Recognizing and dealing with the child in all of us during our divorce recovery - James Christensen || DRMO40 014 || David

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Divorce Recovery Men Over 40 podcast that empowers men with the tools that

[00:00:06] foster hope, resilience, and growth during and after divorce.

[00:00:10] Check it out. Favorite part of counseling is helping couples. I also do a little bit of trauma work. I do counseling with men. Um, but, but if I could choose, I would work with only couples. What are some of the things just off the bat? Uh, do you have a guy going through a divorce? What's some of the first things you can do for him to help himself to gain a foothold of all the craziness and the, and the, and the out of control,

[00:01:43] emotions and all that good stuff.

[00:02:45] What's the method then? It's wonderful that you said that because our instinct to attack the pain in the body is the problem. Let's just talk, let's back up a little bit, talk about why is my body

[00:02:50] experiencing so much distress in the first place? Why does that even happen? And what's happening is

[00:02:56] the human being is designed to survive childhood primarily. So from a design perspective,

[00:03:00] humans are designed to survive childhood. One of the ways that we survive childhood is by

[00:03:04] maintaining an emotional connection with our parents. We maintain that connection with our What is the science of relationship repair? You know, I saw that in your bio. What exactly is that? It's taking a step-by-step approach to what is the first step, the first step of taking a relationship from bad to better, and then a next step. So we start at the very bottom, and we would start right where we stopped us,

[00:04:20] started this conversation,

[00:04:21] which is where are you feeling this in your body,

[00:04:25] and how can you take care of your body, to a single person or a divorce person as it does to a married person. We're still trying to develop the capacity to have an enjoyable adult relationship, whether we're currently in one or not. So one of the things I talk on my podcast, we talk about communication. Communication is big and it's kind of broken in a divorce.

[00:05:42] Since that connection is broken,

[00:05:44] how can men improve communication

[00:05:46] coming from a negative space? the future and request has positive friendly energy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to translate that complaint into a request. So instead of saying, you never do this, you always do this, I might say, I would like you to do that, or I would prefer you do this, or I would prefer you treat me this way or talk to me that way. Realizing that just because I make the request doesn't mean

[00:07:01] my partner has to comply with the request. But but happens when you have a couple that it doesn't work out and make it divorced? Do they transition into a different kind of counseling or do you stop counseling or what has happened in the past with you? No, I don't make any difference with that. The way I talk to couples about this, yeah,

[00:08:25] because I work with a lot of couples who are on the edge of divorce. Do we stay? Do we Sometimes that's not a clear answer. Sometimes you just don't know. It's a difficult question. It's complicated. You might never know for sure whether it was correct to stay or go. And you just have to make your best guess. The default is usually to stay because it's easier. Sometimes it is wiser to go, but you might never never know for sure.

[00:09:42] And so it's just one of these incredibly difficult decisions in life. So I often do recommend a couple's if face-to-face communication is too much for you to handle, try moving down this ladder of intimacy and communication and written would be the lowest. How do you handle, and this is one I kind of get confused with the narcissist, when you have one or maybe two people in the relationship with a narcissist, how do you handle that?

[00:11:05] Best thing is to be like totally hard for me.

[00:11:07] It is very difficult. a certain balance between the two, not just in narcissism, but in any kind of emotional, any kind of emotional immaturity, you're going to see a pretty close balance between the two people. The problem is it's so much easier for me to see my partner's immaturity than it is for me to see my own immaturity. Coming on to like, how do you deal with it? I would say, pay more attention

[00:12:22] to the person's behavior and less attention to the person and it's not, you can't have a good marriage in your 20s. It's just a lot harder. And I don't, honestly, I don't regret my choice to get married. But, but it is more difficult. The human brain doesn't even stop maturing until the age of 25 or 26. And so when we get married young, it really is hard because we're, our child brain is still

[00:13:44] very active. Now, as we get older, that's step number one and you have the whole mountain ahead of you.

[00:15:01] And some couples do make it. I would say it'm not being treated well, I'm not being loved the way I want to be loved. And so my mind is going to come up with some solution to this and solution is often going to be, well, if I leave my marriage, everything's going to get better. I'm not anti-divorce. I do think the divorce is the best option in some cases, but I don't think the divorce

[00:16:22] is going to get you away similar to me in emotional maturity. And then we either grow or stagnate together. So even as I get divorced, I'm divorcing someone who is very similar to me in maturity level, which means that, you know, as I go out on the dating market, I'm going to be able to attract people who are at a

[00:17:40] similar level of maturity. And so what I have seen is people who get divorced get me married and divorce is not the ideal, but it's also not the worst possible outcome. As far as what can you do for your children? Every bit of emotional development that you do as a person, you give to your children for free is the greatest gift. People focus on leaving, you know, a million dollars to their kids. That's great. If you can leave emotional maturity to your children by growing yourself up, that's worth

[00:19:03] more than any, any sum of money. decision to like, well, you know, the marriage isn't doing well. One of us is considering leaving. What I tell them is I say, why don't you two work on your own capacity to love each other for six months and then make the decision? And I'm not saying, I don't want to make sure I'm explaining it well. The thing is that I often tell a couple, the marriage you had is over.

[00:20:23] And so the marriage has already ended because they don't like each other.

[00:20:26] They don't want to be around each other.

[00:20:28] It's not much of a marriage.

[00:21:24] to a person and then decide that divorce is still the right path. So pretty much like a reset.

[00:21:26] Exactly.

[00:21:27] And what I tell them is like, let's work on this for a few months.

[00:21:31] And then after a few months, you're going to make your decision.

[00:21:34] And the ideal case is either you stay with love or you leave with love.

[00:21:38] And I would much rather see that than either staying with anger or leaving with anger.

[00:21:43] And a divorce where one person leaves with right at home and I'm just going to act like a child too. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, it does. We have so much power to influence the behavior of the other person by behaving better ourselves.

[00:23:00] It's hard to do, but it is possible. It's not to that childhood survival instinct we started with. I started off in life as this very small person who was very vulnerable and depended on adults for survival and I was programmed to maintain that connection. I needed my parents, I mean, I really did deem my parents to behave a certain way if I was going to survive childhood. My

[00:24:21] programming was very intense in helping me maintain similar, let's say I'm divorced and now, you know, we're taking turns with the kids and, and you know, my, my ex is doing certain things that I have zero control over, even less control over than I had when we were still married. And my body is interpreting this as a survival level threat.

[00:25:42] My body is saying, if this person behaves in this way, I'm going to die.

[00:25:47] That's what your body is telling you.

[00:25:48] That's why it feels so bad. It's just my chest. My chest is the place where it hurts. I put my hand over my heart and I would just say, I'm here for you. And what I'm doing is I'm reaching for the adult part of my brain, the adult part that knows how to comfort a child that's in distress. And I'm activating that part and I'm allowing the child by my brain that's afraid to feel that, that parental energy, that love, that comfort, that

[00:27:03] strength that it needs to feel. And now the child part says, no, you need to go

[00:27:07] get that from your partner. So the solution is to feel the distress that your body needs to feel. So I'm going to step into the fire I'm gonna step into the pain. I'm gonna allow my body to feel what it needs to feel There is a part of me. There's a programming in me something in my body feels survival level distress

[00:28:20] I'm going to allow it to feel that and I'm going to You're right. Break out the mic and get on it, but closes out, but man, that was God. I've listened to this podcast again when I edit it. It's going to be interesting. But we appreciate James for reaching out to us and this late night on Thursday, but we're

[00:29:46] going to drop.