Good Life Project - Stan Tatkin: Love, Danger, Deviance and Conflict.

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

How do you keep love alive? It's not what you think!This week, we're diving deep into love, romance, danger, conflict, fact, fantasy and truth with Dr. Stan Tatkin, (http://www.stantatkin.com/) a clinician, researcher, teacher, and developer of a Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT). Tatkin's practice is based in Calabasas, California, where for the last 20 years he has specialized in working with couples, and also individuals who want to be in a relationship.Tatkin and his wife, Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin, Ph.D., founded the PACT Institute (https://thepactinstitute.com/) where they train psychotherapists to use the PACT method in their clinical practice. They lead couple workshops and train therapists all over the world.Tatkin is also the author of numerous books, including Wired for LOVE: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship. (http://amzn.to/2GKMJWK)-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, you gotta love yourself before you can love another person. You gotta know yourself before you can be in a relationship. I mean, it's all bullshit because developmentally, we don't do anything by ourselves without having it done first to us. So we learn everything from the outside in, in the beginning, and then we learn it, you know, in tandem. I learn to love myself at the same time as I learned to love you. They're together. They coexist. I learned to know myself by knowing you very well and being open to

you what you have to say about me, because that's how I know myself is in connection to another person. It's all interactive. It's all intersubjective. So these ideas give people the notion that they should not be in relationship, but practice in a cave or read a book or go to therapy, which is not a bad idea, of course, or just do workshops. But this is a learning by doing. You can't learn outside of a relationship. You have to be in one and fail and learn and fail and get better and learn and so on. When this week's guest, Stan Tatkin's marriage melted down, he really was at a loss. He was a skilled therapist, somebody who had built his career helping people, understanding dysfunction on all levels and personality disorders and challenges.

And for some reason, when things started to go south in the most meaningful relationship in his life, he couldn't figure out how to turn down the heat. That marriage eventually ended up ending, but it also set in motion a really deep and profound exploration of how people build relationships together, what goes right, what goes wrong, the biology, the psychology, the neurology behind them. And it led him to completely shift directions in his career. allow people who are in partnership, whether that is business partnership, familial partnership, romantic partnership, to create and to help fix things that are massively dysfunctional, and then to build really deeply meaningful, connected lives together. That actually eventually led him to his own new relationship and to then build not just a life, but also a

career along with his wife and write a series of books, Wired for Love, Wired for Dating, and a number of others, and also found the PACT Institute, which has developed a really powerful methodology to help people both unwind and understand current relationships and then do a whole lot of myth busting and then rebuild or build really powerful, sustainable, long-term relationships. It's a really rich conversation. I learned a ton. It's got me thinking about a lot of the ways that I move into my own relationships in my life.

Really excited to share this with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

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Flight risk. So there are a lot of things that I want to explore with you. So as we sit here, you have a long standing therapy practice focusing very much on partners and couples, co-founder with your wife of an institute. And I want to get into that and I want to get into a lot of your ideas. I want to take a step back though, before we do that, because when I look all over to do a little bit of research, I see a whole lot about your professional, quote, bio, but not a whole lot before that. Because that didn't exist.

That was before penitentiary. I was in a private island somewhere. And I'm always curious, when somebody becomes so sort of hyper-focused on one particular topic and exploration, what is it in your life that led you to that curiosity about this thing? Well, divorce. Before this, well, let me go back to my early life, which was as a musician.

That was my life until 26, 27. What'd you play? Drums. Ah. Drummer. I come from a show business family, a musical family, so that was my life until it wasn't. And I scrambled around trying to find myself for a good four or five years until I decided to go back to school. And once I did in

the field of psychology, I loved it. And I never looked back. I kind of looked back a little bit, took a while to make the transition from being what I thought I would be my whole life, which was a professional musician, to this new idea of being a therapist. But I took to it very strongly. And I had a series of really fortunate experiences and mentors in my life. One of them wasn't John Bradshaw per se, because I only worked for him. But the experience of working at the Bradshaw Center really cut my teeth on working with difficult populations. Tell me more about the Bradshaw Center and what that is. John Bradshaw was popular during the time of Pia Melody and others who were coining terms like codependency, co-alcoholic, getting into early family systems. John was, I think, instrumental for getting people

into therapy who otherwise would never have gone. He was really great at that. So he opened up a center called the John Bracha Center, which was actually, there were three of them in sequence, but located in a hospital. And I was part of that. I came on board fairly early and became one of the lead group therapists. So through that experience, I learned how to deal with or learned how to survive in a very difficult atmosphere with a patient population that had a lot of what is known as disorders of the self or personality disorders. And from there, because it was so difficult working with that population, I came across my next mentor, Jim Masterson, James Masterson. He's located here, actually, at his institute. He has since passed away. And Jim Masterson was the expert at the time on personality disorders.

