Why I Buy Kelsey Flowers

Brett: 0:01

Episode number 67. Hello and welcome to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I'm Brett Nicola, a husband, father and fun lover. Listen in as I share stories, tips and inspiration that will move you toward the connection that you want in your relationship. Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I hope you all are doing well.

Brett: 0:40

You know when I say that I don't exactly know who all this podcast touches and I often try to think about who I am talking to out there and you who I'm talking to. I really do hope that you are doing well, but I have to think that there are some of you who have found this podcast because you're experiencing pain, because you're not doing well, and I want you to know that. I know that you are here, that you're listening and you're wondering what to do to help your marriage, how to show up in a way that can take away some of this pain. You're looking for tools, for tips, for inspiration that you can use to help you through this challenging time that you're facing. The nature of my job is one that I do sit in some of the most difficult moments in people's lives, and I have to say that being able to do that has touched me. It's impacted me, how I view the world and my own life. It really I don't have a better way to describe it besides saying it's humbled me. It's helped me have a different perspective about my life and what I've gotten. That is nothing from which I've done or deserve, and I have really been able to see individuals, couples, families that are facing some very difficult circumstances, and I know that some of you that are listening are going through some of these very difficult circumstances, and I want to talk to you for just a little bit.

Brett: 2:56

When we encounter circumstances in our life, we often have an emotional experience. Maybe our spouse is doing something or not doing something, maybe we're in debt, maybe we've lost our house or in the process of losing our house, maybe we've lost a child, maybe we get sick. These are circumstances that people face in life and most of these circumstances, I would guess at least, would cause an emotion for all of us. But pick any one of these circumstances and I guarantee you we don't all have the same emotional response. All right, someone might feel anxious if they're in debt and another person might feel embarrassed that they're in debt, and there might be someone out there who doesn't care at all if they're in debt, right? So we all have a different emotion to the same circumstances and when we can see that, we can see that our circumstances aren't directly tied to our emotion and there has to be a link between these two things our circumstances and our emotions. That's important to consider, and what this link is is our thoughts, and it's very important to be able to recognize this and see this, because so many of you guys are experiencing circumstances that aren't necessarily changeable.

Brett: 4:37

It's natural for a brain to try to change our circumstances that it doesn't like in order to change the emotion that we're experiencing that we don't like. And if we don't like something our brain's like, let's change it so that we don't have to feel that feeling of not liking something Maybe it's something that we don't like that our spouse is doing. We go to work to try to change them, change how they're showing up, so that we feel better about them, right? We don't want to feel that feeling of not liking something that our spouse is doing, so we go to change the circumstance, we try to get them to stop it or to start it, whatever it is that we want, in order to feel better. But and, by the way, oftentimes that works, right, it's it's raining outside and we don't like that, so we go inside and we get out of the rain. Right, we change our circumstance so we feel better, and in life there are many circumstances that are easy to change and we can feel better.

Brett: 5:46

But what happens when we eventually come up against a circumstance that we can't change or a circumstance that we don't want to change? What if, for example, our child dies? There's nothing we can do to change this circumstance to feel better. We just can't change these things that happen, no matter how hard we try, and that's an example of a circumstance that we can't change. An example of a circumstance that we don't want to change would be, for example, our spouse.

Brett: 6:24

Right, many of us are in a committed marriage. We are married to our spouse for life, and if your spouse is sick or if they're showing up in a way that brings pain, emotional pain, to you, we don't necessarily want to get a new spouse and we don't want to get rid of them. Right, we want to keep them, but we try to change them so that we don't have to feel these emotions. And it's not working, and this is an example of a circumstance that we don't want to change and we haven't been able to figure out how to change. And so we're left feeling this emotion that feels like is from the circumstance. Whatever it is that our spouse is doing that we can't figure out how to get them to stop doing or start doing, and we don't want to change the circumstance of our spouse, meaning we don't want to get rid of them, we don't want a new spouse, we don't want to change the circumstance of our spouse, meaning we don't want to get rid of them. We don't want a new spouse, we don't want to not have a spouse, we want to stay in that marriage. But we continue to experience the emotion that shows up when we stay in that circumstance, and these situations can be so hard. Our brain goes to work to try everything and anything in order to change the circumstance. We desperately need our circumstance to be different, to feel different, and we don't know how to do it.

