Transcription
[Music] How can I stop being unpredictable and rebuild trust with my wife and kids? Man, that's a big question, dude. What, uh, what, what precipitated the question? What happened?
Um, well, I've been called lately, I've been called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by my kids. By who? Your wife. My wife. My wife. Is she right?
Um, yeah. I think so. All right, good on you for owning it. All right, so keep going. So my kids are, I mean, I don't want to say scared, but really nervous to come to me about anything. They'll go to my wife and like, try to get her to tell me, because they don't know how I'm going to respond. My wife doesn't either. You know, me and her don't have conversations anymore. We do the basic, uh, you know, how's your day? What's going on? Who's taking the kid to practice? That type stuff. We've become roommates because, you know, they just don't know how I'm going to act, respond to questions, or, you know, anything that's brought up to me. So what is, what is, well, how long has this been like this, man?
Uh, I, she says it's been a long time and I'm just now starting to kind of realize it. I finally started going to, you know, to a doctor, therapy, and things like that. And I've just come to realize that I, to me, I really only have pretty much two emotions. I'm either angry or upset, or I'm just laid back. And I don't, I don't know how to change it where my kids will come to me and I can, you know, I can be a dad. Yeah.
You know, can I just, can I, like, man, if you were here, I'd stop what we're doing and I'd give you a hug. And, and I know that you might bristle with that at first, but what you're saying is real heavy. And there's millions and millions of dads in your exact spot. What you're saying out loud is hard, and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm proud of you. It's a courageous thing you're doing. Okay. Yeah, it is.
Now, here's the challenge you have. You, you don't trust you either. You don't come to you with the truth about what you feel about certain things. You anger it away, you rage it away, or you numb it out. You football game it away. And so what you're asking your kids to do and your wife to do is something that you won't even do. And so instead of trying to fix some things so that your kids will come to you, I want to turn off that nuclear reactor that's in your chest. Because somehow you woke up, how old are you? 36. You woke up at 36 and you don't like the life you live. Why? All the things you're saying has, has, tell me if I'm, if I'm out to lunch, man, because I could be way off. Is a guy who's just so tired? Yeah, but you're tired because you've been at war inside your own chest for so long. You don't think you make enough money. You don't like the job that you do. You don't like that you don't show up for your wife, but you don't have any tools in your toolkit. So you just get madder and louder about it, and it makes it work, right? Oh, yeah. Your friends have all gone off to do stupid stuff. Alabama sucked this year. Like, all of it, right? It's all in this. Oh, yeah. Right in the middle of your chest. Right. Definitely.
Where does that come from, man? How long have you not liked the, the skin that you're in? Your life, you only get one, dude. You only get one, and you're like, more than a third over. I've just come to realization, not too long ago, that I, I don't like myself. Yeah. Why? I want to say I don't really have anything to show for my life, but I've got five kids, a great wife, I got a job that I love. Okay. But I just, I don't like who I am.
A lot of men who don't like who they are either have some sort of hidden addiction or a thing they did that they, they've just buried. They've got some things that happened to them. Like in a previous show, I talked to a child abuse survivor. Went on for a long, long time. Or they had some narrative, some false metric that was supposed to feel a certain way when they got it. When I get a house this big, when I cross the six-figure mark, is one I hear all the time. When I get this new promotion and I become the senior associate vice president, whatever, it's supposed to feel a certain way, like I've got there, like I've arrived, like I made it. And most men are hyper disillusioned when they get there and it doesn't feel like they thought it was going to feel. And there's not a psychology for what comes next. So most men get mad and they hit the gas harder. Did any of those three ring a bell?
Uh, the, it's more of what I've come to, I believe, is what happened to me when I was little. What happened? So it was me and my mom mainly. Third shift worker, so I was at home all the time. Did things. Um, I just remember that if I ever did anything wrong or did anything like that, or enjoyed something, she used that as a punishment. You know, if I, if I knew, if she knew that I enjoyed doing this activity or doing these things, that was a punishment. Like she's gonna take it away. Or, you know, that was how things were. And when I got old enough to get a job, I remember working and she used to tell me, well, you got to give me your paycheck because, or we have power and you won't be able to do this, or we won't do that. You know, and it's just, and that's, and so I, I know that I learned to not show that I was happy. Yeah.
Where was your dad? Um, well, they divorced when I was about four, and he was, you know, he'd show up every other weekend and that type stuff. Okay.
So can you cut yourself some slack for a second? You, you, you're trying to be a professional baseball player and you've never seen an actual game played. You're trying to be a great dad of five kids and you've never seen a picture of a good father who shows up and is present in his kid's life. You don't even know what that looks like. You have some fantasies about it, and you've watched some movies about it, but you don't even know what that looks like and feels like. Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself some grace, okay? And you've never had permission to laugh. Laugh inside your own freaking house. To have joy in your own house. Of course, you toggle from numb to anger and back and forth and back and forth. Laughing and joy got stuff taken away from you. That's evil, man. I don't like to admit it. I know because my guess is joy got stuff taken away, and being angry or being sad got you hit. Yeah. So what you learned at a really young age by the person who, by the people who were supposed to love you the most and give you a roadmap for what love looks like, is I need to disappear in my own skin. And there ain't no hiding with five kids. No. I want to. I know. I know. I got two and sometimes I just want to disappear.
So here's what I want you to, to the grace, I want you to give yourself. This is a skills issue, not a character issue. If you stop practicing, I'm going to call it a character issue. But the fact that you're terrible at shooting free throws, you've never tried before, you've never had somebody coach you on how to do it. You've seen somebody shoot a free throw, of course you're not good at it. But I'll be damned, I'm going to wake up every day and take a hundred free throws before I leave the house. I'm going to take a hundred free throws before my kids go to bed. And in four or five years, I'm gonna be real good at shooting free throws because I deserve that and they deserve that. You get what I'm saying? Yes, sir.
