#983 - Gay Hendricks - Deeply Connected Relationships

32:06Here we do it on Tuesday and Thursday night, but it doesn't matter. one of them is for feelings and the other one is for stuff. One of them is called the heart talk, one of them is called the stuff talk and stuff talk is, oh you know Kevin's soccer practice is at five this week. Can you pick him up then rather than five thirty? Boy if that doesn't get done I've seen people come here in here in a storming fury because somebody was 30 minutes late picking up somebody it's our practice. So it's really important to get the nitty gritty of your agreements covered. And so one thing that happens is little tiny things build up.

32:51It's not always things like I'm having an affair. It's little things like, oh, you know what? I forgot to pick up Kevin today, that when you realize that, that 10 -second sweaty communication goes a long way to clearing up those kinds of things. So defensiveness, getting the other person to agree that they want to hear what you have to say, super important thing. Another type of defensiveness is people who not blow up when you tell them the truth, but they veer off and change the subject. And so they start to hear it, but they kind of shut the rest of it out. And you know, if you're in good relationship counseling, all these things will get dealt with.

33:42But I found that a lot of relationship counseling that goes on today is what I call dusting the deck chairs on the Titanic that you're trying to fix surface level things rather than finding out what the fundamental issues are below of those kind of big three things that we've talked about that aren't getting dealt with. Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow or you've just been feeling off, it might not be a training plan or your diet, it might be something a bit more boring, like zinc. And while supplements like Toncatale can help zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production.

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34:47Right now, you can get 35 % of your first subscription and that 30 -day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below, by heading to livemomentus .com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom. A checkout that's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S .com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. What about just a linger on that for one more moment? Let's say that you're the recipient of the person telling the truth and you hear something which is uncomfortable. What is your advice for being receptive to not be as agitated to not be as defensive? How can you be a good listener in that regard?

35:28The very best would be non -judgmental listening, report of how you're feeling like letting the person finish, for example, like interrupting is one of the worst relationship killers. Whoever you are listening or watching this do not interrupt your maid. It's a bad idea. I've never seen it helpful in any kind of situation. So a lot of times we don't give the other person space to finish what they're saying. So number one, give space and then give an authentic response to that un -argulable response. Oh boy, I don't know how to handle that. Oh, geez, I'm feeling scared right now. Oh, I feel so angry when you say that.

36:19Ooh, I feel like crying. You know, those kind of things are an authentic response.

36:33What's and a very out of shape couple trying to wedge their way through and sat right in front of us. And, you know, between the two of them, they were probably, you know, close to 100 kilos over waste, if you average, both on and together. Well, he got up after a while and left. And he came back before the movie started with the giganticest tub of popcorn. You know, like one of those $14 ones that's like a tub. And when he sat down next to her, she said, oh, did you have to do that? Why did you do that? You know I can't resist that. So immediately instead of, oh my God, I'm gonna eat that whole bucket of popcorn.

37:24Instead she went into blaming him for what was obviously a challenge in herself of her own ability to control her popcorn consumption. And so if you make it about the size of the tub or the partner, you miss out on the opportunity to actually have that sweaty 10 second conversation with yourself where you say, oh my God, I weigh 50 kilos too much, and I almost ate some popcorn right there and felt miserable. Those kind of moments, you know, like my, One of my great heroes, Ken Hath, he's a producer here in Hollywood. I only live about an hour and a half from Hollywood, so a lot of people, we always have a saying, once you make it in Hollywood, you buy a place in Ohai or Santa Barbara, and I live at Ohai.

38:12So we have a lot of folks here who are, you know, entertainment kind of folks. And there's a producer named Ken Hath, who was 123 pounds overweight. One Saturday night he was feeling lonely and he found himself he kind of woke up and he was standing in front of the refrigerator looking inside for something to eat and it was like 1030 at night and he had this 10 seconds sweaty conversation with himself where he realized, oh, I'm not hungry. I'm lonely. I'm starting to eat something to make myself feel less lonely. Boom. Yeah. He lost 120 pounds, starting at that moment. That changed everything.

39:04So being able to just, it's like I suppose I've never seen this in person, but a person stands up in an alcoholic like synonymous group for the very first time and says, my name's John and I'm an alcoholic. They nail it, you know, they have that 10 second sweaty conversation yesterday, they might have been telling their friends, I can handle it. I can handle it. Okay. And then there's that moment of realization, full ownership and things progressed from there in a positive way. So something I'm interested in, what we're talking about here is a degree of compromise, a degree of sort of like a lot of understanding that needs to be done here.

39:50I'm interested in how much you should deliberately step in to adjust sort of your own approach to loving versus just being yourself and showing up as you. I think this balance of union and individuation and navigating that is an area that people fit. I feel like I'm losing my autonomy here, but then there's this sensual, maybe this is me, but better. Maybe this is an insufficiency of mine. Maybe this is an area in which it's not a part of my sense of self, my quickness to anger, right, or my bitterness, or my resentment, or my inability to get over myself or my lack of ability to feel my feelings.

