Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of The Virtual Couch.
I'm your host, Tony Overbay. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist,
a certified mindful habit coach, and creator of the Magnetic Marriage Program.
Let me just start with this. I want to ask you something, because I just came
out of a session right before I'm hitting record.
Have you ever had a conversation with your spouse that somehow turned into a
disagreement? I was going to go with fight, but a disagreement about a disagreement,
maybe even about a disagreement that happened many, many years ago.
And it comes up over and over again.
And it feels like this circular questioning problem.
And it feels maddening. And you just feel stuck and misheard,
misunderstood. Because if you have had that experience, you're perfectly normal
and your relationship is experiencing things that relationships experience.
I find that so often connection has faded into just talking about logistics
and sometimes you'll say the right words.
How was your day? But is it just to check a box? And I love this phrase from
putting the first round of the magnetic marriage course together years ago.
Does it ever feel like your roommate's running a daycare with somebody that you used to date?
I've been a therapist now for over 20 years and a couples therapist for most,
if not all, of those 20 years.
And at this point, I've worked with well over 1,500 couples.
I can say that I know that you love each other.
But somewhere along the way, most likely you stop feeling connected and you might even not know why.
That's why I created the Magnetic Marriage Program in the first place.
I think it's for couples who do know that they love each other,
but they just can't seem to connect like they used to.
Or honestly, like they never really even had the right tools in the first place
because I know that they don't come from the factory.
They're things that you have to go and get and find. And often couples don't
even look for the tools until things have gotten in a pretty challenging place.
The next round of the Magnetic Marriage course is not open yet,
but the wait list is. And as has been the case in previous years, it feels fast.
So head to TonyOverbay.com slash magnetic and grab your spot on the wait list.
Your marriage may not be as bad off as you think it is. I just think you need
new tools. And I have those tools.
Let's at the very least help you learn what you don't even know that you don't
know about how to reconnect.
And on that note, follow me on Instagram at virtual.couch,
TikTok at virtualcouchsubstack at substack.com slash the virtual couch or sign
up for my newsletter at tonyoverbay.com and prepare to hear a lot about relationships moving forward.
Let's get to today's episode. Imagine this. You are drowning in responsibility.
You feel like you're managing everything and you're holding your entire life
together with duct tape and willpower and sheer determination.
You're grinding it out, as the kids say. And your partner, bless their heart,
may seem oblivious, checked out, living like they are still in their 20s.
Or you can flip it. Maybe you feel like you are the one that's constantly failing
and nothing that you do is ever good enough.
So you retreat into things like video games or hobbies or anything to get through the day.
And you're trying to make it through the day to get to the next one.
And then hopefully the weekend will be better.
If any of that sounds familiar, I think today's episode is going to be for you.
I've been working on this one for quite a while. And I'm going to share a story
about a fictional couple based on a very, very real situation.
And they are navigating a very real struggle. And we're going to call them Sarah
and Michael. And I truly believe, and they will now attest, that they were weeks
away from divorce when they first reached out and we started working together.
Sarah had become pure duty without any kind of desire, desire for life.
She was just working herself into exhaustion within the home and outside of
it. And what came with that is a lot of resentment.
And her husband, Michael, had become just pure desire, but very little discipline,
escaping into what he dubbed as freedom while his marriage was crumbling around him.
I believe that both of them were suffering from the same wound.
So today we're going to explore why your marriage might be this battleground
between what you think you should do and for the sake of today.
I know that no one likes to be should on, but we're going to use that word because
that's the right word today.
But things that you think that you should do, but what you actually want.
Even if you know what you want anymore or ever really knew what you wanted,
you just thought it would be better than it is.
And we're going to look at how these patterns show up across all kinds of family
traditions, spiritual traditions, cultures throughout history.
While I don't want to say that your problem is as old as time, what if it was though?
Because if that's the case, you're not doing it wrong. It's just,
this is where relationships get.
So I want to take you through the exact framework that I use with couples to
move more from a place of combat to connection.
And I also plan on getting pretty vulnerable about my own therapy work and why,
even as I'm talking about duty and desire, I realized why I sat on this episode
for a while, the word duty, I didn't like the way it made me feel.
It kind of made my chest tighten. And what I'm discovering about discipline,
and apparently it is a necessary thing.
But also we'll talk about values, personal growth, and one of my favorite concepts,
It's called Impermanence, about how accepting that nothing is permanent,
including your current beliefs and hopes and thoughts and dreams,
and how that might sound scary.
That also might be the most liberating thing that you ever truly embrace.
Let's get right to it. We'll call this the email that started it all.
It had a subject line I couldn't ignore. It was titled, Need Help, But Skeptical.
This is what Michael wrote. He said, Dr. Overbay, which I love that because
I'm not a doctor, but that does get my attention.
I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, not a clinical psychologist.
I don't have my doctorate in psychology, so I am not a doctor.
So he says, Dr. Overbay, I found your podcast through a friend.
My wife and I are struggling, and I think we need couples therapy,
me, but I'm honestly not really sure what to expect.
She seems really checked out lately. She's angry a lot. She won't go do things
with her friends, even when I tell her that she can.
We do fine financially, but she's always on me about what I spend my money on or how I spend my time.
I feel like she's become my mom instead of my wife. She just seems so anxious
and angry, and I want to fix this, but I also don't want to spend a bunch of
money sitting around with somebody who just says, tell me more about that for an hour.
I need actual tools. Can you help or should I look elsewhere? Okay.
First of all, tell me how that made you feel, listener. Before I tell you what
happened, let me point out what this email reveals because it is a goldmine
for a therapist. First, notice the language.
She seems checked out. She's angry. She won't go do things. She's always on
me. So everything's about what she's doing wrong.
Not really a single sentence about his own experience beyond feeling like she treats him like a child.
Second, he says, I tell her that she can go out with her friends.
Guys, if you're giving your wife permission to have a life, I think we've got a problem.
That's parental language, not the language of a partnership.
And third, he says, I want to fix this, but I also don't want to spend a lot of money.
Translation, fix my wife quickly and cheaply so I can get back to the things
that I want to do. Maybe here's the kicker.
I don't want somebody to just ask me how that makes me feel.
Michael, my friend, feelings are literally a giant part of relationships.
And if you don't want to talk about your feelings, you're looking more for some
sort of mechanic, not a real couples therapist.
So I could have easily said, hey, probably not your guy and moved on or not
responded. But something told me that Michael genuinely didn't know what he didn't know.
And I have a strong desire to help guys learn the things they didn't know because
I did not know the things that I did not know.
And I'm so grateful to continually learn things that I was not aware of that
can help me as an individual and in my relationships.
