A (4:48)

And for most people, they equate rest with entertainment. How often do we hear, oh, I just need to get home from work and rest, and then you find out what that really means, and it's, oh, I just need to get home from work and have absolutely no responsibility, and then get my pacifier, which is my screen, in my face. Or my TV in my face. And so for the first many years of our relationship, Brandon was on a hunt of our marriage, on a hunt for peace. And every single time he thought he arrived at this, oh, I'm relaxed, I'm at peace. I'm in my space of calm. I would observe, and I'm like, oh, so peace, calm, tranquility. That's what you think you're experiencing when you have nothing. No responsibilities in our marriage, no responsibilities with our children, no responsibilities in your job, a screen in your face, a high from the video games, a high from seeing nearly nude images. Whatever it was, it's like, ooh, that felt like peace because all of the anxiety paused for a moment. So there was this trickery feeling of like, oh, this is what peace is. And again, this is why we talk about childhood all the time. It's like, this was learned as a child. This wasn't just something you started doing when we first got married. This is something you started doing when you were a little boy as soon as you had a negative experience, a negative emotion, an uncomfortable experience. Maybe the ultimate root of a lot of this is normally loneliness. So it's like, oh, as a little boy, I had a lonely experience, which then led me to coping with that loneliness with a screen, which then led me to coping with negative experiences and emotions with screens. And then fast forward many years, and it's just how you live. It's like, oh, I need to enter into a restful, peaceful state, so I must have a phone. And. And it's like, rest and entertainment do not go hand in hand. A screen is entertaining. It's not restful. You're not getting into a state of rest. You're not getting. You might be laying down or sitting down. Having a phone in your face is actually keeping your brain stimulated. It's actually the opposite of rest. Going out and going for a walk would actually most likely bring about more feelings of peace and rest than laying down with a blanket on, staring at a screen. It's like your mind is racing and thinking and going and spinning, and you're not actually entering into a state of peace. You're most likely running from something that you don't want to experience. A lot of anxiety. Brandon's going to share about this in a second. A lot of anxiety comes from running away from an emotion that you don't actually want to face. And normally we run straight to whatever it is that we've learned to become addicted to to escape whatever it is that we're scared to actually Face.

B (7:33)

