Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Balancing the Light and the Darkness

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

We are diving deep today into two complex listener-submitted questions that touch on some of life's most challenging and poignant moments. First, a dedicated father struggling with marital strife and seeking advice on how to make a smooth transition for his children amidst a looming divorce. His heartfelt story highlights the complexities of family dynamics and the impact of parental conflict on young minds. Next, shifting gears to address a question from a 27-year-old martial artist from Ohio, who grapples with balancing the darker aspects of self-defense training with the need to appreciate the brighter side of life. Here is the link to the new podcast hat: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/collections/hats  

Good morning, everyone. It is Friday. The weekend is just around the corner, which is kind of awesome. Two questions for today. First one's a little bit long, I think. Trying to keep it right around 30 minutes. It seems like the sweet spot for a Q&A on a Friday. What else is new?

I think that's about it. Release some hats. I think I'm wearing one right now. there's a couple left in black and green you can go to shop.com to pick one up if you want to or you can just let the sun get in your eyes it's up to you let's do this to the smoke i'm looking at danger close now all righty here we go let's dive directly into the first email i am going to a lot of the times i'll read the entire email and then try to work my way back through it i am going to kind of just stop on this one as we

we go and provide my thoughts in the moment. And I think you'll understand why I'm going. There's a little bit here. By that, I mean, there's a lot to unpack, and I don't want to miss something that I think might be important. So here we go. Hey, man, my name is redacted. Been a listener for a long time. Have learned lots and practiced a lot of what you have preached, except for one thing, and I wish I would have listened. You have talked more than one time about not arguing with your spouse in front of your kids. I'll stop right there. I have talked about how I have fallen short of that many times. I wish that I have a perfect track record on this. And probably the reason that I bring it up is I feel guilty about it to this

day. One of the best pieces of advice that I think I can give is when it comes to your relationship with your significant other. If it's not going well, don't have that out in front of your kids. It is not your job to air your dirty laundry to your kids or in front of your kids. I'm not saying hide the realities of life from them, the pick and choose where you're going to provide criticism of your significant other. Back to the email. I have an 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl.

It's an awesome split. You are going to experience the full spectrum of parenting. They are freaking awesome kids. My wife talks down to me, or on me, I should say, all the time. I've been going on a few years now. I've always just disengaged from the conversation when she acts like this to try not to make a scene around my kids. But I am human, and I have a breaking point. Today is the third time that I have snapped recently.

And it ended in my wife saying, fuck you in front of the kids and telling me she is divorcing me. As soon as that happened, I walked away because I was not going to have that conversation in front of my two children. Now, I'm not the only one who feels she pushes me to these limits. I'm going to stop here. I understand as much as anybody else in the world. The desire to say, somebody pushed me to fill in the blank. Say something. Do something.

feel a certain way. When the real sentence is, I allowed myself to fill in the blank. Like I said, oh my God, I understand as much, if not more than most people, how easy and seductive it is to say, well, that is somebody else's fault. I only did X because you did Y, which terminated in Z, which is a shit so for everybody. Don't let yourself say that. your wife's behavior is on your wife. Your behavior is on you. Unless you are in a situation where you think bodily harm is going to come to your children, if you get it to a place where you snap that, I'm not going to say your wife didn't have a hand in that,

but if you snap, that is on you because you have the ability to detach from that sense, situation, physically remove yourself from that situation, to not engage in that situation, to not allow yourself to snap. Nobody can force you to do that. And it sucks to say that because it puts all the emphasis back on people owning their own shit, myself included. And I'd so much rather say, when I fall short of the person that I want to be, that it's that person's fault. But there is truth to the saying, anytime you're pointing a finger at somebody, there is three pointing back at you. Super true, super tough, but super meaningful. Your wife didn't make you snap. You allowed yourself to snap. And don't forget that. And hopefully that can help you

