Mark Groves on Emotional Sobriety

Mark Groves shares his journey from heartbreak to becoming a leading voice on emotional sobriety and authentic connection. He discusses the importance of finding meaning in suffering, the power of setting boundaries, and how to transform pain into personal growth. Mark also explores the impact of technology and social media on our well-being, and offers practical advice for navigating relationships, healing, and self-discovery.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think actually a real good sign that you're in
a trauma bond is when you use the words twin flame.
So no offense if someone's using But this is the
way we sort of like spiritually justify our self abandonment.
I think being best friends with all your ex is
a little weird, all of them. Yeah, And I think
when they're still tethers, Like, don't get me wrong, children

(00:21):
are an obvious necessary tether, but you know, like ten
years later, when they're still like, oh, I'll walk the
dog this week, I'm like, just look like I have
a dog. I love dogs, but get another dog. Like,
you need to close the doors, stop sharing houses, stop
sharing apartments. I know someone who is dating someone who
still shares a dog with their ex.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Some people study love, Mark Rose lives it. He's not
preaching fairy tales. He's pulling truth out of the wreckage.
This is a man who turned heartbreak into a doctorate
in human connection, who looked his pain dead in the
eyes and said teach me, and it did. From Greate

(01:08):
to Love to the Mark Rose Podcast, he's become a
voice promotional sobriety for taking off the mask, dropping the performance,
and remembering who we are beneath all the noise. Today,
We're not gonna be talking about dating. We're gonna be
talking about truth and learning. Stop chasing people don't see you,
and start becoming the kind of person who can finally

(01:28):
see yourself. Welcome Mark to the Sino. So this is
a real blessing to have you.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
I love what you do, and I before we get
into all your great teachings, and I need to hear
a little bit of a backstory, because there's no way
a brother can be dropping truth like that unless he
had some real hard life lessons.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Well, you know, the origins of my real deep interest
in human behavior actually come from a desire to manipulate
human behavior. I was in pharmaceutical sales actually for about
fourteen years, and in that time I went through a breakup.
And it was actually through that I wanted to understand

(02:10):
why am I so good at talking about everything but
my feelings like there's something more going on. It's not
a skill set issue. And I was really obsessed with
understanding how to change behavior. But then once I hit
that sort of emotional rock bottom, I just thought to myself,
like I felt like I'd had the blinders on for
so long that I'd just been checking off the boxes

(02:32):
of my life doing all the things I was supposed
to do. For the first time in my life, I
chose to go against that narrative, and I found myself, strangely,
in the most difficult moment in my life. I found
myself the most connected to myself and most proud of myself,
despite society saying I was a failure for having a relationship.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
And Mark, how long ago was that?

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Almost eighteen years?

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Wow, and that was your tap out moment?

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Yeah, that was the first time I ever even thought
about why I did what I did and who was
I and what shaped me? And it was actually reading
man search for meaning after that where I was like, wait,
maybe I'm actually here to do something more than just
be a provider and make enough money to take care
of a family, Like maybe there's something to be found

(03:18):
in this pain that I'm in. I never thought about that.
That wasn't like even as I wasn't thinking about purpose
and meaning. You know, I was thinking, get a degree
in finance or marketing or something something smart that would
make good money, and that was it. But then once
that happened, I was like, wow, I've been living pretty
much on autopilot.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
So you get introduced to the great Victor Frankel book
Man Search for Meaning, which is a must read for
anybody who's on the path. Yeah, and what inspired you
in that book? You know, the idea that to live
is to suffer, but to survive is to find meaning
in your suffering. And Ara like, wait, what was find
meaning in my suffering? I I'd never turned towards my

(03:58):
pain before, really with deliberate intention of like, hey, I'm
going to actually use this. I got better at that over.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Time, and the more repeated pains I had that it
didn't take me as long to really start to apply it.
And then I'd say that it was sobriety that really
had me confront because I think, like, ultimately the work
actually used the termine your introduction. But I think ultimately
the work is to get sober from everything that distracts
you from who you are.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, tell me about I don't tell me about your
sobriety journey.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Yeah, you know, I never thought about quitting alcohol from
a place of you know, I'm living this sort of
exact rock bottom, like how someone might painted like waking
up in the wrong place, etc. It was that something
felt off and I kept getting the nudge from whatever god,
the universe that was like, hey, maybe you should look
at your relationship to alcohol. And that kind of haunted

(04:51):
the back of my mind for a long time. And
my wife actually, when we were dating, she went a
year without drinking. And it was really inspired by that.
And then I met this guy named Trevor Boehm, who's
a men's coach. I was on a bachelor party and
he was having the best time and he was so
fun and I was like, wait, you're not drinking and
he's like, yeah, I quit drinking. And this was you know,

(05:14):
when you're on the edge of a lesson and the
universe just like keeps introducing you to like, hey, you
better pay attention. So now we're just going to get
a billboard. So Trevor was kind of one of my
billboards and he said I asked him, why did you
get sober? And he said, I got sober the day
of what my wife left me and he said that
was four years ago and it's the best choice I've

(05:35):
ever made. And I was like, wow, Okay, there's something
rich in this. And then I was listening to Paul
sellick the Channel. Then he's a writer and in this book,
I think it's called the Book of Truth. There was
like eight books or something maybe done, I don't know,
but in this book. I remember I was listening to
it when I was walking in Manhattan, and I remember
exactly where I was because it said your body can

(05:58):
only alchemize the lowest life of truth you're willing told,
and I was like, okay, what does that mean? Like
there's something in that. And then he went on to
say that what is something you know to be true
that you don't live And instantly it was like you
need alcohol to connect, and I was like damn, okay,
And then the next lines were when you like, essentially,

(06:21):
when you don't live the thing you know, then it's
like being It's like being a fish that lives in
an aquarium who finds out about the ocean but goes
back to the aquarium and pretends they don't know. That's beautiful.
And that's where I was like, oh, that's rich. Yeah.
I was like I'm that fish. I'm the fish in
the aquarium, like seeing this vast ocean and all I

(06:43):
need to do is get sober to taste that. Okay,
and then it was also codependency because I was seeing
that A lot of the reason I didn't want to
get sober is because I was afraid of the social
friction it would cost in the places where there's a
social contract to drink, So bachelor parties, guys trips, weddings,
and you know, I had like a guy's trip, a

(07:05):
bachelor party, and a wedding, a wedding. I was an
EMC right after I decided, So I was I got
to break all these social contracts and experience myself in
discomfort with the discomfort of other people that were having
a response to my reflection of to them of their
lack of choice.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Interesting, yeah, it makes perfect sens but let me Marko.
What I get from you, though, is there was you
know this, you came out of this difficult relationship you're
questioning whether or not you should not drink anymore. There
was an opening though you had some you were in
like blatant denial, there was right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
There was like there's something here. I'm not ready to
confront what's here? Like the I wasn't ready to say
full stop. But it was when I had that awareness
that I had I had a piece of knowledge I
wasn't implementing. And the time between my engagement ending and
that sobriety is years, Like that's probably about fourteen years.
So I didn't think I needed to get sober. At

(08:05):
twenty seven, I was still using alcohol to minimum to Still,
even though I started to awaken to my thought process
and who I was, I still used alcohol to numb,
you know, just more subtly I was. I was. It
was almost like I was microdosing grief. Yeah, you know,
I heard grief.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
I love it. Oh that's beautiful, man, I'm all about that.
And then was it easy for you to get sober
as you struggle?