Yeah, I tell guys all the time after coming out of this way of living and discovering that the feelings and the emotional sensations and impulses that go through our body are very fleeting. They, they don't actually persist and remain if we acknowledge them and direct them to go through our body and then create a new emotion. So what, what that looks like is most men and women could spend 20 years running away from feeling one emotion, when all that emotion needed was two minutes to cycle itself through your body and for you to decide how you'd like to respond to that emotional recognition. Okay, I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now. Does that mean I need to numb out, start drinking, become an alcoholic, isolate from everybody I love? Or I'm feeling really over overwhelmed right now. I could do 60 seconds of breath work, could take a shower and go for a walk and do some stretching and watch the sunset. You don't have to, you don't have to kick anybody out of your life. You don't have to commit suicide. You don't have to do anything crazy because of a negative emotion. You can actually create stability in your emotion and your brain chemistry by acknowledging the emotion instead of ignor it and letting it flow through your body. So the primary way which we're going to discuss is anxiety, depression, any daunting emotion, the way you work through it is you let it work through you. The moment you pick up a screen, every time you feel overwhelmed, the moment you pick up a cigarette, you start smoking pot endlessly. Any of these things you turn to that you need to regulate, you make it much more difficult to live a healthy life, to live a sustainable life. So if you're running from an emotion, the emotion will not kill you. Your response to it is what is bringing you down. The emotion itself does not take you down. It's what, it's the meaning you put around it. It's how you perceive this feeling in your body that it will overtake you and you will never be able to escape it. But really, it's your response to it that's overtaking your life and creating a bunch of difficulty. For me, like I talked about, getting married and having kids meant that the stress and pressure way up. It also meant the amount of time that I had to spend to myself was way less. The parameters, the, the amount of time you get to yourself gets smaller as you become an adult and have more responsibility. And this reality began to feel suffocating to me because I was like, wait, wait, wait, where's my four hours? Where's my five Hours. Where's my weekend? To myself. Which I, I didn't like those times when I was alone and wanted to be married and have kids. But now I'm married and have kids and I'm like, oh my gosh, like, can everybody just leave me alone so I can go stare at a screen and research some random topic, look at some sports cars, numb out on on YouTube, numb out on Instagram, and just ignore my life? I wasn't facing emotion, I wasn't feeling healthy. We even told the same counselor. They gave us this great advice on the, on the waterfall analogy. We were trying to tell him, like, look, this is in the same session. I was like, hey, like, I think video games could be good for me because they helped me kind of deal with things. I. And then we kind of work through, like, do you feel less anxious after playing? And I'm like, no, I actually feel usually more anxiety from trying to win the game I'm playing. So it was like, wait, I'm spending more energy trying to play a game to alleviate my anxiety that ends up creating anxiety. And I spent four hours away from my wife and kids. Is that creating what we want? I don't think so. And so one of the primary ways that I want you to pay attention to and I began to realize as we went backwards and looked at this, was I was depriving myself of the care and support that I needed to no longer be plagued with anxiety. So instead of doing a few minutes of breath work, instead of getting a nice 30 minute weightlifting routine, I stared at my phone for 30 minutes. I slept in because I stayed up late the night before playing a video game. And so I begin to feel behind, like I couldn't keep up with life, I couldn't keep up with ministry, I couldn't keep up with the demands of my wife, of my kids. And it felt like everybody was chasing after me and wanted something from me. So then, guess what? When you're in that state, your perception of reality is, everything is out to get you. Everybody's out to get you. Every reaction to your stimulus is, this is overwhelming. This is gonna take me out. And that came to a T. I actually did a 40 day liquid fast, which meant I only drank bone broth and juice and water for 40 days to pray and fast to become a better man, to hopefully curb this anxiety and also work through my addiction. And I hadn't told Caitlin all the reasons why I wanna do the 40 day fast. She just knew I was a godly man and was doing this for Good reasons. But what happened during the 40 day fast is my anxiety got because I was so fragmented in my being. This is my spiritual me. I'm going to build up my spirit, man, and do all these good things. Well, meantime, I was ignoring the anxiety, trying to stuff it, trying to suppress it. Ended up developing acute anxiety to heat to any stress. It just got louder and louder and louder until after I had finished my 40 day fast. We were getting ready to travel about a month later and we were running late to the airport. I could handle no overwhelm. I get these pounding headaches if I had to process more than like a very simple piece of information. I was always overwhelmed, always on edge, always frantic and reactive. And we were running late to the airport. We were in the shuttle going to the Portland airport and our daughter had pooped in her car seat. There was ash falling. We were in the parking lot from forest fires. There was ash and it was hot. I've got a pounding headache and I realized we're not going to make it to the flight. And I'm already saying like, damn, I'm so overwhelmed. This is not a good day, not a good day. That was just my internal state. This is horrible. This is bad. Life sucks. We get to the airport and I'm realizing we're not gonna. Our flight's already boarding and we're not even into the doors yet. We walk in those, the front doors of the Portland International Airport and the walls begin to narrow in. My vision began to get blurry and narrow and all I could do was crumble to the floor. All I could do was collapse. My nervous system said, we're actually not able to take another step forward. And I just said to Caitlin, we're not going on the trip. I can't move. Like, I can't do this. I have nothing left. I am out of energy. I have no capacity for any stress, any stimulus. And Caitlin and I, we wrestled in that moment. She was like, please just go to the ticket, the check in desk with me. Please just come with me. Okay, you can't come. I'll go get the. I'll you take this. Our kid and the bags. Caitlyn went up to the desk and they were. Southwest was easily able to put us on a different flight, but because I had been there having that panic attack, we weren't able to get on the next flight because I missed that second one too. So we had to wait in the airport for another five hours. So I want to acknowledge that the cost of anxiety is very high. It's not just that you don't feel good, that you feel overwhelmed. It's the cost that's put on Caitlin was so high. The cost of putting on our children, the cost of me putting a screen in my kid's face while I was rocking them to bed because I couldn't calm myself down. I constantly had to live distracted. I constantly had to live a degree of separation because I did not know what to do with my anxiety.

A (14:07)

