Rewriting your Past Narrative and Challenge Self-Blame - Ryan Christensen || DPTSP #068 || David

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Don't Pick The Sky Podcast, the podcast that explores helping men over 40 heal from divorce. We entertain and search out some of the out-of-the-box solutions for healing. And we're out of the box today, baby. Today, we have Ryan Christensen, a professional hypnotist that specializes in peak mental focus and performance. Specializing in inevitable success, he helps people transform their mindset and subconscious beliefs. Welcome to the show, Ryan. Introduce yourself.

[00:00:28] And with my sexy voice, I have a few questions for you.

[00:00:43] Welcome to the Don't Pick The Sky Podcast with the premise of connecting men over 40 with the tools and community to thrive in their divorce recovery either before, during or after a divorce.

[00:00:58] Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, David. Yeah. So I'm a professional hypnotist these days. I've been doing it for almost five years now.

[00:01:03] I spent 11 years in the military between the Marine Corps and the Air National Guard. I spent about 16 years as a contractor in DC working in counterterrorism and counterproliferation.

[00:01:11] I became the hypnosis thing for two reasons. Number one, it's time for me to move on from the intel world, trying to save the world. The world doesn't want to be saved. So it's time to move on for that and start working with people one-on-one.

[00:01:21] But the biggest thing was really just to try and fix my own head. I'd spent most of my life where life really wasn't worth it.

[00:01:27] It turns out I'm autistic and bipolar. I didn't have any idea about that until last year.

[00:01:31] And growing up with autism when nobody can help you is incredibly difficult.

[00:01:34] From a very young age, that's what works for everybody else and not for me. Everybody else can get what they need, but not me.

[00:01:39] So 2019, 2020, I really started working pretty hard on myself trying to figure things out.

[00:01:44] 2021 was really when I declared jihad on all of the S and tried pretty much everything.

[00:01:50] Pretty much everything you can do. Psychiatry and counseling and coaching and belief work and somatic stuff and breath work and energy work and Reiki and spiritual stuff and plant medicine and hypnosis.

[00:02:01] All of it, none of it really was able to deliver what they said it would never.

[00:02:05] I think nobody actually gave the solution that they said they couldn't.

[00:02:07] So I had to sit down and reverse engineer everything, figure out how things really worked in order to be able to find a way to get myself across that finish line.

[00:02:14] In your book on winter peace, you emphasize the importance of rewriting the meaning of your past experiences.

[00:02:20] How can divorce men over 40 use this strategy to reform their divorce and move forward?

[00:02:26] Man, that's a really good question.

[00:02:29] The first thing I would say is it's never about what happened and it's never about what they've done.

[00:02:35] Okay. It's always about you.

[00:02:37] Every lesson is always about you, about what things mean about who you are, what it means about the kind of man you are, what you could have done.

[00:02:44] Okay.

[00:02:44] So when a marriage fails, we as men pretty much always blame ourselves.

[00:02:49] We're pretty much the ones that will almost always, we're the ones that are trying so hard, so long to fix things and make things right.

[00:02:55] And when that doesn't work, it's the easiest thing in the world to blame yourself.

[00:02:59] So I should have done this other thing.

[00:03:01] I should have done this extra thing.

[00:03:02] There's one more thing I could have done.

[00:03:04] But the thing is, it always takes two to tango.

[00:03:07] You can only take responsibility for your own choices and actions.

[00:03:12] And you can never ever force someone or make someone do something that they don't really want to do.

[00:03:18] Correct.

[00:03:19] So the first thing you really have to understand is it's not your fault that it didn't work.

[00:03:24] If you did everything you could, if you did everything right to the best of your ability, you've done your partner.

[00:03:30] Right?

[00:03:31] And your partner has a part of that play as well.

[00:03:33] Now, if you made some mistakes and stuff, you got to own that.

[00:03:36] You got to own that piece of the puzzle, right?

[00:03:37] You always have to own the things you did and did not knew that were wrong.

[00:03:41] Right?

[00:03:42] But you still have to make sure that you understand that you weren't the only person in that play.

[00:03:48] So you got to say, okay, this is what this is on me.

[00:03:50] This is on them.

[00:03:52] Right?

[00:03:52] And the other thing to recognize is that there's this idea of, oh, I should have done this.

[00:03:57] Or if I'd known I would have been able to do this, or I should have been able to make this choice.

[00:04:00] And the reality is that's not actually true.

[00:04:03] Because if you've been, if it had been possible for you to do something better, you would have.

[00:04:07] It was actually available for you as a choice.

[00:04:09] You would have made it.

[00:04:10] Right?

[00:04:11] So we always have to understand that in any moment in time, we're only able to navigate the world to the extent that we understand it with tools that we have.

[00:04:18] Right?

[00:04:19] For us and them, a lot of relationships I've been in, the lady I was with just, they've got a lot of stuff that they haven't dealt with.

[00:04:25] And they're not able to face it for whatever reason.

[00:04:27] And because they're not able to face it, they're not able to work on it.

[00:04:29] It's not their fault.