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Now? Actually, once I broke those first social contracts, then
it was easy. And I was only going to do
it for a year. But then once I tasted a year,
I was like, I can't go back. I can't consciously
go back.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
And did you enter recovery community? You just do it
on your own?

Speaker 1 (08:42):
No? I just didn't on my own.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Did it on your own?

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah? Beautiful because it wasn't so much an addiction as
it was. I mean, on some level it's an addiction,
you know, because an addiction is you know, taking anything
that changes your state, and that you don't have discernment
over isn't an addiction, and so I didn't have discernment
over it. And a lot of my work, I mean,
i'd say all my work is about creating choice where

(09:07):
you don't have any right now, and so you know
it could be because ultimately, if you can't leave a relationship,
you can't choose it. And so by leaving alcohol, if
I ever decided to re engage with it, it would
be from a place of choose, do not have to?
And that's something I noticed in I kind of played
whack a mole with that. In every area of my life.
I'm sort of taking out each block like each domino,

(09:30):
till everything in my life is from choice. There's no
have tos?

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Got it? That makes perfect sense? And then Mark walk
us through how did you start create love? How did
that walk us through that path? How did you? How
did I want to hear that?

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Well? From the time when I was twenty seven, when
I went through the engagement ending, I just wanted to
really understand why marriage existed. I didn't understand it. I
was I grew up Catholic, So I found myself a
recovering Catholic. I wanted to understand why did I follow
this idea that everyone gets married and you know, goes
off into la la land. When I when I got

(10:07):
I broke off my engagement. I realized, oh my god,
there's a lot of divorce around me. And wait, there's
a lot of people who stay married and dislike each other.
I want to understand this, and so I started to
read books like the History of Marriage from Stephanie Kohn's
and then I found things like positive psychology and that
I was really optim I was really obsessed with because

(10:28):
I thought, oh my god, the science of optimization. Instead
of studying what's broken with us, why don't we focus
on what's good? And I started to write about what
I was learning because I felt like there was a
big gap in the space of relationship. So I started
to write about what I was learning, and then that
started to do well. And then, you know, I preach

(10:48):
about people using breakups as this vehicle for transformation because
you're between patterns. So there's very few times in your
life where you're clearly between a pattern, and so you
can where you come from and what shaped you, and
now you can consciously at least do our best ability.
Choose what you want to do moving forward, what you
want to create. And so I was dating this woman

(11:09):
and she was like, hey, you should start an Instagram account.
She managed social media of her companies. I was like,
what's Instagram. She's like, oh, it's like for photographers and stuff.
And I was like, all right, Nah, I'm probably not
going to. And then we broke up and I was like, yeah,
I'm definitely going to. Now I'm going to sing to
show her. And so I started. I posted my first

(11:31):
post in December of twenty thirteen, and I posted every day,
even up to three times a day, for eight years
without missing a day. Wow. So yeah, I was in
the early hustle.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
What was that experience like for you? What kind of
feedback you're getting? I mean, it's a very vulnerable place
for you to be, and how were you putting those
messages out kind of navigating your own kind of recovery
let's just call it that.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, you know, I went through I'd say the more
waterboarding of that in you know, on the MIC, I
was macrodosing it when I would publish articles that I
would write, because the articles were really a way that
I would write, like what have I been through? And
what am I learning? You know, what are the things
I'm most ashamed of? And then what had I learned
from that experience? So I really found my writing was

(12:17):
a way that I excited my shame. But you know,
there wasn't a moment that I hit published that I
wasn't terrified, you know, and I I always I remember
talking to a friend who's a great writer. His name
is Brian Raves, and I said to him, why do
you like always seem to be capable of writing such
profound things? And he said, I write from the edge
of my truth. When I hit publish, I'm afraid, and

(12:39):
that means that I'm writing something profound for me. And
so I really started to use that as a guiding
as a guide post. And then you know, on Instagram
it was interesting because I if I was to go
back through, I think I have seven thousand posts. I'm
sure let's say two thousand of those, or fifteen hundred
of them, or probably repeat posts. But of the let's

(13:01):
say fifty five hundred, there's such a journey and arc
through that of like what I believe love to be.
You know, when I read an old post and I'm like, ah,
I don't know about that one. You know. So I
think the internet offers us this window of our own evolution,
which is really beautiful.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
What is withdrawal? Why is it necessary? Why is it
healthy for some people to go through withdrawal?

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Oh? Yeah, you know. The other day, I was working
with a client and she just started working with me,
and she was talking about how she's taken a couple
months of not dating and she started to date again.
She just went through a six year relationship that ended
like four months ago. And I was like, look, I'm
going to present an idea and you're probably not going

(13:47):
to like the idea, but I promise there's value in
the idea. She's like what, because she's just met a
guy and now she's like, oh, I'm excited. And I said,
I think you should take at least six weeks from dating,
which is like, well, I've already taken two months. And
I'm like, no, you haven't, Like you haven't intentionally set
a guardrail. That is about creating a container for you

(14:09):
to experience the space and what's underneath arousal, desire, being desired,
and the reason we need to withdraw from these things
is it's like the only way you can I was
talking about inserting choice when you can build this bulletproof
wall around who you are. Because when you're let's say
you have you struggle with boundaries or self expression. The

(14:32):
first step of that is to actually withdraw from the
things you're in relationship with so you can draw walls
around you so you can experience what a self is.
We're not getting to the healthy negotiation of self with
others yet because we haven't even experienced a full self,
and so you have to witness yourself. Say, I'm actually
not dating right now. I'm taking some time for me

(14:55):
and I'm going to just go into the exploration of
myself if and when, and it's the times available. If
you're available, great, I'll come back into contact with you.
Well that often does to someone who's met you or
as interested in you, is well, one it'll make you
more attractive, but two it'll actually if they try to

(15:15):
break your boundary, they've already demonstrated that they're not a
partner because they're not respecting it. And what you get
to witness in yourself is that when you're in relationship
to desire or chemistry or whatever it is, you're actually
saying no to it, despite the scarcity and all the things.
Because of course when I said that to her, she went, wait, what, like,

(15:39):
but I just met this guy, and I was like, oh,
I I get it, and you're thinking already that you're
not sure if you're ready, and if you were ready,
you wouldn't think you're not sure if you're ready. So
he said, honor that and just go into the cocoon.
And then what will it will do is bring up

(15:59):
the material of what do I do when I'm not
doing that? It takes away the drive that loneliness. You
don't have an option, you have to be with the loneliness,
and so there's a powerful thing to that. Like one
woman I was working with, I usually recommend three months,
but one woman I was working with, when we said

(16:19):
three months, she was like, I can do a month.
And I was like, you're already negotiating with what you're
capable of. And then she's like, well, can I date women?
And I'm like, well, do you normally date women? She's
like no, but since I can't take guys, I might
open the door. And I was like, this is so good.
But it shows you that we start the energy becomes frenetic,

(16:41):
and you can always tell when you're operating from a
wound when there's a frenetic energy to it.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Don't wait for closure, you create the closure. Can you
talk about that?

