Speaking and Communicating Podcast

What triggered it, really, was just a lot of insecurity over not being good, or anxiety of she's gonna leave me because I'm not being good enough.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

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Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with marriage coaches, Kathryn and Cass Morrow.

Who are here to talk about not only their journey to a much happier and blissful marriage, but how they help other couples as well, and how communication skills play a role in that process.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome them to the show.

Hi, Kathryn and Cass.

Hi, Roberta.

Thanks for having us on.

Thank you for being here.

Please tell us a little bit about yourselves.

Welcome to the show.

Yeah, you betcha.

Thank you for having us on.

Bye-bye.

So we, well, the first thing we like to tell everybody is that the reason we are in the business that we do, we coach men and women in their marriage, is because we came back from the depths of hell.

Well, I specifically destroyed my wife, beat her down emotionally.

There was not entirely physical abuse, but I mean, physical intimidation, flipping out of a bed, enough physical.

And there were sexual problems too.

And so we just can't understand why people are quitting, because we are on top of the world now.

We figured it out, and we're just in love with loving each other, and we just don't understand why people are quitting, you know?

If we can do it, we figure anybody can do it.

Especially what you were saying, Kathryn, a lot of people would ask, you know, if you have friends, and you tell them, you say, Cass did this, usually the first thing they're like, Kathryn, why are you still there?

You can even come to my house, pack your bags, go!

You know, the quitting part.

What is it that made you think, this is something we can work on?

Well, I knew that he was capable of being a better man, because when we fell in love, he certainly knew how to make me swoon, how to charm me.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

So when the charming behavior went away, and it was replaced with abusive behavior, I remembered what it was like when it was good, and it was really good.

I had never been in a relationship that was that good before, and that passion filled.

So all the time when it was getting worse and worse, and when his behavior was getting worse, and then I was getting reactive at the same time, I knew that there had to be more, because I had already seen that it was possible.

It's not like we had these problems in the very beginning.

It did happen very quickly.

But in the beginning, there was so much good that I knew that I wanted to get back there.

I didn't know how to get back there, but I knew that I wanted it, and I knew that he was capable, more than capable.

He just was refusing in my mind.

So it's almost like you had a resume, you had a history, and you know what you were capable of.

So then the question becomes, for you, Cass, so you were that person, what then triggered this now alternative behaviour?

Dr.

Robert Glover coined a term called the nice guy in the 80s.

What my wife would say is we're nice a-holes, we're not nice guys.

But it's basically, the feeling of self-worth just wasn't there.

I needed to feel like I was good enough.

I needed to feel like I was loved enough.

And so the problem with a nice guy is he's actually not a nice guy, hence Kathryn's term.

What we do is we give all this love, hoping to feel like we're good enough, right?

To prove that we're good enough.

And the problem with that is that it's creating what's called a covert contract.

It means you're giving to get, right?

So if I do this, this, and this, then you're gonna make sure that you do this, this, and this, and then that means I'm gonna feel so much love.

And a lot of it's approval.

A lot of it's just feeling love.

A lot of it's just internal, just knowing good enough.

And it stems from not having your needs met when you're a child.

Not learning how to communicate feelings, what you're feeling, not even understanding what you're feeling.

And so what triggered it really was just a lot of insecurity over not being good enough, or anxiety of she's gonna leave me because I'm not being good enough.

I think the very first fight was, you mentioned something about one of your exes, Joel, being a good man.

And I was like, nobody treats you better than me.

Like, I need to be ready to prove it, that I'm good enough.

And she's like, no, there are nice guys out there.

This is not like abnormal, and I couldn't even take it.

It started to just fester and fester and fester.

And as the woman in this type of situation, and I think it can go both ways, but this, our specific situation, it was the man that had the covert contract.

So if you're on the other side of the covert contract, there's a reason it's called covert.

I didn't know that it existed.

When he's being this nice, wonderful person, he wasn't expressing his needs.

And so when I was, I was living life, enjoying being loved, and I thought everything was great, and then all of a sudden the tables turned, but I had no idea what he needed.

I didn't know he was feeling insecure.

I didn't know that he was feeling like he needed my approval.

To me, I just, everything was happy-go-lucky.

Everything was fun.

I didn't know he needed all this reassurance.

I didn't know he had insecurity about my past, his past.

I didn't know any of that.

So when you're on the other side of the contract and you don't know what contract is there, it gives you every opportunity to bail.