[00:04:31] You know, it's just how things are.

[00:04:33] And a lot of times afterwards, they'll do the work on themselves and say, shoot, wish I'd been able to do this.

[00:04:37] So do I.

[00:04:38] But if it wasn't available to you, it wasn't really available to you.

[00:04:41] Wow.

[00:04:42] You write about the idea that nothing is wrong with you.

[00:04:45] You just talked about that.

[00:04:46] How can men recovering from divorce challenge the belief that they are inherently flawed or responsible for their marriage failing?

[00:04:54] That's a really good question.

[00:04:57] When I'm talking about it in the book, when we're young, we're trying to figure things out, right?

[00:05:00] Things aren't working.

[00:05:01] We're trying to figure out how to navigate the world.

[00:05:03] And we try stuff, nothing works, and nothing works.

[00:05:05] So it's easy seeing the world to say, it's not the thing that I'm doing that are wrong.

[00:05:08] It's just me.

[00:05:09] Because you have to find a way to win.

[00:05:10] You have to find a way to get what you need in that environment.

[00:05:12] And you don't have any control over your environment when you're that young.

[00:05:15] So this idea that there's something wrong with me starts really early.

[00:05:18] Just one of those inherent things you pick up when you're in an environment where you can't get what you need.

[00:05:22] That's 70% of people have an insecure attachment style.

[00:05:24] So about 70% of people have that idea that they're the problem, okay?

[00:05:27] And so you're carrying that with you through your entire life.

[00:05:30] From that day forward through your entire life until you sit down and actually really dig deep into that level of your mind and fix that, it's going to be a constant thing.

[00:05:38] Divorce.

[00:05:40] Again, it comes down to that idea of you're going to do the best you can at all times.

[00:05:43] You're going to do the best you can at all times.

[00:05:46] So the things that happen, the mistakes that you make are just because that's the stage of development you were at the time.

[00:05:53] And it's not about you.

[00:05:54] It's about the things you believe.

[00:05:55] It's about the things you understand.

[00:05:57] It's about how you understand your emotions and can deal with them.

[00:06:00] Those understandings and those beliefs are not who you are.

[00:06:04] You're a person who believes things.

[00:06:06] You're a person who does things.

[00:06:19] You're a person who makes choices.

[00:06:30] Right?

[00:06:31] I have made these mistakes, but I am not the problem.

[00:06:34] The problem is how I dealt with the world.

[00:06:36] The problem is how I dealt with the situation.

[00:06:38] The problem is how I dealt with the marriage, a job, whatever that happens to be.

[00:06:41] You mentioned success becomes inevitable once we stop fighting ourselves.

[00:06:46] It's almost like getting out of our own way.

[00:06:49] Yeah.

[00:06:49] How can someone who feels stuck in a self-blame start the process of self-acceptance?

[00:06:55] Wow.

[00:06:57] That's funny.

[00:06:58] You're asking like really big questions, man.

[00:06:59] Really big questions.

[00:07:00] So what's the answer to the universe today?

[00:07:02] What's the answer to the universe?

[00:07:03] Just give me that one.

[00:07:04] The first thing I would say is it's a perspective problem.

[00:07:08] Okay.

[00:07:09] I talk about in the book, I basically look at mind as four different parts.

[00:07:12] You got your consciousness, your rational mind, your emotional mind, your instinctive mind.

[00:07:15] And most of us look at ourselves as our consciousness.

[00:07:18] That's who we are because that's how we're experiencing the world.

[00:07:20] But you're not your conscious mind.

[00:07:22] You're all these other parts of you too.

[00:07:23] Plus your physical body.

[00:07:24] Talk about having a soul.

[00:07:25] All this stuff is you.

[00:07:27] So when we're looking at ourselves as, oh, I'm not getting what I want.

[00:07:29] I'm not getting what I chose.

[00:07:31] You're not getting what you consciously chose.

[00:07:33] What you're getting is something that other parts of you needed instead.

[00:07:37] You're not getting what you want.

[00:07:38] You're getting what you need.

[00:07:40] Okay.

[00:07:41] And what that means is you simply don't understand the totality of what you are and what you need.

[00:07:47] What those deeper parts of you are doing.

[00:07:49] So we have this tendency to say, oh, I was in my own way.

[00:07:52] I'm beating myself because I'm not good enough.

[00:07:54] I'm broken.

[00:07:54] Don't measure up whatever that is.

[00:07:56] No, you are actually doing something different than what you thought you were.

[00:07:59] You're pursuing a different goal, meaning a different need.

[00:08:02] So the first thing you do is step back and say, okay, everything I've done good, bad and indifferent was for my best benefit to the extent that every part of me understood at the time.

[00:08:11] Right.

[00:08:12] One of the biggest things is for me, I grieve up on life really young.

[00:08:15] The first time I went in my life was about nine years old.

[00:08:17] So the vast majority of my life, my mind was just trying to keep me breathing.

[00:08:21] Just trying to give me a reason to keep living.

[00:08:23] Just trying to keep me going through the world to get what I could.