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah, A lot of the times I hear people waiting
for their ex to get into contact with them, or
for them to finally treat them well or finally give
them the conversation they couldn't. Yeah, and look, those are
all great intentions. And if you're waiting for something like that,
like all move on when I need to feel respected

(17:10):
by look, I'm not. All of those are important, the
need for respect, the need for all that, but you
have to create it yourself. You know, if you think
that closure comes from someone apologizing, then you've given them
the same power you probably lost in the relationship. So
it's just important to reframe it that, like closure, moving on,
none of that depends on anyone else, just like self

(17:32):
respect doesn't depend on anyone respecting you. It's how you
relate to disrespect that creates respect. And again not minimizing
the importance of feeling respected, but it's actually standing in
the space of honoring yourself that creates that cultivates a
relationship with yourself that when someone comes into your life
who's disrespectful, it doesn't even match. And so you don't
even have problem. You can already feel you could probably

(17:54):
even sense their tender profile, you know, and then you're
just like no, because there's a lot of like, Look,
there were studies back in the day where you could
go into a college person's dorm and make a pretty
good assessment of their values as a character. You could
do it with their Facebook profile, you could do it
with their tender, their bumble. We can make pretty accurate

(18:14):
assessments of people, and you know, these are called decision heuristics.
There are ways that we shortcut decisions. We put you know,
we like create value judgments and sometimes we're going to
be wrong. So of course curiosity is important in openness,
but in general, if we're pretty connected to ourselves, we
can have a pretty good accurate barometer of what's going
on in someone's life. And I think that comes from

(18:35):
having a deep, honest assessment of ourselves.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Hm, that's beautiful. Mark, what's your counsel for the client
who's always falling in love, always met their soulmate, always
met the right person. You know, I like to say, what,
walk me through your process with this person and educate
our audience about you know, some techniques.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Perhaps well first, I often those people need more of
like a cosmics lab. And what I mean by that
is when you fall in love really easily, or you
fall in love like you get love bombed and you
call everyone a soulmate. As soon as you call everyone
a soul may which a wee could go into sort
of like Okay, yeah, anyone who's your datre is a

(19:16):
soul mate, blah blah. But when you're like that person's
the one, and you've gone on one date or you've
had one experience of chemistry with them, maybe you've had
sex with them, you've already exited the space of discernment.
I can already tell that when someone's like that, they're
not grounded because they get picked up by the momentum
of someone else. They get picked up by the fantasy.
And I actually think that the same people who fall

(19:38):
for build intimate emotional connection with AI bots are the
same people who get love bombed, because both are just
being are just telling you what you want to hear.
So there's a lack of groundedness and discernment in the
energy of the words. So if I still have a
wound where I've been desperately craving to be chosen, loved
sweeped off my feet, then all be prone to that.

(20:01):
But what's really happening is I'm not an adult assessing
what's going on or probably like sort of suspended in
a younger developmental stage. And so what I say to
people when they're going through that, well one is is
really start to think allows someone to become the one?
And notice yourself wanting to give the title, because really
what we're trying to do is like label something and

(20:22):
then will probably then bypass red flags and orange flags
because we're still trying to accommodate the title that we
gave them. So if you don't give the title now
you can be a little more grounded, like have they
earned that title? And you know, ultimately that is probably
an unresolved as I was saying, an unresolved thing from childhood.

(20:44):
So I think they likely have to go into just
the exploration of where that longing comes from. And as
you you know said, it's like then develop the ability
to be with themselves, you know, the ability to become
the person that they've always been seek which is such
a cliche, but you know, ultimately you're waiting for yourself

(21:04):
to save yourself.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Right on. Yeah, right, that's beautiful man. Mark walk us
through your teachings and about helping clients shift the narrative
and move past their sad story.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
You know, a lot of culture right now is like,
if you talk about someone's experience of being stuck in
a victim mindset, what someone will say is that's victim blaming.
And so we've seem to have lost the ability to
live in the complexity of what it means to be human.
So if we tell someone because you know, there's that

(21:39):
spiritual line that is like, it didn't have it to you,
it happened for you. The problem with that line is
in that transfer of two to four, you're negating the
experience of victimization. If someone was abused or something like that,
I always walk them through that complexity of understanding that
something can happen to you. You could be the victim

(22:00):
of something, and yet it is up to you to
do something with that something like you're still responsible for
the material that's born from that, because if you don't
excavate what meaning you create from that experience or whatever
it might be, you'll never be able to walk towards
love with open arms again. Because it's my belief that

(22:24):
love and pain live side by side. We're usually hurt
by people we love, So if we don't explore the hurt,
what lives next to the opening is the suffering. And
so we have to actually go towards the suffering, the
trauma the thing and say, even if you were four
and you had no choice, you want to be able

(22:44):
to and that's a survival based thing. Of course, choice
was taken away from you, that's the idea, and so
the opposite of trauma is choice. So if I was
to go into that moment, we'd say, if we really
needed to develop a skill set from that, what would
have been the skill set we would have needed? Find
my voice, stand up for myself, activate anger, things that

(23:05):
weren't safe in the moment, and so we want to
really develop that. What I see is that we tend
to relate from our wounds, and then the way that
we relate we sort of circle the drain of the wound,
you know, we sort of stay stuck in the suffering
of it. But the moment you actually start to look
at it and say, teach me, teach me what you know,
teach me the wisdom that source from our suffering. And

(23:27):
then once you integrate the knowledge that the wound provides,
then the wound actually, I don't even want to say
it's healed, because we actually need the hyper sensitivity it creates. So,
for example, if you grew up and you had let's
say an aggressive or angry, eruptive parent, you're likely hypervigilant,
right Like, you likely develop a sort of sensitivity and
a great scanning of the circumstances. And you might think, like,

(23:50):
when you're in the wound of it, it's hyper sensitive,
so you almost get reactive to everything. But when you
actually see it, you've over developed a skill, so you've
actually become like a hyper a tuned radar. And you'll
see a lot of people who have been through this.
They're naturally they're therapists, they're coaches, their doctors, their nurses,

(24:13):
their dietitians, there's some form of care. Because and I
say this with love, because I started doing I did
it myself first, is that we're monetizing our survival strategy.
So we're getting paid to stay in our wound, and
what happens is is that we tend to then draw
partnership or relationship where we're trying to fix something for
someone and you think of this like an enabler or codependency,