So he didn't know what he didn't know. He's stuck in a pattern and so was his
wife and neither could see it. So I did write back.
And after a few email exchanges, he and Sarah agreed to work with me.
And that's when things got interesting.
I like to meet with each person individually first because the story you tell
when you're alone or one-on-one with the therapist is usually closer to your
actual experience than the performance that you might put on when your spouse
is in the room, especially when you first meet with a therapist.
So Sarah came in first and I could absolutely track the exhaustion before she even sat down,
shoulders kind of tight and jaws set, eyes doing that thing where you can tell
she's on the verge of crying, but also doesn't really know who I am and doesn't
necessarily trust me and doesn't want to show weakness.
And so I'd asked her one of the most basic questions, what brings you in?
And that opened the floodgates.
And she told me that she feels like she's holding the entire relationship together,
their entire life together for that matter. And she thinks that Michael is oblivious.
She said, I wake up at 5, 5.30 every morning and I pack lunches and I get the
kids dressed and I make breakfast and then I end up dropping them off at school.
And she said she also works full days as a project manager and she'll pick them
up and she manages homework and she makes dinner, she does baths,
she handles bedtime routines.
And Michael, she did say he does work too, but when he gets home, he disconnects.
10 minutes, maybe chucking the kids around the room, half an hour or more on
the toilet, then turns to his phone, then video games with his clan,
then planning for his next mountain biking trip with his buddies.
So I asked her, what does that feel like for you? And she said,
I feel lonely and I feel exhausted and I feel invisible.
And then she said, one of these things that just, it sticks with you.
She said, I feel like I'm a machine that keeps everybody running and nobody
notices that until something breaks.
And then she said, I can't even remember the last time that I wanted anything for myself.
And so I brought some gentle awareness, pushed on that a little.
And I just said, what happens when
you even have a desire or when there is something that you want to do?
And she said, if I have anything like that, it feels like a threat.
And she said, especially if I hear of something that Michael wants to do, one of his desires.
She said, when Michael suggests going out or that she should do something for
herself or heaven forbid, when he tries to be intimate, She said she feels a wave of anger.
How can you think of that when there are permission slips to sign and the car
registration is overdue and sure you're going to get to it and the kitchen's
a disaster and I haven't called my mom back in three days and her son's struggling
in math and her daughter's the last one off the bench on her soccer team.
If I think about myself, that feels selfish.
And she said, yes, I struggle with perfectionism. This feels irresponsible.
And honestly, I get mad that he even suggests wanting to do something,
whether it's for himself or even me wanting to do something.
Because she said, I think he wants me to say yes to me doing something so he
won't feel guilty about all the stuff that he does for himself.
And so I asked, what would happen if you actually took a weekend away?
Because she had mentioned that her sister had invited her to some sort of spa retreat.
And her response was immediate. And she almost didn't even let me finish asking
the question. She said, how could I do that?
It's not because of money. It's because Michael couldn't handle it.
Because if I let myself want things, if I stop being vigilant,
everything's going to fall apart. And she said, somebody has to be the adult.
Somebody has to sacrifice. And at that point, she started to get really emotional.
She said, if I'm not the responsible one, and I did not know this was where
she was going next, she said, who am I?
What's even my value in the home or in the relationships?
So duty had become her entire identity. She completely severed it from any sense
of her own joy or her own desire.
And she'd been doing it for so long. That's just what it felt like to be her. It just was.
And when I did ask a little bit more about intimacy, and we're not even talking
that it has to be sex, but any kind of physical touch or cuddling or holding
hands or something, anything, she gave a pretty bitter laugh.
She said, that just feels like another thing on the to-do list.
Another person who needs something from me when I don't have a thing left to give.
She said, I can't actually remember the last time I wanted him. I just feel numb.
And then I feel guilty for feeling numb, which makes me resent him and feel worse about myself.
When I asked her what she resents the most, she was really clear that he still
gets to want things, that he still has these desires and pleasures and joy,
because that feels like a luxury that she can't afford.
It's like he's playing while I'm drowning. And then, thank goodness for humor,
she once said to him, I'm drowning. Why won't you even throw me a life preserver.
And then she said he made an inappropriate joke about, oh, the thing with the
big hole in the middle. She said, you can guess them what he said next.
And I couldn't help myself. And I laughed, kind of came out of nowhere.
And then she broke down and laughed too.
And we had a really funny moment. And what I liked about that was.
Man, that was so nice to see her have fun, even just in that moment.
And then when she was able to gather herself a bit, I asked,
have you ever shared moments like that with Michael?
These kind of comical or humorous moments? And she said, oh,
we used to, but she's like, I can't let myself do that now because then he'll
think that he's won and then he'll back off and he won't do any of the things
that I asked for him to do around the house.
And I asked her if she had experience with that. And she said,
no, but I'm sure that's what's going to happen.
And I know that right now I could do a whole thing on projection and emotional
maturity. And today is not that episode.
But Sarah had become the embodiment of duty while completely shutting down any
kind of her own desire or joy.
And that was eating her alive from the inside.
So Michael then comes in. Michael's energy was different.
I thought he would be jovial and bubbly and what a lot of guys are when they
come in to see me because he's the one who had reached out. But instead,
he came in and he just sat back, arms crossed, very defensive before I even
asked a question. And then it made sense why.
The first words out of his mouth were, Sarah probably painted me as this irresponsible
man-child who doesn't do anything around the house.
And I just told him, hey, I'm actually interested in your experience,
not hers. That's why we have these individual appointments.
And he softened a little bit and he's like, so basically you're telling me yeah
without telling me yes, which I did not play into.
He told me that he works hard, 50 plus hours a week as a software engineer.
But then he said, the second he walks in the door, or even as he's driving home,
I start feeling this tension.
And he said, it just feels like Sarah's keeping score of everything that I'm
not doing. And I'm constantly failing.
Like the teacher's disappointed in me. Like my mom's mad at me all over again.
So he said, yeah, I, he retreats, he games.
I did make a joke about toilet time. He said, it's definitely not a half an
hour, but he does say that he's planning retreats constantly.
Something to look forward to.
Because he said, because at least there, I'm not being evaluated or found lacking.
I asked if he viewed those things as an escape and he got defensive and he just
said, no, those are things that I have to do to survive.
But then his voice softened a little bit and he said, you have to understand,
I used to be able to make her laugh. When we first got married, we were spontaneous.
We decided at 9 p.m. to drive to the coast and watch the sunrise.
And he said that we would make love in the middle of the day.
She was alive. And now she's running on fumes and resentment.