If I had known that there were things I could have been doing to help him through that, I could have done it a lot sooner, but I had no idea.

His behavior turned so quickly, it didn't give me any desire to want to help him because he was acting like a psychopath.

And because when you create these covert contracts, a lot of times you don't even know it.

And so you live in your own sort of reality, and there's stuff that goes with that in my brain, of course.

But the end of the day, she didn't have time to catch up because I was escalating and escalating and escalating so fast.

It quickly turned, within months, it turned to daily fights.

Sometimes more than once a day.

Oh, yeah, sometimes like all night long or three days in a row, towering over, lecturing, screaming, whatever.

Even though she knows now how she could have helped me sooner, it escalated so fast, there was no possible way for her to even catch up.

That's why everyone told her she should leave was just like what you thought earlier.

There's nothing you can do.

It's over.

Flags are raised.

Get out.

Get out.

You know?

Yes.

And here's the irony as well.

So you're trying to prove that you're the best guy.

When she mentioned her ex being a good guy, you're trying to prove.

But the behaviors you display in trying to prove that you're the best are the very behaviors that drive her away even further.

So you're having the opposite effect of what you are hoping for.

100%.

So in the effort of the nice guy trying to prove he's a nice guy, it doesn't always come out as rageful as me.

It doesn't.

It can sometimes be withdrawn and shutting down and just hiding from responsibilities.

But all of the efforts undermine any of the good that you do.

Really, it's really sad.

It's an epidemic.

It's everywhere.

And I do think Kathryn's right.

There's nice girls, too.

It's just that this doctor wrote a book about men, about himself, and it's helped a lot of men.

Kathryn, you said you wish he would have communicated to you that he needs to feel secure and validated.

Do you think that had he done that, you would have understood what to do then to make him feel better, so to speak?

Not fully, but I would have been more motivated to learn.

The way that he was presenting himself to me, I wasn't motivated to learn anything.

He was just, like you said, he's trying to prove himself to be a nice man, and all I was saying was that he was a bad man.

So if he was able to communicate earlier what he needed from me, I wouldn't have known how to give that to him intuitively.

I didn't really know much about insecurity.

I didn't know much about approval.

We have very different upbringings, and so we have very different, even just core values.

But I would have been inspired to try to learn to be a better wife for my husband, because I did love him.

Even when he was acting like that, I loved him.

And so if he could have come to me with more tenderness and vulnerability, although I wouldn't have been perfect at it, I at least would have tried.

And we could have gotten through it together rather than enemies.

We were enemies, really.

Yeah, it was a war.

It was always a war.

It was a war, yes.

And, you know, to back that up, you know, there was a point, it had already been a couple of years of bad, bad, bad.

Like, it was every day.

Two years of every day screaming.

Almost always me picking the fight.

It could be about anything.

To back that up, when we started to realize how insecure I was, and that was part of the initial discovery, that's when you were like, let's play this little game.

I love you, but I'm insecure.

And I lost my poop.

I'm like, that's not going to work to say I love you.

I'm insecure.

It's not going to work.

And she's like, just try it.

Yeah, so he thinks really quickly, so just to elaborate on that.

What happened was he had made some accusations of me.

He was living in his own reality with these deluded thoughts, and he was making the accusations.

And I said to him, I'll tell you what, when your mind starts to go down one of these paths, if you can communicate to me that you're feeling scared, because what you're accusing me of is not even possible, and that's against who I am as a woman and as a person.

So if you communicate to me, hey, I'm feeling scared and my mind is starting to run, I promise you that I will help you through that.

But if you come at me with an accusation, I'm going to get my defenses up.

So we came up with this code, and he would say, I love you.

And I said, but I need to know that you love me, because if I know you're about to go off the deep end, you don't treat me with love.

So you need to specifically say, I love you, and then you need to tell me that you're feeling scared or insecure, and I need to hear those two things.

If I hear those two things, I promise you I'll be strong for you.

And he looked, like he said, he lost it.

He said, it's not possible.

I won't be able to be there for him.

And I said, let's try it.

And it worked.

From the very first time that he tried it, I was able to just quiet my own defenses and be there for him and allow him to, instead of accusing me, talk me through why he thought I was sleeping with another man, or why he thought, well, that was almost opposite.

He always thought I was sleeping with...

Fear of abandonment and whatever.