[00:08:26] And I didn't understand that until I was almost 45 years old.

[00:08:29] I didn't understand that was what I was doing.

[00:08:30] So of course, I'm going to be putting myself in terrible situations.

[00:08:33] Of course, I'm going to be letting myself get beat up and walked all over.

[00:08:37] I'm just trying to keep on going.

[00:08:38] I'm just trying to keep myself alive.

[00:08:40] And that part of your mind cares if you're breathing.

[00:08:41] It doesn't really care if you're happy.

[00:08:43] So the first thing is to start the journey of self-acceptance is to recognize that every single thing you've done, every mistake, every when is to meet a deeper need.

[00:08:54] Okay.

[00:08:54] And start taking a look at, okay, what could that thing be?

[00:08:58] Even if I don't like it, even if I don't wish it's true enough, that part of your mind and part of yourself is operating as if it's true.

[00:09:05] So if you can just allow it to be true long enough to start figuring things out, that's when that journey really begins.

[00:09:14] With those four parts of the brain, where does self-care come in?

[00:09:19] What do you mean?

[00:09:20] Self-care.

[00:09:20] There are a lot of men who go through a divorce, they don't take care of themselves.

[00:09:25] Like I tell them that when the plane's going down, you put your oxygen mask on first, but everybody's putting on everybody.

[00:09:31] The other kids oxygen mask first, then they pass out.

[00:09:34] So divorced men really don't take care of themselves.

[00:09:38] They don't make themselves a priority.

[00:09:40] Oh yeah.

[00:09:41] Yeah.

[00:09:41] That's not surprising at all.

[00:09:43] Most men, we're living for everybody else.

[00:09:48] We're there in service to everybody else.

[00:09:49] We're doing things to create things in the world.

[00:09:52] Right?

[00:09:52] So quite often we are always last.

[00:09:55] In our priorities.

[00:09:56] Right?

[00:09:57] And nobody else is really looking out for us to take care of us either.

[00:10:00] So when you've got that as your base, the way of navigating the world, of course, when you get divorced, you're not going to take your care of yourself either.

[00:10:08] Because in a way you'd feel like you don't deserve it.

[00:10:10] If you feel you don't deserve it, you're not going to give it to yourself.

[00:10:13] And when you're in that kind of low place where you're blaming yourself for everything that happened, if you're the reason this thing failed, because that failure, the failure of a divorce really confirms in a lot of ways that these things about you, that you thought about yourself were true.

[00:10:26] That you're not good enough, that you don't deserve, that there's something wrong with you, that it's your fault.

[00:10:31] Something that cataclysmic and heavy, losing something that precious to you, confirms once and for all that all this stuff is true.

[00:10:37] And it's really hard to start digging yourself out of that hole until you're able to take that, you've got that better perspective.

[00:10:43] And oftentimes that's going to take somebody else to help you see that.

[00:10:46] Because it's really hard to see on your own.

[00:10:48] Or even a big divorce.

[00:10:49] Wow.

[00:10:50] Yeah.

[00:10:51] One of the key takeaways in your book is that emotions are not pain, but signals asking for help.

[00:10:58] How might this insight help men process the grief or anger that often follows divorce, especially with men?

[00:11:04] Man, the anger of grief is huge.

[00:11:08] So grief and sadness are an emotion that basically say you've lost something valuable.

[00:11:12] You lost something you needed to survive.

[00:11:14] And we were talking about divorce.

[00:11:15] That's a big thing.

[00:11:16] You're losing your wife.

[00:11:17] You lose your family.

[00:11:18] You lose your home.

[00:11:18] You lose all kinds of stuff, right?

[00:11:20] You're losing the entire life you built.

[00:11:21] So of course that's going to be huge.

[00:11:23] Number one, I would say, let yourself feel it.

[00:11:26] Okay.

[00:11:27] Because that process of grieving is your body and yourself processing that loss.

[00:11:31] Okay.

[00:11:31] So you have to let that sucker flow.

[00:11:34] Because if you don't, it's going to stay stuck and it's not going to be completed.

[00:11:37] And it's just going to sit there until it blows up in your face.

[00:11:39] Okay.

[00:11:40] So number one, you got to let yourself just feel that stuff and process it.

[00:11:43] Okay.

[00:11:45] No way through that other than just allow it to flow.

[00:11:48] But the second piece is, experience is what we get when we don't get what we want.

[00:11:52] Experience is really valuable.

[00:11:54] You've lost something really valuable.

[00:11:56] Learned a lot of stuff.

[00:11:57] If you're willing to take the time to figure that out.

[00:12:00] Okay.

[00:12:00] So there's a lot of lessons from there that you can pull that are going to give you something

[00:12:04] to balance out that loss.

[00:12:06] The other thing is there's a difference between an Irish wake and a funeral.

[00:12:10] One is a celebration of life.

[00:12:12] One is more in the loss.

[00:12:14] That's a heck of a lot more effective and a heck of a lot better.

[00:12:17] So pull all the gold things from the marriage.

[00:12:20] Right?