(24:37):
and so what's happened is is like, if you don't
need me, then I'm not valuable. So I'm going to
pay you to need me, and I'm gonna through my
work not actually fully liberate you because I still have
an unconscious hook to be needed. And so I see
this with a lot of care providers is they're stuck
in that till they realize it. And then what happens

(24:58):
when they realize it is that it becomes a superpower
because it's no longer using any energy to source your
own worth and value, and now the skill set can
be released fully and then that's where that's where the wound,
when explored, can be honed. And then that overdevelopment of
hypervigilance actually becomes deep intuition and knowing. You know, I

(25:20):
was working with a client last week where we were
talking about how she seems to be attracted to men
who are unavailable. So I said, She's like, I can't
tell if it's my anxiety, et cetera, et cetera. And
I was like, okay, well, first off, anxiety is always brilliant.
So instead of trying to figure out what's wrong with
me that I'm anxious in relationship to this person, start

(25:41):
to think what's right with me that I'm anxious in
relationship to this person? And then we can now, even
if it's so called not valid, we have to validate
it so we can go into it. But what I
said to her, which was going on in her circumstance,
is she can tell when someone's shoulders are just kind
of turned and they say, I'm here, I'm here, I'm

(26:01):
choosing this, And then they have these small little strategies
for distancing right, like language like hey, you know, don't
bring that up. I get a little overwhelmed. So they're
controlling the depth of communication and the depth of intimacy
with this language. And I said, like, your anxiety is
because you feel these shoulders not turned towards you. You're
picking up the most subtle cue of unavailability. And so

(26:23):
instead of being like, what's wrong with me that I
can't tolerate this lack of alignment, it's pay attention. And
what would make your breath calm based on their behavior.
It's not their responsibility, but it is your responsibility to
hold the bar to what you need for their shoulders
to turn to you, because otherwise what you do is
psychically you're reaching always. And there's that saying like a

(26:45):
child will continue to reach even if a parent doesn't
reach back. But as an adult, you have to decide
that you're going to stop reaching where people don't reach back,
and then that allows the child to settle in the
anxiety to subside because you're not really waiting for them
to choose, your waiting to be validated in the experience
of what you're truly feeling, which is accurate generally. Oh man,

(27:11):
red flags and orange flags. You know it's in green
flags too, right, I think? I think a lot of
the times we are obsessed with other people's red flags,
but we don't even realize our own, you know. So
that's a good place to start, is like, what are
my red flags? And if you could actually ask a
former partner, who's safe to ask, or even a best friend,

(27:32):
what do you think are the things that I most
need to work on? The Other thing you can ask
them is what are my greatest gifts. That way, you
get a little balance of negative and positive feedback, and
negative feedback not even being bad, but just you know,
help some of us internalize the feedback when people are
looking for red and orange flags. Really, what I see

(27:52):
is like a lot of the time people are not
clear about actually what they desire relationally, so they actually
haven't written out a list of the things they truly want.
And then what happens when we're not clear is we
just sort of follow connection. We just follow chemistry. But
chemistry is not compatibility, and so a lot of the
times we confuse those things. And so we know that

(28:13):
if our chemistry has led to a lack of compatibility,
then we know what we're probably doing is following a wound, right,
Like we're still in a pattern of a wound. And
so I always like to say to people like it
just means like on some level your radar or your
picker is broken, and that's not a bad thing. It's
not to shame it, but it's to say, like the

(28:35):
ultimate active of true freedom in relational batterns is that
just because you have a draw to someone, you don't
have to pursue it. And we generally pursue when we
have connection because we believe connection is finite, you know.
But I think a lot about what ram Das says
that don't fall in love with the method. So like,

(28:57):
if meditation connects you to God, God is within you,
meditation just connected you to them or him or whatever.
And so it's like if you didn't find love in
a person, you fell in love with a person and
love was already there. They just awakened what's within you.
So when you really start to get that, then you
realize that chemistry is something that you share, but it's

(29:18):
something that you have, and so it's not something that
lives finite in someone. So you stop operating from the
scarcity of that. But a red flag, I would say,
if anyone's just coming out of a relationship, that's a
pretty good red flag. If someone's not clear on what
they want, if someone is ambiguous or ambivalent about what
they want, if someone's inconsistent in communication, if you try

(29:39):
to set a boundary and they don't honor the boundary,
if you ask for something that you need, if you
set a boundary like hey, I'm not ready to be intimate,
and they sort of use shame or gaslight you or
try to use guilt. I'd say it's generally though, if
they talk shit about their ex, that's a good sign
because yeah, one day you might be the so you

(30:00):
just have to be mindful of that. And I'd say,
look like, I think being best friends with all your
ex is a little weird, all of them. Yeah, And
I think when there's still tethers, Like, don't get me wrong,
children are an obvious necessary tether, but you know, like
ten years later, when they're still like, oh, I'll walk
the dog this week, I'm like, just look like, I
have a dog. I love dogs, but get another dog. Like,

(30:24):
you need to close the doors. Stop sharing houses, stop
sharing apartments, stop like I know someone who is dating
someone who still shares a dog with their ex.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
You said, we repeat what we don't repair, talk about
that please are just a great line, Yeah, if.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
We don't actually bring completion to the thing. If we don't,
Because if you think about it, all, all relationships that
are successful are is rupture repair, So ruptor repair rept
to repair, because a successful relationship is not an absence
of conflict. It's how we navigate conflict that's different. Of course,

(31:04):
Like two humans who are different, are going to naturally
bump up against one another's. That's actually the feature, not
a bug. And so there's a great quote. I don't
know who said it, but it's that you could tell
a lot about someone by how they leave things. And
I've always thought a lot about that quote, because when

(31:25):
I was younger, I never thought about leaving a relationship
with Grace like that was not It was like, oh
do I text him?

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Do I?

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Not like I want more closure, I want more understanding.
Now I would have no problem actually asking for what
I desire, and if they couldn't give it, that would
be because of them, not because of me, and so
I would be able to move forward. And I think
the onus is on us to go so deeply just

(31:53):
into the understanding of why we do something. I don't
think that's a same for change. I always have to
be clear with that. It's like I used to think
that you had to understand the pathology, but I actually
don't think you do. I think the understanding of the
pathology is great if you're processing shame, because you realize

(32:15):
that whatever pattern you're in probably came from somewhere, and
so just understanding the pathology makes you realize it's not
your faull. But we can always go, like we could
go from the space of attachment to the space of
inherited trauma to epigenetics, like like we could always find
another layer that would explain why you are where you are.

