Getting emotionally ‘BUFF’ in your divorce and divorce recovery - David Enevoldsen || Don’t Pick The Scab Podcast 017 || David M. Webb

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Don't Pick the Scab Podcast with the Primus of Connecting Man Over 40

[00:00:18] with the tools and community to thrive in their divorce recovery either before, during,

[00:00:24] or after a divorce.

[00:00:26] Check it out. I also have a psychology background, my undergraduate degree was in psychology and I continue to be fascinated by psychology. So emotional buffination is kind of the merger of all these things. It's a combination of my personal experiences, what was working for me going from basically a suicidal mess, but there's definitely a lot of overlap, I think, with respect to emotional intelligence, emotional agility. A lot of people use these terms interchangeably, I think. I would just say emotional abuffination is the specific framework I've offered, which

[00:03:01] differs a little bit from some other people. think about attracts similar things in your life. The reason that I find that useful is a couple of things. One is I think it really orients you away from being a victim because the core idea of a lot of attraction is if something is happening in your life that you don't like it, somehow you brought it to yourself.

[00:04:20] And so I think one of the common things, and this is something I saw as a family law attorney,

[00:04:24] this is absolutely something I have done myself and I think everything is her fault, I start spewing all sorts of vitriol and anger and horror. And that's going to feed back to me. It's going to make the environment between the two of us toxic. It's going to make it much harder to resolve things in terms of agreements. It's going to be bad for my kids if you have kids. So it doesn't really help. It tends to fireball things out of control when you shift into blame mode. This was a real struggle as a

[00:05:45] family law attorney was constantly people just wanted to come in and talk to me about how evil So a lot of the framework with the law of attraction is if you're thinking about positive things, positive things tend to manifest, or if you're thinking negatively, the world starts to become negative for you. There's a wide range of reasons. I think that thinking in a positive way, and there's a lot of research supporting this just on a psychological level.

[00:07:01] When you're thinking more positively and dwelling on sort of positive And so that's another aspect of the long traction that I like is that it reframes your thinking into away from all that negative stuff into the positive stuff and that has ripples all over the place. Perpetually focusing on positive things can reduce anger. We fixate it on things like gratitude for example. That just

[00:08:23] fundamentally alters the framework that you're calming at someone else with and the way you're I believe that most of what comes out, even if you don't get metaphysical about this, most of what comes out starts with thought. If I wanna go pick up something, I'm gonna pick up my pen off the table here. I have to first think I wanna do that and then kind of actions proceed on from there. So it starts with thought, but yeah,

[00:09:41] it's then it can turn into speaking and into existence.

[00:09:44] People use like Montrose to kind of tell themselves,

[00:09:46] I want this thing to come into effect and some sheetos, watch TV, and just dwell on how I'm going to be a millionaire. And I think that's a little problematic, and that kind of shifts into that lazy pattern. One of the themes that I think about the law of attraction is that you're becoming the magnet for the things that you want. So you are the attractor. And so what I like to think of, in my mind, this is a misconception about the law of attraction,

[00:11:02] is that I think a lot of people just think of, by way of law of attraction, if you get sort of metaphysical about it again. But the framework I come from is more like become that person. Truth. And that often requires work. And that requires changing who you are, which is not easy.

[00:12:22] You know, that's difficult.

[00:12:23] Yeah.

[00:12:24] Action played that you have to actually do the work in order for law of attractive work. want to have a positive relationship with my kids or I want to get through these divorces from the least possible. I want to recover and feel good, you know, those kinds of things. So whatever it is, there's often action, even though I'm like the core, like a spiritual sort of side of this action in and of itself is

[00:13:40] not the baseline for this. It's thought. But I think action is sort of an

[00:13:44] extension of the podcast. the analogies I like to draw is that if you imagine you're like walking out in the forest and you find this this old car, this just beat a heck, like the engine's been torn out, there's like no tires on it, like nothing's working. And then I sit down and I say, well, I replaced the alternator on this beat up car and it's still not working. And I've been

[00:15:01] on a new tire and it still isn't working. That, that to Paying a lot of attention to what you're doing and what you're attracting. And this goes back to kind of some of the law of attraction stuff too, but for example, I get out of it divorce and I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna go start dating again. And then I immediately run into problems. I have a running theme that human beings are inherently drawn romantically or otherwise to people

[00:16:22] of comparable emotional developmental levels.

[00:16:25] And so very often what you ways you can shift that is to change who you are. Because if you are attracting the wrong kind of person for you, meaning that if you're seeing relationships successively that are just kind of toxic over and over and over again, something is in you that's being drawn to those people that are causing this toxic situation.

