Transforming Relationships By Healing Your Own Wounds First | Dr. Caroline Leaf EP 502

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:11Why do we attract certain people? Basically, as humans, humanity, because of a wide full of nature in the mind, brain, and body. When something is off, we don't to that to restore balance. It could be that you just see something that you didn't really experience, but it could have triggered something or didn't trigger something. But just the mere fact that you're human, there's a desire to help. Sometimes you hear women who will try to find a guy who maybe has a deficiency or is broken or something's off, right? And they see the potential. And they're like, okay, I'm going to go help this person overcome this challenge or this pain or this struggle and fix them.

0:49And they struggle for them, that guy, to change or transform or heal or grow. Or when they do transform, then there's nothing else to fix. Or they try to reinvent new problems to fix in them. So what happens when a woman who is not healed finds a healthy man, a man who's working on himself, who wants to grow, who's doing it independently, but doesn't need, like, all this fixing? Why is she unable to be okay and happy in a healthy relationship? Because there's brokenness in her and what she's trying to fix is herself. And you'll see that male-to-female, you'll see it in male-to-male relationship, female-to-female relationship, whatever.

1:29Really? In any kind of relationship, It's the unique person. So first, we must look at the person, see ourselves as a unique human being, and then we look at what our gender is. What we're talking about here is the essence of what I have missing in my relationship. I need to see in someone else and want to fix. Instead of me fixing myself, I try and fix someone else. And you can't fix anyone else. The only person you can fix is yourself. All we can do is support other people. That's when it gets even more challenging in relationships when you're constantly trying to change someone. I just feel like that's where a lot of stress and chaos happens.

2:02It's conflict. Because you're not accepting them. You're not choosing them based on acceptance. Exactly. I give an example of the relationship of people that have been married for quite a few years. The husband in the relationship used to get incredibly irritated with his wife and switch off, and found her just demanding and always nagging. And they had just kind of got into this pattern of, you know, very unhealthy, and got to the point where kids are out of home, and all that kind of thing. and this person is basically at a point where, you know, do I carry on with this? Which is very often what happens once.

2:32Right, after the kids are gone. And this person started doing the neurocycle. I mean, they were sort of working through this process and started initially very sceptical. Basically, the neurocycle is just mind management. It's the scientific way that you get your mind, messy mind to listen to a wise mind to change your neuroplasticity. So it's mind of a neuroplasticity. So it's a science of how do I find how I'm showing up and how can I change that? which is your question you asked right in the beginning. Can we change this? Or do we have to live with all of this? Yes, we can change it. So that person, that husband, lived with that relationship for years, but you don't have to live for whatever, however, 40, 50 years of marriage.

3:11You don't have to live with it. You can train your kids to start looking at these things in yourself so that you can become healthy and pick up things quickly. After a period of initially being very sceptical, suddenly a connection was made around about three weeks into the process of, oh, I'm actually blocking off to my wife, and she is just trying to get me to connect with her. That's what sounds like the nagging. And me seeing her as just wanting everything to be perfect all the time and finding that really irritating is actually triggering my poor relationship with my dad. Wow. And my dad was one who'd required complete and utter perfectionism.

3:49Oh, my gosh. So as soon as what sounded similar... They're criticizing me. I shut off. I protect. Coping mechanism. And the realization has transformed and saved a marriage. How much does our love as adults in relationships reflect based on what we witnessed our parents' love like as kids? Huge news. Really? It's really huge. Having said that, if you didn't witness a good relationship, it doesn't mean you can't have one. But it does mean you're going to have to overcome a lot of obstacles. And that is... It's harder. It's harder. It's definitely harder because it generally leads to a lot of mistrust.

4:26What very often happens is that when you've seen that you haven't had a good model, you don't get into deep enough relationships and then you can get hurt very easily. Or you kind of end up maybe sort of almost using people without even consciously using people. And you meet people that are also broken, so you use each other. So it creates a lot of distrust. Things will trigger you much more quickly and that kind of thing. You know what I always say when it comes to parenting? Because I'm a parent of four kids, as you know, and awful work with us. I always tell my kids this. I was someone's daughter, and I have a mom and a dad, and they were someone's daughter and son.

5:00And each person had baggage. So you cannot go into a marriage, a relationship, and parenting without baggage. We know that. It's logical. So you've got all this come down, and it's in these networks, and it plays out, and it's triggered. And whatever isn't resolved will be triggered badly. And whatever is resolved, oh, you'll handle it. you'll see, oh, I could be like that, but I'm like this, or my mom did that, but I'm not going to do that. And so in other words, that's where you've worked through something. So what we need to do as daughters and sons going into relationships is to say, okay, I know what my parents went through.