And that resentment is toward me. And when I asked him when that changed,
he said, I think it was around the time that we had kids. And he said, I get it. Kids are hard.
But he said, it's like she decided
that being a good parent meant killing everything fun about yourself.
And it's like she expects me to do the same. And he told me about a few weeks
earlier when he'd found a babysitter. He did this on his own.
He made a reservation at a restaurant that Sarah used to love and told her,
keep Friday night open. And her response was,
that's the same night as a school fundraiser planning meeting.
You could have looked at the calendar.
And he said, that's a meeting that she could have skipped. And I asked him,
okay, what was that like for you? Because you put in this effort and you're
trying and his voice cracked.
And he said, she doesn't even want to be with me anymore. I'm just the guy who
helps pay the mortgage. And occasionally she wants me to discipline the kids.
I don't even feel like I'm her husband. I'm a roommate that she's constantly disappointed in.
And then when we talked a little bit about intimacy, he got really uncomfortable,
but honest. He said, we haven't had sex in months.
Before that, it was maybe once a month. It always felt like she was doing me
a favor and then just going through the motions. And he said,
I want to say that I'd rather have nothing than that because at least nothing is being honest.
But then he said, but then I
go with nothing and I just beat myself up and think what's wrong with me.
And I asked what he thought Sarah might say about why sex had stopped.
He said, she'll say that she's too tired and too stressed and too much on her
mind and that the kids have been pawing at her all day.
And then he paused. He said, here's the thing. She's choosing to be that stressed.
I made a little note on that one. I knew we'd be revisiting that.
And then he continued, she's choosing to take on every single responsibility to refuse help.
And then she resents everybody for not reading her mind.
And he told me that he often offers to help and to do more and asks, what can he do to help?
And then he said that she'll sigh like he was making it worse by asking.
I've seen this dynamic plenty where one partner says, just tell me what I can
do to help. And it's the right mouth.
It sounds helpful, but often it puts the mental load right back onto the other
person who is taking care of the things to now have to manage this person as well.
So over time, he said, I just stopped trying to connect.
Now, just do my thing, work and game and ride and try to do things with friends.
At least that's where I feel competent.
And I did take a dip back into feelings. What does that feel like?
And he did a nice job. He said, lonely. I miss my wife, but I have no idea how
to reach her when she's built up this wall of duties and responsibilities around herself.
And then with a little bit of edge, he said, pardon me, stop trying because I am angry.
She's chosen martyrdom over me and over us, and I can't compete with her need
to be the perpetual victim of her own life.
And I brought awareness to that language that did feel a bit harsh and he got
defensive. Well, maybe that's how I feel.
And the alternative becoming like her, he said, grinding through joyless duty every day.
He said to me, that's death. So when I asked what he was afraid would happen,
if he actually committed to some of the structure that Sarah wanted,
he got really uncomfortable. He said, I'll lose my mind. I'll disappear.
I'll just become another cog in this machine of her version of what family life is.
Everything that I love about myself, spontaneity and adventure and playfulness,
I think it will get ground down into nothing.
And he said, Sarah's already lost those parts of herself. I don't want to lose
them in me too. That's a lot.
Michael was protecting his desire for joy and adventure by refusing anything to do with duty.
And Sarah was protecting her duty by not allowing herself anything to do with desire or joy.
And both of them were starving, I think, for what the other person had,
but they definitely weren't aware of it. So when I brought them in together, I had a brief fantasy.
What if they both just said, you know what? We've been binging on your podcast. We get it now.
We are fluent in four pillars of connected conversation. We just wanted to pay you to say thanks.
That is not what happened. Within just a few seconds of me trying to introduce
a framework of how to communicate, they were already interrupting each other
and they were in their corners and their arms were folded and they were ready
for battle and they were sitting on opposite sides of the couch.
Yes, the marriage therapist does look at where you sit. And I stopped them and
I pointed out what had just happened.
That Sarah was so desperate to be heard and Michael not to be vilified and both
were so locked into that pattern that they couldn't even listen to me introduce
a concept that might help them.
And then Sarah launches right in. I feel like I'm the only adult in the relationship.
I manage everything. The kids schedules, the bills, the house.
And I also have a full-time job.
And Michael comes home and just wants to relax and play video games for hours
and go mountain biking. And I'm drowning in responsibility.
And Michael just immediately reacted. She makes it sound like I'm a deadbeat.
I work 50 plus hours a week. But the second I walk in the door,
here's your list. Do this. Fix that. Why didn't you remember this?
I feel like I'm just another item on our to-do list.
And then he does what a lot of guys, if I'm just going gender stereotype, do.
He went right to sex. faster than usually a first joint session would.
And we haven't had sex in months and we don't laugh anymore.
And he said, I married a woman I loved, not a hall monitor.
The classic division, it was so clear that Sarah had just completely identified
with duty and her entire self-worth was tied to being the responsible one.
She was screaming for him to acknowledge that he is not responsible.
Her genuine desires for things like rest and playfulness and intimacy and spontaneity,
they've been suppressed so long that I don't think she could remember what it
even felt like to be alive and free.
I believe that she truly identified that that is not something that even happens
when you're married and have kids.
Michael had built his whole life around escaping duty and structure because
to him, it felt like death.
And his genuine need for structure and purpose and to contribute,
it was buried so far under rebellion against Sarah's demands that even when
he did help around the house, it was with resentment.
Like he was doing time. He wasn't building a life together.
And both had these rehearsed speeches. It's what I call the greatest hits.
These familiar patterns, they fall into almost this flat affect.
And the same dance, attack and defend and withdraw and go apart for a day or two.
And then somebody finally pokes their head out of the bunker and,
hey, I'm sorry, are we okay?
And then, yeah, we're good. And then they're good. But that's not good.
That is the absence of bad.
And at this point, they can't tell the difference. It's just the dance.
It's how they co-regulate. So we identified a real core wound.
Sarah was able to eventually express that she secretly despised Michael for having any desire.
She was seeing that his desires as childish and selfish, and that her duty then
had become this joyless obligation, and it was just completely severed from
any kind of wanting. She couldn't even allow herself to want.
And Michael acknowledged that he resented Sarah for her martyrdom.
And that was a difficult conversation.
His pursuit for desire, gaming, biking, it left him also feeling hollow.
And I thought that was a really important point because Sarah just assumed that
that was him living his best life.
But he said it was hollow because it was his desire against something,
not a desire towards something.
That his pleasures had become escapes, not a way to fill his battery,
not genuine fulfillment.
And then Sarah's wound, if I let myself want things, if I relax my grip on responsibility,
everything falls apart, even though she hadn't allowed that to even be a thing.
So she said, desire feels dangerous, duty feels safe, even if it's killing me.