40:32Like, is that really the seat of your person? Like, oh, that's where, like, you shouldn't be changing me. I love my anger. I love, like, oh, this is an opportunity to alchemize something that I or my own couldn't do through the union of this relationship. And then there's other parts of us that we think, well, no, like, that is me. I'm sensitive, I'm a sensitive person or I'm a passionate person or an energetic person or I'm a peaceful person. And this feels like I'm being told to lose some of my autonomy, to sort of lose some of my individuation in service of the union. And this is a compromise that I'm not prepared to do.

41:06So this balance between adjusting your own approach versus just being yourself, union individuation. I'm interested in how people navigate that if that makes sense. Oh, it makes perfect sense. In fact, I really appreciate you bringing up this subject because, well, everybody here or this listening or watching this, including you and me, have been born and we've been six months old. And let me tell you what happens in that little period of time because it gets replayed every day in close relationships. The first six months are about establishing trust, union with another person, being able to let go fully into your caregiver.

41:52Most of the time that's with your mother, but sometimes it's not. And sometimes that's not a good connection. Sometimes there's something going on. There's with your mother or with the environment that keeps that sense of trust from developing in that sense of ease with connection. So that needs to, those tracks are laid down in the first six months of life. At six months, what happens is we start crawling and adventuring. So you start going out into the world. And what happens is you go out into the world and then if you encounter obstacles, you go back to your caregiver and you clutch mom or you, you know, get nurtured again.

42:36If you go out crawling across the floor and the dog barks at you, you scurry back to mom and, you know, get a hug. And I was just watching a baby elephant. Yesterday I love nature shows and I was watching a nature show, a little nature clip on YouTube where it showed a baby elephant chasing some other animals around, you know, the, the, the, the, the place in Africa where all these were. And suddenly the baby elephant fell over. I saw this video. What did it, I saw this video. Oh, you've seen it. It ran back to its mom. Yeah, me, you know, yeah. And so how that gets replayed in every day in life is where constantly in the process of individuating ourselves, becoming more of who we are, and learning how to Let go into relationship at the same time.

43:38So union and in union and Individuation doesn't happen every six months. It's happening every six seconds in a close relationship. You're always Connecting and also being yourself. That's why I'm just looking at our Oprah book, Conscious Loving from 35 years ago. The first time we were on her show, we were on there with that book. I'm just looking over at my bookshelf. And the subtitle is how to be fully yourself and in relationship at the same time. How to be fully together without giving up yourself. And so this daily practice of knowing that your life is about getting more in touch with yourself and having more empathy and space for other people.

44:31That's what it's all about. And, you know, from having been at deathbeds over the years, from people who were passing out of this mortal thing we've got going here, I've heard a people say things like, oh God, I wish I hadn't spent so much time at the office. So why didn't I ever say I love you, you know, to somebody So there's all these incompletions that people walk around with that other things that need to be said in those 10 second or 10 minute conversations. They don't always need to be sweaty. You know, you could say like, my wife and I have a question that we ask each other every week, which is, Is there anything that I could be doing or saying right now that might make you feel more loved and treasured in our relationship?

45:26And it's an invitation if there is something great, say it, if not, great. Things are going along just fine. But living in that question means that I'm always, and she's always looking for, hmm, is there anything that I could be doing or saying that would make her light up? Isn't it? You used to make, yeah. Just so interesting that the openness from both parties here, hey, we're in this together. We're not just committed, we're co -committed. You see the best in me, I see the best in you. I have faith that your judgment is good. And I actually believe that you may in some ways know me better than I know myself, maybe in many ways.

46:09And the sort of egolessness of it, I'm not gripping too tightly to this sense of me. I'm not being rigid and I'm not seeing things as personal attacks. Hey, we're building this thing together. We're building this partnership together, I think. It's a kind of humility. It's like co -humility in that way. It seems pretty important. Yeah, because I'll just tell you from practical standpoint, when people come in for relationship counseling, pretty much the first thing we have to do is get them to both agree that they want to have a great relationship. know because a lot of times people come in and person one over here has decided a long time ago that they're out of the relationship but they haven't told number two over here you know that it's a spiritual divorce that happened six months ago or six years ago and they have never gotten back into the relationship and so commitment is a key first step in any kind of clearing up any kind of relationship issue because if you can get both people to say, I want to have a great relationship with you.

47:36That's what I'm here for. A lot of times though, the person is there for something different and if they were telling the truth, they would say, I'm not here to fix my relationship with you, I'm here to justify why I decided to leave. Yes. And so, you know, I'm kind of peaking backstage in the therapist's office there to tell you that if you're coming into counseling with that kind of attitude, you know, let the person know right up there and we can tell it with their with their body line. We We say, you know, are you committed to having a great relationship with Jane or John? And they say, well, of course, I'm completely committed to that.