And that's what I thought after leaving Bradshaw that I would do, is I would specialize in that area, which I did. But I also lucked into a gig charter hospital where I became director of the outpatient drug and alcohol program, something I really didn't want to do, but it was an opportunity to work after Bradshaw. And I did that for a couple of years. But during this time, I was also a teacher, also taught college. And I became very interested in prevention, preventing personality disorders, preventing psychopathology, starting with infant mother pairs. So I studied this prevention model that came out of the Hinks Institute up in Toronto. And I retooled my practice to work with caregiver infant pairs. And oddly enough,

as much as I love that work, it's very hard in this country to get people to do this, to come in. There are other countries like in Canada and other countries where it's mandated with at-risk mothers to do that kind of a hot divorce, meaning the whole relationship was so head-spinning, and what went wrong seemed to go wrong very quickly. We were still hot when we divorced. It wasn't cold. It wasn't like what happens many times. People are just done. We weren't really so done as we were still in a fight. And when that happened, it really crushed me. The divorce, I couldn't make sense of it. I mean, I could and I couldn't. And as I was studying the brain, and in particular, the autonomic nervous system, it occurred to me that one of the big

problems that I had had, or that we had had, was in co-regulating distress states, my ex-wife and I. That means that two nervous systems hitting each other at the same time in distress, creating what I now think of as a threat state. Not purposely, of course, not intentionally, but something that can happen psychologically and subpsychologically between two individuals who happen to hit each other in the same places at the same time. It would be like you and I being on fire at the same time, over and over again. And nobody is there to put us out, right? And that's what would happen to us. We would hit each other in the same places that were so untenable that we would quickly spiral into this biological threat state where now I see it as fight or flight that neither of us could get out of.

And it was head-scratching. And when that happened, I was very impressed with John Gottman's papers that he had first come out with on the psychobiology of couples. And John Gottman has done a lot of wonderful research up at the University of Washington, Washington State. And so along with my learning about infant attachment and arousal regulation and infant brain development, I started to make the transfer to adult pair bonding. And my memory is such that it's hard to know exactly how that happened. But I think I was obsessed with what had happened in my marriage. And I

took that obsession and started to transfer everything I had known and studied to adult pair bonding issues. Two therapists in a relationship going through this, you know, it's from the outside looking in, you would wonder, you know, well, these are two people who are trained in the psychology of situations like this. Surely they would be the ones who would be able to zoom the lens out and look down and see what's really happening. And I think there's probably a lot of mythology, right? Like when you're in it or in it, it doesn't matter who you are, what your training is. Here's the truth about all of that. You can be as smart as you wish.

You can learn as much as you can about relationships, even about the brain. You can go through analysis as I did. And if you get hit in the right way at the right time with another person who represents deep family, which, you know, primary attachment partners do, all bets are off. When you go live, you can become an animal, a three-year-old. All that knowledge goes out the window. And that's because of how the brain operates, that these higher cortical areas where we learn and are able to be flexible and plastic, these are very plastic areas of the brain, they also happen to be energy consuming. And because of that, when we are under stress, they no longer operate very well because glucose and blood begins to be distributed elsewhere and not to these very fancy energy

consuming areas of the brain that do error correcting and where time is a factor because they're slow. You need time to let all parts of the brain operate. But if you are in a lot of stress and starting to move into what we think of as a hypothalamic state, fight or flight, there's a brain change and there's a neurochemical change. We're automatic anyway. 99% of our day is automatic, run by memory. But when we get aroused like this, we're completely automatic. And there is no mediating part of our brain that says, wait a second, maybe that face meant something else, or maybe she said this, but you thought that. That goes out the window. And what happens is that we resort to very basic memory having to do with threat.

And we do anything and everything we can to protect our own interests, protect ourselves. This is a human condition. This is not about being self-centered. Everybody will do this. And so that is why I say, you know, when we get into these threat states, it's almost sub-psychological. We're acting and reacting so quickly, faster than thought, that we don't have time to figure out why we're doing something. And when pressured, we basically make it up. That's what our brain does.

So it's almost like we regress into a primal state or the more primal part of our brain dominates. It dominates because these subcortical areas are very low energy consuming. And so they can operate under low oxygen conditions, which is exactly what happens when we get a hyper aroused or hypo aroused, same thing happens. And so before you know it, you are, you know, because of this rapid back and forth, that's mostly nonverbal. You both can create this threat state, mostly based on misunderstanding, by the way, because real time is too fast. And that is what would happen with me and my ex-wife. It had nothing to do with intelligence, has nothing to do with how much therapy you have.

