Sustainable Change After Divorce: Victor Giusfredi’s Insights for Men Over 40 || DPTSP #087 || David M. Webb

[00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of our podcast. We're thrilled to have Victor Gusfredi as our guest. Victor is a certified life, health, and wellness coach and internationally certified neuro-linguistic practitioner with over 20 years of experience in mindset, catch my breath, and behavior psychology. He specializes in helping men navigate challenges of divorce and personal transformation. As the author of No Grail Without Dragons and the upcoming Marriage by

[00:00:29] Design, Victor combines practical insights with no-nonsense approach. His passion for understanding the mechanics of the mind drives him to equip men with the tools needed for lasting change and fulfillment. Victor, tell us a little bit about yourself and we'll go from there.

[00:01:00] Welcome to the Don't Pick The Scab 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.

[00:01:13] Thank you. Thank you for having me, David. That's such a fancy introduction for just a regular guy who just obsessed with finding a way to feel better about myself, my life, and just suffer a little bit less. So can you share some of your personal journey that led you to become a life and wellness coach?

[00:01:36] Yes. Funny enough, the certifications that I acquired were not to become a practitioner, but to actually understand the processes that are used to instill sustainable change in people.

[00:01:49] But my journey, I think I've lived a handful of lifetimes by now. I was born in Argentina, moved around 50 times by the time I was 30. I survived a stepdad who was rather tough on me. And by the time I was 35, I had been divorced twice.

[00:02:11] And so in the emotional realm, I struggled a lot. I faced a lot of different challenges that drove me to the age of considering whether my life was worth of living or not. And that's what pushed me into the deep end of trying to understand how my mind works, why certain patterns are repetitive. And the ultimate goal was to find a sustainable recipe to have a good relationship with another person.

[00:02:41] I've had businesses, I've competed in extreme sports, I've played in music and rock bands. And so I've accomplished my life goals. But the one thing that always eluded me was a successful relationship with myself and then with another person. And so that's why that's really what drove me to die so deep into different schools of knowledge and thought and then just try to understand how it all connects together and how those things translate into our lives.

[00:03:10] Wow. What are some common subconscious patterns you observed in men facing divorce and divorce recovery?

[00:03:18] There are numerous that are repetitive. One that I noticed the most is anger. For many men, angry outbursts become a common scapegoat for the emotional turmoil that they're facing inside.

[00:03:42] But it's tough because getting divorced means different things for different people. Some might feel that they're not good enough. Some might feel that they're never going to be loved. Some have gotten divorced because of infidelity and that leads to a whole sort of cast of demons in their own heads. But I think the most common one is the display of anger as a call for help when we feel that we're drowning in our own emotions.

[00:04:10] And that anger, a lot of the guys that I've worked with think that they suffer from anger issues. But what they don't know is that anger is also very closely related to depression. And when you're going through divorce, anger can become the tool that you use to overcome something that is choking you.

[00:04:34] Because as men, I don't know about you or your audience, but for example, for me, anger became a tool to escape exigent circumstances. When I felt that I wasn't being hurt or that I was going to be hurt or that I was facing something that could mean harm to myself, I used anger to snap out of it, right? To bring myself to a different state of consciousness and then recall that adrenaline and that fight or flight and I chose to fight.

[00:05:00] But that's a common one and that's one that exists in marriages and divorcees too. I mean, I think that a lot of guys deal with regret when it comes to their angry responses. That's one of the most common ones. Wow. Can you elaborate on the concept of rewiring thought processes? That was very interesting. Yeah. And it has this flavor of new age to it. It just sounds weird.

[00:05:25] But something that I learned through understanding neurolinguistic programming, which is pretty much the things that happen in our head before they translate into results, it's that we are quick to focus on the things that happen outside of us and then we react to them emotionally. But seldom we take the time to understand what happens in our mind before that translates into those results.

[00:05:54] And for me, for example, during my relationships, I was quick to become defensive. And it was easy to justify my defensiveness because if my partner was being, was nagging me, as I used to call it, or pinpointing a short comment in myself, I felt like I wasn't good enough and then I reacted accordingly. But when I took the time to understand why, I said, why do I react in this way?

[00:06:24] And I started digging. I began understanding that the first thing that I thought, for example, nagging, oh, she's nagging me again. That's the first thing that comes to my head. And that instills in me an emotional state. And that's the emotional state of being, well, I have to defend myself. What she's saying is not true because of all of these reasons. And then that translates into an action, which is me telling her what I thought, right?