(32:36):
But you just really need to decide you don't want
to do it anymore. And it's actually that choice that
changes everything, you know. I was listening recently to a
talk from Michael Gervais, who is like a performance psychologist
worked with like.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Oh, Michael, Yeah, he's awesome.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
He's so great, And he said we were talking about
cool plunging. I was talking to him about it as
a way of like building emotional and performance resilience, and
he said, you know, Mark, it's not even the getting
in the cold plunge or like being in the cold
water that is the defining part of that. It's the

(33:12):
walking to the tub. And I was like, I don't know,
I've been in some pretty cold forty forty degree water.
The walking to the tub is like that, I can't
believe I'm about to do this. Is this what crazy
people do? But it's true. It is that psych up
that gets you there to have the hard conversation. But
it's actually the first word. It is the getting in

(33:32):
the tub. The rest is the processing. And that's why
I think cold water exposure is so powerful as a
mechanism of expanding your capacity to be with discomfort. So
I think when we really take responsibility for repair, then
all of a sudden everything in our life changes. And
you know, to be fair, it's not like our society

(33:54):
models repair. Well, you know if anything like what gets
modeled is more ideological space between each other. And so
I think when we can do this interpersonally, then we
can bring it to our community, we can bring it
to our culture, and it becomes a profound thing for everybody.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Mark, how do you help your clients? Let's just say something.
They call you Mark, I'm out of my fucking mind.
I'm in day nine and withdrawal. I don't know what happened. Mark.
We went on three dates. It's been a week since
he's called me. How do you help them not quit
on themselves? How do you walk them through that? Yeah,
I'd love to hear your techniques on that.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Well, you know, there's a great breathing exercise that Mark
Willnn who wrote it, didn't start with you has where
you put one hand on your chest and one hand
on your gut and you breathe. As you're breathing in,
you actually say to yourself, I'm going to breathe with
you until we become one. And what happens in the dysregulation,

(34:53):
you know, because when we're just regulated, especially if we're
processing something more historical, which is probably what's happening in
like an overreaction to something. Is when you do that,
you can actually feel yourself integrate, Like you can feel
yourself the like maybe more desperate or fearful part of
you comes into congruence and what is the word comes

(35:18):
into alignment, I know there's a different word I'm thinking,
but comes into alignment, and so our nervous system actually
will kick into pair sympathetic and that young part is soothed,
and then we can operate from a place of more integration.
If we practice that, I find that's really helpful. But
if someone, let's say, is exploring that, I would want

(35:40):
to go into what is the story that you're running
about this, because let's be honest, if you and I
are if we're going on a date with someone and
we go on a couple dates, and then they don't
talk to us for a week. What it's really a
sign of is probably misalignment. I might need more information,
but even the fact that I have to go get
more information, Like even if let's say something happened in

(36:03):
their life that they couldn't communicate with me, I'm gonna
almost just call bs on that right away, because we've
all if we're a considerate person and we've had a
good experience with someone, we're gonna say, Hey, I want
you to know that I'm enjoying the getting to know
you and this thing just happened at my work or

(36:23):
in my life. Just give me a couple of days
and I'm going to reach out to you, but I
want you to know I'm still really interested in seeing
you again. We would all do that. So when someone
doesn't do that, and we might be like, well, yeah,
it's because their dad left when they were three.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Who gives it to that, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
Like I can have compassion for why someone is the
way they are, but that doesn't mean I need to tolerate
why they are the way they are, because if that
was true, then I'd have to be with abusers, right, Like,
all of a sudden I'd stay with them because I'm
justifying their behavior instead of actually creating the space and
the boundary for them to step into a responsibility. So
I would want to really just explore, like, what is

(37:05):
it about the disappointment that you have, and let's go
into that. That's fair disappointment that someone ghosted you and
isn't communicating with you and isn't treating you. Well, great,
let's go into that. But actually starting to see that
as an early gift of misalignment. You know, I wrote
years ago that ghosting is just someone else dumping themselves

(37:25):
for you. That cause, you know, the fair response that
people had to that was they felt like it negated
the pain that ghosting is. And yeah, and you know,
I'm not talking about someone who's been dating you for
two years and then ghosts. I'm talking about like the
early dating process. If someone goes to you after two years,
like they've got much larger character problems.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Mark, How can someone tell the difference between chemistry and
a trauma bond?

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Oh man, that's such a good question, you know, and
I think it's a it's a fine line. That's the
hard one. Yeah, because chemistry is a trauma bond. Till
it's not. You know, I think as soon as you're
using the words soulmate, I think, actually a real good
sign that you're in a trauma bond is when you

(38:11):
use the words twin flame. So no of if someone's
using but this is the way we sort of like
spiritually justify our self. Amendment. I always like the question
is choosing them and choosing me, is choosing this experience
choosing me, because every choice of someone else should be
simultaneous with the choice of yourself. As soon as that

(38:32):
answer is no, you're out, like you've you've entered a
really dangerous space because no longer can you be in
your body in the choice, and you're really operating from
a wound, and that wound says like the connection to
them is more important than the connection to myself. So
I was saying earlier that you can usually tell when

(38:52):
a wound's working because it's frenetic, and like trauma bonds
are frenetic, and so any rapid escalation is a really
good sign of a trauma bon This isn't always a
red flag, but I'd say it's a cautionary orange flag.
And that's early big gifts, early big trips, early big gifts,

(39:15):
because what I have seen with and I'm speaking in
the with women with men, is that men who use
power and money, who rapidly escalate, will do it with big,
lavish trips. It's like being on an episode of The Bachelor,
like you've flown in an alicopter at the top of
a cliff and there's a chef there. Of course you're

(39:36):
going to fall in love because you're not on the
ground literally, but it's because you're being captured by this idea.
And what they're doing is is actually very It might
be unconscious, it might be conscious. If it's conscious, it's
a way worse thing, you know, than we're talking about,
like narcissism, sociopathy. But it's like they're tapping into the
part of you they can sense, like a drugdop when

(39:59):
someone is waiting to be saved, and so that trauma
bond is those connections of like the waiting to be
saved and the person who wants to save. But that
person who wants to save usually has more of like
a disorganized sort of attachment style, like they're hot, they're cold,
and in that world of like narcissism, they would say

(40:20):
they're feeding off you, they're getting their supply. But at
the end of the day, you know, we're responsible for
the things that we bring into our lives. I'm not
saying it's our fault, but a lot of the questions
are like why do I, like, why do I keep
dating a narcissist or someone like that? But the real
question is why am I drawn to them? Why are

(40:41):
they drawn to me? You know, I think it's a
lot like and again I'm not blaming anybody, but I
am saying like, you at least have to take responsibility
for what you choose, because anything that's in your life,
you're choosing. So if you can choose it, and you
can take responsibility for the choice, then now you can
unchoose it. But if you're not willing to see that
on some level, even if it's painful, you're consenting, that's

(41:03):
such a delicate line to play with because yeah, because
then what happens is people go but you know they
were psychologically abusive. I'm like, yes, I get it, and
we're not negating that. Let's live in the complexity of
both and that they are psychologically manipulative and you're still
consenting to be in the dynamic. Yeah, but they use
a lot of psychological mind tricks. Great, and how do

(41:26):
you free yourself because if you can just say okay,
I am responsible, there's no blame and so now it
goes oh, but there is power. So now I could
say I don't want to go in that dynamic anymore
because if you know, kid who gets bullied in a school,
and then you move that kid to another school, they're
likely going to get bullied again because there's still an