Most of us actually weren't taught this when we were being raised. When we were growing up, we weren't taught what we were feeling and we weren't taught what to do with what we were feeling. So a lot of us just grew up feeling different emotions. They could have even been pleasant emotions. And of course, at some point in our life we experienced negative emotions. And for most of us, our parents were unaware of what they were feeling, unaware of what to do with the feeling. And so therefore they could not teach us what it is that we were feeling and what to do with it. So we experience our first onset of negative emotions and we don't know what we're even feeling. We don't know what to do with that. Most of us probably don't even remember those initial experiences cuz they were probably so early on. So then we piggyback all these negative experiences and it's like we don't even have a word for what we're feeling. We don't even have language for what it is that we do with these negative feelings. So then we just look to everybody else in our environment and for most of us, we grew up and we saw, okay, my parents come home and they let us know they had a hard day at work. They let us know that something negative happened to a family member. They let us know some sort of sad or bad news. And then what do we see with our parents doing? Maybe they get on a screen, maybe they watch tv, maybe you know, older generations, it's like, okay, I'm just going to get out the cigarette, I'm going to get out the newspaper, I'm going to do something to dissociate from my reality because my reality is too painful right now to actually fully sit in and embrace and move through. Little to none of us grew up in a home where it's like, here's the negative experience, here's the negative emotion. And it's like, oh, I'm feeling really sad, I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Let's go for a walk for our family. What this looks like is okay, maybe we have some sort of an encounter. I'm trying to think on the fly of something. It's like, okay, there's been times where we. There was like, this experience where we found that the, like, sewer smell was leaking through the walls. I don't even remember all the technical languaging of it. And it was like, oh, this is really overwhelming because they couldn't get it to the walls because there's asbestos and blah, blah, blah, blah, and we're in a rental. And so then it's like, instead of my kids seeing, wow, this is heated. Like, mom and dad are talking to the property managers. Mom and dad are having people come in and out of the house. Mom and dad are having people check on things. I can see mom and dad are having a lot of serious conversations. They're not seeing, okay, mom and dad are feeling a lot. There's kind of this negative situation going on. Okay, here mom and dad are turning on the TV so we can all calm down here. Mom and dad are getting on their phone so we can all feel better. No. What do we say to our kids? Like, hey, this is pretty overwhelming. I'm not sure what we're going to do right now. All I know is we're going to get outside and we're going to go for a walk. All I know is we're going to go get into nature. All I know is we're going to go sit at the table and have a meal together. So if you grew up and you felt things and you didn't know what that was that you were feeling, you didn't know. Oh, this is overwhelm. Oh, this is anxiety. Oh, this is sadness. Oh, this is despair. Oh, this is anger. Oh, this is pleasure. Oh, this is joy. Oh, this is abundance. Abundance. Oh, there's this goodness. It's like you don't even know what it is that you're feeling. And then it's like, what do we do with all these emotions? You know, so many. We call it the terrible twos. A lot of this links to painting. It's like we call it the terrible twos because at two is when they develop mentally, start to try to express themselves, yet they don't have all of their vocabulary and sentences. They're still learning it. So they're trying to express themselves, but they don't have language for it. And most grown adults are still too. They still have all of this emotion, and they don't have language for it, and they don't know how to speak in full sentences. To say this is what I feel, and this is what I need. And so they start acting out on a tantrum. And the tantrum might look like pornography, it might look like alcohol, it might look like overeating. Whatever the addiction is, it's just how you're throwing your tantrum to handle with what you don't know, what you're feeling. All of this comes down to what is it that you feel and what is it that you really need or want. For Brandon, he thought he was moving towards peace. He was actually trying to run away and go into his cave of nothingness when he realized, oh, I have overwhelm, I have anxiety, I have these emotions, I can name them, and then I can move towards what it is that I'm actually wanting and needing. Do I need to get more sun? Do I need to go outside for a walk? Do I need to. Brandon's going to go into how he began to give himself an embodiment routine. Do I need a cold shower? Do I need 30 minutes of exercise? We deprive ourselves of what we really need, trying to escape these emotions we don't want to feel. And all we actually need to do is sit for a second, two minutes, like Brandon saying, oh, this is what I'm feeling. I recognize it. We talk about the four Rs all the time. It's like, I recognize this. I receive this emotion, I release this emotion, and I replace this emotion. It's like, let's release the anxiety and replace it with what our body really needs to move through whatever it is that's bringing about these bouts of anxiety, that's bringing about these negative emotions. What is it that we really need? What is it that we can step into to offer ourselves the gift of peace?