And Michael's wound, if I submit to duty and structure, I'm going to lose myself
and I'm going to become a robot.
Freedom and desire are the only things that are keeping him alive,
even if he feels like he's becoming more lonely.
And as a couples therapist, one of the worst forms of loneliness is being lonely
within your relationship.
So here's where things get really interesting. And I'm grateful that you've
made it this far in the podcast, because I want to connect Sarah and Michael's
story to something bigger, because I think their struggle is actually the story of so many marriages.
And this is what prompted me to want to do this episode. I was listening to
an interview recently with an author named Heidi White.
She was on a podcast from a guy named Jonathan Pajot.
It's called The Symbolic World. And I've listened to a handful of his episodes.
And if you don't know who he is, he's a French-Canadian Orthodox icon carver, an artist.
And this incredibly thoughtful guy who explores symbolism and meaning and patterns
and stories and art and culture, he often looks at how the same archetypal narratives
keep showing up across different traditions and time periods.
Heidi was on a show talking about a new book of hers called The Divided Soul.
And something that she said, I don't even feel bad being dramatic.
It stopped me in my tracks, had me write it down.
And I listened to it a few times over. And I went and got the transcript of
the podcast interview. But she talks about what she calls the fundamental wound
of human existence, and it's this division between duty and desire.
And what was really interesting, she uses the story of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden to illustrate this concept.
Now, before anybody tunes out, because I'm referencing a biblical story,
let me explain how I want to use this, because I thought Heidi did a nice job.
I want to take this story as my muse.
And when I say muse, I mean it in the sense of inspiration or a starting point
for contemplation, because it's the spark that gets us thinking about something deeper.
So, whether you believe literally in the story of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark
or Jesus turning water into wine, whether you believe them as literal historical
events or as metaphorical narratives or not at all, honestly,
it doesn't matter for what I'm about to share.
And here's what I find so fascinating.
When you step back and look at the similarities in so many stories that are
found in the Bible, also in other scriptural texts, in a variety of spiritual
traditions across cultures, in ancient mythology, you start to see patterns.
And the same themes emerge when we call these patterns archetypes,
these universal symbols and these narrative structures that appear across human
culture and throughout history.
The psychologist Carl Jung talked extensively about archetypes and these recurring
characters, these images and story patterns that seem to be baked into the human psyche.
Things like the hero's journey, the great flood, the fall from paradise,
the dying and rising god, the trickster, the wise old man.
He says that these aren't accidents. They're not just different cultures randomly
coming up with the same stories.
The point might be that these patterns appear in cultures that are separated
by vast distances and thousands of years who had no contact with each other.
The ancient Greeks weren't borrowing from the Sumerians, who weren't borrowing
from the indigenous Americans, who weren't borrowing from the Hindus,
but they're all telling versions of the same fundamental stories.
And what that suggests is that these narratives are tapping into something universal
about human psychology and about the human experience, what Carl Jung would
call the collective unconscious.
Now, depending on your belief system, honestly, this observation might land
differently for every one of you.
For some of my more Christian faith-based listeners, you might think,
okay, well, maybe all these cultures separated by time and space,
we're all trying to communicate about God.
Maybe they're all referring to your God just through different cultural lenses and language.
Maybe the universal nature of these stories is evidence of a universal truth
that different people intuited or that they were given access to,
and then it came through in the language
or the culture or the symbols and stories that they had access to.
Or maybe when you hear about this concept of people who knew nothing of each
other coming up with very remarkably similar stories to try and make sense of
things like suffering and death and rebirth and chaos and wisdom and discomfort
and uncertainty and the human condition,
for some, maybe it causes you to rethink your own belief system.
And maybe it raises questions about whether anybody has the complete picture
or whether we're all holding different pieces of the same puzzle.
I work with so many people navigating faith journey, faith crisis from high demand religion.
For some people, this realization does start to trigger a faith crisis or even
an existential crisis. And it's why so many people don't feel comfortable looking
outside of their own faith community to read those texts or those narratives
because it feels threatening.
Because if other cultures have flood stories, dying and rising God narratives,
and heroes journeys that predate or exist independently of my tradition,
what does that mean about what I've been taught?
And does that make my story any less special or less true or less meaningful?
I think that so much of this gets into the work that I love doing around emotional immaturity.
That all or nothing or black or white thinking. That if someone else has a different
experience or story than mine,
then that must mean that they think theirs is right and mine is wrong.
That's not emotionally mature. What if we can have different opinions and still
maintain connection with others?
And it doesn't have to be yours is right and mine is wrong.
And I want to acknowledge that this causes people to have a lot of discomfort
because this is part of the human experience.
It can be deeply unsettling to realize that what you thought was unique might
be part of a larger pattern.
But here's what I've witnessed in my own life and in the lives of so many clients.
For others, this realization actually can soften them up.
It opens them up. And instead of creating crisis, or maybe better said,
after they sit through the crisis and realize the world still spins and they're
okay, it can create more curiosity, more genuine humility about the human experience.
And it can allow people to more easily forgive themselves and others.
Because then they're able to embrace not only the very present moment,
but whatever their belief system is right there, right now, while also accepting
that it could most likely grow and shift and move and adapt as they continue through life.
Because every moment through life is the very first time that they've ever been them.
So check that out. Now I'm learning this. Now my thoughts are this.
And I'm here to personally testify to you that this has been one of the most
beautiful and liberating concepts that I never had a clue that I didn't know
about. because it leads me to want to know what else I don't know.
And I want to know what other people's experiences are and what are these archetypes
and what are these stories.
And over time, it's not scary. It's exciting because this is my own hero's journey.
The journey of discovering that I don't have to have everything figured out,
that I don't have to defend my beliefs against every single challenge.
And if somebody else has a different opinion, it doesn't mean that mine's wrong
and that theirs is right.
Growth and change aren't threats to my faith or my identity.
They're actually evidence that I'm alive and I'm engaged in life and that I'm paying attention.
I want to talk about this concept of impermanence. It's one of the most fascinating,
scary, and then liberating concepts that I've ever embraced.
Impermanence is the recognition that everything, literally everything,
is constantly changing, that nothing is fixed, that nothing is permanent,
not our bodies, not our thoughts, not our emotions, not our relationships,
not our beliefs, or our understanding of truth.
And I know, because I've been there, that for most people, at first,
that sounds terrifying.
It can even be accused of being nihilistic because if nothing's permanent,
well, then what can we count on? And what do we build our lives on? But here's the paradox.
When you truly embrace impermanence, it becomes profoundly healing because so
much of our suffering comes from trying to make things permanent that can't be.