Okay. This is, um, kind of a recent revelation in the neurological literature, in the brain science stuff. Your adult relationships and your relationships with your wife, your relationships with your kids, actually uses the same pathways that were developed with your mom and your dad. Your brain repurposes those same relationship pathways. Great. I, right. Exactly. As, as all of the Western world, all of planet Earth goes, oh, great. Here's all that means. You're going to have to build new ones, man. That's your only option. You made five kids and you looked at a woman at an altar and you said, I do, till death do us part. Yes. So your only option is, I got to build new ones. And the way we build new ones is not sitting around ruminating and not sitting around thinking about it over and over again and not listening to another podcast and their podcast. It's getting out there and doing it, even and especially when I don't want to. I've been doing that. I've listened to podcasts, books. I'm like, you know, I need to do that. I need to do this. And then I just, and then you don't sit there. That's right. You just sit there. That's right. So what courage and bravery looks like for you right now is doing it anyway.
Can I tell you how simple it is? Place. How old are your kids? 12, 12, 10, 8, six and six. Okay. Uh, those, you got twins on the back end. Yeah. I, I, dude, I'd hug you again right now. Um, all right, number one, I want you to build. And again, I'm stereotyping Alabama, so you may not know how. I want you to build a cornhole thing. Oh, yeah. And I want you to have a nightly tournament with your six, with your five kids, okay? I want it to include trash talking. I want you to do it when it's cold. I want you to do it when it's hot. I want you to, um, ask your seven-year-old, hey, is it okay if you're going to go to bed getting dominated by dad at cornhole? And they'll be like, bring it on. Sounds great. But here's what I want. I want them to get some sort of predictability. Every evening, Dad's gonna show up. And I want you to practice showing up when the only thing on Earth you want to do is go hide in the bathroom and sit there for 45 minutes and scroll your phone, or just turn on a football game and numb out. I want you to make yourself go do it, okay? Okay. And I want you to show up, and I want you to show up, and I want you to show up.
All right, here's number two. This one's going to be even harder than that one, okay? Are you ready? I'm ready. I want you to go to Walgreens today or Walmart or something. I want you to buy five of the cheapest spiral notebooks you can buy. And I want you to write their names on it. And I want that to go on their bed. And every night, I want you to write something in it. It can be one sentence. I'm not asking you to write a paragraph. One sentence where you saw them doing something great that day. That's it. And if they want to write you back and put it on your bed, you would love to get that. You can tell them that. So I'd have it there before they went to bed. Yep.
Okay. The third thing is, I want you to take your wife out for breakfast and say, I want to start two things on a regular basis. Number one, a week, weekly calendar, dinner, budget meeting, just us together. How we doing? The second thing is, I want us to begin to ask every morning before I go to work, how can I love you today? Say that one plenty of times. Do what I said. I've heard you say that plenty of times. I know. I want you to ask her, and I want her to ask you. And if you want to be a real gangster, I want you to go for a walk together once a week. No complaining, no whining, just walking. I'm going to send you every deck of the question for humans, for couples, and the intimacy deck. And I want you all to commit to doing a couple of cards. Okay, here's what you all have to do. You all have to rebuild your marriage, yes, from the floor up. You have five kids. You have seven people in your house now. Sure. Did. Okay. And I want you to tell her, I don't have the skills to be the dad that I want to be. I never, I've never seen it happen. But you need to get a couple of men in your life that you can call, that you can text, that you can have coffee with, that you can grab a drink with, that you can laugh with. And if that's her dad, if her dad's an amazing man, I want you to call him and tell him, I'm going to invite you into my life. But your dad didn't show up for you, man. You got to own that. That means you got to go get some help. I think I got a few. Why don't you tell your wife, I've never seen a mom show up and be present with her kids. I'm learning. I'm gonna, but I'm going to dedicate myself to learning how to do this right. And so that might mean, hey, wife, when you see me getting enraged, will you just put your hand gently on my arm? And I promise I won't disappear. I'm gonna put my cell phone away. I'm not going to continue seeing a counselor. Will you do one last thing for me? Yes. I want you to write 9-year-old Barry a letter and tell him that you're so sorry that his mama treated him like that and his dad walked out. I want you to tell him that that little boy is loved and that you're going to grow up and you're going to fix it. You're going to be a dad that shows up for all five of his kids, okay? Yes, I will. Won't you let that little boy go play? That little boy needs to go have fun and not have the stuff get threatened to get taken away from him. He needs to go get a job and learn how to save and give and spend some of his money. A little kid needs to learn how to laugh and play. He's got his whole life to get beat down by the system, man. As a kid, man, he needs mom and dad to love him and show up, and that didn't happen for you. But that little kid is still trying to defend you and protect you. You got to let that kid go play. People ask me how to do that sometimes. That's holding a picture of the, of yourself as a young kid and writing that kid a letter. Sometimes that is taking a picture of your mom, Barry, and put it in your back pocket. And every time you want to snap at your kids, every time you want to yell at your wife, every time you want to just grab your phone and disappear, I want you to pull that picture of your mom out and look at it and say, hey, Mom, I'm gonna, I'm gonna beat down on my kids just like you did on me. We're going to do this together. And then you're going to realize real quick, no, no, no, no. I'm not letting her into our house anymore. She's out. I'm gonna learn these new skills. I'm gonna go get it. I'm proud of you, brother. Barry, like the, the light came on for you. We're going to get a routine and we are going to stick with it. We're going to ask our wife, you're going to ask your wife, how can I love you today? And I'm going to let you in. How can you love me? Inch by inch by inch, we're going to walk this thing out.