The combination of our two nervous systems plus our history seemed to be combustible. And the big problem was that we weren't good at soothing each other. Neither of us were good at putting the fire out. And I think that is what ultimately made it a no-go. And that became part of my study, is not so much what we hear about conflict in couples, you know, money, time, sex, kids, but something that's happening automatically on a very fast level that has nothing to do with psychology per se, but has to do with the human condition whereby we tend to filter the environment out for dangers because of our need to survive. That we have more parts of our brain that are devoted to danger and threat and possible threat than any other thing. that we have this subcortical area that operates at lightning speeds based on memory only. And that most of the time, we're basically slaves to that part, to these areas of the brain. And that this is the human condition. This is how easy it is for us to go to war. This

is how easy it is for us to misinterpret even those we love, our children, our parents, our partners, and for the moment forget that they're good people, forget that we love them, forget that they're not predators. This seems to be a big have done horrendous things. And they're good people. They're smart people. They're well-studied. They're giving and generous people. But in a moment, there's something literally deep and primal that is somehow triggered where it's almost like something snaps. And I've been fascinated by that phenomenon because there was nothing else that you would look at in this person and say, oh, well, that was clearly coming. No, they didn't know either probably because what got triggered was something in implicit memory or procedural memory, something that can

only get triggered by movement, a physical position, a smell, a visual or an auditory cue. These things lay dormant until they're not. Most of us don't have that many pockets of what is ordinarily thought of as unresolved trauma or loss. So we're not as given to these surprises. But they do exist and can surprise us, especially with our most important relationships. And that's when they're likely to get triggered is in our primary attachment relationships. And there's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Deconstruct a little bit. Primary attachment relationship. Tell me. So you and I are newly friends, right? And we're not going to trigger each other unless we have outrageous behavior that reminds us of something dangerous or something unlikable, which of course has not happened. You're a very nice man. Let's say we became interdependent. Let's say we became so close, like cop car partners,

where we had to depend on each other to save our lives, right? To protect each other. We would start to trigger more because in that situation of interdependency, we remind each other of our earliest figures upon whom we depend on. And that makes the relationship different. We don't have those memories ordinarily until we begin to experience dependency. And then we remember what went wrong and what went right in those situations of dependency. When that happens, we become deep family in a sense. We start to become proxies for all these other dependency relationships that are in the past. They're stored basically in procedural memory. Sometimes people call it body memory. And so they can pop up under these circumstances where they wouldn't pop up if we were just friends.

Yeah. So it's almost like the deeper you go with somebody, the more likely you are, or the more likely that relationship is to trigger something that happened that was similar enough in a previous relationship where there was that deep sense of attachment and that same response then gets transferred to the new person to a certain extent. Exactly. And sometimes we don't know it. And then we find out other times in therapy, we learn about it and we already know that that exists. But this will surprise people. I used to call it the marriage monster that, you know, we're doing fine. We're doing great. We get married and suddenly I fall into a deep depression for a year. And why? Or you become a whole different person, somebody who I wouldn't have predicted. Well, there's something about that new situation that triggers memory, memory based

on a similar situation. And that, you know, our earliest dependency relationships are the biggest culprits here because that goes to our deepest sense of safety and security. And where we're not safe and secure, where we're vulnerable, where we could get hurt again, those memories lay dormant until we get back into that situation and then surprise. So this is, you know, this again is very much about human nature, the nature of the mind, and there's nothing aberrant about it, but people don't know and don't understand. So this is all unfolding in your own life and it starts to really affect your interest in the direction that you want to go with your vocation. Yes. It's kind of like, you know, the doctor healer. Yeah. Isn't it always with

almost any sort of health healing therapeutic profession, right? Yeah. There's something personal to it. And so when I met Tracy, who is my wife today, someone I've known actually most of my life anyway, that relationship was an eye opener to me because I found that as two people, two nervous systems, we were very good at it. It was a lot easier for us. The areas where I'm a pain in the ass, she can manage. The areas where she's a pain in the ass, I can manage. We are rarely, if ever, on fire at the same time. And so it works out very nicely. We're very good at distress relief, very good at creating excitement, something called exciting love. We're very good at co-creating quiet love. And so I learned as much through my relationship with Tracy as I have on anything I've ever read

or studied or any research I've done, or even from my own patients. The corrective experience I had with Trace led to ideas about secure functioning and what a secure functioning relationship is, having nothing to do with attachment theory, but having to do with social contract theory, justice, fairness, sensitivity. And that sort of our relationship has been this live petri dish of examples that helped me formulate and helped me think about this whole matter, not only just about human pair bonding, but how that represents the smallest unit of a society, the couple, that there is no smaller unit. There is no individual that is a society, right? It's

all relationships starting with a dyad. And all dyads have to be based on some kind of system of social justice, whether it's just or unjust. And so, that then led to this whole idea of secure functioning as a goal in therapy, as a therapeutic stance, a place to point to, a place to strive for. And then with some research found that people of all backgrounds can achieve this, but also already have achieved it. Street people, people who would be considered mentally ill, and that is mutual survival, to be in the foxhole together, to have each other's backs, to be experts on each other, to take care of each other because they can, and because nobody else actually will. So how does it square with the popular advice of put on your oxygen mask first? You put on your oxygen mask first with children. And the reason you put on your oxygen mask with yourself first is because children do not require the same amount

of oxygen that the human brain, the adult brain does. So if you are anoxic and you die or you pass out, you're of no use to your kid. With your partner, no, you put your mask on together. You have to do that. This is the idea that the couple represents the top of the food chain. They're a resource engine. They create resources that allow them to care for others, to be more creative, to be more independent, and to be more resourceful. So if the couple is the top of the food chain, where's the individual? The individual exists in the third thing that they create, which is the relationship. So you and I are individuals. We don't serve each other. We serve the relationship that we created. That relationship is an ecosystem or