Brett: 8:07

Now, from my perspective, I can't say that I've been faced with some of the circumstances that so many of you have faced, and I can't say that I know your situation or your experience, but I have sat with many, many stories and have held pieces of these stories and I've seen the reflection of the pain that these circumstances can bring up in an individual, and in that way I feel like I have some understanding or perspective because of it. And I think what I've seen, or thought at least, is that our life is one of duality, meaning it seems that no one can live a full life and truly escape the pain of life, and it just seems like that's how it is, that we all, as we live our life, to any extent of time, we're going to experience pain. We can't avoid it. No matter what we try to do, we're going to experience this pain. That comes from our brain, really.

Brett: 9:36

But if we're going to measure, like from a humanistic perspective, if our pain is equally distributed or distributed fairly, I can't say that it seems like we all experience the same amount of pain. It really does seem like some experience many, many heavy and challenging circumstances, while others seem to experience much less, and I don't know why that is either. I don't know why. You know, we all have these different experiences in life and some have maybe more positive experiences and others have more challenging experiences. I think that there is, you know, a reason for the duality of our life, that there's good and bad, that there's like good feelings and difficult feelings, and that I guess I see through the lens of my faith that because of original sin, we all experience these challenges and this pain here on this life, and so it seems that that is life, that we experience pain.

Brett: 10:57

Now, we don't all experience the same circumstances or the same level of challenges, for whatever reason, but I also do know that our brain works in a way that doesn't necessarily experience pain on a universal continuum, meaning, you know, like the pain of losing our bike is equal to everybody and the pain of losing a job is equal to everybody and the pain of losing a child is equal to everybody. I think that we experience these circumstances and the pain that we experience in these circumstances is very individualized to us, and the easiest way I could show this to you is maybe just having you think of like a time from when you were young and maybe there was a distressing thing that happened to you that now you're able to kind of laugh about it and you can see that it wasn't as big of a deal as you felt like it was when you were a child, for example, maybe your, your parent, ran over your bike, and I don't know why, but it seems like that's like a universal experience. Haven't we all had somebody run over a bike? I don't know, I think so, but at the time, maybe with this kind of an experience, you might have felt like the world was ending right. It was very distressing, and it was. It took a lot for you to recover from that circumstance. And maybe today, if your bike was ran over, you wouldn't be as disappointed, you wouldn't be as dysregulated and you'd be able to kind of manage yourself a lot better. It wouldn't be as painful as it was when you were like six At least I think for most adults.

Brett: 12:53

It wouldn't be as painful as, and we wouldn't see the same meltdown that we did when we were six. And why is that? I think it's because of two things. First, at that time in our life that was, that was, one of the most difficult things we ever faced. Right, we'd never had the experience of having this amazing bike and then losing it. And so, because of that, that was, that was all we knew. Right, it was all the pain that we knew at that time. And now, because we've had more difficult experiences, our perspective is different, and we can see that we thought that was bad then, but we've now experienced more difficult things, and so it's not that bad. The second thing I think it relates to the first somewhat, but it's that, you know, back then our bike was really important to us and now it's not as important to us.

Brett: 13:50

There's other things in our life that we view as more important, and this is important to know, because I think that, no matter what we experience in our life, I do think we all experience intense pain, because our perspective and our experience really has an impact on the pain that we experience. And I heard this quote recently, and I think it illustrates a little bit of how pain works in our brain, and the quote went like this it said something to this effect that we all have many problems in our lives. Until we have a significant health problem, then we just have one problem, and I think it just really illustrates that until we're faced with a circumstance that trumps the other circumstances in our life, we face the pain that is directly tied to our current circumstances. And so, without that perspective and without those experiences, the intensity of our pain is tied to what we think is the intensity of the experience or how bad our experience is and I think I share all of this to help you see that your brain and your thoughts have so much power and if you're faced with a circumstance that you can't change or you don't want to change, I think this is something that you consider.

