Solution Focused Venting: Complaining Is NOT helping YOU!

There's healthy ways that people can recover and vent. I mean, look at brunch on any given Saturday or Sunday where there's a bunch of women together, and maybe some of them are married, some aren't. And it's just basically a cat fight session about how terrible men are. Well, men do that, too, in their caves, or they go watch sports for a whole weekend and drink beer. There's these unhealthy dynamics of venting. What's a healthy way for us to vent as men and women? Like, what does healthy venting actually look like? Maybe I've heard from John Gray, who sat on this show a few times. He said, you know, you should actually never complain to your woman. You should actually never vent to your woman. But. But twofold. How do we vent to each other in a healthy, conscious way as men and women? And how do we vent to our friends in a healthy, conscious way while still upholding the sacredness of the relationship?

There's a. I have a perfect example of this that. That has always stuck with me. When I was going through my training programs and becoming a therapist, there was a woman that I worked with, and all she wanted to do every single day was complain about her husband to all the other women at work. She would just. And complain and complain, complain. I would walk through and overhear, and every word she said was a complaint about her husband. Until one day, I just kind of. I was in the same room, and she. And she started venting to me. And I said, wow, sounds like you really hate your husband. And it stopped her in her tracks that hard. And she said, what do you mean? She said. I said, I've never heard you say a single good thing about him. So I can only assume he's a horrible monster, that you absolutely hate him. I'm sorry you're married to him. And she was so blown away. She's like, no, my. Like, start stuttering. I know. He. And. And then she just shut down at the. She shut down visibly right in front of me, like, trying to calculate. And then she just walked away. And then she came back to me a couple days later and said, adam, I just want to thank you. I had never been aware that all I was doing was just negatively complaining about my husband. From then on, she would say a concern about her husband, but then ask somebody, what could I do about this solution? Focused sharing. Solution. Focused venting. Share a concern. Look for a solution. That's the proper outcome. It was amazing. Her marriage turned around in a matter of weeks when she started Doing that. All of a sudden, her marriage turned around, and she was telling us, like, guys, it worked. It was amazing. I actually talked to my husband, and he did this, and he did, and it's. It's wonderful. And we finally got to meet him, and he was a nice guy all along. He was a wonderful man. And it transformed their marriage in a matter of weeks when she started having a solution attached to the venting.

I wonder if there's ever a time where it's actually healthy for a sacred marriage, a sacred, intimate union for. For a man or woman to vent outside the relationship. Is it only with a trusted therapist? Like we work with a woman named Margo Running? I absolutely love her. We just launched an episode a few weeks back about some very deep, powerful, healing work that we did.

Awesome. Of that. It was fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah. I mean, it was literally groundbreaking. And we've gotten more messages and more flooding of just feedback about the depths of vulnerability that people are now looking at. In other words, like you said earlier, what. What. What is possible? What's the evidence I can gather about what I actually want versus me being stuck almost, Adam, in a trench or in a groove of where I am and just incessantly complaining about that?

And let me say really quick about that. I actually respect both of you tremendously for doing that, because the world needs people who have platforms to stand up and say, this is what's possible. Let's show you. Let's show the world a couple working diligently to resolve issues instead of just splitting off, having different partners, being angry, having a messy divorce. We've seen enough of that. You guys are creating a huge counterpoint that the world needs. So thank you for doing that.

Thank you for seeing that. Thank you for acknowledging that, man. Yeah. So I'm. I'm. One thing I've learned is that when I was young, one of my. Because I have a very, at times, anxious attachment style. So as Carrie and I work towards secure together, of course, like a perfect puzzle piece, she had more of an avoidant tendency from childhood. And so before. Before we jump off this pod, which we gotta go into attachment styles, because it's not. It's not only attachment Adam, on Instagram that y' all need to follow, but it's so much depth of your work. But I wonder, Adam, what is a healthy way for me to go outside the relationship so that I can actually learn, not just event, not just to tell people how crazy my partner is for her and I both and for all of Us in intimate relationships, sometimes when we're this close to the elephant, we can't see the whole thing. Is it just with a therapist? Is there trusted cohorts we can go to? I lead a men's group here in Austin, and there's 10 of us that we have a very structured way of giving and receiving feedback, which is something I learned from Johnny Blackburn and also John Wineland. So there's structure there. But what does it look like for you? How do you. How do you tell clients and how do you share with your clientele to have those trusted networks outside of themselves with the sole intention of positive feedback, of actually moving them in direction that they want to go? What does that. What does that even look like?