48:27Well, I'm here, aren't I? You know, that's a summation of 50 years of defensive responses that I've heard from people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about co -commitment? What are the steps to co -commitment? and what does that mean to you?

48:47It's choosing to be in the game. I was a very, I played high school football for two years and I was minimally athletic, but I thought it was the best way to please the girls. Because I noticed that the athletes always walked around with the cool girls in the high school and so that was a big motivation since I was a portly nerd that wore big thick glasses and it was sort of pear -shaped at the time. I was I was a head being carried around by a body and so I decided to go out for junior height or junior varsity football in my 11th year and I spent the entire year sitting on the page that never let me in except toward the end of the season.

49:35We were ahead 49 points at one point and so I think at that point the coach said it was safe to send me in a couple of my unathletic partners in. So we got in there and I remembered the distinctly though the difference of something that happened the moment I stepped onto the field. Suddenly I realized I have to be committed to being here. I have to play this game no matter whether with 49 points ahead. I have to play this game like I mean it. And so, you know, in a lot of relationships, that commitment has wandered off, you know, through different interests or just drifting apart. Or, you know, like, I went on my, actually, he's a therapist where I used to practice out in Colorado.

50:25He told me, just as a colleague, we were talking about, because we'd both been divorced. I got divorced after a couple of years of our really. unconscious loving marriage when I was 22 or 23 years old. And I learned a lot from it, but I was really good. And I asked him, you know, how did you decide to leave your first marriage? Because he'd done the same thing. He'd been kind of gotten married to somebody right out of college and hadn't worked out. But he was in a great relationship now. And he said, And well, the day I decided to leave was I came home from a three day working trip and I was so ready to see her.

51:09And she opened the door and the first thing she said was, the upstairs toilet is broken. Thank God you're home.

51:19Yeah. And that did it. You know, he was so high and excited about connecting and then boom. And yeah, those kind of moments can make such a, you know, very few people leave in a relationship for logical reasons. You may have 42 logical reasons, but it's built in some kind of emotional moment. This episode is brought to you by Woop. Your body is constantly sending you signals, but without real data, it's easy to over train, under a cover and miss your best performance, which is where, whooped brand new 5 .0 comes in. It is the newest version of the wearable I've trusted for like 2000 nights. Now giving you everything that you need 24 -7 tracking, if you're heart rate, your sleep, your recovery, your workouts and more all translated into clear personalized simple data.

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52:39I hope you don't spend as much time on Instagram as I do. But because this has been emotions relating as the algorithm has reverse engineered where my interests are at the moment. So I'm getting a lot of, um, nest, uh, recording cam footage of, of stuff that's like real, um, loving things. It's this real famous video of, uh, what every man really wants. And it's this dude in his, maybe he's maybe 40, 45, like big guy in his garage and he's deadlifting. What looks like 500 pounds, maybe more, right? It's a big, big weight And he's got maybe his son in front of him and he's lifting this weight up and his son's jumping up and down going go daddy Go go daddy go and then another one which is a dad opening the fridge and his daughter's there In the in the kitchen behind him and she says are you going to the gym daddy?

53:37And he goes yeah, and she went wow I'm so proud of you and just walks off and this dad like just breaks down, crying. Right. Another one that I've seen recently is a man getting home from work and it's a montage of this outdoor camera facing the door of the house and he pulls in and it's every single day and every single day that he pulls in, his wife's waiting at the door for him and as soon as he gets out of the car she runs over and gives in my hug. And that's the opposite of the toilet upstairs is broken and I need you to do the thing. My point here is I really do think for all the first three buckets that I talked about, the macro trends, the evolutionary psychology underpinnings, the modern culture, I think people are very despondent about what those are.

54:35Socioeconomically, guys aren't doing particularly well. It means as a dearth of eligible partners for women who are doing the college and earning thing, oh, not good, and retreats and men going their own way and aggressive feminism and all of this stuff, then no, no, no, no. Evolutionary psychology, very sterile, not particularly great at sort of relating and showing and doing all the rest of this stuff. Also, can be a source of discomfort for people. Look at this programming that's, you know, Marionetteing me from 300 ,000 years ago, like that's not very good. And then the culture thing, oh, the go -mags and in cells and red pill and dating shows and all of this stuff, you know, it's all really bad.

55:13And then there's this pocket for me, which is a much more conscious, mindful, positive, some relational approach. And I really do think that if we can get people into this sort of perspective, if they can really understand, hey, you can have union with somebody and your life can be, it's not 50 and 50 makes 100, it's 100 and 100 makes 200, together you are better than you could be apart. But it takes work from both people. I just, I'm seeing Rick Rubin calls them whispers. So he pays attention to whispers in the culture, to little conversations I'll hear at the pool at Soho House in here in Austin or Just a headline that I see or a comment that I see on a YouTube video or whatever and you sort of like the Sherlock Holmes thing You'd start to piece these bits together.