I think it's really, really important to understand that the problem is not that I couldn't communicate.

It's that I didn't know how.

I didn't even know what I was feeling.

We really feel strongly now that parents...

We're doing the same thing to our children today unless you learn this.

You remember when your parents said, don't cry.

Nothing to be scared about.

Go to sleep.

All invalidating comments.

Yeah, stop screaming.

I'm taking away XYZ.

So what does that teach us?

That you're not allowed to feel.

We can't even figure out what we are feeling.

We're not allowed to communicate those feelings because at that age, you don't know how to communicate.

We're just told to stuff it down, shut it down.

And so we feel very strongly that that's a lot of what happened to me because there was abuse tied to it as well.

But I couldn't have begun to understand what I was feeling, you know, had no idea.

Because if I looked at every relationship after my leaving my parents' home, there was always cheating.

There was always miserable fighting.

And it just got worse until I met Kathryn, where I treated you worse.

I had no idea.

I was still in my blame state.

It was everybody else's fault.

But really, I just didn't know how to communicate what I wanted.

I didn't think I even knew.

I was not allowed to have needs or to know where I was going.

Right.

And also the self-worth part, like if you look at Kathryn, you can see how beautiful she is.

Was there also part of you wondering, do I deserve a woman like this?

And you constantly needing to prove that you are worthy of her.

I think so, because when I met Kathryn, clearly she's the one that was able to inspire me to want to grow and change.

By the time I met Kathryn, I didn't care if she was a pretty woman.

I just wanted a woman who was going to treat me loyally, respectfully, love me.

I thought everybody was the problem.

I used to say to Kathryn, I don't just call you a name.

You run your shopping cart into me at the grocery store, I'm going to call you a name.

That's literally how I felt.

But she's beautiful.

She's the most brilliant person on the planet.

She's super hilarious.

Like anything she wants, she can get.

It's unbelievable.

And so I think for sure, by the time that I met Kathryn, there's no way I deserved it.

The rug is going to get pulled out, for sure.

And I believe really fully most people, when they haven't figured this stuff out, they self-sabotage.

Especially if you have abandonment issues, I'm going to make sure that I push you away before you can push me away and hurt me.

V of rejection.

So let me reject you first, because I know you're going to reject me when you find out who I really am.

Yeah, I really, really think so.

It's really sad.

And there's so many ways you can do this.

I used anger binges and alcohol, but a lot of other people would just shut down.

Other people might placate.

People, please, right?

They do all these things that smother their partners.

So there's so many different ways that you can look at how you just sabotage, you just destroy.

Because then you can't be hurt.

If you leave me, you made the choice.

And that's also what I would do.

Oh, so much gasoline.

And so let's start then with what you guys did.

So Kathryn mentioned earlier the I love you, but I'm feeling this way right now.

So that was the first step to let's figure how we can change this dynamic.

And what happened after that?

That was one of the first things.

And one of the other things.

So I was living in the twilight zone.

And I got a lot of different therapy.

I saw multiple different counselors because I was starting to think that I was crazy because there was a lot of gaslighting, and there was a lot of abuse.

And I had never seen anything like this before.

I was the best narcissist that there is.

Yeah, it was crazy.

And I was starting to lose reality.

I had to do a type of therapy at one point called somatic experiencing because I was losing touch with reality.

And so in one of my sessions with one of the therapists that I had, I was telling a story about the gum story.

I was telling a story about Cass.

He was Ryan at the time before he changed his name.

And my therapist said, it sounds like your husband is suffering from cognitive distortions.

And a cognitive distortion is when you don't see reality with clear eyes.

You're not seeing what's actually happening.

They hear something different in their mind.

They see something different.

Their reality is different than what's actually happening.

And so as I started to explain more scenarios to this therapist, he said that he's not seeing him.

So he couldn't say yes or no, but he said this really sounds like cognitive distortions.

And he recommended that he get some help and that we potentially even see a psychiatrist, which we did.

But that was a game changer as well, because I told him about it.

Let's tell a story.

So we're driving down the road, and we had some gum.

I wanted to throw it out the window, but I didn't want to throw it on a car that was out there.

So I was holding it in my hand on the steering wheel, not touching the steering wheel, I'm just holding my hand.

And Kathryn, as the sweet woman, in knowing what's going on here, babe, I can throw it out my window, meaning there's no car next to me.

But my reality said, you're gross for holding your gum.