a terrarium. It's the air we breathe, the water we drink based on our agreements. We're stewards of that system that is fundamentally rooted in assurances of safety and security, absolute safety and security. Is it perfect? No, but we perfectly agree that is our mission. That's what we're loyal to because the alternative is terrible. So here's that third thing, the third thing being the relationship that we create, which in fact turns out to be like a fingerprint. It's something that can never be created again. It's phenomenological. It's something that only two people can make, and once they break up, it's gone forever because it dynamically involves aspects of ourselves that another person may or may not amplify. So it's something to be protected and respected because

it provides cover for us. And this cover, again, has to do with our agreements. It's all about agreement. It can never be because we love each other or because we're attracted to each other or because we have the same things in common. Those are fleeting. They're not substantive enough to be interdependent. And yet those are the things that most people point to as the source, the glue. And as a couple of therapists, I know that is unsustainable. It's not enough. That people who have a much heavier reality-based purpose in terms of what they serve, the point of their relationship and where they are actually pointing together, that is a mature adult relationship. That's based on reality, the understanding that there is no

perfection, we're perfectly imperfect, that everybody's a pain in the ass, and that when we are together, we accept each other as burdens, and that we're two separate minds, two separate individuals. How are we going to move through life together in a way that is fulfilling and exciting that doesn't make us feel like we're losing anything. Yeah. And I think that last part is the part where we kind of think, well, if we lose those first things that brought us together, then everything from that moment becomes flatlined and everything is over. And from what I understand you're saying is there's a natural sort of like set of alchemical things that will spark us in the beginning. And necessarily some

of those will fade, that it's the nature of things. But that doesn't mean that you cannot co-create and sort of like build those moments of energy and electricity into the relationship on a sustained basis in other ways. The best part is after the affair, after the infatuation, after that part. But not many people know it. They crash and burn in the early phases of the relationship, or they're unprepared for what comes later. And a lot of that has to do with what we saw in our parents' marriage, what we see around us. It's hard to imagine something if we've never experienced it. And so, like anything else, when you choose one thing and you go into

it deeply and you study it, you find a whole world of novelty. If you look at it in a distant way, in a gross way, then it's boring because it's very easy to run out of novelty after we begin to automate each other. That's always going to happen with anything new. The brain is going to turn into something old soon, and that's for energy conservation. So what you were talking about, when we first meet each other, it's exciting. And that excitement is mostly projection, mostly fantasy, but it's still exciting. And as we get to know each other, like anything novel, our brain begins to take these things that are new and fit them into old ideas, old sort of accommodating to old memories. And now we think we know each other, but we've really just automated each other in a way that stops us from

exploring, looking deeply, going eye to eye, face to face, finding ways to engage each other by using third things, right? We stop doing that. And then we think, oh, I'm just not into this person anymore, or I'm bored, or I need to go out and look for something else. And that is a misunderstanding, I think, of choosing one thing and going into that thing something that I think any of us are comfortable owning because I think we probably equate habituation with blah, blah, blah, right? So you mean I have to live a life where everything is now gone from it rather than it's an interesting premise if we start with the fact that, yes, this is going to happen.

And now it's our responsibility to figure out how we move forward in a way that reignites something. That's where we get to our mission in life is to be a force of nature together, is to be experts on each other, to study each other, to work in tandem with each other as individuals, but also as a team, and that we can move each other up in our careers. We can face dragons together. We can handle complex situations together. There's always something there that can enliven our relationship and can prove on a somewhat daily basis, not saying I love you, not saying I trust you, but actually demonstrating it. It's the demonstration of loyalty, demonstration of

commitment that feeds the beast, that actually leads to a different kind of love than was initially there in the excitement period. And there are all sorts of tricks to create that exciting love, that dopaminergic addictive kind of love that gets us into the relationship in the first place. Yeah. Talk to me about safety though, because my sense is that none of this matters without, like that is the fundamental building block. Well, there are some people who play with danger as a stimulant. And there are lots of models for this, both sexually and romantically, where if the relationship is getting stale, put a little threat into it. A lot of people think this way. And it does work. It does work to up the ante or to make the relationship exciting if you throw some danger into the relationship. But then there's the problem of having to rely on fear or threat to hold the relationship together or to create a spark. tend to find that low complexity. That is something that teenagers would think of.