56:10I think there's a real fertile ground for a wonderful relational revolution it's just It's scary for people to do. And I think that co -commitment thing, the idea of 50 -50 is so pervasive in modern romance. So there's a difficulty for helping people to trust that if they take 100 % responsibility for everything, that their partner will do the same in the end. And yeah, I guess when it comes to the concept of that 200 % responsibility and conscious relationships, what are the biggest obstacles that you face when convincing people that the only way to change their partner is by actually changing themselves.

56:54How do you overcome that obstacle? How do people get that faith? Well, you've touched on something incredibly important because out in the culture, you know, like if I were to watch a television sitcom or something like that, you know, it presents And such a completely standardized version of what male, female relationships are supposed to be, or any other kind of relationship for that matter, about 15 % of the people we've worked with over the years are in same -sex relationships. So what I want to say applies to people across the board, but one of the things that you see in relationships, a lot of times that destroys them early on, is some sense of competitiveness, comparative competitive kind of thing where you're competing for favor among the children or competing in some way with each other.

57:49And so that comes from that 50 -50 kind of responsibility, fighting over who's 50 % is it. The only solution for that is that taking 100 % responsibility, one person and the other person taking 100%. That's the only way out. And as you well know, though, that's not the way many relationships are set up. In fact, out in the society, like if you watch politics, you know, if you watch the news every day, you see the victim persecutor dynamic in action all the time. How many politicians speak every day about how they are being oppressed or somehow Now inconvenience by the other party. You know, nobody stands up on the floor of the Senate and says, I take responsibility for this.

58:44And it's always the other guys are responsible for keeping me from doing what I want to do. And so what my life has been about and what I kind of, my revolution is all about is making it okay and safe for everybody to tell the truth. like I want to vote for a politician that says, we've got some serious problems. I don't have the slightest idea how to deal with a lot of them, but I sure want to be working on them with everybody else who wants to work on them and who wants to play. You know, that's the spirit in which we're going to get things done, but I don't see much of that conversation going on.

59:25In fact, it's usually nowadays, if anybody tells the truth, they get fired. It's very unseductive. I suppose at least in politics, it is a competition. You need to beat the other person by any means necessary and whatever's most compelling to most of the electorate is what. People will vote for what politicians will give the policies that people will vote for because if they voted for something else, the politicians would do that. It's the same reason that anybody who complains about clickbait on YouTube, you go, dude, wife, you didn't click on it? The creators, the creators of it, stop creating it.

1:00:08But yeah, I think a lot of the time when we're talking about this sort of co -commitment thing, I'm going to give everything. I'm really going to dedicate myself to this and I want you to do the same. A lot of the time both partners tend to dig their heels in and they want the other person to go first. I'd be committed if you were. Yeah, I will take responsibility if they take responsibility to which sort of defeats the purpose entirely and creates this chicken or egg scenario. So how do you overcome that? Well, you work with the person until they're able to see that taking responsibility feels so much better than arguing for the victim position.

1:00:52Most couples arguments are a race to occupy the victim position. One person gets into the victim position, blames the other, and the other person says, wait a minute. I'm not the one that's ruining your life. You're the one that's ruining my life. And then off they go. That's why one of my great elder mentors, the late Eric Burn, MD used to say that most people don't experience 15 minutes of genuine intimacy in their entire lives. Because they stay locked in that victim persecutor dynamic and don't ever take a month enough responsibility. Oh, I'm creating my life the way it is. Oh, wow, that's a moment of power.

1:01:34That's a moment of genuine agency. And you know, it's pretty rare too. What's a way to step in and pat an interrupt that a couple is in this rhythm. They have got this race to the victimhood pedestal. What is a way that someone could interject and and patent break that? Well, I used to do a lot of business consulting back in the 90s after my book The Corporate Mystic came out and I used to go into companies like Dell and Motorola and Bell Labs and places like that. And I always call it parachuting into enemy territory because a lot of times a board would be stuck on a particular issue. And I would be the guy that was parachuting in to try to get the board unstuck about something.

1:02:23And it was interesting. It was never a business problem. It was always some emotional issue that somebody was stuck on. They were replaying some old anger issue or they were playing some old fear issue or something, but they weren't dealing with the problem that was. And I remember working with a very famous company that had a hundred million dollar deal at stake with a big Los Angeles entertainment company. And they were stuck to the point where they weren't speaking to each other. And so they repaired to their respective hotel rooms and did some introspecting and realized, oh, wait a minute.

1:03:11it. We have a whole bunch of fears that haven't been addressed. And so through a little bit of coaching, one guy stood up and said, I just want to tell you some of the things I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that mixing with your culture, we're going to lose some of the precious aspects of my culture here because we value dot, dot, dot. And I don't see you guys value So, but once the fears got out there, the business problem took about 20 minutes to solve. You know, that it was three days of, you know, having the car stuck in the ditch. And then it just took a little bit of authenticity to put things back on the right track.