[00:12:21] Looking at the loss.

[00:12:22] Yeah.

[00:12:22] Look at all the good stuff you talk.

[00:12:24] Right?

[00:12:24] Look at all the good times.

[00:12:25] Look at all the ways that you grew.

[00:12:27] The things you understood about yourself that you give from the world that you didn't

[00:12:30] know before.

[00:12:31] The things you understood about yourself that you can give that you didn't know about

[00:12:34] yourself.

[00:12:34] A man becomes a father who gives a marriage.

[00:12:37] There's a level of caring and compassion and everything else that you've learned that

[00:12:41] you never had before.

[00:12:42] Can't really find any other way.

[00:12:43] So number one, figure out a bunch of lessons, not about what you could have done differently,

[00:12:47] but about who you are and how you need to navigate the world.

[00:12:50] Number two, take as much of that good stuff with you as you can.

[00:12:53] Let the grief process, let it do its thing.

[00:12:55] Take as much from it as you can.

[00:12:56] That's going to be a big thing to balance out that loss.

[00:12:59] As far as anger goes, yeah.

[00:13:01] Anger is a big thing for me, but we have to understand that it's never about what they

[00:13:06] did.

[00:13:07] It's never about their actions.

[00:13:08] It's never about what they did.

[00:13:09] It's about what that stuff means about us.

[00:13:12] We're not angry because they did that thing.

[00:13:14] We're angry because we let it happen.

[00:13:18] We're not angry that they didn't go to therapy.

[00:13:20] We're angry that we put up with it and disrespected ourselves.

[00:13:26] So it's almost like it's not the front end, it's the back end.

[00:13:29] One million percent.

[00:13:31] Wow.

[00:13:32] One million percent.

[00:13:32] You discussed the idea of the treadmill in the cage.

[00:13:36] How do these metaphors apply to men who feel trapped by societal expectations of masculinity,

[00:13:43] especially after a divorce?

[00:13:45] Well, so those are two very interesting traps.

[00:13:48] Okay.

[00:13:48] Basically for the audience who doesn't know the cage is where life is okay.

[00:13:53] Everything's okay.

[00:13:54] Mediocre, right?

[00:13:54] Lights are on, food's on the table, but there's a lot of stuff that's off limits.

[00:13:57] You're not really able to take the actions you want to.

[00:13:59] There's a gap between where you are and where you should be.

[00:14:01] All right.

[00:14:01] That one's pretty easy to recognize that you're in that one because there's a lot of stuff you just

[00:14:05] can't get.

[00:14:06] The second one is actually harder to recognize.

[00:14:08] That's the treadmill is a situation where there's something painful and intolerable situation

[00:14:12] in your past.

[00:14:13] You're trying to get yourself away from, right?

[00:14:15] Like you grew up in a poor neighborhood, not a lot of opportunities, but you had that one

[00:14:18] thing that you were really good at that allowed you to get out of that situation, right?

[00:14:21] So there's this constant reinforcement of you being rewarded for the thing you're good

[00:14:24] at, whether that's business or athletics or whatever, but there's that pain in the past

[00:14:28] you got to get away from as well.

[00:14:29] So it's got like double whammy motivation.

[00:14:32] And when that happens, that one area of your life is really the only area that works.

[00:14:36] The rest of it, a mess.

[00:14:38] A lot of guys that get in divorce, why?

[00:14:40] Because they're workaholics.

[00:14:41] They're on that treadmill banging away on the business 24 seven.

[00:14:44] And so everything else falls apart.

[00:14:46] So if you were looking about this from a perspective of after divorce for guys over

[00:14:49] 40, take a look and see if either one of these applies.

[00:14:53] Are you one of these guys who just wasn't really taking action?

[00:14:56] Wasn't really doing for what he needed, settling and doing the minimum, right?

[00:14:59] Or are you one of these guys where your business, your sports, whatever that was your entire

[00:15:04] life and everyone else was secondary.

[00:15:07] Once you start recognizing which one of these were at play, if either of them were, then

[00:15:10] you can just start doing the work to figure out why.

[00:15:13] Very interesting.

[00:15:15] So in your book, you say a win is a win for someone who feels like they've lost everything

[00:15:19] after the divorce.

[00:15:21] How can they start recognizing their small victories?

[00:15:24] Quite often, again, it comes back to the conscious perception, right?

[00:15:28] We've got these standards, we've got these ideas of how things should be.

[00:15:30] And if we're not getting that, we feel, oh my God, we've lost.

[00:15:32] But when you look at human survival, it's not just fight or flight.

[00:15:35] It's also fight, flight, freeze, spawn and flop.

[00:15:38] Okay.

[00:15:39] Flop is that response that says you don't have any other options, right?

[00:15:42] So you guys scrap it in the schoolyard, big crowd gathers around them.

[00:15:45] One starts losing, tries to get away, can't, hits the ground, curls up a ball, takes it, right?

[00:15:49] Sometimes the best you can do is just survive the experience.

[00:15:54] Right?

[00:15:55] If you're still breathing, you did it right.