And we cling to these beliefs that we think we have to defend forever.
We hold on to these versions of ourselves that no longer serve us.
And we stay in rigid positions because we're so afraid that changing our mind
means that we were wrong.
But we were just being in that moment based on how we felt and the things that we knew.
We knew what we knew because that's what we knew. So that feeling of being wrong
to the emotionally immature feels like death, like abandonment.
But what if changing your mind isn't death? What if it's growth?
What if your belief system evolving isn't betrayal, it's actual maturity?
And what if you could hold your current understanding with both seriousness
and lightness, knowing it matters deeply right now while also knowing it's not the final word?
Impermanence teaches us that the problem isn't change because change is inevitable.
Everything is changing. The problem is our resistance to change.
That's what causes anxiety. That's what causes depression.
I mean, there's chemical challenges with that as well. Don't get me wrong.
But our desperate clinging to certainty in an uncertain world,
our need to be right instead of curious, that's what causes a lot of stress and anxiety.
So now when Sarah realized that her rigid sense of duty wasn't permanent,
that she could actually accept that that is how she has felt and how she has
shown up until she doesn't anymore and then reconnect with desire,
it was initially terrifying.
And you can see why she desperately clung to this identity of who she felt she
needed to be. If I'm not the responsible one holding everything together,
who am I and what will happen to the family?
What if the family still survives? By embracing this concept of impermanence
and allowing herself to change, to grow, to become somebody who could hold both
duty and desire, that's part of what freed her.
And when Michael accepted that his rebellion against structure wasn't really
doing him a lot of favors either, he could start to evolve and embrace a little
bit of discipline without feeling like he was losing himself.
So much of this is, I'm afraid of this thing that I've never even done.
So I build up this narrative in the story that that is going to cause a certain
thing, but I've never even tried it.
He could start to practice some of this discipline without losing himself.
It felt like if he did that, he was going to give up his identity.
Instead of evolving, changing. For him, embracing that impermanence,
allowing himself to be more of this integrated version of himself,
that's actually what allowed him to reconnect with himself and allowed him to
show up better for Sarah.
We are all trying to figure out things that do not make sense because we cannot predict the future.
The brain is a prediction engine. It desperately wants to, and we sure don't
like discomfort and we want certainty.
And those are all fighting against each other. We're trying to create meaning
in a world that often feels chaotic and uncertain.
And maybe, just maybe, the healthiest approach isn't to lock down one interpretation
and then defend it against all others and try to have confirmation bias and
find all these reasons and conspiracy theories of why I have to be right.
What if the goal was to hold our current understanding with both commitment,
but also humility to say, hey, this is what I believe right now,
but I am open to the things that I don't know that I don't know.
This matters to me right now. It matters deeply, but I'm open to learning more. I'm open to being wrong.
And I don't even like the concepts in this setting of right and wrong because
I'm just showing up, thinking and feeling and believing the things I do until
maybe I don't any longer.
That's being open to growth. That's not weakness. That's wisdom.
That's the hero's journey.
That's what all these stories across all these traditions, I think,
are trying to teach us. Okay, back to the podcast. Somebody help me down off my soapbox.
Tell me off. I think I was having a moment. Back to the story of the Garden of Eden.
So it's one of these archetypal narratives and whether it happened exactly as
written or whether it's a profound metaphor for the human condition,
it contains something pretty true about our experience.
Here's what Heidi White argues using this story as her foundation.
She said, before the fall in Eden narrative, what Adam and Eve wanted to do
and what they should do were perfectly aligned.
Duty and desire were unified. And all of a sudden I'm listening.
I'm thinking, okay, tell me more. She said, they were given commandments,
be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, take dominion over all the creation,
eat from any trees of the garden.
Not that one, but everything else. And all these commandments were desirable to them.
They wanted what they should do, and they should do what they wanted.
There wasn't a division. How fascinating.
But then the character of the serpent comes in and does something brilliant and devastating.
He creates a false perception that fulfilling their duty, staying away from
that one tree, actually is going to prevent the fulfillment of your desire.
He makes them believe that what they want and what they should do are actually opposed to each other.
Kind of putting this in a different frame because I wanted to understand this
so desperately because it just felt like something was there.
The serpent's trick isn't to make them do something they don't want to do.
The trick was to convince them that the boundary, the one limitation placed
on them, is preventing them from getting what they actually desire.
He reframes the commandment from a loving protection into this repressive restriction.
He takes something that was actually aligned with their best interest and then
makes it seem like it's working against their best interest.
Or think of it this way. Before the serpent shows up, Adam and Eve experience
their one limitation is just part of a larger freedom.
It just is. They have an entire garden of delights, trees to enjoy,
fruit to eat, and meaningful work to do. and they have this intimate connection
with each other and with their dad, with God.
And then there's one tree that you can't eat from. But it wasn't experience
as deprivation, just was. It was part of the fabric of their reality.
But then the serpent narrows their focus about that tree.
Now we need to focus entirely on what you can't have, the forbidden other,
and convinces them that actually the thing you can't have, that one restriction,
turns out that's the key to happiness. I cannot believe the dad is keeping that
from you. What's up with that, right? Right.
Suddenly, everything that they have becomes invisible, and the one thing they
don't becomes everything.
And I thought of some modern examples. Imagine somebody who commits to their marriage vows.
They've chosen monogamy and commitment and faithfulness. And for a while,
that commitment, that is totally aligned with what they want,
because they want this deep intimacy and trust and this life built together
and these shared experiences, but they grow apart.
Then they meet somebody at work, gives them attention, makes them feel exciting and new again.
And then here comes the serpent's voice. Because, hey, your commitment to your
marriage actually is preventing you from being happy.
Real fulfillment would come from following this desire.
Staying faithful, that's just
a rule holding you back from what you really want. So that's fascinating.
The trick is the false dichotomy. The person starts to believe that their commitment,
duty, and their happiness, desire, are opposed.
When in reality, the momentary attraction, what if that's counterfeit of what they actually desire?
Which is a deep, lasting intimacy that can only come through commitment.
And I know as a practicing couples therapist that works with a lot of people
that are going through divorce, that there is a time and a place we can talk
about capacity where someone,
because of all the things that they bring into the relationship,
there might be a limit or a capacity issue where they aren't even aware of the
things they're not even aware of trying to show up different in a marriage.
Right now, I want to explain this process or this concept. Let me give you another example.
Because take somebody who is trying to get healthy and they commit to a nutrition
plan and exercise and they're going to move their body regularly.
That's their duty to themselves. And it's aligned with their desire to feel
good because when they have energy and they eat well and they get in better
shape, now they're going to be around for their kids and their grandkids.