[00:06:53] Obviously, we start self-regulating in a way so we don't go straight up with a knife out. We just say, hey, I don't think that's true or that's not true because of such and such. Then our partner replicates. And then next thing we know, we're calling this noble effect that leads to a place that we don't want to be.

[00:07:11] But so rewiring your thought patterns is it's questioning the things that you perceive and you believe and trying to understand how that translates into the results that you want. So it's almost like you have that wire that goes and you actually cut it and say, hey, wait a minute. Let me move this wire over here. Think about it before I continue that current down the road.

[00:07:36] And unfortunately, sometimes we only become aware of those things when we're exposed to a situation that we really don't want, like divorce. When you get divorced, you go through the bargaining process where you start realizing that a lot of things that you thought were important are really minuscule compared to the pain that you're facing after getting divorced.

[00:07:55] It's a lot easier to, excuse me, to surrender your ego a little bit in favor of you experiencing the emotional state that is being in a happy and fulfilling marriage for a longer period of time. And so I went through enough relationships and two divorces to question myself deeply enough to say, hey, what else do I have to lose? I've lost everything multiple times. I'm living in my car for a few months.

[00:08:23] I'm at the edge of just going through the other side. So why not look in the place that I don't want to look at, which is within myself? What if I am an accomplice of creating all of the things that I don't want to experience? And it turns out that I was. It turns out that the way that I interpreted things led to a specific pattern. And so when I said she's not nagging me, she's telling me something that will help me improve myself, then my emotional state was different. I would no longer feel defensive, but I felt tell me more.

[00:08:53] Right. And then my partner felt heard and then she told me more. And then I took it as constructive criticism. And next thing you know, we're growing together instead of becoming enemies. And it all started from just changing the tune of what I thought, just becoming aware of that and then quote unquote rewiring that to lead that electricity to a different side. With electricity, you can light up a house or you can light it on fire. Yep. Usually for good or for bad. What about self-worth?

[00:09:19] Men going through divorce recovery, their self-worth has just been damaged. How do you incrementally get that back? I think it's important to question oneself what it is about our self-worth that we're not clear about. One of the hardest things for me to accept was that everything is 50-50. And that's because my first divorce was, it wasn't easy.

[00:09:48] Emotionally, it was hell, but the process was rather easy because my wife just, when we were young, my wife just decided to live her life in a different way and she packed up her things and left. Right. But my second was a bit harder because my ex battles some difficult challenges with things that she carries through her life. And that translated differently into our marriage. And in a way, she murdered my character.

[00:10:17] It was a constant, you're not good enough at this, you're not good enough at that, you're not a good enough father. It's all about money. And we start acquiring all of those opinions of others as part of our personality. And when you come to do a checks and balances about who you think you are, everything that resonates in your head is everything negative that somebody else told you. So how were you able to fight that? It's by having an honest conversation with yourself.

[00:10:45] And it's not a process that you partake in and it's rather easy to do. It's actually quite a difficult process. You have to flesh yourself psychologically in a way and then own up to what you've really done because you know what you've really done. And then put the other things into question. Am I a bad father? Am I a home dog? Am I all about money? And once you come to a conclusion, say, no, you know what? I'm not all about money.

[00:11:14] I work hard because I want my family to have a decent life. Then you start rebuilding yourself by knowing what's true about you and what's not true about you. Because generally speaking, you're an invaluable human being. You cannot have a value to yourself. You can go and create havoc or you can go and give your life to helping other people overcome the challenges that almost destroy you.

[00:11:41] But when it comes to rebuilding after divorce, you have to take inventory of all those mental battles that you're fighting. I'm sure people like us over 40, we have watched plenty of action movies, right? I don't know if kids now do. And what's the common pattern in the action movie? The hero faces enemy after enemy and he faces all of the little hordes of minions until he gets to the big guy, right? And sometimes the big guy beats him, but he learns a new technique and goes back and eventually defeats him.

[00:12:11] And so that's what rebuilding your value entails. It entails facing all of those minions, all of those comments, all of those negative things that you believe about yourself based on other people's opinions. And seeing what's true and what's not true comes off your back. And what's true, you have an opportunity to actually take an honest look at yourself and say, Hey, I like this about myself and it leads to good results. Or I actually don't like this about myself and I have a chance to improve it. And eventually you build yourself up from there.

[00:12:41] You acquire a new identity. Yeah. Oh, God, man, you just jumped on my word. I was going to talk about the cousin of self-worth identity, but you don't, you, your, your identity takes a hit and then you don't know who you are. And so is it the same with identity? You talk to yourself, you slowly mold that back together. Yes. Yes.