moving forward recognizing when you're getting to that place and doing something about it before the kettle boils over. I get it. I opened with how many times I have fallen short. I totally understand, but let's not lie to ourselves or other people. Okay. Now, I'm not the only one who feels she pushes me to these limits. Her own mother and friends tell me all the time that I shouldn't take that from her. And maybe being too patient in the beginning made her feel she's allowed to talk to me the way that she does. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making my own excuses in my head. I'm a little fucked up about it right now. However, I know things were going south several months ago, when my son came up to me and asked,

why is Mommy always mad at you? Why is Mommy always yelling at us for no reason? How come Mommy never plays with us? Why does Mommy always get mad at you when you play with us? The list goes on, but I think you get the picture. It breaks my heart that my kids pick up on all of this. This is also one of the things I wish I had done better in my previous marriage. your children are sponges and as I age as a parent I swear though that I'm not even sure this is possible

but whatever type of sponge children seem to be made out of they really pick up or they're attuned to the bad things or the things that you wouldn't want them to pick up on and it's like they're made out of teflon when you modeled behavior that you would want them to pick up on It's, or maybe it's the, you know, a thousand out of boys are erased by one, oh shit. Or maybe it's somewhere in between. Don't lie to yourself as parents. You're, it's not, I don't think it's a matter of you being not good at hiding things from your kids. Kids are really good at picking up on things that you don't want them to.

They hear, they listen, they may not process the same, but they are gathering. and uptaking information at a velocity that, quite frankly, I wish I could have slowed down at certain times in my life. So again, let's not lie to ourselves or fool ourselves that our kids aren't seeing what's actually going on. There's a reason why your child, I was going to say confronted, but that's not the right word. Your child asked you about these things. And I suspect it's not because she heard or saw them once. In my experience with kids, maybe because that processing and your communication ability is a little bit different, it takes them a little bit more exposure to come to you. I'm sorry that that happened, but for all the parents out there are people

and relationships that involve kids, man, your kids are picking up more than you actually think that they are, at least in my experience. All right, let's go back. Where was I? The list goes on, but I think you get the picture. It breaks my heart that my kids pick up on this. And consider in the past getting a divorce because of it. But I do love my wife and I couldn't do it even if I felt like my marriage was damaging my kids. I do love my wife and I couldn't do it even if I felt like my marriage was damaging my kids. This was a hard sentence for me to read, to see you haven't written this out because in my opinion, your role as a parent is primary above all. And I get that you love your wife, regardless of how she may be treating you

or how things are currently going in your situation. But your children are innocent. They didn't choose to come into this life. They didn't choose to be a part of this marriage, whether it's going well or catastrophically falling apart. And it is your fucking job to protect them. And as a father, I cannot fathom somebody arriving at a headspace where they would say, I wouldn't leave a relationship with somebody, which is voluntary, by the way, being in a relationship, even if it was damaging my kids, which is a relationship that is involuntary. Once you are a father, you are a father. You don't, well, I mean, I guess some people do make the choice to detach from that.

and be dead beats or another version that I prefer more is a piece of shit but your kids have no choice in that and in my opinion neither do you so I'm sorry for what I'm about to say and maybe you're writing this out emotionally but what the fuck is wrong with you your priorities are completely backwards in this and I'm not just saying, I'm not trying to judge you as a person, I'm just saying this sentence in a snapshot in time that I think you might have written emotionally. Your priorities are backwards in this. And I would challenge you to sit with that sentence in that sentence alone for a little bit. Engage the depth of your soul here for a second and determine whether or not you are actually

willing to stay with somebody who is not treating you well, even if it was going to damage your kids. And if you were, why? That doesn't make any sense to. me. So I don't want to belabor that anymore. Let's move on from there. I'm not perfect. Neither is anybody else in this world. So you're not alone in that boat. I work at town because I decided to be funny in high school and I didn't go to college. So I work lots of overtime to pay our bills and get a spy. I feel like my wife resents me for it, but also yells at me and tells me I'm broke and we don't have enough money to do something she wants. You know, I have three kids. my middle son is going to, he did a semester of junior college and he's getting ready to go to full-time school in Bozeman here in August.