Brett: 15:29

First, that the pain that you're experiencing is a part of life. We can't escape pain, we can just learn how to feel it. And if you don't learn how to feel it, then you end up trying to run from this pain your whole life or until the circumstance changes. You buffer away from the pain, and the ways that you do this is you might go to your phone, you might go to food, you might isolate or you might turn devices that take you away from reality. So learning to really let the pain be and learn how to feel it is so important and to just let pain be a part of the experience that we call life.

Brett: 16:14

The other thing that we want to do is we want to begin to watch our brain right Versus just always being in this reactive place of trying to improve our circumstances, to feel better. I want us to kind of watch that link that happens between the circumstance and the emotion, the thoughts, our brain and, for example, if you have a spouse that isn't as loving, caring or invested as you like them to be, this definitely can be a difficult situation, one that is full of pain. And to apply that, to apply these two things, we remember that our goal isn't necessarily to get rid of the pain, even within marriage. I don't know that the goal is to have, like, a super pleasurable marriage. I think marriage isn't the place that we go to to have ultimate pleasure. It's a place that we go to to serve. So when we're serving, it can come with pain.

Brett: 17:18

But when we learn how to deal with the pain and we learn how to be with the pain, then, rather than trying to get away from the pain, we can begin to watch our thoughts and this is very powerful. It's that link between our circumstances and our emotions. When we begin to watch our thoughts, we can begin to examine these thoughts and really begin to measure what is really true and factual and what isn't necessarily supporting what we want to believe and think and where we want to go in our life, and we can begin to let go of some of these thoughts that aren't helpful, that are creating a more painful situation than we have to experience. Another example would be that some of the most intense pain that can come with a spouse that isn't showing up in a caring way is this thought that we aren't worthy. Now, if we don't recognize that we're having this thought, then we're going to just be in this reactionary emotional place.

Brett: 18:34

What we need to do is just slow down a little bit, recognize this thought that's happening as we just examine and watch our thoughts, and what we can begin to do is we can begin to see that, oh, our spouse is showing up a certain way. We're having this thought that we aren't worthy about it, and now we're having this feeling like hurt or rejection or disconnection, and we're blaming it on our spouse, on the circumstance. But it really isn't derived directly from our spouse or from that circumstance, but it really is because of this link that's happening between the circumstance and our emotion, which is this thought that we are believing and what the actions of our spouse seems to be confirming that in some way, their behaviors or the way that they're showing up has merit on our worthiness or loveability or something like that. When we can begin to see this. We can begin to just softly, gently poke holes in this and see how maybe it's not as true as our brain would like to believe. It is true and our brain always likes to be right. If it has this belief, it's always looking to confirm that belief.

Brett: 19:55

But what we can do is we can begin to become intentional about changing this thought. When we intentionally change this thought, we can change the emotion and our response to the circumstance, to our spouse. This is so important because we can take our energy off of trying to change our circumstance or change our spouse and we can put it towards something that we have much more control over, and that thing that we have more control over is our thoughts. If we can change our emotional experience in our marriage, with whatever circumstance that we are facing, we can begin to show up with much more alignment with who we want to be. We can begin to really, no matter what, be loving, caring, supportive, whatever.