(41:47):
energetic entry point. Now, of course there's a lot of
dynamics to navigate in that, but the point being like,
we have to work on the energetic entry point and
then from there we can resolve whatever needs to be resolved.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Mark, you've worked with thousands of couples, you have empirical data.
Give me some highlights of what you see in successful couples.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
Well, there's mutual alignment about the baseline of agreements. So
you know, a lot of us create vows when we
get married. We used to sort of inherit those vows.
They were sort of like cultural value, you know, like
honor and obey, and those ones aren't so attractive anymore.
Honor and obey, my joked with my wife. Are we

(42:30):
going to go with that one for the wedding? She's like,
you might, I'm not. I was like, okay, I'll do that.
I could honor and obey you. I like this this
kind of this kind of sounds hot, but we're we're
not really explicit about this in our relationships. We think
the time for a vow is actually at the ceremony,
but really the time for a vow is in the

(42:50):
beginning of the relationship because you're creating shared agreements about
how are we going to navigate conflict, like how do
we deal with let's ahead or Norman of sense, how
do we deal with opposite sex friends? How are you
just going to navigate that? Like if that comes up,
how are we navigating? What does trust mean? What does
truth mean? What does growth mean? What happens when like

(43:12):
what you desire bumps up against what I desire? And
so what I see with really successful couples is is
there is an agreement. Now, most couples don't start out
with those agreements if they've been together a long time, right,
you know, as I was working with someone recently where
she's like fully awakening to everything she desires that she

(43:32):
got married really young, and now she wants to pursue
a career and she spent her life as a mom
and blah blah blah. You know, and I'm sure many
people understand that story in both directions, men and women.
But I said to her, you know, it's like, when
you chose that relationship, it's like you were on the
radio dial Am seventy seventy and now you're at AM
ten ten. And that's not because it's better or worse,

(43:55):
it's just different. And so your relationship is currently at
seven and you're feeling like you're going crazy because you think,
what's wrong with me? But really you're at ten ten
and your husband wants to get to ten ten, but
he's terrified of ten ten, and he might choose to
never go to ten ten. But your job isn't to
go to seven to seventy and stay there. Your job

(44:16):
is to bridge between the two and invite him, but
not go there and stay there, because then you'll just
resent him and hate him. And I said, so you're seeing,
like what's wrong with me that I love him? I
wanted the perfect family, And I'm like, so you have
to let go of that, because that's a prison, And
so what I see with really successful couples is what

(44:37):
comes up. Like the agreement my wife and I have
is that if something's coming up for one of us,
it's coming up for both of us. Essentially, like one
person who's picking up on something anxiety, distance, desire, whatever
it is that we don't go, what's wrong with you
that you feel that way? The relationship's fine. We go,
what's right with you that you feel that way? And

(45:00):
what would resolve that? Because I usually find that when
something comes up for one person, they're like the canary
in the coal mine for the relationship. So it's like
a really good example is if someone's dating and then
they get engaged, and the one person is so much
paralyzed by anxiety about the engagement and getting married. We

(45:21):
don't want to go into psychotherapy or coaching from the
place of fixing the anxiety. We want to go into
it from what is brilliant about you that you're anxious?
Because let's say, for example, when I've worked with people
like that, let's say the person who's anxious and hesitant
notices that their partner has somewhat of an unhealthy relationship

(45:45):
to alcohol, but they don't want to point this thing,
but unconsciously they know in their nervous system, they know
that in order to be in a successful relationship and
have kids together and raise a family, they want whatever
alcohol is distracting from to be resolved. So their anxiety
is actually brilliant because it's actually inviting information to this

(46:06):
person to look what's below alcohol so they can actually
meet So them stopping the sort of anxiety. I see
the pathology of anxiety as being the suppression of feelings,
the suppression of self expression. And so when you suppress
an emotion, it'll show up as guilt, shame, or anxiety.

(46:27):
And so when you express and get to the core
of the anxiety that I'm actually worried about this person's drinking.
Now we've given expression to the thing, and so we're
resolving your self censorship. And that's inviting the other person
to explore their relationship to alcohol, should they choose. But

(46:48):
we've resolved the self expression part. They have the choice.
In order for the relationship to move to the next level.
This self expression needed to be resolved, and this sobriety
needed to be reached makes sense perfectly. Yeah, So that
I love that if you turn from curiosity, then it
shifts everything. But most people go, I'm how anxious, I'm depressed,

(47:10):
and society will tell them there's a chemical imbalance, which
is not. That's a totally disproven marketing tactic from farms. Yeah.
So what that does, though, is it sells drugs for
drugs that say they change that that chemical. But what
it does for the person is not resolve their feeling
because they use a drug to a nest hies that

(47:31):
they're the canary and the goal mine.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Wow, wah wah, Mark, how do you maintain your own
level of self care and being, you know, this kind
of elevated teacher.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
Well, the first thing I'll say is kill your gurus,
because I think that anyone who wants to be an
elevated teacher as a poor I don't you know. I
see myself more as like I'm in the trend and
like I basically write and teach from the things I've

(48:03):
struggled with and struggle with. So right now I'm really
deeply exploring my relationship to technology, and one of the
protocols I've been implementing is about restructuring my relationship to
dope meine and then creating neuroplasticity to change my habits,
et cetera. And one of the things. So there's two

(48:25):
things I do. One is the first thirty minutes of
the day, don't use my phone. That delays the dopamine.
It changes my association when I wake up in the morning,
I don't use my phone as an alarm. Yeah, I
go to a coffee and workout, and so there's an
association of something else that provides the neural cocktail. And
then it actually makes it if you get a cold
plunge in their exercise, it actually makes it so you

(48:47):
have more control over your phone for the rest of
the day. Very similar actually to glucose, which is kind
of ironic because chronic use of your phone is going
to notifications increase cortisol. Cortisol increases glucose, and so increased
chronic glucose leads to metabolic dysfunction. So I'm starting to
like see all these connections to all these things, not

(49:09):
to mention how blue light impacts melatonin. But the one
that I've been really challenged with because I started to
do this two weeks ago as I was really studying it,
and then I came out with my protocol so I
could test it is man that last thirty minutes is
so deeply ingrained into my habits that I'm probably consistent

(49:29):
three days of the week, so I have four that
I'm failing, and it started with only one that I
was doing, and so it's getting better. But I share
this because to me, it's not about perfection. I will
get to the seven days with the last thirty minutes
that I know I will, but it's that there is progress,
and I'm honest about my challenge. I'm honest about it.