Here comes the serpent's voice when they're stressed. You know that cookie?
Actually, that's what you want. So your discipline is preventing you from comfort and pleasure.
Real self-care would mean giving yourself what you want right now.
And suddenly, the boundary they set for themselves, which was actually in service
of their deeper values, if I eat right and I exercise, I do feel better,
but now it feels like oppression.
They're not experiencing this as, I'm choosing not to eat the cookie because
I value how I feel when I eat well. And if I start eating one cookie,
I'm eating the entire sleeve or box of Girl Scout cookies, hypothetically, thin mint.
They're experiencing stupid diets keeping me from what would really make me happy.
Now, back to another example. A parent sets boundaries with their teenager.
Curfew, screen time limits, expectations around homework and chores and things like that.
These boundaries are duties that the parent has taken on in service of what
they desire for their child.
Safety and healthy development and future opportunities and success.
The teenager though experiences it as restriction and
then the parent starts to internalize that and i felt this
one our kids are now adults but man this one i almost
hesitated to write because it's coming from a place of i'm
noticing some feelings of guilt because here comes the serpent's voice hey your
rules kind of making your kid miserable they'd be happier if you just let them
do whatever they want and then being a good parent means being their friend
and not their jailer and then the parent starts to believe that their duty of
trying to maintain boundaries as opposed to their desire of having a happy,
connected relationship with their kid.
And this is one I know I didn't know because I was afraid to put it in play at times.
I worried that if I held a boundary, then it was this all or nothing black and
white thing where then now my kid will not like me forever.
When in reality, the boundaries are essential to the child's well-being and
actually to the long-term relationship.
Or I thought a lot about somebody who's building a creative practice,
writing, painting, music, whatever.
They know that they need discipline and structure. Well, do they know?
I hope that they know. They probably know they need structure and discipline
to hone their craft, the practice.
That's the duty side. But then when it comes time to sit down and practice, here comes the serpent.
This feels like work. And real creativity should be spontaneous and joyful.
If you are forcing yourself, you're killing your artistic spirit.
And suddenly, the discipline that would actually lead to mastery and genuine
creative freedom down the road feels like it's opposed to their desire to be an artist.
The pattern is so familiar.
Take something that's actually protecting you or serving your deeper values.
Now reframe it as oppression or restriction and then convince you that true
fulfillment lies in abandoning that structure.
Make the boundary seem like the enemy of your happiness instead of the container for it.
The concept of the serpent, if it's a brilliant metaphor, if you believe in
it literally, but what that does is create a split in your perception where
there wasn't one before.
So all of a sudden, the concept of the serpent makes you experience your commitment
as constraint and your discipline as drudgery and your boundaries as barriers
and your responsibilities.
I couldn't think of anything that starts with the letter R and I love alliteration,
but your responsibility as burdens.
When in reality, these things are the structures that allow your deeper desires to flourish.
And then here's the toxic part. Once you believe that duty and desire are opposed
to each other, now you're kind of trapped.
Because if you follow desire, you might feel guilty about abandoning your commitments.
I'm going to sit down and practice every day on the piano, for example.
But then I'm not going to do that because I just want to be able to figure it
out and do it when I feel like I'm doing it.
Or you follow that duty, got to sit down and practice every day,
and you feel resentful that you're not, you don't like it, that you're not getting
what you want. Either way, you're divided against yourself.
Either way, you're suffering, and that's the wound. That's the fracture,
and that's what Sarah and Michael were living out in their marriage every day.
Heidi White then said, and the scripture tells us that Eve looked at the tree,
saw that it was desirable to eat, and that it would make one wise,
and it was then and only then that she decided to eat it, and that moment is
when desire and duty split.
That fracture, that fundamental wound is something that we keep replaying in
our own lives, psychologically, morally, and then we keep telling ourselves
the story over and over again in different forms because it captures something
essential about the human experience.
That's why Sarah had become pure duty without desire, that she'd organized her
entire life around what she should do, and she'd lost all connection to what she actually wanted.
And that disconnection made her resentful and exhausted and numb.
And then Michael had become pure desire without duty because he then had organized
his life around escaping responsibility because he experienced duty purely as constraint and death.
And that disconnection left him feeling hollow and lonely and defensive.
Here's the thing. True duty and true desire aren't opposed to each other.
They're meant to be unified.
And this part may sound a little counterintuitive. Stay with me.
This is probably not the part that I want to put into a clip or a reel.
But what if your duty as a spouse, either side, includes desiring your partner,
not as an obligation, but as part of what you've committed to cultivate, to figure out?
What if that's a me thing? and your duty as a parent, what if that includes
modeling things like joy and rest and accountability and emotional safety for
your children, not just productivity?
Desire without duty, without structure, I think it becomes slavery to impulses.
And then duty without desire becomes kind of a joyless obligation.
Think about learning to paint. You have a desire to create art.
You get really good at it. To get good at it, you need discipline.
You need to practice techniques that feel frustrating at first.
And if you follow every impulse without structure, you most likely won't develop mastery.
You might get somewhere, you might have fun, but if you only focus on technique
though without remembering why you wanted to paint in the first place, it can become a slog.
It can become drudgery. The same with an athlete.
Getting proficient and becoming really good at something requires practice and
repetition and frustration.
Those are things that seem to stifle the very reason that an athlete starts. Yeah.
But then if they stay consistent, and if they even let duty shape their desire,
then they eventually get freedom in their desire that they didn't have in the outset.
A real example, I mentioned my son in previous episodes. He had a wonderful,
amazing high school basketball career that led him to opportunities to play in college.
Four-year varsity starter, set a school record in scoring, four years of all league.
And I remember people saying so often that he was so lucky to have been blessed
with that gift. And I remember him coming to me once in high school after a
friend of his mom had said to him in front of her son, his friend,
that his friend just wasn't as blessed as my son was.
And my son telling me that the mom had no idea how often my son practiced,
not from a place of validation, but just to share my experience.
We had the standing rule with any of the kids that if they wanted to go on a
run, we went. If they wanted to talk about a friendship thing, we did.
If they wanted to talk about something with school, we did it.
If they wanted help with the project, let's do it. If my son wanted to go to
the church at night, even after a long day at work and put up shots, we did it.
It didn't matter if I had worked all day or not. Smile and say yes.
Did we go overboard at times? You bet we did. And I'm sure we created situations
where their lack of planning created an emergency for my wife or me,
but we were trying to figure things out as best as we could.
My point being, though, that the number of hours practice that he put in was
what allowed him the freedom to be as good as he was in the games.