Brett: 20:49

Right now, when our circumstances are directly tied to our emotions, like we can believe, then we're kind of out of control because we have to control our circumstances to control our emotions and if we're hurt, then we're upset and angry and protective and frustrated and resentful and defensive, but and we think the only way to not be that is to change our spouses behaviors or our circumstances. But it's not the case. We can change our thoughts and our spouse can do whatever they're doing and we still can show up in a loving, caring, supportive way. Now, why might you do that? Because I really believe that so many of you are married to spouses who are in pain, who are really struggling, and when we show up in a protective way which is angry, frustrated, defensive, resentful it doesn't really help them show up in a way that is clear, right. They move into their protective spot, we get stuck in our cycle and we become confused in our relationship and we lose each other. And that's really why I want us to change our emotional experience, because that's how we can show up as a cycle breaker, that's how we can show up with clarity within our relationship and we can really understand what is happening for our spouse in a much more efficient way and a much more productive way, and we can make sure that our spouse really has a clear message of our love for them, our care for them and how important they are to us. And when that happens, we can oftentimes break this confusing cycle that can cause distance and hurt in our relationship and we can have a much more connected, close and loving relationship.

Brett: 22:41

I often ask my clients to describe how they want to be as a spouse, and they share descriptives like they want to be caring, supportive, intentional, loving, loyal, things like this. And then I ask them if they always show up that way in their marriage, and pretty much universally I have to say it for myself and it seems like most others answer the same way that no, there have been times when I haven't shown up in those ways that I like to be in my marriage, and then I'll ask them why, and they'll often point to the things, the circumstances in their life that are preventing them from doing those things right. And now, when we can see it this way, we can see that it's our thoughts and our emotions that are causing us to show up out of alignment with who we want to be, and we don't necessarily have to change our circumstance to change our thoughts and emotions. We can leave our circumstances as they are and we can change our thoughts and emotions, and in this way we, in theory, can always show up the way that we want to, and it's a skill that we can develop and we can become better at it and more consistent at it, so that we don't have to change our circumstances. We can have the same circumstances that we have right now. We can believe different thoughts, we can have different emotions, we can show up in different ways and have different results.

Brett: 24:20

I'm going to give you an example of a time that I was able to do this in my own life. So when I was like 20 or 21, I started to notice that I was losing my hair and I guess the truth is my friends started noticing that I was losing my hair and they began to point it out, and I have to admit that it was a pretty challenging circumstance that I faced. I remember, maybe after, like our second baby, I was sitting in the hospital and I was researching on my phone, like how to prevent hair loss, and let me tell you, there's a lot of theories out there and I can't say I've tried them all, but, based off of my research, it's pretty difficult to keep your hair once you start losing it, and maybe I don't know, I guess send me an email if you know a solution, but I didn't really find one that looked viable and feasible for me, and I wasn't able to change the circumstance of hair loss. So what did I do?

Brett: 25:28

I began to like wear hats. I began to cover up my head. I began to dislike going into public indoor spaces where I might need to take my hat off or become exposed, and when I was exposed or didn't have a hat on, I wasn't covered up. I had a hard time looking at people in the eye. I lost my confidence and it wasn't because I was going bald that I lost my confidence. It wasn't because of the circumstance that I lost my confidence and I was showing up in this way, but it was because I believed that people thought bald people were weird and people thought that bald people were less attractive or less likable. Those were the thoughts that had me feeling really unconfident and self-conscious and embarrassed, and these thoughts created the difficult feelings for me.

Brett: 26:22

And when we can see that it was these thoughts and not the fact that I was losing my hair that was making me feel this way, I began to be able to see that these thoughts weren't 100% true. And then, one day, as I was thinking about my thoughts, this new thought came to me and this new thought was that I can be bald and be a loving, caring guy, no matter what. And I love that thought because all of a sudden I wasn't focused on what the other person was thinking about me, but what I was thinking about the other person. For some reason, it was just life changing for me to be able to believe this thought and to be able to just go to these functions and be loving, caring, interested, compassionate and have a feeling of care for that person that I was interacting with rather than focusing on if they were caring about me. And that was just a change in my thought. But it changed the way that I presented myself and it opened me up to the connection that I wanted, that I feared I was losing by losing my hair and that by being bald would prevent me from having.