Of my three kids, I would say he might be the only one that enters higher education. I have none, literally not a second, barely scraped through and graduated high school. And I am not for or against college. even when I was growing up and definitely in the generations before me, the traditional path was this. You go to high school, you go to college, you get your degree, and you go and find a job that is working in that degree field. That was the traditional path. I don't know if that path is as valid anymore. If you pair that with the predatory nature, my opinion, of student debt, student lending, that deviates from any other lending policy.

that you could ever get for anything else in your life. You'd never get a car or a house or a loan of any kind with that lack of debt, income or proven ability to pay it back. But whatever, let's just saddle young children with six or, you know, multiple six-figure debt earlier on in their life. That sounds like a fucking great idea. Some higher education is great. Like if you have an advanced degree, you're going to be a doctor, an engineer, a specialist,

of course. Whoever's going to build the bridges I drive over, please go to college. If I ever need brain surgery, please, please, please, please. have gone to medical school and all the training that you need. But outside of that, I think it's time we start looking at not going to the traditional education route into higher education a little bit differently. I have watched my kids reinvent the way that they teach themselves, and it's largely through the internet. And I feel like had I had that tool when I was their age, I might have done the same thing. But they did have that tool, and they do have that tool. And I have watched my kids

teach themselves things that exceed at least meat, but definitely exceed sometimes what they are learning in traditional brick and mortar school. There are a lot of career fields out there right now that don't require higher education. So I would say it's not negative thing that you didn't go to higher education. You're busting you ass to pay your bills. And that was kind of like a tangential aside. I think we should start a conversation around, I'm not saying that college isn't valuable. perhaps the conversation should be how valuable is it and does it have that level of value for everybody is it the right call for everybody that's the conversation i'd like to have my question here on this one is you know you have kids that are eight and five why isn't your wife contributing and people be like fuck you she's the homemaker if that's the case you didn't actually mention it in the email and i get that headspace

i understand that position but i also understand the realities of life and there are plenty of dual income families that have an eight-year-old in a five-year-old. Pretty soon your kids are going to be at school. The eight-year-old probably is. The five-year-old is getting really close to being at school. And your wife's going to have six to eight hours a day with which she could dedicate to whatever she wants to. If she wants to complain about not having enough money and is currently not allocating any of her time to bring in additional income, to me, there's a conversation to be had there. I'm not going to say that she's wrong, but there's a conversation to be had. Clean up your own room before you complain about the tidiness of somebody else's. If she doesn't think you have enough money and you're out there busting your ass,

pop on board, sweetheart, pull up your socks, straighten out the old sleeves on whatever workjacket it may be, and get in the fucking trenches. And that sucks for me to say, because I know there's a lot of people that don't have the ability to do that. But if you want it bad enough, if you need it bad enough, you're going to find a way. sitting there and bitching about it and complaining about it while not being part of the solution is a pretty good recipe to never get there. Where are we at? So I don't know where the balance is there. That was back to a sentence after talking about the money. I feel like I've tried everything to make my wife and kids happy. And I've come to the sad truth that the only time my wife is happy is when I'm

miserable. When I give up and quit doing everything I love and focus 100% of me on her, then she is happy. maybe a divorce is what's best. I told her I want to go to marriage counseling and she refuses. This was my last ditch effort to try and fix this and she won't even try. We are 30 years old and I've been together since we were 19. For people who have listened to the podcast before, I don't go into details about my divorce, but one thing I have said is if I was able to go back in time and give my younger self some advice, it would be very simple.

It would be that maybe wait until I was a little bit older. and that has nothing to do with the person that I ended up marrying. It has everything to do with me. I was 23 when I got married. And I don't even recognize the 23-year-old that I was, which I think is very natural. I'm actually double that age right now. People grow, and you can find somebody and grow together. It happens all the time. There's examples of that. But you can also find somebody and you can grow apart. And if you guys got together, or you're 30 and you got together since you were 19. Let me check them out. on that, that's 11 years. You got together very, very young. Neither men nor women or fully functioned, formed human beings at the age of 19.