[00:15:59] It's going to win.

[00:16:00] If you're still breathing, you did it right.

[00:16:02] It may not be pretty, right?

[00:16:04] Not saying you don't take your hits, not saying it was a fun experience,

[00:16:07] but if you're still breathing, you still got options.

[00:16:10] If you're still breathing, you did it right to the best you possibly could at the time.

[00:16:14] Right?

[00:16:15] So even as you're progressing after the divorce and trying to put your life together,

[00:16:19] every single day you're still breathing, you're doing it right to the best you can in that moment.

[00:16:25] The other thing I would say is get somebody on your side.

[00:16:30] It doesn't matter who, whether that's a psychiatrist or a coach or a friend or somebody from the faith community,

[00:16:36] whatever that happens to be, get somebody on your side that can help you see things from a different perspective.

[00:16:42] Because the thing that messes us up the most is we can't see past your own nose.

[00:16:46] We're locked into one point of view or one field of view, one interpretation of the events.

[00:16:51] And when you're locked in like that, it's really hard to start making moves outside of that box.

[00:16:56] But you get somebody else that you trust to help you start seeing things from a different angle that starts to open up those more possibilities.

[00:17:02] It makes things easier to do.

[00:17:06] Well, how do you suggest men shift from finite games by comparing themselves to their ex or other men to the infinite game of personal growth?

[00:17:19] Comparison is such a whirlwind and such a cluster of fuck sometimes.

[00:17:26] Yeah.

[00:17:27] That's probably one of the hardest things to do.

[00:17:29] First thing is to recognize that is what you're doing.

[00:17:31] Because so many people don't actually recognize that's what they're doing.

[00:17:34] They don't recognize that they're measuring their worth from the outside in.

[00:17:38] Okay.

[00:17:39] But the only really way to transition from that to the infinite game once and for all is to actually take care and fix all this stuff inside yourself you don't like.

[00:17:46] The reason we're playing the finite game is because we look at ourselves and say, hey, where are we?

[00:17:51] I'm not good enough.

[00:17:51] There's something wrong with me.

[00:17:52] I don't like that answer.

[00:17:54] Don't like that answer at all.

[00:17:55] So I got to be somebody else.

[00:17:58] Can't be who I am and what I am.

[00:17:59] I got to be somebody else.

[00:18:00] And that's the thing that starts that whole finite game.

[00:18:03] You're trying to be somebody else means you have to prove that this identity is true.

[00:18:08] You got to have that evidence from the outside world to do that.

[00:18:11] Right?

[00:18:12] That's how we get on a treadmill.

[00:18:13] That's why we're trying to figure out like, oh, what kind of masculinity do I need?

[00:18:15] You're figuring out who you're supposed to be because you can't be who you are.

[00:18:18] You don't like who you are.

[00:18:20] Can't be this.

[00:18:20] Got to be something else.

[00:18:21] So you try and find a game you can play.

[00:18:23] A definition of masculinity, definition of success that you have a shot at.

[00:18:27] You start running down that road.

[00:18:28] That's where that treadmill comes in.

[00:18:29] And you can only get off of that once you step back and you figure out what's going on with you to a point where you can actually accept who you actually are.

[00:18:38] Once you can get into that, once you can actually own, accept who you are, every single level, all the things you didn't like about yourself, then you don't need any external validation.

[00:18:48] Then your worth is coming from the inside out.

[00:18:51] Once you're worth is coming from the inside out, you don't have to prove anything.

[00:18:53] You can start playing life like an infinite game, right?

[00:18:56] Where it's all about doing the interesting things, doing things you find interesting, doing things you find fun, doing things you find rewarding.

[00:19:04] Not because somebody tells you you should, not because that's how you get the points, that's how you get the girls, whatever it is, but because that's what truly drives you from the inside out.

[00:19:15] Well, you've described negative emotions, which is cool, I think.

[00:19:20] Negative emotions as survival signals rather than wounds.

[00:19:24] How can men use this perspective to approach challenges like co-parenting or reentering the dating world, which is so scary?

[00:19:32] Yeah, yeah. Most of the stuff that we deal with when we're talking about co-parenting and dating world is identity stuff.

[00:19:38] Who are we? Right?

[00:19:40] Because when you talk about co-parenting, you're still having to deal with that same person that messed up your life in a lot of ways.

[00:19:46] And every single interaction is another challenge of this.

[00:19:49] I'm the person who failed in this.

[00:19:51] I'm not the person.

[00:19:51] I'm the person who's bad, whatever that was.

[00:19:53] Pushing all those old buttons.

[00:19:55] When it comes to the dating world, it comes down to self-worth.

[00:19:59] How valuable do I think I am?

[00:20:00] What do I have to offer?

[00:20:02] And again, that kind of goes back to figuring out that way to create their value from the inside out.

[00:20:06] But when we're talking about negative emotions, the way I look at it in the book is like every single emotion you feel is your mind asking you for help to solve a problem.

[00:20:14] Each different emotion has a different kind of connotation, right?