[00:13:09] And I think after losing everything multiple times, there's a lot of truth in saying that you're really only capable of doing what you love and being who you want to be after you lose it all. Because sometimes we hold on to an idea of ourselves that's in the past.

[00:13:30] One of the hardest things for me was remembering the victor that raised his voice that is X and the one that made the snarky comment and the one that, that, that ignore her for being on the phone or that turned down a date night to go out to, to go to work. And we hold on to that identity, but that's not us anymore. And I think we don't give enough, give ourselves enough credit for knowing that we did the best that we could back then.

[00:13:59] That was our old version of ourselves. I'm sure that the 20 year old David version of you, it's not the same one today. And sure, he made a lot of mistakes, but you're, you can be damn sure that he did the best that he could with the tools that he had, because you wouldn't have suffered as much. If you knew everything that you knew that you don't know back then. So identity is the same. And after your divorce, you have another chance of becoming who you want to be. And you can put it down on paper and say, Hey, who's a man that I will respect, right? Who do I look up to?

[00:14:27] Somebody who's temperate, somebody who likes justice, somebody who's fair, somebody who's sympathetic, somebody who's vulnerable. And then you can actually work on developing those traits, which are just traits like everything else that you've developed up until now. We're not hardwired that way. You can actually develop those traits. What do you say to a client? Man, I got a ton of questions for you, man. You make me happy. What do you say to a client? Because I am a second generational divorce person. My parents are divorced.

[00:14:55] What do you say to a client that kind of harps on that, where they can't let that first and second generation go? It's almost like we're cursed. Yeah. Let me be a myth foster here. My parents are still together. They got married. They met. And within two weeks, they were getting married. And now my mom is 60 and my dad is almost 70. So they've been married for 38 years. And I was two years old at the time.

[00:15:24] And I saw my mom go through hell on earth to stay with him. Right? She bent over backwards. She did all sorts of things. My dad was, again, he was tough to say the least. I found out he was my stepdad when I was 11. And that's when I realized why he treated me in a specific way and he treated my brothers in a much different way. And that sort of took my path in a different direction.

[00:15:50] And so one is to wonder how much justification do we derive from the decisions that our parents made? Because if it was because of my parents' example, I would have stayed married the first time around and done whatever it took to be married for the rest of my life. Even if that meant unhappiness and living in that uncomfortable aching of hopelessness due to the fear of being alone. Right?

[00:16:18] The other thing is that your parents just did the best that they could just like you do. Right? And I don't think that divorce is something that you inherit. I think divorce as a child is something that you suffer. And I can tell you I suffer because I don't have divorced parents. But I suffer the fact that my biological father never showed up. And I also suffer the fact that I see what my divorce, the effect that my divorce has had on my kids. So there's so many levels. There are many different levels.

[00:16:47] And staying together for the wrong reasons could have been worse because I've definitely had these conversations with myself to say, Hey, would have I been better if I stayed with her? But the reality, it's no. Because it was a violent relationship. My kids would have inevitably acquired the way of our dealings and our habits.

[00:17:07] And eventually, perhaps we would have damaged the kids much more by staying together than by actually going through the pain of separation and then trying to help them cope with it. I'm sure, knowing what I know now, I'm 100% sure that would have been the case. I'm 100% sure. Yeah. You mentioned sustainable change. What does that look like in the context of recovery from divorce for men over 40? Sustainable change.

[00:17:37] It's about giving a new meaning to the thing you're wrestling with. I could have gone, let's take my last divorce, for example. I could have given that two primary meanings out of Infinite, which would be number one, I ruined my kid's life. I took their mom away from them. Now my kids have to see her once every two weeks. And they suffer in silence.

[00:18:07] They suffer in ways that they don't know they suffer. And I'm a bad dad. And I'm not worthy of being a partner. Or I took the hard path. I did the hardest thing. I suffer. But shouldering the suffering gives meaning not only to my life, but also improve my children's life. And so I'm okay with what I've been through because, you know what, I'm the man. And I'd rather suffer the pain than the people that I love.

[00:18:37] And that creates the type of change that lasts for a lifetime. Because, again, everything comes down to rewiring the way that you think. You can have the first version in your head and think that you're a POS and that you're not worthy of another partner and that people are not meant to be together, whatever else you want to tell yourself. But pretend on the outside that you are. Pretend that you're a good dad or whatever.

[00:19:01] But it doesn't come out the same because eventually you do fall victim to your thought patterns and then that manifests in either depressive symptoms or addictions or other coping mechanisms that are not as healthy. But to achieve an actual sustainable change forever, you actually have to change the root of the problem. And that would allow you to – it's a change that it's not – that it doesn't take effort to sustain.