1:04:03Yeah, so that's how you inspire people to sort of be more proactively benevolent in their relationship and stop keeping score, do you have a culture that teaches people to expect the 50 -50 split at every level? Yeah, well lawyers have told me that I've had in my practice that they've been told in law school, a good settlement when both people go away unhappy. And I was so pleased the other day. I saw, I don't know if you watched the open, I'm a golfer and so I watch the British Open. Anyway, I never miss it. I abdly watch the Open every year and this year one of our guys, Scotty Schaeffler from Texas won it.

1:04:50But at the press conference, he said something so valuable. This is the fried. It is one of the... I've reached out to Scotty to try and bring him on the show just because I've watched golfer a while. That one press conference thing. What's the point of me doing this? Why am I doing this? Let me tell you, I've worked my entire life for a few moments of satisfaction. It's phenomenal. It is so wonderful to see a high performer, do the thing, win the thing, and then warn everybody else off of it. Totally. And to not only say, I'm feeling this great feeling today, but he said, in a couple of days, I'll be back to my normal state of dissatisfaction.

1:05:33And I thought, well, I've never heard anybody say anything remotely like that. And then the other thing he said was, you know, it's great, you know, that I'm making living playing golf. But the day it interferes with my relationship with my wife or my child is the last day I'll ever play golf for a living. Wow. You know, that's because he's at the peak of his career. and with that kind of attitude, he could go on for years and years and years. But I'm so, I was so grateful to hear somebody at that statue say that. What I think is really wonderful about it is as well, it must be difficult to be the wife of a world champion golfer.

1:06:15He's a win all the time. He's training all the time. I mean, actually, golf probably one of the, one of the pursuits that probably gets the least female attention, I guess, I mean, Tiger Woods aside, he kind of transcended the sport, but you think about like NBA stars on the road or football players or whatever, and you think, oh, there's going to be a lot of female groupies around there. You're like, golf, really, are they like the pinnacle of sexiness when it comes to athletes? But still, you're in a relationship with a guy, a lot of attention, a lot of options, always on the road, late nights in hotels, so on and so forth.

1:06:49And a lot of the time, especially as someone who has the tiny micro amount of public attention, I'm thinking more and more about what is it like to be in a relation, to be on the other side of the relationship of the person that's the A player, right? That is the person that's out on stage because, well, it is an incumbent on the person who has got all of the stuff going on, who has all of the attention, to make the person who doesn't and is still there supporting them even more comfortable. You know, he finishes, he puts at the final thing high fives his caddy and looks around for where's my partner at because she's, if I go and celebrate with everybody else first, what's the subtext of that?

1:07:35The subtext is everything is a priority and you are what pick, you pick up the slack at the end. I was having a conversation with a friend recently who had dated a really, really famous singer for a while and she would get off stage and he would be the last person. After she's just had, you know, like, tens of thousands of adoring fans and they've all, it's the attention's been on her and she's sexy and done up and beguiling and charming and all the rest of this stuff. And then she'd get off stage and he's had to swallow his pride. He's had to like the fragile male ego of, I am here supporting my partner doing her thing.

1:08:12And then he was the last person that was sort of greeted and shock horror that relationship didn't last. And he is also, he's also public facing. And now when he does his thing and he's out on stage and he's, you know, the man, the pedestal, the, you know, the fucking savante that's up there, the first person he looks for when he comes off and finishes is his partner and he runs over to her, gives her a big kiss. She's the foot and she gets to be here. He did all of that and everybody loves him, but me, like I am his priority. That fits around me as opposed to me picking up the scraps afterward.

1:08:52And I think, yeah, that's everyone should go and check it. I retweeted it last week on my Twitter account, Scotty, like what a boss, what an absolute legend. Well, golf is the only sport that I'm remotely skilled at. So I watch carefully utterances by my favorite golfers and that was one that just really lit me up. Talking about that 50 -50 thing, I wonder whether there's an issue of trying to measure apples to apples in this competitive nature because one person does the dishes, one takes out the trash, one goes to work, one looks after the house, the nature of a heterosexual relationship is that we are always apples to oranges.

1:09:35Like, people are tracking what each partner brings to the table based on an assumption of evenness. But that's impossible because we bring different things to the table. And I have to assume that that just flattens the polarity of the relationship, which just leads to inevitable failure. Yeah, well, John Gray is an old friend of ours and you know, he made up that whole Mars is, men are from Mars, women are from Venus things. And he was telling me one time about where he sort of got that idea. He was in India and he was watching a group of people Cooked dinner for the village and he noticed that all of the men were just sitting around squatting watching Smoking not saying a word and the women were cooking and they were animatedly talking with each other and that kind of thing So you know if you go back in evolution you're gonna find that For most of human evolution, we were hunter -gatherers.