And I know that there are people who have serious talent, but I have personally,
I don't know if I want to say never, but I don't feel like I've ever met somebody
who was an incredibly successful fill in the blank, whatever that is.
And I've had this opportunity to work with athletes and musicians and authors
and successful business people.
And yes, a lot of them had definite advantages due to their family finances
or positions in the community.
But there are plenty of people who also had those types of advantages who didn't
put in above average amounts of effort into whatever it was that they wanted to do.
For me personally, the number of Google Docs and unrecorded podcasts and recorded
podcasts that I've done nothing with that I've created over the last 10 to 15
years would be mind blowing.
I was thinking about this in a way, it's almost like the concept of epigenetics,
that we may have a genetic predisposition for something, let's say like anxiety,
but then if we grow up living on the beach and there are no financial issues
and we have an amazing, wonderful dog and life just flows,
it's as if that genetic predisposition doesn't become unlocked.
What if we have this predisposition for something, but then do we take advantage
of the opportunity to nurture those abilities or gifts?
So then to unlock true desire, I'm afraid, or maybe let me reframe that.
No, to unlock true desire, it's going to come with a free life course in duty or discipline.
Even if you have a number of stories that your brain's telling you about duty
or discipline, the greatest hits of those being things like,
well, I'm not very disciplined or I'm not even sure where to start.
Or what if this isn't something that will eventually pan out for me anyway,
or I'm not even sure if this is something that I would like to do,
and I want to turn this into some sort of almost infomercial now and say,
and as we're talking about this act now, your brain will also provide you with thoughts such as,
sure, but if I like doing this thing now, and if I do it too much,
then I won't like it anymore.
Or I can't pursue this thing because if I make it my focus or my job,
then it will lose all the magic.
I bring that up because I remember so well hearing that concept over and over
earlier in my career about if people just pursued their passions,
granted with discipline, then it would no longer be enjoyable.
And I would say, man, that's a great point until I remembered the very person
in my office who was saying that exact thing when I thought, wait a minute.
I did not care much for my 10 years in the computer software industry, and I love what I do now.
And it's been at the time that this happened, I was 15 years into my career, and I loved it.
And I love it more and more. And here I am another five or more years since,
and I still absolutely love it.
And I can't wait to continue to learn what else that I don't even know that
I don't know yet about myself, about relationships, of human behavior,
of parenting, of faith, you name it. When we don't discipline our desires,
we find ourselves reacting to these moment-by-moment impulses.
When we don't connect our duty to desire, we become dried-up, resentful machines.
Sarah actually needed what Michael had. Michael needed what Sarah had.
Sarah needed to reconnect with desire to remember that her duty to her family
includes her own flourishing, raising her emotional baseline.
And Michael needed to reconnect with duty to understand that his desire for
intimacy and connection can't be achieved through just escape and self-indulgence.
In sessions, I said to Sarah, you've become so identified with duty that you've
lost touch with an important truth.
Your duty as a human includes actively working on desire for life.
Your duty as a mom, what if that
includes modeling joy and rest for your children, not just productivity?
What would it mean if doing your duty to your family required you to reconnect
with what you genuinely want? And to Michael, you think you're pursuing desire,
but you've identified that you're just running away from things.
Real desire that kind of fulfills requires commitment and structure and discipline.
You say you want connection with Sarah, but you're not willing to do the small
daily acts that would make you trustworthy and present to her.
It's like he wants the harvest without planting anything.
The goal wasn't to get Sarah to loosen up and Michael to tighten up,
though behaviorally, over time, that might look like that's what happens.
The goal is to help them see that true duty is desirable.
That Sarah's duty to her family and to herself is not opposed to her flourishing.
It actually requires it.
A burnt-out, resentful, joyless mom doesn't serve anybody well, especially herself.
And true desire requires duty.
Michael's desire for intimacy and connection and a meaningful life can't be
achieved through escape and self-indulgence.
It requires the very commitment and discipline he's been trying to avoid.
So some of the homework that I assigned for Sarah, things like,
hey, this week, I want you to identify one thing that you genuinely want.
You don't even have to do it right now. Just be aware and not the things that
you think you should want, not what would be responsible to want.
But what do you want? What do you desire? What would bring you joy?
It could be as simple as a few minutes of reading a novel. It could be taking a bath.
It could be going to coffee with a friend. It could be going on a walk.
It could be just sitting outside and doing nothing.
And we'll get to the point where your assignment is to actually do it.
We need to identify it and then notice the guilt and understand that isn't being selfish.
It's part of your duty to remain human.
For Michael, that's where we got a little more pushback. Choose one small concrete daily duty.
Make the kids lunches. Do the dishes after dinner. Take out the trash without being asked.
And don't brag about it. Commit to it for a week, not because of Sarah's nagging,
but as a practice. And you don't need to get a trophy for it.
You can tell me about it as your therapist, But try not to just get the validation
from your wife for the thing that she does kind of all the time.
And then notice how it feels different when it's your choice,
when your structure is your choice, not a rebellion against her expectations.
And my own work. I need to be honest about something that came up for me while
working with Sarah and Michael.
When I first heard the word duty in Heidi White's podcast, boy,
did I have a negative reaction. I felt my own tightening in my chest.
Because words just don't have dictionary definitions. They have relational networks
of meaning that we've built up over our entire lives.
When I hear duty, my brain doesn't just think of responsibility and what a wonderful
thing to provide a container for my desires.
Oh, no, I pull up associations, being controlled, doing things I don't want
to do, lectures on responsibility, feeling trapped, resentment.
And I realized, oh, I'm more drawn to this desire side of the equation as well.
I love spontaneity, following what feels alive in the moment.
The idea of discipline and structure felt constraining. And honestly,
there were moments in the sessions, especially when Michael would talk where
I wanted to say, you know, Sarah, I think he's got a good point.
But then the more I've explored this concept, the more I've had to look honestly at my own life.
There are areas where I could use a lot more discipline and I can't just blame
it on, oh, it's my HD or I don't do a nice job with checklists.
My resistance to duty is sometimes actually, maybe it's my resistance to growth,
that fear of what the future may hold if I now actually do the thing that I've
always told myself that I want to do, something that I need to continue to examine.
And I want to touch briefly on values and values versus socially compliant goals.
I talked about this earlier in the year in an episode when I was talking about
New Year's resolutions, because this is where I love ACT, acceptance and commitment
therapies, emphasis on values versus socially compliant goals, that it's so crucial.
Values are the directions you choose for your life based on what truly matters
to you. And socially compliant goals are the things that you think that you're
supposed to do because others expect that.
Your parents instilled that in you, your community, your church.
You're trying to do these things because you think that's what you need to do,
especially to avoid judgment or to get validation or because that's just what responsible people do.