[00:19:29] Once you change that beginning thing that you believe, then it's much easier to sustain it because when the thoughts come, the first thing is, say, no, I'm a good dad and this, this, this, and that. And then it shows in your emotional state and then it shows in your actions and it shows in your results. Yeah. So it's almost like comparing. You have A and B. A is better. B is not better. And then you go for A and then you go from there. It's almost like you have to see the negative in order to realize the positive. 100%. 100%.

[00:19:58] And the philosophers always say without happiness, they can be – without sadness, there can be no happiness. And it's something hard to understand. But imagine you wouldn't know what white is if you didn't know what black is. And then you wouldn't know the joy of what a good meal tastes like if you hadn't been hungry. Right? You can take somebody who hasn't eaten for three days and you can take somebody who just had lunch. Bless you.

[00:20:26] And you can feed them both the same hamburger. And one guy is going to be thrilled and off the charts, enjoying fulfillment. The other guy is going to be like, I don't really want to eat this. Same event to people. But while you have – the low that you've experienced will also allow you to experience a higher high. And so you have a choice to see how you interpret that. And it's all about giving a new meaning to the suffering that you've been through. And there's definitely good meaning.

[00:20:53] It just takes some time to first identify it and then convince yourself that's what it is. I mean, you also have to believe it because if you let the voice of your captor say, that's not true or that's BS or that's justification, then you're not going to believe it. But if you actually embrace it, then you're like, hey, listen, I did go through this suffering. I might as well get something for it. Pain is not free. And you just change the meaning of what you've been through. Sure. And you still hold the negative. The negative is still true.

[00:21:20] But at least you're wise enough to find the positive on it and then give your life a new direction. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Pain is not free. I like that. What about the F word? Forgiveness. That's the big one, baby. Let me tell you something. That men have a hard time with. I'm about to make that a whole lot easier for you. And look, I love my stepdad. He stayed in my life.

[00:21:50] As hard as he was on me, he also taught me the hardest lessons in life. Things that had gotten me through many things in life. But he struggled with violence and aggressiveness. And I was usually the scapegoat for those impulses. And ever since I remember, maybe when I was six years old, I got my first punch in the mouth. I've gotten whipped with pretty much anything you can conceive of.

[00:22:17] I've gone through some sort of torturous punishments. And that was sustained up until my late teens when I finally rebelled. And I got into a fistfight with him. And that was the day that I felt that I had overcome the person that antagonized me for so long. And that goes emotionally, physically, spiritually. I was a mess in my late teens.

[00:22:45] And throughout my life, I carried this deep hate and this deep desire for his destruction. And after a beating, my brother and I will talk and say, Hey, man, when we get old, we're going to get this SOB and we're going to beat the crap out of him. And I carried that for a very long time. And I didn't talk to him. If I called my mom and he was around, I wouldn't say hi. If he said hi, I said hi. Now I couldn't care less.

[00:23:11] I was very adamant to let him know that I hated him. You're going to show him. You're going to show him. I just wanted to stick that knife in and just twist it every time I could, right? And after my second divorce, I came to the realization that I wouldn't have been able to overcome the things that I did overcome

[00:23:38] if I didn't learn to be tough from all the things that he taught me and all the lessons that he taught me. And for a minute, I decided to put that critical voice on the side and the hateful voice and remove the blindfold. And I said, let me, you know what? If I'm so adamant about crucifying him for the things that he did wrong, how about I give him some credit for the things that he did right? And I started thinking.

[00:24:07] And I came up with a list. And suddenly, the scale was even. And the other part of this was that me as a parent, I had made a lot of mistakes that I was ashamed of. And I knew that I made those mistakes not willingly, but just out of instinct, out of things that happened before I even realized them. And I only realized what I'd done after the fact. And I carried that guilt. And I knew how much that guilt waited on me.

[00:24:36] And I said, man, he probably was victim of the same thing. And I think there's a verse in the Bible that says, God forgave them for they don't know what they do. It's verbatim that. It's like they do things and then they realize, they don't do them to you. They just do things. And that to me helped me see the human side of my dad and allow me to forgive him because he had done a lot of good things. And ironically, the only one who carried the weight off of that resentment was me. Yep. You know, the moment I was able to forgive him,

[00:25:05] I felt this huge weight off my shoulders. I broke down crying. I saw the light. And we've had a great relationship ever since. And I realized that forgiving other people is not about them. It's about you. You're not punishing them for what they did. That's right. They remember what they did. Unless they have some sort of mental challenge that they rejoice in what they've done, or at least they justify it. But otherwise, a somewhat healthy human carries that weight with them. And you shouldn't poison yourself.