B (19:02)

What made the biggest difference for me was when I began to get traction emotionally. And when we begin our healing phase at the end of 2019, it was not going to be possible to heal at the same emotional state I was in. And so I was like, okay, what do I do? I've been stuck in this emotion, and it's clear I can't keep using the same tactics, the same strategies to numb my emotion. And the taking away of all the distractions made it get louder, made the anxiety very loud. And what I want to give you is in one sentence, I think the clearest way that you can overcome anxiety or any negative emotional pattern and create a new one, and that is through deliberate practice in a controlled environment. So I'll say that again. The way to create a new emotional pattern for yourself Is deliberate practice in the controlled environment for me. And I'll give you what that can look like for you as well. For me, what happened was I was sharing with my counselor. I found through the phone. A phone Counselor, Remote Counseling, 2020. He gave me this emotional miming technique where it was basically just, hey, what does this emotion feel like in your body? You guys can try this right now. So if you're feeling anxiety, what would it look like if you had. No, you couldn't use words, but you were communicating what anxiety felt like. And I tried it out, and I was like, oh. So I started, like, acting out what anxiety felt like. And for me, just. Even just acting out anxiety, it actually felt like it could flow through my body. But then you actually try out another emotion. What does feeling proud feel like when you feel proud of something and you act that out? It's just like 15 seconds. You just mime it out. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, I didn't know I was allowed to do this. I didn't know I could just mime out an emotion for 15 seconds. And it gave context to what I was feeling. Emotions aren't felt in your head. For those of you guys that are like, hey, you know, emotions are just for women. No, no. Strong men feel emotions and know what to do with them and know the emotions they want to generate. That's a strong man. And so emotions are felt in your body. If you've turned off that mind, body communication, it's going to be impossible to create connection in your relationship and heal from any form of addiction or unhealed parts of you. You have to engage your body in this emotional process. And so what I did was begin to several different coaches and experiences I had. I begin doing a daily embodiment routine. At the beginning, when I didn't have this full routine, what I did is I would take a cold shower, do a little bit of breath work, do some emotional response training where I would rewire the emotions I was feeling through these practices that my counselors and coaches that I had found gave me. And I was blown away. One of the routines that I give them in inside of my men's community app, I call it emotional response training. It's how to replace emotions in over. Over the course of 14 days. And when I started doing this exercise where I would do some miming, acting out the emotion, writing out the emotion I was feeling and had felt when I was a kid, and then replacing it, I was like, oh, my gosh. Within two weeks, the panic the overwhelm that I thought would never leave me. Within two weeks of doing the exercise twice a day, I didn't feel panic in my body anymore. Honestly, one of the most frustrating things to me about healing is the regret and remorse I feel when realizing how simple it was. Overcoming addiction, overcoming our poverty mindset, overcoming the disconnection in our marriage is often very simple. And it's when you realize that you were holding the key to your own jail cell. You can either judge yourself, beat yourself up, or you can just simply say, okay, I'm not going to live in that prison anymore. And that's what. Anxiety, depression, this emotional constipation. So. So whatever you want to call it, you're putting yourself in that jail. Jail cell. What's been done to you that the things you've lived through, the things that were difficult, those things happened. What emotions you want to generate now is entirely up to you. What your initial reaction and response to that emotion, what it brings up in your body, that's what you get to. That's the signal to you, okay? This is how you experience it. Your responsibility is what emotions you're going to generate going forward. When your wife tells you she's upset, you can say, wow, I feel really attacked. How you respond and what emotions you generate after that can dictate the entire course of your marriage. And so for me, what happened was I created an embodiment routine with a coach and with. With what I had been enjoying, and I began to do it every day. And what. What started happening is my nervous system was at rest. When we'd be having deep conversations, when Caitlin would be showing up in her strength, I could show up in my strength incapacity. And I was like, oh, my gosh, my wife's not a threat anymore. My wife's not a bad girl because she speaks her mind. This is actually exciting. I can be in this conversation and still be in my body. And so I think for any man or woman struggling with their nervous system right now on the healing phase, developing a daily routine, it can be 15 to 20 minutes, is what I recommend to the guys in my app. If you can begin doing some simple breath work, some simple movement, you're priming your body. You're warming up your body, one, to learn a new pathway, and two, when you need it the most in real life, in real time, you're able to pull from that experience you're creating in your safe environment. So what I've said is it's deliberate practice in a controlled environment. You can Rewire your emotional response to the world around you and in your relationship.

A (24:09)