I don't want her to think I like her so much, so I'm going to be a little more distant. I'm going to try to make her feel a little insecure, because maybe then she'll show me how much more she likes me. And this kind of thinking can go on into adulthood. And there are some people who even write books about this. I think it's a low complexity way to do things. There is a way to go deeper with someone, a deeper love that can also be immensely erotic by using attraction and other techniques rather than fear or threat. But that's not in popular culture exactly. I think people who understand when they are bound together because of survival, like people who are living on the street, or like the other people I've mentioned and so on that have a common interest in survival, they have other ways of maintaining that excitement, that interest, without putting danger within their own foxhole. The danger is outside, never in the

foxhole. And that, I think, is higher complexity. Protect the safety and security system at all costs, which, by the way, the universe throws all sorts of pitches to couples to threaten that all the time. And that there are other ways of sparking that dopaminergic, exciting kind of love or eroticism without messing with the safety and security system. Across the board, I've never seen a couple mess with that system and come out okay. They usually learn the lesson that thou shalt not fuck with that system. Because when that happens, it's very hard to re-equilibrate. It's extremely disturbing to humans and primates, actually, to have that primary attachment system be disturbed by either, I don't know if this will exist tomorrow, or I don't know

if it really exists now. That kind of fear that makes somebody want to move towards someone is not sustainable and also is very hard on the brain and the body in terms of stress, stress hormones. It seems, I mean, it makes sense from the outside looking in, not that it's living it and what makes sense are not necessarily the same thing. It feels like also that navigating together those big things that the universe throws at you from the outside, that the things that you move through together, that you do move through together, probably deepen that sense of safety.

Yes. Every time you prove it, every time you demonstrate the strength of the relationship, which by the way, has to go two ways. It's mostly by declaration. You know, two people saying to each other, if not the same time, then alternately, this relationship will continue. It will not end. This relationship can handle who we are. We can't break it that easily. This is something that people have to tell each other. Otherwise, it's not true, right? If people act as if the relationship is so breakable, which many insecure people do, because of their memories, their experiences, that actually does weaken the relationship. It is what people say it is. I mean- I mean, say or show?

Say and show. Usually they go together. Although not, I mean, I would imagine not always though, because you could say, yes, I'm in this, like I'm 100% committed. And then, you know, like the next day your actions completely betray that statement. Well, we'd have to find out what those actions are and who perceives them as such, the person who's doing it or the person or the other partner, right? Now we get into a certain complexity in terms of perception. But certainly, people saying that the relationship may not exist is going to be devastating. And people behaving it and saying another shows deception,

which is also devastating. So we're talking about a realization between two people that these are the things that they're going to do and these are the things they're not going to do because they know the consequences of doing whatever they want, right? because we've had experiences where we haven't or somebody hasn't been transparent with us. And why not? Why not be transparent? What's the point of spending all those resources? If you pick somebody to be your partner, your mate, why spend all those resources to vet in your head what you're going to say and not say? So these, again, come down to two people having a mutual interest. Not all mutual interest, but a mutual interest in terms

of making life livable, being able to survive and thrive, being able to do things for each other that you'd have to pay other people a lot of money to do, it's an agreement or set of agreements. I mean, it goes back to, it's almost like, you know, I feel like there's this evolution of the social construct around what marriage is or what partnership is, where a couple of generations ago it was viewed largely as a social contract. Like this is, it's almost like an agreement. These are the roles that we play. And then over the last generation, it has emerged into something which is much more about passion and romantic love and emotion and choice. And it kind of sounds like what you're saying is that the real sustainable, nourishing, flourishing state that we all aspire to on a deeper level may be closer to the old.

Yeah, but there were problems with the old too, because even though it's supposed to be- I'm glad you said that, by the way, because I want some of this new stuff. It's supposed to be a social contract, but if you look closely at the fine print, it's not fair. It's not always just, and it certainly isn't sensitive. And it's according to someone else's rules. When we look at adult partnership and two separate individuals who are individuated, differentiated, coming together in a union because they can, because together they can do more than they would otherwise. It's based on their unique agreements, not something found on the internet or read by a rabbi or a priest, but something that they

co-create as a forward-looking document. And these are things like thou shalt not kill, these are things that they both drink the Kool-Aid on, they both believe in, that violating this would violate one's own principles and make that person a phony, right? So thou shalt not kill wouldn't work if it were, you know, I'm getting much better at this, so give me some props. I've only killed two people. Or thou shalt not kill if I'm in the mood, right? These are absolutes that protect people from each other. And we tell each other everything has to be challenged as to why would you do that? Why is it a good idea for me? And why would it be a good idea for you? And if I can't argue why it's a good idea for me and you, it's not going to work. And vice versa, you have to do that with me.

So we're talking about real principles of governance, right? How we're going to govern this relationship and how we're going to govern this relationship and how we're going to govern others. What are the priorities? Who's at the top of the food chain here? How are we going to make decisions when other things conflict with our needs, personal needs and mutual needs? And so mature people have these ideas that are explicit and defendable and don't take it for granted that it's just because. Why are you monogamous? Why do you want to be monogamous? There's nothing in your biology that suggests that you have to be, so why are you choosing to be? Why is it a good idea for you and why is it a good idea for the other person? And if these people cannot adequately defend it,

they're probably not going to do it. So there's so many. Have you found now in years and years and years of practice that, well, although I guess there's a little bit of bias because I'm guessing by the time that you sit down with many people, things are not in a great space. But does anyone in real life really examine these things on the level that you're talking about? Yes. They just don't come in to see me.