1:10:37For just a wink of an eye of modern life, we've become something different. But hunter -gatherers, the male element, they're out having to be very quiet and very touch with their communications if they're on the hunt. Whereas back home, everybody that's left, that's not out hunting, is talking and chattering making and making and how to parenting and yeah yeah yelling at kids to get away from the edge of the forest and all those kinds of things so it's been a much richer communication environment for females and we should also remember evolutionarily too during the modern era and I'm talking 10 ,000 years or so since we started moving into cities and living in cities and that kind of thing On the Alabas come from a background of having been slaves.

1:11:33Because if you look at the who was actually in Greece and in Rome and in Middle Ages Europe and all that kind of thing, you know, 90 % of the people were in virtual slavery of some kind. And so slaves, one thing they get good at is having a separate inner life that the other people, their oppressors don't know about it. And that's the reason, you know, like the Russian guy got kind of surprised when the iron curtain went down and people knocked over the Berlin wall because they hadn't perceived what was building out there in the 90 % of the people that were essentially slaves. And so all sorts of things happen because because nobody's paying attention to what other people are feeling.

1:12:23And so now in society, what I want to promote is everybody having a rich inner contact, a rich inner life where they're unconditionally loving of themselves and having that be the foundation for unconditionally loving other people and being able to communicate with them in such a way that ten -second sweaty conversations aren't even necessary because you've had so many rich conversations before anything dramatic happens. Yeah, I, an inverse of that. A lot of my friends are having kids for the first time, first time fathers. And this isn't a story that's second hand from anyone, but I've thought about this dynamic a lot.

1:13:08You could imagine a dynamic where the man is the breadwinner, mum is breastfeeding a newborn and wakes up 10 times per night, but wants her partner to wake up with her so that things feel even, right? And not even taking into consideration that the guy has got to be at work the next day to provide and will be exhausted from all of the wake -ups, even though the woman is also going to be exhausted, because she's got to care for the kids and all the rest of the stuff. But there is just, yeah, I suppose,

1:13:39understanding where individuation and unique capacities have a place at the table and where union and collaborative projects have a place at the table and being able to know, I'm going to do this thing and I'm not going to resent the fact that they're not there suffering along with me because I know that there are other things that they do which are costs that only they incur that they're doing in service of me too. And I suppose I have to assumed that this is where trust and faith that the other person is committed is like foundationally toxic to this because as soon as that breaks down, every cost that you incur doesn't feel like it's being reciprocated and this then begins to get the competitiveness and the point scoring.

1:14:27Well, I did this for you. The reason that I'm telling you that I did this for you is because I don't feel like you're doing things for me. And by me showing you how much stuff I'm doing for you, I'm going to motivate you into doing things for me in It's like that it seems like a big goody and not that just needs cutting through. Yeah, yeah. And that's why it's so important to get the competitive thing out of relationship. And you know, one of the first questions we ask people in their first session is, are you on the team or not? You know, is this a team for you, you and the other person, are you in it together?

1:15:04Are you committed to being in it together as allies rather than enemies? Because it doesn't take much to make people enemies. And once they've started going into that whole victim thing, that's unravelled to the trust and connection in a relationship very quickly. So keep it simple. Come back to those three things all the time. Am I in touch with my feelings, my authentic feelings? Am I telling the truth? and am I taking full joyful responsibility? But responsibility because somebody's making me take responsibility. Do I see generally that, oh, I'm in charge of my life? I can make it up however I want.

1:15:48If you get two people that are doing that, like Kitty have been, and I've been doing for the last 45 years, you can do lots of miracles like published 61 books between us and beyond 500 television shows and travel around the world two million miles teaching seminars. One of those things, none of those things would have happened if we were constantly ragging on each other and competing with each other. And you also probably couldn't have done it on your own. I wouldn't have wanted to do it on my own, you know, because before I met Katie, I was missing half of life because I'd been in an umpteen different relationships, including one longer one and just ran up against the same, you know, it's like realizing after a little while you're on the Titanic and you're blaming the iceberg, you know, which is a useful thing to do if you can do something about it, but at some point in relationship you have to realize, Oh, I'm the iceberg.

1:16:51I'm the thing that keeps happening to me. I'm the thing that keeps happening and being getting criticized or criticizing all the time. So the moment we make that inner move, all it takes is once to try to really get the door open to seeing responsibility as on the same wavelength as creativity, because if you are genuinely taking responsibility, you're saying, I'm an equal here in this universe as you. I'm an equal to everything in the universe. I am the universe. I am part of the whole. And once you establish that feeling, creativity comes to you just like so fast because you're not in the way of the creative impulses that the universe itself.