[00:17:42] So because of that, I think prioritizing self-care is absolutely critical. To improve all that and unfortunately this is something this is one of the emotional buffination themes also This is something that requires some work, you know It's a lot like working out at the gym where I don't just go to the gym one time and say well I'm buff forever. I don't have to do that again like you keep going on a regular basis. I'm a state of it Right same thing with with the emotional stuff like you have to keep working on it

[00:19:01] Disabates so make it part of your routine, you know, there's a million things you can do in that realm like reading stuff

[00:20:02] I think it's a whole lot better. What do you think about that?

[00:20:08] 100% agree with that the words and this has impact in a million different ways

[00:20:10] One is the interactions you're having with the other person

[00:20:14] It's funny like my business partner reason attorney also

[00:20:19] Very frequently especially when he's like upset and he's sending an email to someone

[00:20:22] He'll send it to me first and say hey, here's my drag Can you filter this for?

[00:20:25] Because oftentimes what will happen is we get really angry I was using with me were like becoming real and I was becoming convinced all these things were true You know, I said I'm a terrible husband. I said I'm a terrible parent I said it was terrible business and like all these things were coming true and it felt like garbage and so You know when I realized like changing the words I was using even with myself was such an important thing

[00:21:43] I actually thought I would win

[00:21:45] and I had this exercise that I was doing that you're using, even the tone that you're using is really important to pay attention to. Yeah, the tone cannot be produced most of the time through a text or email, so it's kind of nice. But it also kind of can. It's a hard to sense it, but you can use a lot of words that are going to shift it in one direction or another. It's funny you say that there's a key in Peel Skit.

[00:23:03] Oh, heck yeah. I love you, Peel. You partner first and say, can you check this for tone? You're just interacting. That is one of the positives there, is that you have a few minutes to type it up, step away from it for a second, say, okay, I'm ready to send this, read this again, say what I wanted to say, but you're right.

[00:24:20] There's a piece, you are. Yeah, it stands for own, understand, and resolve. And so the first step of that is owning what's going on in just kind of a general sense here. You say, okay, I'm going to get control of myself. I'm going to get control of my behaviors. I'm going to understand where I'm coming from and

[00:25:40] why I'm reacting to these things. Sometimes you're getting an idiot. This is what she's talking about. She's not talking about the things that you're actually talking about. I went, oh my God, you're right. And so the next time I had a conversation with this girl I was dating, I remember I had a moment where things started escalating and I stopped myself and I went, what is she actually talking about? And I went,

[00:27:00] oh, she's talking about this other thing over here. And the opposing attorney and she was representing herself and she was trying to say all this stuff. And the thing she was saying, me no legal sense whatsoever, she was like citing maritime law and law from Maine and like it's all these things that had no relevance whatsoever to what we were doing. And so she obviously didn't prevail in court and so she came when he was very angry about

[00:28:25] that. That right there can fundamentally alter what's going on. Because if you start having a sense of where somebody's coming from, you start speaking to that instead of just reacting to whatever is going on, that's huge. And then the last step is resolve. And resolve is having this understanding of here's where I'm coming from, here's where there's coming, they're coming from. You make a choice about what you're going to do to fix the problem.

[00:29:41] And it means very important not to slip into just blame because if I can start

[00:29:45] going into blame, then you also get into victim what you do. So if you're like, you need to always be calm, and then they watch you having a tantrum in a restaurant because the waiter didn't do whatever, they're going to mirror that. They're going to go out and have tantrums about other things. So getting control of yourself and being a model for them, I think is really, really

[00:31:01] huge.

[00:31:02] Probably bigger than anything else. what you're presenting your kids and how you're interfacing. Going back to that hour model, if they constantly see you arguing with their mom, then that starts to become the model for them as to how a romantic relationship should work over how you're gonna interface with your ex or other people. And that can really turn into very toxic places too.

[00:32:20] I've seen cases where the two parties were just fighting

[00:32:24] and fighting for years and spending hundreds

[00:33:22] He says, I will watch it. What's one of the most important things you want to give to my listeners as we sign off

[00:33:27] here?

[00:33:28] It's all important.

[00:33:29] But if you had one thing to trap them some knowledge, what would you say?

[00:33:34] I think that in my mind, the most fundamental starting place is what I call absolute responsibility.

[00:33:40] And that is just this assumption that whatever is going on, it's on you.

[00:33:46] And so if you don't like what's happening, so I've got a number of different resources. I've got a few books. I've got the emotional buffination book Which is you can find it on my website or on Amazon or other places the website is m buff.com That's E M B U F F.com

[00:35:04] You can find the book there. It's often audible as well as if you prefer to listen you can hear it there