Yeah. And you went from being daily crippled by anxiety, and you shared some larger stories where anxiety pivoted our entire trajectory. And there are countless other stories where Brandon had to leave something to go sit in the car because he was crippled by anxiety. There were countless evenings where you just had to have your time to yourself, to have your screen, to have your thing, to have your whatever, because the anxiety was swallowing you. And I watched as 2019 hit and the anxiety had been building and building and building, and it's like built upon the foundation of everything else that we already teach. Because as you're doing these embodiment exercises, you're also finally, for the first time ever, getting out all of your lies, all of your hiddenness, experiencing true intimacy in our union where we fully see and know each other. It's on the foundation of that that you begin to now realize, oh, if I can rewire my brain and how I see women and my sexuality and my wholeness, if I can rewire all my belief systems, oh, I can surely rewire this belief system I've built around anxiety as well. So we talk a lot about sexual brokenness and how you rewired and transform that simultaneously alongside that, literally in the day in and day out, I'm watching you also rewire how you're going to engage with your world, how you're going to move from anxiety and into peace through these embodiment practices, through the miming, through the actually sitting with yourself, sitting with your feelings instead of running from them all the time. And I watched you go from crippling anxiety that stole from yourself, stole from our marriage, stole from our family, stole from our trajectory. Like, we wouldn't even be able to speak on stages at our workshops if you were sitting still, crippled by your anxiety. Because we wouldn't even be able to get on the planes to get there. It would be hit or miss if we would even make it to our own event. So it's like you sitting with this emotion, instead of running from it, has given back the gift of our entire life together. And so I watched as you're crippled daily by anxiety to moving into true, authentic peace. Peace that doesn't mean that we put a phone in front of our face. Peace. That means you are fully in your body, you fully know what you're feeling. Doesn't mean that you always feel perfect emotions. No, we both experience negative situations, negative conversations, negative emotions. That's the human existence. The difference is now we know what we're feeling, and we know what to do with it. And now we have the opportunity and the gift to listen to our bodies and what we actually need. We have a toolkit of, like, oh, I'm feeling this. And so let me look into my toolkit and like, oh, I'm going to pull from one of these things. Some of our favorites, like, we've already shared is working out, walking, getting. Getting in water, getting in nature, spending time, quality time together. These are the things we do when we're hit with a negative emotion. So it's like Brandon's literally, I've said this another episode that's like. You're like, how do you know when to trust your husband again? It's like I watched my husband go from not being able to, like, handle a single negative emotion to being able to handle any emotion on all of the spectrums, whether it was the most severe at the time of us going through a marriage breakdown of 2019. We're moving straight into 2020, when the whole entire world, Coll, all of us are experiencing extreme negative emotions as we're all going through the repercussions of COVID 19. So it's like we were in the midst of negative emotions at that same time. My family. My family of origin was going through deep traumatic experiences of cancer, of unjust. What are those called? Allegations. And we're just in the thin throes of what most people would experience or call, like, one of the most traumatic negative seasons. I watched my husband enter into that season and completely transform himself and show up in a whole new way where it's like, oh, yeah, I can handle this. I can embrace this. I can sit in this. I can be in this. I can hold space. I can hold space for my wife's emotion. I can hold space for my family's emotions. I can take as through this and into peace and to the other side. This. All of what we teach is, how do we go from here to the other side? Some of much of us are just spinning and looping at the end of the. At the bottom of the waterfall. We're just stuck here. We're, like, stuck in the eddy. We can't get out. We just are stuck. And we want to get to the other side, where there's freedom and abundance. And most often, like Brandon said, it's so simple. It's so simple that when you hear how simple it is, you want to throw a stone and say, you have to be wrong. You have to be wrong. It cannot be that simple. I'M not. We protect ourselves. We say, I'm not even going to try that.

B (28:49)

Yeah.

A (28:50)

You're telling me that just to move through years of anxiety. How dare you judge me because I have to take medication to survive my anxiety and my depression. You're telling me it's as simple as just learning what I'm feeling and learning what to do with it. I just have to do some embodiment exercises and some miming and that's all I have to do. It's like, yes, yes, freedom is already your inheritance. It's already what you have inside of you, and it's already what you have available to walk into. Most of the time, all we have to do is reorient our belief systems so that what we think is then what we create. So most of the time, change, healing, transformation, abundance, goodness is literally all we need to do is change a little bit of our belief system. It's a simple, simple shift and a massive, massive movement towards exactly what we want to create in life.

B (29:41)

So good. If you're a man that really wants to grab life by the horns and and you're looking to rebuild your marriage, we talk heavily about this concept of developing an embodiment routine, mastering your emotions, and bringing that the fruit of that into your relationship. Inside of my Men's Community App if you want to check out the Grounded Nation and be involved in our weekly coaching calls and the courses and routines we give you inside of the app, you can click the link in the show notes to try out a free trial. See if it feels like a good fit for you. I'm in there every day answering questions and coaching everybody through our weekly experience. So if you want me to walk alongside you as you're rebuilding your emotional toolkit and re engaging in your marriage, I'd be honored to be a part of that. Just click the link in the show notes. I would love to welcome you into the community. Thank you guys so much for being here for this podcast and we'll see you next week.

A (30:27)

Sam.