(49:53):
For me, I think like when my wife and I
had a kid. I mean, I thought I was really
good at communication until I had it gid, you know,
and then I'm like emotionally exhausted, and you realize you're
just like back into the lab. Sometimes I fall out
of a ritual. But doing this thirty minute thing in
the morning has really been brought back in more accountability,

(50:15):
more space, and it's actually a beautiful cascade because you
could go on your phone and then end up down
a rabbit hole about nothing for thirty minutes, and you've
missed your whole opportunity to set your day. And so
for me, it's morning wake up, put my feet on
the earth, like go outside. We don't have the sun
anymore early in the morning here, and so I look

(50:37):
into a red light as on a space red light.
If it's a day that I do movement, I do movement.
I read from an actual book. Now. I used to
listen to audiobooks more I still do, but I'm reading
from an actual book. And I try to create some
ceremony in the morning, like through all of that, and
that's been really good. So that's the way I try

(50:58):
to and I nail it more more days than I don't.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Right on, And you've had an interesting relationship with Instagram,
I have, yes, yeah, yeah, can we talk about that.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
You know, I thought I was going to leave it forever.
And I think, like anything, as I said earlier, anything
you don't know how to relate to, it's pretty natural
and normal to push it away. So I didn't know
how to relate to it. You know, I really in
a lot of ways, my work grew up on it.
You know, as I said, my first post was December
twenty thirteen. You know, I kind of look back at

(51:31):
that now and I'm you know that eight years that
I went without out missing a day sounds like a
great badge of honor, but at the same time like
led to a lot of psychological suffering, and I didn't
really understand why. That's why I needed to leave it.
When I left it, I really started to see that
the way that social media relates to you is very

(51:52):
similar to an abusive relationship, you know, because and I
know that sounds aggressive meant to because people have a
lot of circular there's a lot of circulating anxiety now,
and that's due to a lot of things. That's due
to sort of political unrest, but it's really due to

(52:12):
the fact that there's there's a bunch of mechanisms that
I started to see as a creator. The first one
is that nothing you ever do will be enough. That's
the way that the platform relates to you, Like how
many times do you post a day? There's never enough.
We can't get out of the fact that these companies
are owned by shareholders, and the legal responsibility to shareholders

(52:36):
is profit. The way that they make money is ads.
The way that they make money from ads is your attention,
my attention. So it's by design that the system wants
you to create the most sticky content that keeps people
on the platform. This is no longer social media, you know,
as Gary Vaynerchuk calls it, it's interest media. They saw

(52:57):
that TikTok doesn't care who you followed. That was the platform.
They went, We're just going to show you stuff that
makes you stay here. We don't care that you follow Mark, Like,
who gives a crap if you don't want to. If
we're not gonna stay and pay attention to Mark stuff,
then we're going to show you cat videos. That's why
the algorithm is. I mean, it's so bananas because you

(53:17):
can find yourself thirty minutes later stuck in a wormhole.
And if you think about it, what it's really doing
is inducing a trance state, and you can then go
without your consent. You can go from watching a video
on off roading to a golf video to someone being assassinated,

(53:37):
like how is that again, without any preparation for your brain,
your mind, your soul to be exposed to that thing. Again,
I'm not villainizing this. I think what needs to happen
is it's a tool. And if I gave you a hammer,
you can build a house, or you can harm people.
Technology doesn't care about your biology, but it will explore

(54:00):
if you let it. And there's thousands of behavioral scientists
and there are trillions of data points on us, and
so they know better how humans work than we think
we know. In the arrogance of humanity is that we
can't be hoodwinked. Yet history tells us we're hoodwinked all
the time. And so what I want people to understand
is that anxiety that you have is actually very appropriate

(54:22):
because nothing you ever do is enough. If you want
to say something and the platform doesn't like it, it
will just kick you off it. If you make money
from the platform, you're going to be limited in your
self expression because you won't want to affect your rent,
your bills, your mortgage. You're paying your salaries, your employee salaries,
and so when you just understand that, But it's actually

(54:44):
this mechanism that I find most fascinating is that one,
you're being evaluated by people you know. So if you
have a private profile, that's happening for you and that's
going to affect your nervous system. You're going to be
constantly surveying for social safety. One is you're being evaluated
by people you don't know. That's a big deal to

(55:05):
the nervous system because that's very unpredictable. The third one
is wild. You're being evaluated by a non human entity,
an algorithm, and that's the determining the perceived value of
your words, your work, your self expression. Yeah, so now
you're actually even negotiating with something that has no empathy,
no feelings. All it is about is optimization. And if

(55:28):
you're not willing to use viral hooks and strategies and
seventeen second videos, then you might be ft. The last one,
which I think is the most interesting, is that if
you and I have this conversation sitting around a fire, historically,
right back in the day before cameras, when we went

(55:49):
to bed at night, we would have we'd be able
to rest our, nervous systems would be able to rest
What would happen is there isn't a version of us
that exists. We're sleeping, but the first time in human history,
you and I are at social risk when we're sleeping.
And so the data actually supports this in different ways,

(56:10):
but in an interesting one, they gave strangers the task
to have a conversation for ten minutes in a cafe setting,
and then what they recorded was that when people's phones
were on the table, not even using them, they reported
that the conversation felt like the quality of it was
lower and they felt less empathic concern from their conversation partner.

(56:34):
And I say this because what's happening is, yeah, we're
seeing a phone. Wow. Yeah, we're seeing their phone on
the table and hours and we're thinking because your phone's
beside you, you're thinking about the phone and not you're
not here because we're thinking about our phone and not here.
Because what's going on is our nervous system on top

(56:55):
of the dopamine and the addiction, etc. That's coded in
our brains. After a little while, well, we're actually thinking
am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? And
so a lot of the circulating anxiety and inability to
be to pay attention, you know, this sort of I
would say sort of viral diagnoses of ADHD is really

(57:16):
that we can't pay attention because we're constantly in our
surveillance modes, so we're not resting.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
Hm.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
Hm. That's where I really started to see, like, Wow,
you have to do a lot of deep work to
be in relationship to that thing.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
That is really sobering and unbelievably informative. How long was
your break being off it six months, right, and what
was the deciding factor to get back on.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
There were plenty of factors. The first one was that
I kept listening to Gary Vaynerchuk and I really like
the way he speaks. But he was saying, look like
you might be thinking social media is destroying everything, blah
blah blah, and He's like, but at the end of
the day, the conversation's happening on social media, and it's

(57:57):
going to be happening for a little while, so get
off your I just pulpit and talk about it on
social media, like the people aren't going to hear you.
And I was like, that's so true. And you know, actually,
the real big one is I was talking to a
friend of mine who's a relationship coach named Mike Elliott,
and he said to me, Mark, what's different about Instagram

(58:18):
for you? Because like, you're on LinkedIn, you're on TikTok,
you're on like there's clearly something. And I was like, yeah,
you know what there is. You're right. I never thought
about that. And we were sitting in an uber while
we were having this conversation. I was laughing because I
was thinking the uber drivers, like, what the fuck are
these guys talking about. Then he says to me, you know,
I'm curious, what is the one thing that you would

(58:39):
have wanted to hear from Instagram or like your followers
or like the platform. And I think and I was like,
you know what, that's a good question. I think that
I matter, that like my perspective matters, and that like
seeking that out was exhausting right unconsciously. And he said, yeah,
you know that kind of sound a lot like your mom.

