work around intimacy as well. So we'd love to hear from you. And also, you know, feel free to leave a rate and review here for the Lime Voice. They're doing some amazing— you guys are doing amazing work here. So thank you.

Well, thank you. Okay, before we go, Luis, do you have a book that you would recommend to our listeners? A book or an audiobook or something that if they really want to focus on this aspect of their life, a tool or resource that they could go to?

You know, when I think about people being in a lot of pain, I think of several different books. One of them for me is just poetry in general. Hafiz is an amazing poet. He has a book called The Gift, and it's really easy for you to just sit down, read a few lines, feel wonderful. And then set it back down.

Nice.

Wow.

Yeah. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes as well.

Yeah, poetry is supposed to be another one of those really therapeutic things.

Incredibly therapeutic for me. That's originally what I sought to get my degree in, is poetry. Wow. Yeah. Thanks so much, guys, for having me on the show. It's been a real blast.

Thank you so much. It's been fantastic. I feel like you've done an awesome awesome job of, of really giving hope to people who are in really difficult situations and are trying to make the most of it.

Yeah, thank you.

Disease is contrary to life. Therefore, wherever disease exists, life must also fight to exist.

Good job fighting, Lyme fighters. Keep it up. We'll see you next time. LymeVoice contains general information about medical medical conditions and treatments. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such. Okay, Lincoln? Okay. The medical information on LionVoice is provided as is without any representations, warranties, expressed or implied.

Okay?

Okay. LionVoice makes no representations or warranties in relation to the medical information on this podcast. You must not rely on the information on this podcast as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about your medical matter, you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. And for you, you consult your parents, okay?

Okay.

If you think you may be suffering from, from any medical condition, you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard disregard medical advice or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this podcast. Got it, Lincoln?

Got it.

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