[00:25:36] Forgiving helps you. It doesn't help the other people. It helps them, too, if you let them know. That's a brave thing to do, to call and say, Hey, David, you know, I know we've had our differences. I know all of these things happen between us. I just want you to know that I love you as a human being, and that whatever weight you carry of your actions towards me, I forgive you. Yep. That's a brave thing to do, but that frees your soul. That frees the other person. Oh, yeah. Good.

[00:26:06] Yep. So I got a question for you. Is your brother on the same level as you with your dad? I don't know. I don't know. Just wondering. It's hard to tell. I see we're brothers, but we're cut from different clots. And so we're on different paths of what it is that we pursue. I have this obsession for learning more and distilling myself

[00:26:34] and discovering what the hell I'm all about and how to live life in a different way. And he's on his own path. So I don't know. I think that even if we did the same thing, we wouldn't be on the same level because I think nobody is on the same level. Everyone is on the same level. Correct. What about co-parenting? We're going to go out with co-parenting. My men are over 40. They have a hard time with co-parenting. One of the things they struggle with, and you've heard this, is not being able to control what happens at the ex's house,

[00:27:03] which I think is almost like forgiveness that you're worried about something you can't control. They have a hard time with that. What do you speak to that? I obviously wrestle with that. And even though I have full custody of my kids, so ever since 2019, in 2019, while I was going through my second divorce, my kids showed up on my doorstep and my ex took a second job and then she disappeared from the picture.

[00:27:33] And I became a full-time dad every single day. I lost my job right after that. So I really, my life flipped upside down. And I've done a decent job at raising them. Healthy foods, healthy mental exercises, helpful strategies. They thrive in school, but they don't suffer it. Every time they come with a hundred, I roll up the test and another thing and I smack them in the head. I said, don't bring me any hundreds anymore.

[00:28:03] And they crack up. So they, so I've done really a lot of work on myself and then on them. And I'm very methodical. So just to make sure that they have the tools that I didn't have, but when they go to moms, it's a different story. Mom buys anything under the sun. They eat sugar from the beginning of the day to the end of the night. They get into fistfights and they're like kids that I don't know. Right.

[00:28:31] And at first I used to go at her and say, Hey, I'm doing all this work. And what you're doing is this and that. And eventually when you realize that you cannot change what other people do, no matter how much you try, I came to understand that what happens at the other place is just an advantage for me. And what do I mean by that? It's, it's a chance for me to show them who I really am, to show them the way that we live and the,

[00:29:00] and the results that produces. And when they're old enough to contrast that with the things that they've experienced over there, because eventually they'll be aware enough to be like, Hey, wait a minute. We, my dad does this and he acts like this and he responds like this and he treats us like this. And then when we go to moms, this is what happens. And, and that will give them same thing with the joy and sadness or hunger and being full, right? That's a contrasting thing. And, and that gives that, that's what puts the separation

[00:29:30] between who you are and who they are. And that gives you a chance to really just be your best self and give them another flavor of a human being that they can take with them later in life and be like, Hey, what if I act like my dad? Cause acting like my mom hasn't really worked that well. Or what if, or my dad was such a wise man. He never raised his voice. He always taught us with love and care. My mom did this. It's just a chance to just dig in your heels and just become better for the sake of your kids and then just show them who you really are.

[00:29:59] and eventually they'll be wise and smart enough to know the differences and they'll thank you for it. You know, it's a long, it's a long game, but it's the only shot you got. Trust me. They do. They do. Yeah. It comes. All right, Victor, man, that was basically simple. Awesome advice. That's all. Thank you. Yeah, you're knocking it out of the park, man. We're definitely going to come back and do this again. Yeah, for sure. Let the people out there know

[00:30:28] how to find you on the internet. They can head out to my website, which is victorjusfredi.com. It's spelled G-I-U-S-F-R-E-D-I and that's my same handle on social media. Although I'm not very active on social, I'm finishing up a second book, which is about marriage and the subconscious patterns and how that affects your marriage. So I've been really deep in the hole with that and I'm working on a music project. That's my, but yeah. You're a good man. I like to create. What can I say? So yeah,

[00:30:57] they just find me online and you can send me an email. I'm sure you put it on the link on the show notes. I will. Yeah, but we'll go from there. Absolutely. Hold on the line, Victor, but thank you very much for your time and we'll see you next time, but hold on. I think it's a pleasure. Man, that was fun.