(59:03):
And I was like wow, like wait what you know?
And the Superdriver's like, wait, what what am I doing
with Instagram mom? And so I I'm like, oh, that's good.
Holy okay. So then I get home and I say
to my wife like, you wouldn't believe what this and

(59:24):
I just said to me and she's like, yeah, that
makes sense. And I was like what I mean? Yeah,
why you impart this brilliant knowledge on me? And she's like, well, no,
I'm just saying that like makes sense. And I was like, huh,
are unresolved wounds of worthiness or like some like even

(59:46):
if you have a cell in your body that hasn't
actually healed that codependency or that thing or that word
is social media exploiting that very last cell. And I
was like, that's interesting. Okay, so these are now tools
for healing too, because I started to think, like, well,

(01:00:06):
I met my wife on Instagram, Like that's brilliant. I
built a beautiful business on Instagram. I've you know, impacted
millions of people. Like that's such a gift. We're having
this conversation in large part due to social media, and
so I was like, there's complexity to this, So like,
how do I use this as a tool and decide
that I'm using it? It's not using me, so again,

(01:00:28):
coming back to I left it, so now when I
come back to it, it's on my terms. And how
easily it can move, Like that's the thing I've noticed.
So if I can't decide when I pick up my phone,
my phone's deciding when I pick it up. And so
this is for me, the most potent material to work
with because it's the most deeply hooked into my biology.

(01:00:51):
If that makes sense perfectly.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Wow, Yeah, what's your your experience last two to three
years with clients investigating psilocybin or plant medicine for their healing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Well, you know, I've been on my own journey with
that too.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
I did not know that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
Yeah, So I went to Peru and did ayahuasca a
couple of years ago. It's almost two years now, and
then I had experienced psilocybin before that for healing. And
then about it'll be almost a year ago, I did
an internal Family Systems Parts work MDMA psilocybin journey. And

(01:01:34):
I've done a lot of things, and I will say
that I was I would say it's not my psychedelic
I mean, it was important and it was part of
my journey and I got some really good lessons from it,
but I would say that it's not like my medicine,
you know, in general, like that I would come back
to as where as psilocybin I can come back to.
I really actually find a lot of profound experiences from it.

(01:01:57):
The MDMA and psilocybin is the most profound thing I've
ever done, Wow, and the fastest. Like I definitely want
to do another experience just for more integration. But I
did it with this guy named Mike Zeller, And what
was so powerful about it is you do the MDMA.
Have you done MDMA so secon.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Yeah, So he was explaining to me that the MDMA
is an empathogen, so you can go like deep into
any part, any trauma, any hurt, and you you can't
feel shame, like it's impossible. That was true for me,
so I could like go deepest into the hardest things
and then I had so much compassion. And then the
d or the psilocybin allowed me to like come out

(01:02:43):
and integrate it in my nervous system. And I actually
found a week later myself in deep breaths that I
hadn't taken in a long time, and.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Oh it's beautiful. Man.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
Yeah, it was amazing. Like I definitely know why I
only did MDMA once in college, where I was like
this is too good. I can't do this again for
a while ever. And then when I did it for
the therapy, so with a much deeper intention than going
to a bar, and I was like, wow, I really
get how someone would want to live in this world,

(01:03:16):
Like it's a it's a profound experience, you know, you
just love everything and you it's almost like christ consciousness,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Well, and so Mark, what's your criteria when you if
you do make recommendations for clients to investigate that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
I think when someone's really stuck, you know, really stuck,
I think about sematic therapy really being one of the
most profound forms of work because you're working at the
level of the nervous system and a lot of our
stuff happens pre verbally, so actually to try to verbally
move through it just doesn't make sense because language isn't
even available, Like, you know, no offense of someone's sleep trains,

(01:03:54):
but sleep training is for sure a sematic experience for
a kid, you know, and I was sleep trained, So
it's like that that can't be accessed through the mind
because the imprint in the nervous system is not language.
It's terror, it's fear, it's Mom's not coming, Dad's not coming.
I think sematic therapy is really powerful for that. And

(01:04:14):
so my recommendation when someone stuck is sematic therapy. And
if there's a deep trauma that they're trying to resolve
that they seem to just keep swimming in, I personally
would recommend people for that might at least, you know,
i'd recommend a consult with someone who knows about that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
Right, Yeah, wow, beautiful. And then ASTA talk about your
book you did.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
Yeah, the book was I wrote it with my wife.
If you were to ask my wife and I if
we would write a book together again, the answer would
likely be no. It was good preparation to have a kid.
I'll tell you that, because you've got like two different
styles of creativity creating one thing, two different voices merging
into one. And I believe deadlines are suggestions and my

(01:04:59):
wife like structure and deadlines, so we had we accommodated
her more need for more rigidity, which there's a chapter
in the book called Liberation through Limitation, and that might
have been written for me. It was really a beautiful
thing to write. It felt like a real culmination of

(01:05:21):
all my work and all of our work, and my
work and her work in one place that like walks
people through the whole journey, like not just the arc
of our relationship, but the arc of our own increy
into ourselves and then the nervous system and attachment, like
framing how that works and what that looks like through
it too. So yeah, I'm really grateful. It was such

(01:05:44):
an awesome opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
It's a powerful book.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
It's a really powerful book. How lot it take you
guys to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
Then you know we've submitted the very last manuscript edits.
We submitted that the day before our son was born.
So yeah, yeah, it was crazy and it took us,
I want to say, about five months to write it,
maybe six Wow, yeah, wow. It was about that. And

(01:06:14):
then we recorded the audio book and that we actually
did unscripted conversations at the end of each chapter that
I really enjoyed. That's what I'm you know, having had
a podcast that was something that I really wanted to do.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Right up your alley, Yeah, all right, you open for
some rapid fire.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
Yeah, let's go. I love wrapping hus.

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
The thing that I want to teach my son the
most is love. Love is truth. The biggest lie I
once believed about relationships.

Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
Was oh, stay together at all costs.

Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
The moment I realize I was the problem was when
a woman told me I was my favorite breakup song
of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
Into the Road Boys to Men.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
The hardest boundary I ever had a set with somebody, Hmmm.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
Someone I love who was treating me poorly, who had
addiction issues.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
Vulnerability is.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
Courageous.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
I knew I was healing when.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
I expressed my needs.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Text you your younger self one sentence, What do you say?

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
Your sensitivity is your superpower.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
The most unrated act of self love is Boundaries. One
book every human should read about relationships.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Other than our book is Getting the Love You Want
by Harvil Hendricks, Ellen Hunt.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
Classic so finished. This healing doesn't make you better than others,
it makes you integrated. The world would be a better
place if people understood that love is not peaceful Cino.
The thing I'm most grateful for is my wife. Right on, brother,
Thank you man, It's been a real blessing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
And thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
It's a real gift to have you. Thank you for
everything you do.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
Thanks for having me. It's such beautiful energy. I appreciate you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
The Sino Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts, hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty
eighth av Our lead producer is Keith Carnlick. Our executive
producer is Lindsey Hoffman. Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank
you so much for listening. We'll see you next week.