I've interviewed many older couples, some of them we would consider mentor couples, and they naturally did do this. Some of them because they grew up and suffered and they came to this. Some because their families were, you know, this was part of the culture. This is how they thought. They thought as a two-person psychological system. But so many of us come from families where the culture is a one-person oriented system where relationship was not the center of all things. The self became the center of all things. The self became the center of all things.

Some self-interest would trump relationships, whether performance or appearance or taking care of me, don't leave me, that kind of thing. So a lot of this is people coming to the table with ideas that can never work because they're inherently one person oriented. It's good for me, but if it's not good for you, sorry. And then they accrue all this memory of unfairness and insensitivity, which then turns into threat, by the way. So no, it's not a natural thing. This is why we worry about it, the Institute, because there are so many screwy messages about relationship and about how people should be. There's so much absolutely harebrained ideas out there that still exist that are misleading and actually contribute to relationships being unsustainable. So give me an example or two.

Oh, you got to love yourself before you can love another person. You got to know yourself before you can be in a relationship. I mean, that's all bullshit because developmentally, we don't do anything by ourselves without having it done first to us. So we learn everything from the outside in, in the beginning, and then we learn it in tandem. I learned to love myself at the same time as I learn to love you. They're together. They coexist. I learn to know myself by knowing you very well and being open to you, what you have to say about me, because that's how I know myself is in connection to another person. It's all interactive. It's all intersubjective. So these ideas give people the notion that they should not be in relationship, but practice

in a cave or read a book or go to therapy, which is not a bad idea, of course, or just do workshops. But this is a learning by doing. You can't learn outside of a relationship. You have to be in one and fail and learn and fail and get better and learn and so on. Or know how to do it well from the beginning. That's a trick. Yeah. And I guess a certain amount of that is probably modeled by the relationships that you see. Relationships that you see. And also what you're attracted to.

There in literature and movies, in music even, there can be very good examples of good partnership that we can strive for, good parenting we can strive for. There are, of course, a lot of bad examples of that as well. So some people get their examples from watching others or having a mentor or having a best friend or especially a lover. We learn by observation and also by our own experience what we've seen and what we've also experienced with another person. Yeah. It's interesting that I've done a lot of thinking over crisis, that most of the places that we've sought to find it over the last few generations are either not satisfying that need anymore or doing it in a way which is not adequate. And we're grasping because we have to have that in some way. And so I've tried to deconstruct what has to be there.

What's the baseline to feel that and and similar to what you're sharing about you know one-on-one relationships where safety is the starting point it's the same thing with getting that sense of belonging satisfied within a larger community too there are so many other levels of potential things that make it better and deeper more interesting and more engaged the fundamental thing if there's no safe container. Nothing else happens. Let's build on that. You used two phrases.

Let me see if I can remember them properly. I think it was excitement, love, and quiet love. Yeah, three states I consider important to co-create in a relationship to be able to do that together. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Okay, so take me there a little bit and tell me a little bit more about what they are. Exciting love is a high sympathetic vitality state that is less of an emotion and more of an addiction-like experience. And the reason it's more like an addiction-like experience is because of the neurochemicals that are involved in exciting love. They're very similar to those that are created and follow

a certain neuropathway as do drugs, and drugs of a particular kind, excitatory drugs. So exciting love is that love that you feel when you're infatuated or you're in a really great conversation with somebody and you're in a flow. You're riffing with each other and it's so much fun, right? You just want to come back to it again and again, right? That's the dopamine part, the thing that makes you want to come back again. And then there are other drugs involved here too, like noradrenaline for attention, testosterone, which adds the eroticism, the excitement. And there's more than just those. Those are called the catecholamines. But there's more than just that. There are connecting neurotransmitters that are produced when we're connecting with another human brain, something that we can only

do between human brains. It's called an amplification effect. We don't have that when dealing with animals. We think we do, but it's basically masturbatory. It's basically amplifying our cells, but it's still muted compared to what two human brains can do. The good news is we can amplify positives like this exciting love that is very dopaminergic. We can also amplify negatives, which is the other side of the coin where we're in conflict constantly, where we're starting to see each other as predators. But back to exciting love. It follows the same neuropathways, reward neuropathways that involve, this is kind of nerdy, but dopamine systems and the GABAnergic systems. So it's exciting and comforting, maybe a little agitating

as well. That can be co-created at any time between partners through gazing, eye-to-eye contact under certain circumstances, but also through what's called joint attention, something we know when studying babies. Joint attention is when we take a third object and rather than use it for our own pleasure only, we use it to amplify each other. So that's our dog or a child or the Eiffel Tower or this new scenery that we're standing in front of. If we're skillful, we use that third thing as a way to create that amplification effect between us. And this way we can constantly get hooked on that, right? We can constantly co-create that, which is necessary for wanting to do it again and again. So think of it that way. I want to do this, right? It's that addiction. I want to come back to this.