[00:20:16] Anger is something out there is messing with me.

[00:20:18] You need to make it go away.

[00:20:19] Right?

[00:20:21] Once you start looking at these things as signals and questions, then you start moving away from that paradigm of emotional pain comes from emotional wounds caused by emotional trauma.

[00:20:30] If negative emotions are just signals and questions, then they don't come from emotional wounds.

[00:20:36] When you can make that transition, all of a sudden there's nothing for you to heal.

[00:20:39] True.

[00:20:40] Right?

[00:20:42] Which means they're not caused by emotional traumas.

[00:20:44] Which means nothing actually happened to you.

[00:20:47] It's just your interpretation of the world.

[00:20:50] Nobody can make you feel anything, right?

[00:20:52] If this is just how you're interpreting the world, then all that stuff is yours.

[00:20:55] Which means nobody ever did anything to you to begin with.

[00:20:58] You're stuck in situations where there's no good way out.

[00:21:01] There's no way to win.

[00:21:02] Mine was screaming at you for help.

[00:21:04] You didn't have an answer.

[00:21:04] That's all.

[00:21:06] But again, survival is a win.

[00:21:08] So you actually got it right to the best of your ability at the time.

[00:21:12] So is that one of those times where you say that I did a small win?

[00:21:15] Like I survived.

[00:21:16] I'm still breathing.

[00:21:17] You make those steps.

[00:21:19] Yeah.

[00:21:19] And even when you're looking at your past, were you in situations where you can get your way out of it?

[00:21:22] Yes.

[00:21:23] Absolutely.

[00:21:24] Did you have any power to change that?

[00:21:25] Nope.

[00:21:26] Are you still breathing?

[00:21:26] Yes.

[00:21:26] So you did what you need to.

[00:21:28] And often that's just endure the situation as long as you need to.

[00:21:32] People don't see that as when, but you look at Martin Luther King, that's exactly how he won.

[00:21:35] It's just being able to endure what the heck happened.

[00:21:37] Just keep going.

[00:21:39] Just push forward.

[00:21:39] Keep going.

[00:21:41] You emphasize curiosity as a response.

[00:21:43] So it's like anger, fear, and sadness.

[00:21:46] What are some of the practical ways men can cultivate curiosity instead of judgment during tough moments?

[00:21:54] Judgment and curiosity are the exact opposite.

[00:21:56] Definitely are.

[00:21:57] Because of judgment, you're saying this is what it is.

[00:21:59] You don't even ask a question.

[00:22:01] Right?

[00:22:02] But if you can start looking at emotions as questions, then if you're asking a question, you don't just give the answer.

[00:22:09] You have to figure out what the answer is.

[00:22:11] And that's where that curiosity comes in.

[00:22:13] Right?

[00:22:13] Each emotion has a different, is a different kind of question.

[00:22:16] So anger saying there's something out there that's messing with me.

[00:22:18] Okay.

[00:22:18] What's messing with me?

[00:22:19] How do I make it go away?

[00:22:20] How is it messing with me?

[00:22:22] Instead of just reacting, step back and say, okay, what's actually the thing that's problem here?

[00:22:26] Oh, she's pushing my button.

[00:22:28] Oh, that means I've got a button.

[00:22:29] That's on me.

[00:22:32] She's going to do what she does.

[00:22:33] But if she calls me a jerk and I don't feel like I'm a jerk, that's not going to hit.

[00:22:36] If she calls me a jerk and I feel like I'm a jerk, that's going to hit.

[00:22:39] There's a button there.

[00:22:40] It's getting pushed.

[00:22:40] So as these things happen and as you start hitting buttons, okay, that's the point where you need to step back and say, okay, what is it in me that's matching what's going on out there?

[00:22:50] Because one thing about hypnosis, we have this idea that of the critical factor where your unconscious mind only judges everything true and false based on what it already believes.

[00:22:58] Okay.

[00:22:59] So if it doesn't match, then it's false by definition.

[00:23:01] It gets ignored.

[00:23:02] So if somebody calls me a jerk and it hits, that means I believe I'm a jerk.

[00:23:08] Right?

[00:23:08] If she calls me a jerk and I don't believe I'm a jerk, that's false by definition.

[00:23:11] It gets ignored.

[00:23:12] So a lot of times these triggers, these things that happen to you are showing you what the beliefs are deep inside.

[00:23:17] Okay.

[00:23:19] There's a difference between the rational mind and the emotional mind.

[00:23:22] Rational mind is looking at individual things, individual events.

[00:23:25] The emotional mind is looking at like patterns over time, the themes that run through stuff.

[00:23:29] And it's not that one is right and one is wrong.

[00:23:30] They are both 100% correct at all times because they're both looking at reality from two different perspectives.

[00:23:36] So if you think one thing, you feel another thing, they're both true.

[00:23:40] And if they're not the same, that's a sign you should probably step back and figure out what's going on because there is an explanation that makes both of these correct at the same time.

[00:23:48] All right.

[00:23:49] So your emotions are always true from that perspective, given how they're seeing things.