It doesn't surprise me at all that you may have found stretches of time where you grew apart. Don't rush to get married. For people who aren't in the situation, if you found your person, fucking awesome. And there are, of course, people that can get married. young and it lasts for a lifetime. But they are anomalous. The math, the stats are not in your favor. But if you wait a little bit, it does in fact tip the stats at least a little bit. It's going to be hard work either way. The perfect relationship does not exist. The perfect person doesn't exist. You can grow together. But at 30, it doesn't surprise me that you guys are much different

than you were at 19. I bet you, the person who wrote this email, feels like a much different person. I bet your wife does as well. And sometimes what you want at 19 is what you despise at the age of 30. And that is not talking about your partner. That's just your values in life and the way that you view the world. If she is unwilling to go to marriage counseling, what does that say to you? you are with somebody who is unwilling to invest anything into saving what you have. Is that worth fighting for? Is this the person worth fighting for? Are you the best version of yourself in this relationship? Or are you finding yourself expressing things and being the person that you don't want to be? Because you're in that relationship, these are all questions for you to

answer. Completely heartbroken that I can see the end in front of me. I know I've been a good dad and I thought I had been the best husband I could be, but I have failed her and those kids. There is a question coming, so sorry for the useless info. I'm kind of treating this email as if I'm talking to a therapist, which I am not, by the way. So I'm sorry about that, but it doesn't look like my marriage will last past another month. I'm going to stop you right there. Even if you guys decide to get a divorce, and you can go through this amicably, your marriage is going to last for probably another six months, potentially another few years. And it's going to last. It may not exist in the shape of you sharing a home. It may exist in the terms of you sharing custody and co-parenting.

But these things take time. You've been together long enough that there's going to be some legal involvement in unwinding this. And maybe it could happen in a month. My suspicion is it will be many, many multiples of that. So prepare yourself for a little bit of a harder road or a longer journey. My kids are so young and will be so confused. What can I do, in your opinion, to make this the easiest transition I can for them? I know my wife is going to try and convince them. I'm a monster because I can hear her in the next room as I'm typing this, telling them that I am a mean and don't care about her at all. I'm going to take your advice on this part and just leave that alone because I don't want to fight in front of my kids anymore. But how do I let them know

that I am not a monster and will be there for them no matter what my life, my wife is telling them otherwise? Any info would be great. Thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I know you've helped many people already. Hoo, rough ending there for sure. It's a horrible situation. You are trying to figure out ways to not pour negativity and hatred. and maliciousness into your kids while somebody else is. So, I mean, you have some choices. You could match her behavior, which I absolutely don't advocate, even though a lot of people go down that path.

They're like, oh, yeah? Well, she said this. Let me tell you about her. Oh, mommy said this about me. Let me tell you this about mommy. Who, please don't do that. Another thing you could do, an option that you have, is for every incorrect or negative thing that your wife tells your children, you could spend time trying to argue with them,

not argue with them, but argue on your behalf and tell the other side of your story, which is also not an option that I recommend. Having said that, I'm going to carve out a caveat there, if somebody is telling your children something about you that is horrendously untrue, oh, he abuses me, oh, he cheated on me, he's a predator, things like, like that, address it. No, that is not true. That is a lie. Nobody should be saying that to you. Like, address those things head on. I'm not saying devote a Steinbeck novel to trying to like get down to the granular detail, but address those things. Beyond that, as much as what I'm about to tell you is going to suck. This is, I'm pretty consistent in this theme and narrative when people

are in this situation. The best thing that you can do is get yourself into the best headspace, to the best mental space, the best physical space, and be the best version of yourself that you can possibly be for your kids. Based only on this email that you have written to me with no other data to make this hypothesis and what I'm about to say. So I could be completely wrong,

but based on a single email from somebody that I don't know describing the situation and I understand that it is only from your eyes, not hers, I would say that the situation that you are in right now is one that is not conducive to you being the best version of yourself. And I am not advocating for you to leave or I'm not advocating for you to get a divorce. Those are decisions that you have to make. But ask yourself, am I even capable of being the best version of myself in the situation

that I am in? Or do I need to change that situation, even if it is detrimental to me in the short term, and maybe even, I don't want to say detrimental to, but damaging to my kids in the short term to create an environment for long-term growth, health, and happiness. Only you can answer that. You have to find a place where you can be the best version of yourself. You don't have to tell your kids that you are. You show them that you are.