1:17:41And this universe is an incredibly creative place. I was reading about a place in astronomy out in the universe where there's 32 sons, S -U -N -S, being born a second. They're spewing out out there somewhere, 32 new sons, just like our big bright shiny one in the air, but 32 of them a second. And we're part of 800 billion galaxies. And so if you're pretending you're different from all that, that you're special, well, you're asking the universe to, you know, it's like putting a kick me sign on yourself. You're going to be a little fast. Yeah. You've got to be a member of the universe before you can take full advantage of it.

1:18:28If you're trying to prove that you're special and different and not like everybody else here, that's an awkward place to be. Also, if you are encountering similar situations regularly throughout your life, we're talking about relationships. So all of my exes, all of my exes and narcissists, all of my exes, they're unable to end a relationship in a charming way. Or all of my exes are terrifyingly jealous or whatever. You go, all of them? All of them. All of them. Well, that might be true. What's the common denominator between all of your, oh, you are, you are the common denominator between all of the experiences in your life.

1:19:08So when you see this thread that happened, I'm often told that I'm X or Y, I'm often told that I'm too sensitive and emotional and I can't take a response, but I'm often told that I'm cold and I need the B -B -B -B. It's like, well, maybe take some heed of that and consider that it might not, the other people might not be the problem. Yeah, you, in fact, it probably is you. And even if it's not you, taking responsibility wherever you can is going to feel much more empowering than waving the victim flag and like raging at the sky. You know, you just reminded me of the very best one liner any person has ever sent to me in a therapy situation was when I was a university, when I was a professor at the University of Colorado.

1:19:58I worked at the branch in Colorado Springs. I was ahead of the counseling department there. And we also were expected to have a private practice. So you weren't just preaching stuff. You were practicing what you preached. So one day a week I spent seeing clients. And a fellow came in that was in his thirties. And he said that since the time he was 17 years old. He had been in a number of relationships, mostly a matter of months, but a couple of them that had been in a matter of years, but they always ended the same way, where the woman betrayed him or left or moved out of town, or something that always looked like it was the other person's fault.

1:20:48And here's his one liner. He said in this very innocent voice, She said, Dr. Hendrix, I'm beginning to wonder if it has something to do with me. You think? Yeah. And it didn't take me 10 minutes of being a therapy wizard to find out something that he had never thought about, which is amazing in itself. He had never connected up the fact that he was one of four boys and he was the baby of four boys. And after his mother had him, she decided she'd had enough and disappeared with another man and just didn't come back. And so he grew up in this milieu where his father was of ranting on a pretty much daily basis.

1:21:39If your mother were only here, blah, blah, blah, and just couldn't adapt very well and was playing the victim card throughout my clients. And it was so deeply ingrained that he'd never made the connection. He didn't until he was 35 or so years old say, oh, that horrible betrayal, when I was a year old, I'm replaying the pattern. Wow. So, I've been blessed in a way. I've been able to sit with people thousands of times now where they had that realization. But I never get tired of it. It's always the most beautiful thing to see because when a person gets out of life happening to them and gets into, oh, life is happening to rule me.

1:22:28That means I can do something about it. I can create a new dream or I can create a new relationship. You can't do that when you're operating from the victim position. So good. One of my best friends is currently writing a book about agency and he summarizes agency as, I happen to life, not life happens to me. And I suppose the elevated, ascended, spiritually enlightened version of his life happens through me. That's a more hard opening side of things. But I think the ground floor is like, hey, I happen to life. I can impact my future. Holy shit, like I can leave that relationship I don't like or I can move out of that career that isn't infusing me anymore.

1:23:15I can set a boundary with my family that's pissing me off or I can lose 50 pounds or I can change my habits like fundamentally you are not at the mercy of the things that are happening to you and the same thing goes for your relationship. And I think I've had this theory for a little while I'd be interested to know what your opinion of this is. A lot of a lot of relationship, proselytizing that happens on the internet. A lot of the issues that people are trying to navigate are fundamentally incompatibility, being intellectualized, reverse engineered, I have a friend who has made a big deal out of the fact that your partner should challenge you.

1:23:57His wife of many decades is super disagreeable. It's like, well, obviously, obviously the person that you fell in love with is the philosophy that you then bore out of that because if not, you would have broken up. And the same thing goes for like all the way down. Much of it is what you need to be able to do this within your early. You must be able to navigate this with your partner. It's like, I get the sense that it is far easier to find a partner who compensates for our shortcomings and actually helps us get past them, then it is to fix them. Like, I like to party three nights a week and my partner has a problem with that.

1:24:40It's like because you chose a partner who doesn't like to party three nights a week. It's just an incompatibility problem that you're now trying, oh, well, it's my resistance. I must get over my resistance around jealousy or whatever it is. Like my partner flirts with loads of people and I need to teach them that it's wrong. It's like you chose a flirty partner. You chose a partner that floats with everybody and you're the sort of person that feels uncomfortable with that. There is a man or a woman out there who would be absolutely fine with it and maybe even would actually quite like it because they know that they get the partner when they come home.