[00:23:54] It's a clue.

[00:23:55] Is it where, so what I'm hearing is that judgments are closed ended, but curiosity keeps it open.

[00:24:03] Yes.

[00:24:03] And curiosity helps you figure out what's actually going on.

[00:24:07] Right?

[00:24:08] Because if you're just judging because of emotion, you're not actually listening to what's telling you.

[00:24:14] Right?

[00:24:14] You're saying what I think is right, what I feel is wrong.

[00:24:17] You're not even asking.

[00:24:18] But that's trying to help you see the world and help you understand it.

[00:24:22] It's like trying to fight the world with one hand tied behind your back.

[00:24:26] You're crippling yourself that way.

[00:24:28] So you listen to it.

[00:24:28] You got to give it a steal.

[00:24:29] Yeah.

[00:24:30] Yeah.

[00:24:30] Got to give it a steal.

[00:24:31] Cause it's trying to help you.

[00:24:32] It's trying to tell you something.

[00:24:33] So ask it.

[00:24:34] What am I missing?

[00:24:35] Best question you can ask.

[00:24:36] Okay.

[00:24:37] What am I missing?

[00:24:39] Because if you understood it, you wouldn't be feeling that thing.

[00:24:42] So there's something about how you're viewing the situation.

[00:24:44] You're viewing yourself.

[00:24:45] That's wrong or incomplete in some way.

[00:24:48] It's trying to give you a piece of the puzzle.

[00:24:49] So say, what am I missing?

[00:24:52] Gotcha.

[00:24:54] So in winter pace again, in your book, you describe reframing childhood experiences to change beliefs.

[00:25:01] How can men apply this concept to reshape their beliefs about relationship and love after divorce?

[00:25:07] We haven't talked about the love word yet.

[00:25:09] Yeah.

[00:25:12] It's hard to do on your own.

[00:25:14] Honestly, it's really hard to do on your own.

[00:25:16] Partly is because you've lived your entire life with one story.

[00:25:20] You have the story about why things are the way they are, how you ended up the way you ended up.

[00:25:24] And so it's hard to break out of the mold on your own.

[00:25:26] That's why, like for me, like I could never really do the serious work on myself.

[00:25:29] I had to always hire somebody else to do it for me, even when I knew it was wrong.

[00:25:33] Okay.

[00:25:33] I'm because if you are in conflict with yourself, if you got that friction, if you got that inner

[00:25:38] war, then your unconscious mind doesn't really trust you.

[00:25:42] So why is it going to let you make a lot of changes?

[00:25:43] All the stuff that you want to do are things that it thinks is dangerous and bad in some

[00:25:46] way.

[00:25:47] So why is it going to let you make a lot of changes?

[00:25:49] You know what I mean?

[00:25:50] So it's hard to do that on your own and it's hard to reframe things from your own perspective

[00:25:54] because you already know the answer, right?

[00:25:57] That's why you often need somebody else to help you come in and give you a different perspective,

[00:26:01] give you a different way of looking at things, walk you through things in a different way

[00:26:05] so that you can actually do that reframing, right?

[00:26:08] Sucks.

[00:26:08] I know we wish we could all do it our own, but that's just not the way it works.

[00:26:11] Plus go back to that rational versus emotional thing.

[00:26:13] You can't get to the forest from the trees.

[00:26:15] You can understand Times Square in every bit of detail.

[00:26:18] It's not going to tell you anything about how New York looks from the air.

[00:26:22] Can't get there from there.

[00:26:23] So you need somebody to help you back up, see things from a different angle.

[00:26:26] But as far as talking about things like relationships and love, relationships or love are one of the hardest

[00:26:31] things because it is where you're most vulnerable.

[00:26:34] You can't hide who you are in relationships.

[00:26:38] Not for long, which means that's where the truest parts of yourself come through and where the judgment happens the most.

[00:26:46] That's why it hurts so hard when you get judged in a relationship because they're judging the true you.

[00:26:51] The soft end of what you really are, the things you don't really want to show anybody else.

[00:26:55] It comes out, you can't hide it over time.

[00:26:57] So with relationship, a lot of it is really about self-worth and deservedness.

[00:27:03] If I'm worth a lot, I'm not going to tolerate any BS.

[00:27:06] I get myself in a healthy relationship.

[00:27:08] So if you don't work, not worth a lot, still not that connection, you're going to settle for less.

[00:27:13] And as far as love comes, the first thing you gotta do is be able to love yourself.

[00:27:18] Can't allow anybody else to love you unless you love yourself.

[00:27:21] If you think you're broken, you're messed up, all this stuff is wrong with you.

[00:27:24] You need to fix all these kinds of things.

[00:27:25] It's hard to love that, isn't it?

[00:27:27] Yeah. So the first piece, you got to be able to get to that place where you actually love who you are to include all of your mistakes,

[00:27:33] all the things you wish you weren't right.

[00:27:35] You got to love that stuff too.

[00:27:37] And that's not the easiest thing to do, but that's the sort of thing you can work on your own.