You model the behavior that you want to see from yourself. You wrap your arms around your children metaphorically and literally, and you shower them with love. You live up to every aspect and every ounce of, of being a father. Because being a father is a lot more than being just a sperm donor, right? That's the biological requirements of it. We're talking about everything beyond that, of what it means to be a man and what it means

to be a father. You're still going to fall short from time to time. We all do. Address your mistakes. Learn from them and don't repeat them. You cannot make anybody else happy. There's no way that anything that you do is going to make your wife happy. She has got to find happiness on her own.

And she may be much happier without you. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just may mean you're not a good fit for each other. If she won't go to counseling, I don't know what to tell you other than what I would do is give her an ultimatum. You either come to counseling with me or we're fucking done. And if she says no, be done. Don't say we're done.

And then 20 days later, weasel your way back in there. For whatever reason, that's what's going on between your legs makes you want to do that. All right? There's plenty of fish in the sea. if you know what I mean. And I'm not saying explore with that while you're in this process. Later on down the line, you have plenty of time for that. You're still 30. Find the best version of yourself and determine where that is going to be and then drive towards it. It's the best advice I can give you.

Well, like I said, this is why we only have two questions for today. All right, shifting gears. A 27-year-old hooligan from Ohio. I marry my best friend in a few weeks. Congratulations. And I'm getting settled into a good job that I started in Feb. In my free time, I have way too many hobbies than I have. have time for, but I have spent a great deal of time learning martial arts at least these last three years. Awesome. I have had a relationship with training and fitness most of my life.

My father is a faith, my father is faithful to his karate that he started training in the 70s. I learned under him from when I was about 11 until I graduated high school. In college, I played rugby, my father would be proud. Having never watched or played it before, damn. I wonder what that would be like. That's got to be a fast learning curve. Impressive, though, for sure and cool that your school had a rugby team it was a blast since then i started learning boxing in 2021 started brazilian jihitsu in 2022 now with four-stripe white belt which for people who don't know about brazilian jihitsu it goes white blue purple brown black a lot of schools will give you four stripes at each belt so it's kind of like a micro progression mark as you move along the way so

he's at a four-stripe white belt about to become a blue and join a hybrid combatives program blending striking and ground fighting in 2023 for a more practical self-deafing defense training. When it comes to practical training, I never want to have to be in a defensive situation to save my loved one's life or my own. I also know that sometimes we don't have a choice. I spend some time reading about watching videos and journaling defensive scenarios to help get better prepared. Should I find myself in such an unfortunate event? I believe that no one is 100% prepared for anything ever. You are, in my opinion, 100% correct. You just too many variables. But if you focus on a lot of the foundations, it'll prepare you for a broad, a breadth and depth of challenges you may feel or not feel but face.

In my opinion, at least, it's all it counts for. But we can train resiliency to make better decisions in high stress situations. Could not agree more. Test yourself before the world tests you. Bend yourself before the world throws a situation at you that bends you. That's how you develop mental toughness, physical prowess, physical ability, skills, all those things. It's incremental exposure over time, and then when you get to game day, you're ready for it. Long story short, my question is, when spending so much time thinking about fucked up shit,

do you have a method to balance thinking about the dark stuff and enjoying the beautiful and bright things in life? I want to stay focused and realistic. I also want to avoid going down a rabbit hole of paranoia. Any suggestions you have on what you think strikes a good balance of light and dark is appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read my little essay, and thanks for being a positive influence. in people's lives. P.S. My wife, or soon-to-be wife and I are taking our honeymoon in Montana in July. Excellent choice, sir. And we'll be checking out the Calispell BRCC shop Friday, July 12th. Can't wait to see it. I am in town that day. Hit me up with another email. If I am available,

I will come meet you and buy you a coffee as a honeymoon gift, maybe even a t-shirt, perhaps some cookies to go with your coffee. How do you balance the time between the dark and the light? well maybe one of the easiest things you can do and this might sound overly simple is set a time boundary for how much time you want to spend diving into this uh you know there's there's timers on apps of almost every kind social media being a great example um you can put a governor on how much time you can spend on social media rabbit holes looking at shit that will have no impact on your life and becoming emotionally attached to it you can set it for 30 minutes and you can set it for an hour or probably I don't have one, but I've heard about these things. And I think you could set it for whatever you want to. And I think that that is healthy. What you're doing is you are bracketing your attention span on a particular topic, topic, subject, app, whatever it may be. And then you can move on.