1:25:06And there is another partner out there for you who wouldn't float with anybody and would love the fact that you're really dedicated and that you pay attention and that you care about the fact. It's like a lot of it is reverse engineering incompatibility and then forming some kind of philosophy out of it. And then on the other side, people because they have their own idiosyncrasies and preferences, their mating philosophy is precisely the thing that they chose because it's born out of the thing that they committed to. If they were like, your partner should be really easy going. You go, you married a woman that was super disagreeable for 40 years.

1:25:39You square that circle for me. It wouldn't because it would be in discordance and it would cause a ton of havoc. So yeah, that incompatibility thing, the way that philosophy is born out, a lot of it is people just navigating wrong partner choice as far as I can see. I agree, because like I mentioned earlier, I had one of those really difficult relationships where I chose somebody unconsciously, it was incredibly critical, and then I complained all the time about her being critical. And so I think we should all remember a quotation from that great marriage counselor, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, where he says about his girlfriend.

1:26:22He says, I got gaps. She got gaps. We fill gaps. And so look for somebody not necessarily that's just like you, but has things that you need to learn. And I like, I remember when my wife corrected my Mr. Fixit program way back in the early stages of our relationship. Maybe in the first year of our relationship, she He said something about she felt tired. And I went into fix it mode and I said, oh, well, why don't you try. Let's meditate for 15 minutes together or something like that. And I tried two or three things and finally she said, when I tell you something like, I'm scared or I'm tired, I'm not looking for you to fix it.

1:27:11I'm just looking to tell you for the sake of letting you know what's going on on me. And I remember being just dumbfounded at that. I'm not supposed to fix it. You know, that was news to me. I grew up in a family with some people who were addicted to substances in it, where I was sometimes called upon to take responsibility for parenting them, rather than them parenting me. And so I was, you know, used to operating out of Mr. Fixit mode and Mr. Fixit just didn't work in this relationship. And so I had to go for Mr. Resonance mode rather than Mr. Fixit mode. What, there's a really famous meme that's floating around on a, it's a girlfriend texting her boyfriend and she says, I dropped my burrito on the floor, I'm devastated.

1:28:10And his response to your situation is, are you in the problem solving mode or you just want to talk about it for a while? It's so true. It's so true. And I think, you know, for the women out there, guys like to fix things, vasopressin for us is a fucking hell of a drug. Like I saw or another great video from a while ago on Twitter said, it's a woman sort of a Gen Z type woman talking to the camera. She says, I've just figured men out. I've just figured men out. Men love quests. They want quests. They're always looking for quests. They just want something they want to go and fix this thing and come back and them to be the hero and they just want quests.

1:28:55They want quests in the bedroom and they want to get a pad on the back and a good boy and didn't you do well and so on and so on. Like they just want quests And that's why the failure of cross -sex mind reading is, I am communicating to you in the way that I would want to be communicated to. And it just takes a little bit of humility and understanding on both sides. And you know, these are things that are hard learned. And I think it's one of the reasons that relationships are training grounds and often the first relationship you get into is probably not going to be the one that you stay in because So many of these lessons are learned through discomfort and then they accumulate over time.

1:29:31You have this cumulative load of errors that have been made and it gets too great. And the relationship catches, like collapses under the weight of it. And then, oh, well, I run it back next time, but I take all of the learnings from the last one into this one and then I go again and, oh, isn't that great? We didn't have to, I didn't tell her like how to go and buy a new barito. I said, I'm so sorry that your barito fall on the floor, honey, isn't that? So, yeah, gay, you are fantastic. And I think your work is wonderful. Let's bring it into land there. I've got enough to talk about for the rest of the day, but we can just do another episode.

1:30:07So tell people where they should go to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing in the interim. Well, good, while we're everywhere, I have a whole team that does Facebook and all those kinds of things. I do my own Instagram, my own personal Hendrix .gay. at Hendricks .Gay Instagram because I kind of get a kick out of that and posting family stuff on there and stuff I do and that kind of thing. So you can find us just about everywhere. Hendricks .com is the jumping off place for everything we do. We have a new thing called the Coaches Portal that you can find, which is a way to get all your answer, professional answers for what you do with your clients and that kind of thing.

1:30:46So, and our books are everywhere. So, we're pretty hard to miss out there. I just thought something that I got to tell you. Maybe you saw this on Instagram. There's the greatest cartoon I saw this week that I circulated all over the place. There's an old -fashioned cartoon of two women sitting in a room kind of in a seance, and one of them is reading tarot cards for the other way. And the tarot card reader is saying to the other woman, And you know, your cards indicate that you're the cause of a lot of your own problems. And the other woman says, bitch, reshuffle those cards.

1:31:33Perfect. Okay. I can't wait to speak to you again, mate. I'm so glad that I found your work. And I really think that you're moving everybody's world in a better direction. and so I appreciate you very much. Well thank you very much. You're clearly in your genius zone and blessings to you.