[00:27:41] You know? Say, yes, I screwed up here.

[00:27:43] I was doing my best.

[00:27:43] Didn't understand. Fair enough.

[00:27:45] I can forgive myself. I can accept that part.

[00:27:48] Forgiveness and acceptance is the easiest thing to start doing on your own.

[00:27:52] You talk about the difference between deserving and having.

[00:27:55] How can men recovering from divorce stop questioning their worthiness, which is huge,

[00:28:00] and focus on what they truly want in life?

[00:28:03] Yeah. So one of the easiest ways to look at this is, okay,

[00:28:07] we tend to think of what we get in life as what we deserve.

[00:28:10] Right? That's how we measure.

[00:28:11] What do I deserve or what I'm able to get? Right?

[00:28:14] But if you think about it that way, then does a four year old with leukemia deserve it?

[00:28:19] They've got it.

[00:28:20] Do they really deserve it?

[00:28:22] Probably not.

[00:28:23] Does a kid in Africa who's starving deserve some food?

[00:28:25] Probably any chances of them getting it? No.

[00:28:27] Having and deserving are very different things.

[00:28:30] Right? To use a bit of a controversial one,

[00:28:32] did Jeffrey Epstein deserve to have hundreds of millions of dollars?

[00:28:35] Probably not.

[00:28:35] But he certainly had that money, didn't he?

[00:28:38] So once you start taking a look at that from deserving and having being two different things,

[00:28:42] and you can reach an interesting conclusion.

[00:28:44] What I deserve is what I feel I deserve.

[00:28:47] Nobody else gets to decide that for me.

[00:28:50] I decide what I deserve.

[00:28:52] All right?

[00:28:52] Other people decide what they will give me.

[00:28:55] They don't get to decide what I deserve.

[00:28:58] Okay?

[00:28:59] Once you start making that connection,

[00:29:01] okay, this person wasn't able to give me love.

[00:29:03] They weren't able to do whatever.

[00:29:04] They decided they weren't going to give it to me.

[00:29:06] They didn't decide my worth.

[00:29:07] They didn't decide what I deserve.

[00:29:09] I'm the person that does that.

[00:29:11] Once you start taking that power back and saying,

[00:29:13] I am the one that decides my worth.

[00:29:15] I am the one that decides my value.

[00:29:16] I am the one that decides what I deserve.

[00:29:18] You can start separating that from the external world.

[00:29:23] That making sense?

[00:29:24] It's almost like getting your power back.

[00:29:26] Yeah.

[00:29:27] Most of us never had it in the first place.

[00:29:29] No kidding.

[00:29:30] Most of us never really had it in the first place.

[00:29:32] We're growing up.

[00:29:32] We're feeling we're not good enough.

[00:29:33] There's all sorts of stuff going wrong.

[00:29:35] From the beginning,

[00:29:36] we're trying to figure out what we needed from the outside world.

[00:29:38] From the beginning,

[00:29:39] we're letting other people decide our worth and our value,

[00:29:41] what we deserve.

[00:29:43] It's hard to learn that after that pattern

[00:29:45] or doing that for 20, 30, 40 plus years.

[00:29:49] Ryan, my men have about a half hour attention span

[00:29:52] because they're men.

[00:29:55] But man, that was awesome.

[00:29:57] We're definitely going to do a part two on,

[00:30:01] man, this, yeah.

[00:30:03] I knew this was going to be interesting.

[00:30:05] So let people know how to find you on the internet.

[00:30:10] Sure.

[00:30:10] So my website is www.ryanthehypnotist.com.

[00:30:14] I offer free 45 minute consultations.

[00:30:16] You're going through some stuff.

[00:30:17] Want to figure out what's going on with you?

[00:30:19] Drop me a line.

[00:30:19] Take a look at what's going on with your life.

[00:30:21] I'll tell you exactly why that's still happening.

[00:30:23] I'll show you why other things haven't worked.

[00:30:24] We can talk about what we can do to get you back in a good place.

[00:30:27] Okay.

[00:30:27] I do programmatic work.

[00:30:28] It's a flat fee.

[00:30:29] You and I work together until we get you to a very good place.

[00:30:31] I don't care how long that takes.

[00:30:33] We got to meet every week for a year.

[00:30:34] We'll do that too.

[00:30:35] Okay.

[00:30:35] Doesn't matter.

[00:30:36] My book is called winter peace,

[00:30:37] how to end inner conflict and make success inevitable.

[00:30:40] It's available on Amazon,

[00:30:41] all the different formats to include audible.

[00:30:43] It's basically designed as a hypnosis program in written form to the extent that you can get all the benefit of working with me one-on-one in that format.

[00:30:50] I give you as much as I can.

[00:30:54] All right,

[00:30:54] Ryan,

[00:30:54] we appreciate you taking time this Friday morning and hang out with us and hold on the line.

[00:31:00] I'm going to go ahead and sign off.

[00:31:01] Everybody have a good night.

[00:31:03] Thanks again,

[00:31:04] Ryan.

[00:31:05] Thank you for having me.