Brett: 27:38

So I know that being bald doesn't really feel like a big deal for you. Like it's not that big of a deal, brian, it's not a big circumstance, but it was for me and I know that you can do the same thing. You can change your thought about your life and your circumstance if you want, if you want to feel better, if you want to show up differently. It's possible. Now I would still take a full head of hair. It's still something that I would like, and if I could get one, I would take one, believe me. But I also experience a lot less pain around being bald and losing my hair and I'm able to show up much more in alignment with who I want to be. I don't resent people who make fun of me for being bald and I don't pull away from situations that I'd like to be part of because I'm worried about what they think about me not having hair. So it's just a small example of how I've used the same process in my life, and I hope that you can see how it's possible to use this process in your life so that you don't have to change your circumstance, so that your unchangeable circumstance doesn't have to be any different than it is and you still can feel better. We just have to begin to watch this link between our circumstance and our emotion, our thoughts, and we have to begin to examine what thoughts are really true, what thoughts are not necessarily 100% true, and find new thoughts that we can believe, that are going to help us feel differently around the circumstance, so that we can show up differently.

Brett: 29:29

I know this podcast was pretty deep and pretty heavy and so I thought I would end it with just a little story and it kind of relates to this topic Early in my name, kelsey's relationship. I would buy Kelsey flowers and she would look at them and make some comment about how much they costed, or she would share with me that flowers don't really mean anything to her and she would just be fine with a card and time together. Why bother getting the flowers? Don't waste your money. And for some reason that really hurt at the time and we'd get into conflict cycles around flowers and I spent a ton of time and energy trying to convince her to like my flowers. By golly I was persistent and she was consistent with her message about not really caring about flowers and eventually she won and I stopped buying her flowers and for years and years I never bought her flowers.

Brett: 30:35

But I thought about this for quite a while and it came up quite a bit that why was this so painful for me? And as I was able to kind of examine and watch my thoughts about around it, I recognized that I was looking for her to help me believe that I was the bee's knees that I was amazing and I was giving flowers to myself. Essentially, I was trying to get her admiration by giving her flowers and when she didn't give that response that I was looking for, my brain took that to mean that she wasn't willing to make me feel as loved as I was willing to try to make her feel loved, that she wasn't as into me and I was looking for how much she loved me by her response to me giving her flowers. And once I saw this, I realized how backwards that was and I started buying her flowers again and I love it.

Brett: 31:33

You see, to me buying her flowers feels so much like love. It's just a little act that represents how much I love her and I love loving her. She has shared with me that she feels loved when I serve her, when I do tasks like take things off of her plate, and I've made efforts to show love to her in this way. But for some reason to me doing the dishes doesn't feel a lot like love. It feels less like a loving act to me than for me to shyly go to the flower department at the local grocery store explaining to a nice lady behind the counter that I'm just looking to buy some flowers for my wife and she will say, oh, is it for anything special? And I respond to her, yeah, my wife. And she blanks at me confused, not getting the joke.

Brett: 32:50

Then I go on to pick out a bouquet of flowers with her and I write a little card and I give it to her and I don't know why, but to me that feels so good. I love giving that to my wife, I love doing it, and even though she doesn't necessarily feel the same amount of love in return, that's okay. And I don't really care what she does with the flowers or how she responds to it. I'm going to make sure that I continue to try to show up in the way that she feels loved. But sometimes I give flowers for myself. I still do it because I love showing her love that way, and doing the dishes is just how I show up so that maybe, just maybe, that girl that means the world to me would love me back.

Brett: 33:55

I hope you enjoyed this podcast and if I could ask you one thing, just like Kelsey feels loved by me doing the dishes, I feel loved by you when you rate and leave a review on this podcast or share it with a friend, just letting you know that have a great weekend, have a great week, everybody, and I will see you back here next week. This has been the Fighting for Connection podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast and want more content like this, check out my Connected Couples campus, which can be found on my website, wwwpivotalapproachcom, and become the difference you need in your relationship.