And socially compliant goals are exhausting because they're disconnected from your actual values.
They become stifling because if I don't even want to do the thing that I think
I'm supposed to do, then I'm going to turn to this concept called experiential avoidance.
I'm going to do anything else other than the thing that I think I'm supposed to want to do.
That is pure duty without desire.
That's Sarah doing everything perfectly because that's what a,
quote, good mom is supposed to do. Not because those specific things align with
what she genuinely values about motherhood.
But that's where you can see it can get tricky because you can't discover your
values just by asking what you want in the moment.
You have to go on the hero's journey. that process of leaving the comfortable,
of facing challenges, of confronting your own shadow and coming back with wisdom
about who you actually are.
And the way you're going to find out who you are is to do things,
to explore, to be open, to, I struggle with the concept of failure,
but to not having a wonderful time in the thing that you're doing.
Because once you know what matters to you, not what you think should matter,
not what your parents think should matter, not what the algorithm on Instagram
or TikTok, things should matter, then discipline stops being duty in the heavy obligatory sense.
It starts to feel more like aligned action.
I think of a musician that I worked with once who valued mastery and creative expression.
And I will tell you, he did not experience practicing scales or just the daily
grind as soul crushing drudgery.
He said, it's just what you do when you're moving towards something that you genuinely desire.
Discipline in the service of something that genuinely matters,
something that you genuinely desire, that unifies duty with desire.
So Sarah needed to distinguish between values that she actually held,
being present with her children, creating a loving home, contributing through
her work, and the socially compliant goals she'd absorbed about what a,
quote, good wife and mother should look like.
And once she was able to make that distinction, then some of the duties became
lighter because they were aligned with her values.
Others she let go of entirely because they were performative obligations.
And Michael had to do the same thing to distinguish his genuine values,
playfulness, adventure, connection, curiosity. He wanted to be a present father
from his immature, reactive rebellion against structure.
And once he could see that discipline in certain areas would actually serve
his values, then he was able to embrace it differently.
Find your own words, the words themselves, duty and desire. That might carry
different baggage for different people. If you need different words,
you can do that. You're an adult.
Instead of duty, you can try commitment. What you've chosen to be accountable
to, structure, the framework that supports your goals, discipline,
the practice that builds mastery or responsibility. what you've chosen to steward,
integrity, alignment between your values and your actions.
Or instead of desire, you might try longing, what your soul is drawn toward
or aspiration, what you're reaching for or passion, what energizes you,
what moves you, aliveness, what makes you feel like you want to go out and live.
The point isn't the specific words. The point is integration.
The point is bringing together the part of you that knows what matters,
values, desire, longing, or the part of you that can commit to consistent action
in that direction, discipline, structure, duty, commitment.
And it's that integration that doesn't happen by accident. It requires figuring
out what you actually value, what you actually care about.
And you can hopefully see that when you are just stuck in this things I have
to do, it's also providing you with a little bit of a reason to not figure out
what really matters to you.
Having the honesty to distinguish your values from the socially compliant goals
and be willing to embrace discipline, not as a soul-crushing obligation,
but as a path toward what you actually want, is going to help.
So where are they now? I have been working with Sarah and Michael off and on
for quite a while. They come in for regular checkups. They've had some setbacks in conversations.
Sometimes the conversations completely derail, but they keep coming back to
the framework and continuing to work together.
And Sarah is doing an amazing job figuring out what she wants and what she desires.
And there was a brief moment where they both feared that they would figure out
who they were and what they didn't like each other, this new version of each
other. And I said, that would be a thing.
And that was a story that their brain was trying to hook to,
to keep them from figuring out what really mattered.
She went on spa weekend, started reading fiction before bed instead of scrolling
through her to-do list or her social media feed.
She's learning that wanting things actually is not selfish and it can be uncomfortable
and enjoyable at the same time.
She can actually hold both of those feelings at the same time.
And being human is what it takes to be a good human and a good wife and a good mom.
And she's also done the harder work of distinguishing her actual values from
these socially compliant goals. And that's taken a lot of undoing as it came
with a free faith crisis that came along with it that she wasn't even aware of.
She realized that so much of her duties, keeping the house magazine perfect,
volunteering for every school committee, weren't connected to what she valued.
It was performative. It was what she thought she was supposed to do.
And then she's learned to let a lot of that go and the world still spins.
And Michael actually loves her even more as she's becoming more of her authentic self.
And Michael is surprisingly starting to embrace discipline to the point where
I am having counter-transference, realizing, oh wait, he's doing more of the
thing that we've been talking about than I sure have.
He's been committed to doing more morning routines. He's started walking in
and taking action on things that needed to be done instead of waiting to be assigned tasks.
He's learning that structure and commitment do not kill spontaneity.
They actually create this foundation for intimacy because now Sarah just has
an overall feeling of trust for him.
You can't have a real adventure without planning it out. And you can still be
spontaneous within those plans.
You can't have deep connection without consistent presence and you can't be
dependable without some discipline.
The goal isn't to choose between duty and desire or between structure and spontaneity
or commitment and passion.
It's bringing those things together because that's what marriage is supposed
to be. The vows are literally the integration.
I want you, desire, passion, longing, and I commit to you, duty,
devotion, discipline as one unified reality.
And the work is to remarry each other however many times you need to.
So if you're listening and you're recognizing yourself, whether you're the Sarah
who's lost her sense of desire or the Michael who's avoiding all sense of duty
and discipline, I want you to know you're not broken.
You are divided and division can be healed.
It is time to do something about it. And I want you to go to TonyOverbay.com slash magnetic.
Get on the wait list, if anything, because I'm going to talk about so much of
this and ways to communicate and connect using my four pillars of a connected
conversation framework. We're going to talk about differentiation.
We're going to talk about the need for validation, what emotional immaturity,
the role that plays, and so many things that you did not know that you did not know.
I want to help you go on your own hero's journey to discover what you actually
value versus what you think you're supposed to and find out what matters to
you and help you be willing to embrace the discipline required to move toward it.
It takes work to get success, and that includes in your marriage.
Your marriage does not have to be a battleground between duty and desire or
between structure and spontaneity or between what you should do and what you want to do.
It needs to be this feast where both are present and both are celebrated.
When you're no longer divided against yourself first and then each other,
you can really start to have an intimate connection. That's the work and it is so worth it.
If you have questions or thoughts or your own stories, reach out, I'd love to hear them.
And then taking us out per usual, the wonderful, the talented Aurora Florence
with her song, It's Wonderful because I'm telling you, if you get the right
tools, it really can be. Have a great week and we'll see you next time.