I need this, right? Quiet love is more serotonergic. It is what Donald Winnicott called going on being. It's a quiet but alert state where we don't have to really do anything, but it's a deep sense of safety and security by just being together. A lot of we don't have to really do anything. But it's a deep sense of safety and security by just being together. A lot of couples don't know how to co-create that, but it's necessary for relaxation and just to feel good in the world. All is good in the world. Some people get it through meditation. Other people get it through other solitary kinds of exercises. But to be able to do it with another person is really important. And it's what we see that is one of the lovely things between mother and baby, or father and baby, these quiet but alert states that are not exciting, not down-regulating, not

anything low, but just relaxed and safe. And then the other one is being able to co-manage distress in a way that attenuates and foreshortens it. That's done as a team. So it's not denying things, it's not sweeping things under the rug, but it's being able to metabolize distress in one or both of us quickly and be able to shift into another state skillfully so that if we do get into conflict this morning, it doesn't bleed into the afternoon. We're able to skillfully shift in and out of these states without holding on too long. So think of it also as the peristalsis of the belly that we're able to hold on and let go together, hold on and let go together, tense and relax. And couples that are really good at that don't accrue a sense of threat.

They're not afraid of anything. They can talk about anything because they don't have the experience of being held too long, trapped, overwhelmed, run over, defeated, any of those things, because they're good at doing it. How much of this in your experience comes naturally to people and how much of it is cultivated through intention? Both. To say that Tracy and I are simply good at it because we're skillful would be a lie.

I think that there's something fortunate about Tracy and I, that the match, something about our combination that is fortuitous. I don't know that that can be conveyed or taught or even described well, except subjectively, both of us realize that we're kind of lucky in some ways. And yet we also apply everything. The principles that have been created in PACT and around secure functioning, largely based on science, largely based on research, but also our experience. How much of that experience is because we naturally are good at it as a couple and how much of it is because of our skill sets, hard to say. And that's something I struggle with. As a teacher and as a therapist, I still have been able to take some of the hardest cases in front of me and have made those cases, those relationships better, not just in the short

run, but permanently. And the older I get, the more I do this, the better I get at it. But it's because I have a very, very strong stance on where I want them to go, what I believe in. And there's a lot of techniques that I use that maybe other therapists don't. There's a lot of aspects to the PACT approach, which is polytheoretical and very complex. PACT, a psychobiological approach to couple therapy, it's polytheoretical in that it's not just psychological theory, developmental theory, neurobiology, arousal regulation theory. It's bringing together all these different worlds, right? So we have to draw on more than just a psychological approach, which means the training is more complex and a lot of moving parts. But I think it also has to do with being very clear about secure functioning.

And having that clarity, I think, also helps couples who are looking for some kind of way to view themselves, a container, as you put it, that actually fits who they are and fits their experience and their history in a way that makes sense, that actually puts them into context, not in pathological terms, but in natural terms and terms that make complete sense, is basically no fault, no angels, no devils, that helps them understand the nature of being human, which involves everybody, not just unique to them, and the way out, and that there is only one way out, and that is they either work together or they suffer the consequences. They either work together in the way that is secure

functioning, truly mutual, collaborative, or they suffer. There is no other way. And I think couples who are in enough pain, which we make sure they are as therapists, are willing to go there if the therapist keeps them in distress significantly so that there's no other place to go. I guess I can't just leave that hanging. I know. You gotta tell me what you mean by that, because a lot of people will just hear those last few sentences and say, you do what? The therapist is nothing, has nothing, unless the patient has distress or is in distress.

We don't want to change. We don't want to do anything that's going to rock our world unless we absolutely have to. We don't care about new ideas unless we're wanting those new ideas. So a good therapist knows how to turn the heat up and to create and maintain a level of distress that leads to interest. Without distress, there's no interest. Without interest, there's no influence. And so, you know, as therapists, we don't have any special tools that appeal to people who aren't interested. If you're not interested, I got nothing for you. It doesn't matter how good I am. But if you're in pain, if you're in distress, and you really want to feel better,

and I know how to point in a direction that gets you the most bang for your buck, in other words, makes it worth your pain to go someplace, then I'll leverage it. I'm talking finding pain, amplifying it, and leveraging it toward a therapeutic stance, which in my case is secure functioning. So that's how we get people to move. They're not interested in these ideas unless there's a distress. Nobody really cares. I mean, it's interesting, but nobody's going to go about trying to change their life because of it. If they can keep things as they are, that's everybody.