5:31They maybe didn't have a great relationship. I don't know the ins and outs. It's not really a child's responsibility to know all the intimate details of why a marriage broke down. To certain, you know, there's a certain amount that they should know and a certain amount that they shouldn't know and recognize that, you know, sometimes things don't work out. And to honor these stories, but at the same time, you have the right to honor the impact it had on your life. So it's not indistri - There could be good impact and bad impact at the same time. You can hold both in your hands. You can hold both in your hands at the same time.

5:59But very often what will either happen is you'll swing to suppressing the negative because you feel you've been disloyal to a parent or to the parents. Really? And very often happens. So you'll almost suppress it for years. And act like, what, it didn't happen. It wasn't that bad, or...? Yes, that it wasn't, you deny it, you diminish, you suppress and you don't deal. And then suddenly something will trigger you one day. And this happened with the conversation that I had with someone where a very successful person, parents went through a very traumatic marriage and the one parent said way too much to the children.

6:28The child, yeah. Yeah, there's got to be boundaries. There's got to be an amount that you do say, otherwise the child will think it's their fault. That's another thing we need to realize. Children will immediately, if there's a broken marriage, a child will think it's their fault, that they're the cause. So it is important to say, hey, listen, this is not you. This is between us. If someone watching or listening has parents who have been divorced, whether it was traumatic or not traumatic as a child with their relationship, watching the relationship, but they went through a divorce, how does that indicate how successful you will be in a marriage or in a relationship if you don't learn to create new healthy meaning around their model of love and relationship and their divorce and if you don't heal and process that?

7:07Like, what are we setting ourselves up for if we're not aware of it? And make sure we really work on these things if our parents have been divorced. You're setting yourself up for failure. The reason I say that, and it sounds really harsh, but the other flip side of the coin is that once you do deal with it, you're setting yourself up for success. And that power is in your hands. You know, and that's really why it's so important that we don't suppress stuff. Because suppressing stuff, not only is it keeping the toxicity and increasing your vulnerability to disease, so physically you're suffering, and you will suffer more and more over time, you are going to kind of boomerang from one bad relationship into the next because you haven't dealt with the core issue but once you start dealing with it look at this example of the first example i gave you can have a 50-year marriage and 50 is a toxic pattern that really was problematic and you can heal that and have the last however many years you've got left in a very healthy relationship the hope is in the fact that we can change but there is work involved there is no Paul that's going to fix it, there is the work involved.

8:06So in the community, we're going to have a slightly more balanced attachment style. If we're raised by a community, or aunts and uncles and friends. It's more realistic. It's more like, oh, okay, they're all going to give them some time. Then we go sit with Granny. Because we're not needing the love and affection from one person. We get it from a community, but if you're in this very isolated, insular-type environment, Where does the parent explode safely? There's no safe environment for a child. Exactly. There's no safe environment. There's no safe environment for the parents. And you are going to explode.

8:38It's very normal to have those arguments. So that's the ideal. It's not what's happening. So what do we do now? How do we deal with that? You have to be honest with your kids. And what Mac and I tried was we do have very different opinions about a lot of things. And both of us are Italian and background and explosive. So we did have arguments. When kids are around and the pressures of raising kids and working. Yeah, four kids, that's a lot. It's a lot. And both of us working and whatever. If we had an argument, we would never just leave it. We would go to the kids. We would apologize. We gave them permission to tell us when we were upsetting them.

9:11We gave them permission to actually, from an outside point of view, say, hey, you are impacting us. This is really upsetting us. If you have an argument, you need to tell your kids, okay, we had an argument about X. Obviously, language, age appropriate, and also within boundaries. they don't need all the details. We had an argument. We disagreed on this. I didn't like dad's reaction. Dad didn't like my reaction. I did this that bugged him. He did this that bugged me. This is how we resolved it. And this is what we're going to do. That's a neurocycle. We went through all five steps of the neurocycle.

9:39Once we'd cooled down and calmed down and we used the neurocycle individually on ourselves and then on each other, it was a God save. It was a life-saving thing in our marriage because it helped us to stand back, calm down, evaluate. What am I really fighting about? what happens if both of us are dead tomorrow, one of us is dead, what would we do right now? And so we would resolve it. And, you know, we would let our kids know we're still trying to resolve it, so there may still be a bit of arguments or whatever, but this is where we're going. This is our resolution. We still love each other. Kids need that.

10:09Even an adult child needs that. We can go through that process of showing, modeling to a child, listen, it's normal to have arguments. We have bad days. We are a mess. No one's perfect. We're not perfect. We do not expect you to be perfect. tell us how you feel you know get it out and go through the sequence don't just blurb it all out the big thing about healing in a relationship to have healthy future relationships is not just get the kids to talk about emotions or mix it all up very organised let's talk about this is how I felt this is one of my emotions this is what I said this is what I did four categories of signals very organised I'm going to talk about how we felt our emotions our behaviours our bodily sensations and our perspective

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11:47Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.