Two pieces here. Two pieces. I always have two pieces. So it's two pieces. Number one is know the two different sides of your brain, right? Have your calm, logical side. That's 20 year, 20 year thinking long term. This is where you would consider yourself is over on the calm, logical side. The emotional right side is like five seconds in the future. Maximize pleasure, minimize pain, and handle all my feelings and everything over here. This is like a drunk monkey with a gun. This is your calm self over here with everything that you want. Be aware that when your emotions go much higher and you've got something that provokes you repeatedly, it drains the functioning of your logical brain to fuel these emotional storms. So when you're like this, oh, no, something's upsetting me, you're like this. You need to go to a brain that is calm and level like this. Low emotion, high logic, and then do what we call processing, right? Process with them. You talk it through and you actually link in and lease their. Their logic. Because you can't let me think logically about this problem and how I feel, but also feel better as I go. So when someone listens to you vent, that's what that's supposed to be, is they're supposed to listen and say, oh, is it like that? Oh, what do you mean, is there a problem here? And they. And they help you process it so you don't feel sc. You're borrowing their nervous system and you're borrowing their logical brain, and it diminishes your emotional agitation. Get back to logic. Then you begin sharing solutions. Then you've been thinking of ways through this. Women do this very intuitively. This is why women do what they do. And they share and connect. They're supposed to kind of guide men into that a little bit. Men are supposed to do that as well. But Women do this beautifully. Number two, every brain, but especially men are like this is. We are meant to connect in a massive, what I call the male solution network. We are like data nodes that are all scattered across the Earth. 3. Point point five billion male data nodes that are supposed to link up into a vast blinking net of data nodes that share solutions and data about problems. And we are supposed to see one guy solves a problem and it ripples outward to everybody else over generations. So everyone has that solution. That's how we got fire. That's how we got the wheel. That's how we have cell phones. That's how we have the Internet. That's how we have everything that we has been passed down to us is this, this data node cluster that passes things down. Now what has happened is men are now isolated. It's individual little data nodes. I must solve every problem in existence alone, without any input from anybody else. Not only problems from the past, but problems from the future. Every single problem. And that man becomes trapped. That man becomes depressed. He. He inevitably hits a problem he can't solve. He doesn't have the skills for it or the training. You connect up to another data node that has your data. Whether that's a therapist who's a specialized mentor is really what a therapist is. Another kind of mentor. In old days they had uncles, grandfathers, fathers, everybody, all kinds of mentors. We're trying to replace the kith and kin network now with a bunch paid professionals and. And pseudo families basically. But you connect to data node clusters that have solutions and then you gather all of those solutions. That is the answer. So share so that your emotional brain levels out and is calm and then seek solutions from healthier networks. That is the answer right there.

Yeah. A key indicator of like I loved how you said you're actually borrowing their nervous system. That's really big. Whenever y' all are out there and you're getting advice from someone that you think is trustworthy and you notice that they're actually telling you what to and agitating your nervous system more or encouraging the faults that you're complaining to them about their partner, it probably ain't a wise elder. It probably ain't a skilled psychotherapist. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because I've definitely experienced that. And I work to regulate myself when giving and receiving feedback from men or just friends so that I can actually let them borrow my nervous system. It's so key. It's so key.

There's something that's interesting here. So I've done some research on the formation of more that racist out group kind of rejection. And what's fascinating is some of it is learned when children are 2, 3 years old and they see somebody who's very, very different from their parents or from those, the clusters they're around. I'm very white, so I'll just use this expression. A small, you know, a white child from a white family walking along and then they see a person with very dark black skin and they go, and it's unusual. So then what they do and you know this, what all kids do is they go and they look at the parent to see what their parent is doing. How is mom or dad reacting? Is mom or dad scared? Did they grab my hand tighter? Did they pull me in closer? Are they scared? Are they nervous? We hurrying past that person, Are we scared? Is this supposed to be scary? If the, if, you know, if this person with dark skin wakes up and says, hey, how you doing? And the dad says, oh, and gives him a big hug. Now we've learned, okay, people with dark skin don't have to be scary. They just look a little bit different. It's kind of like wearing a hat. It's just a little bit different, right? They learn this, they learn these differences from us. So when you have lived your whole life being scared, scared, scared, and you find a mentor, it's you trying to look up to your mentor and say, are they scared? Like I, my, my husband is talking about, you know, whatever it might be. My husband mentioned to me that he's not very happy. I'm going to share that with my mentor. Does my mentor say, you need to leave this guy, he's going to leave you, he's going to screw you over. Men who don't think that this is just the beginning, right, their nervous system goes up and you go, I should be scared. But if you walk in and your therapist or you pastor or priest or whoever it is, they say, well, you know, that can, that's, it's good that he's sharing that with you. He's actually speaking to you about it. What are some other things that he has said or have you, can you ask him some questions? Let's look at that. Let's, let's think about this. And they're calm and they're steady and they're methodical. Their emotions don't spike. They stay like this. Your emotions say, oh, I don't have to be scared. I can calm down. And that is exactly what you need to look for. Like you said, don't look for the person who's escalating with you. Look for the person who has already done the work and is not scared. That will help.

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