We'll all do that. If we can bend reality to feel better, even if it's at the cost of getting better, we'll do it. That's part of human nature. Yeah, it's interesting to me to hear you share that lens from a therapeutic standpoint as a largely lifelong entrepreneur and somebody who's gone deep down this sort of, how do you create an experience, a story, a message that inspires somebody to adopt a change in lens and behavior or something, make a decision, take an action that is in some way beneficial and takes them out of a state of pain. A lot of people in my world are terrified of

creating any experience that allows that person to step into and own the current state of their reality, which often is pain. And I've always taken the other stance in that you're almost doing a disservice. If you have the ability to capture that as motivation for constructive behavior and decisions, you're almost doing a disservice to that person or those people, that community, to not speak to that. Getting someone out of pain is very nice if you're a parent, best friend, lover. But if you're a clinician and you're being hired, paid to, first of all, take a stand for reality, take a stand for, in this case, your patient's best, you believe in their best until they prove otherwise, which is they fire you. You have to assume that people coming to therapy

don't believe in themselves to a certain degree, do want to get out of pain as quickly as possible, like all of us do, and will do anything to get out of that, even at the cost of their real self and cost of their future. The therapist then has a very tough job, something like a parent would have, probably should have done. And by taking a stand for that patient's health, whatever you determine that health is, for me, it's secure functioning and individuation and so on. So I expect them to be a certain way. And it's that pressure of expectation that pushes them there and also allows them and me to be in a certain amount of distress for a time as the juice, as the sort of the motivator for finding a way out that's different than before. But one has to, that's a different kind of love, I guess, is to be able to hold hands and help with people and to make sure they stay there with the belief in them that they will also help themselves out of this thing into

something bigger and better. Piaget called this disequilibration, a period of disorganization where we don't know anymore who we are or what is real. And if we're able to tolerate that, we're reborn into a new organization where there's more of us available now. We become wiser, smarter, right? But not everybody knows how to tolerate those periods, especially if you have trauma in your background or you weren't supported. They're terrifying and we'll fight them tooth and nail. We don't want that kind of disequilibration. We want to feel better now and not change. It's a good gig if you can get it. I haven't found someone yet who's mastered that long term.

How are you okay through this process, though, as the person who's in there holding the hand, feeling some of the feel? And you're a feeling, sentient, emotional human being who's got your own stuff. You making this your career, you working with hundreds, thousands of people privately through workshops, seminars, and institute. On a personal level, how do you stay okay? I think going through my own suffering and here's my own therapy and having so many wonderful people in my life who have saved my life and who have made my life better and hold me up even today, I don't feel separate from people when I'm working with them. I feel, you know, there by the grace of God go I, this is me. And for me, it kind of going back into the fray reminds me of what I had to go through and what I lived through. And I'm a true believer, I guess, that they can do it. And as long as I can believe that they can do it, even if they

show signs that they're going to crash and burn today, I've learned that things are in what they seem. I can play the long game. The couple is always playing the short game. I can see the chessboard. They can't. I'm willing to go through hell and even breaking up with them, with their breaking up, knowing that they're still going to exist. After a while doing this work, you begin to know that relationships are really, really sticky. And like the song, breaking up is very hard to do. So I know things they don't. I can see a longer picture. I'm playing the long game. And that gives me an advantage, which gives them an advantage. It doesn't scare me so much anymore when I see things disintegrate

in front of me, when I see people act out, when I see people threaten the relationship, when they break up in front of me. Because I know it ain't over until it's over. It's hard to explain. I've just been doing this so much. Almost like it's exposure therapy. There's a certain point I know that I can't control anything, right? And I know they'll be okay. So we have a saying in pact for the therapist, kind of a serenity prayer to help them. And it goes like this, I am a couple therapist. These people picked each other. They're in each other's care. What they do or don't do is not my problem. My only job is to push them towards secure functioning. And then I am a couple therapist. These people picked each other. I didn't pick them.

They're in each other's care. They go home with each other. I didn't pick them. They're in each other's care. They go home with each other. I don't go home with them. They're not my problem, really. My only job is to get them to be secure functioning in this life or the next. And as long as I hold to that, I'm okay. So you have to let your ego be. It's a collaboration.

It's a, this is not about me. This is about them. They're on stage. This is about, they're the music. It's not necessarily the easiest place to land, I would imagine for some, for many. No, but it is gorgeous. And I do fall in love with my couples and I do feel blessed to be a part of this. And I've learned so much. I learned so much. I mean, I, every time I'm with a couple and it's my favorite place to be is in the seat in the chair. I learn a ton. So, you know, it's, it's completely reciprocal and collaborative and going back full circle. It's a lot like my

experience in music. I feel like I'm still doing music. Which feels like a good place for us to come full circle, actually. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that phrase out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? Gratitude. Finding a way daily to look at what, and this I learned from being taught a Japanese form of psychotherapy called Nikon. It's so easy to look at what we're not getting and how we're

being mistreated and ripped off. But what we don't do as well is look at what we are getting every day and what people are doing. Even if they don't care to be doing it, we're still getting those things. There's something about counting blessings and seeing what you have that should be done along with what you're feeling angry about to balance out the day. And one of the things I've learned is that no matter how selfish I am, I still get things in spite of myself if I do an accounting of that. And I feel very grateful for the people in my life and the people who have passed who are responsible for my even being here today. And so I think that for me, the good life is taking a full accounting every day, not just what is not there, but what is there

and what you keep getting in spite of all your attempts to spoil things. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.