So I would pick a certain amount of time. Maybe it's an hour a day. I don't necessarily do this myself. And I don't know if that's the right answer. If it doesn't seem like enough, 90 minutes. If it seems like too much, 30 minutes. The point being is this. Go down your rabbit holes.

but do it for a limited period of time. The math is in your favor and everybody else's favor on planet Earth. Your likelihood of somebody trying to kill you in real life is, in fact, very, very low. Your likelihood of encountering violence in real life is very, very low. I am not saying that because I want people to ignore those things. It is the reality of exposure to the statistics. Now, that's great, right? The odds are being bitten by a great white shirt.

are super, super low. If one is wrapping its teeth around you, fuck the odds. It doesn't really matter. And hopefully, that's actually probably not a good example because I don't know what you're supposed to do with the shark.

I'm like maybe poking in the eyes or punched in the nose. I don't know. Point being, stats are great until the shark's biting you. And then it's like, fuck, do these stats really matter? No, because I'm being bitten.

So they are statistically close to anomalous events, but they shouldn't be ignored. If it is statistically anomalous, I think it's safe to say you shouldn't spend the lion's share of your time focusing on it. So how do we do that? We bracket ourselves with time. If you are already dedicating time in your week, you're already doing jiu-jitsu, all these things,

that's your time, I think, to think about these situations, to dive into rabbit holes, to maybe even do some scenario-based training and then leave it there. Have a dedicated time to prepare yourself, body, mind, physically and emotionally, mentally, and then build that rolodex of knowledge. Small incremental pieces of exposure that can build up to a vast breadth and depth over time. And then if somebody ends up jumping into your swimming pool, fuck, they might not know how to swim.

And that's exactly where you want to be. I love jiu-jitsu. I do jiu-jitsu almost every single day. I have no desire to hurt anybody. But if I have to, I will break every fucking limb in their body to protect my loved ones. I'm not looking for an opportunity to do that, but I will be prepared for that. But I don't spend hours every day thinking about those scenarios.

I'll train for an hour, maybe two hours if I'm going to take a class before rolling, and then that's it. And I don't spend the rest of my day looking at what ifs. And now I will say this. I have almost two decades of a forced what if looking for, surveying, for training for worst case scenario. So that, of course, I have the benefit of that. And that can't be ignored.

For years, I was unable to stop looking at the what-ifs. And there are, it's a real thing. You hear people say, like, oh, I can't sit with my back to the middle of a room. And they're hyper-aware and hyper-cognizant. And honestly, I don't think that's a way to live either. And the training, I don't think is supposed to take you to that point, which goes back to the first email that came in. I don't think the training can take you to that point, but you can allow it to.

It is you that got yourself to that point. You didn't put in control metrics. You didn't recognize it first. You didn't take corrective behaviors before you got there. It's not the training's fault. It's what you allowed the training to do, what you allowed the training to do. Not what the training allowed itself to do. So again, getting a little long winded, but tying it back into the first question.

Hard bracket yourself. And man, one of the best things to do, to enjoy the light is to take the time to appreciate what you have, where you are, what you're doing, the things that you get to do with your time. You have more hobbies than you have time for, which is awesome. Be present in those hobbies and activities and enjoy them. I think that's the best way you can balance the dark and the light. Spend some time preparing for the dark, but recognize and realize that most of us live,

the vast majority of our time and our life in that light. Don't ignore the shadows. It's carry a flashlight. Make sure it has batteries. And that's all I have for this Friday. See you guys on Monday.