Why are you holding your gum like that, you gross guy?

Give it to me.

And that's what I heard.

And so when she shared the story with the therapist, it was like it was a game changer for us.

Because he said to me, why the bleep would I give you my gum?

I'm not doing anything wrong.

And I said, well, no, you're not, but there's no cars out my window if you want me to throw it for you.

And he took a deep breath and he said, you're trying to help me?

And I said, yes.

I just wanted to throw it out.

Like for me, it was just simple.

He's holding his gum, he's waiting.

I wanted to do it for him.

And he was like, oh my goodness.

And then he said, how often do I do this?

And I said, every day.

And so when he opened up that door to start recognizing, my therapist called it reality checking.

So he would be able to ask me, hey, what actually is happening in this situation?

And he would have to trust me.

So one of the things was the co-phrase that we had.

One of the other things that we had that we basically did all on our own was recognizing when he was having cognitive distortions, and he would have to commit to trusting me.

After years of him telling me I'm manipulating him, him telling me I'm crazy, and he's living in his own delusions, he had to settle on the fact that maybe he was having cognitive distortions.

Maybe he was living in a delusional reality, which was hard.

That's a hard reality to come to, right?

Well, it's really, really, really hard to admit to yourself, right?

You're admitting that you're crazy.

Are you in the state of if anybody's being nice to you, they have ulterior motives?

Just me.

I think so, yeah.

Not me.

I think that people like me want it so bad.

It's just that because of those covert contracts we talked about, it's never good enough.

No matter how much, I mean, we could use sex as an example.

No matter how much you were there for me, connecting with me, wanting me, just being there, doing whatever, it could never be enough because the insecurity was so deep.

The reality was so distorted that we could do it five times a day for a month and a half, and I'd still be like, you want somebody else.

It's a little bit different.

So you didn't think that everybody had ulterior motives.

When it came to me specifically, I could never measure up to what he needed no matter what I did, and he would see the negative in some of the positive that I offered.

And this would transfer over to everything.

I mean, if you talk about business, I mean, every time you have to follow somebody, they're a loser, right?

They're a terrible person.

They can't do this right.

They can't do that right.

Like, narcissists to the extreme.

This is one of the reasons why we can't stand it when people say narcissists can't change, because most people think they're partners in narcissists when they're not, and if I can change and start to look deep into the reality of what's actually real, then we just can't understand why people are stuck in this new trend.

It's not possible.

It's not possible.

It's not possible.

And then how did you get started of helping other married couples?

There was a really big gap from where we were talking about to later, but essentially, you know, a lot of growth, a lot of roller coaster, and our timelines are completely different, because I was trying to curb things like anger way sooner.

The restraining order of probation, you didn't believe me.

And then eventually, Kathryn said to me, I'm not in love, I'm not attracted, I'm upset, and I'm only here to honor my commitment and my oath under God, which propelled a big anger fest for me for three days.

And then pretty soon I had to get to more work and realize there was more responsibility I had to take.

Shortly after COVID, you started taking your first course.

It was COVID.

So it was 2020 when he thought things were going really well.

I still was not happy.

That's what he means by the timelines being so different.

So it didn't turn a corner for me until the end of 2020.

And when I told him that I'm not in love and I'm not attracted and all those things, I said, but I can't live like this anymore.

And for me, it was rock bottom.

If we can't fix this, I cannot stay.

So I'm pregnant with our third baby.

Our twins are one year old.

I was like, I just can't do it.

So I started to do a lot of work, and I started to recognize how I could use more empathy and more gratitude and just more understanding to try to help him rather than judge him, because I had been so beaten down and abused by him emotionally that I didn't have a whole lot of empathy left.

And so when I was able to kind of turn that switch back on, and I didn't even really want him, I wanted to not lose my 50% custody of my children, and I also didn't trust him to raise our children.

And so through that process of trying to keep my family together, I got my husband back, which I didn't anticipate that happening.

And it's so important to recognize because women don't realize the power that they have.

Men are sure they're big, alpha, strong, all of these things.

But if we come in as women with gentleness instead of reactivity and with empathy instead of judgment, we can build them up to help them be the man that they need to be.

And we proved that it would have been, without my help, it would have been impossible.

I don't know that I would have done it.

I've been trying for years and without me accepting him and without me really boosting him and building him up by working on my own flaws, which is the defensiveness and the reactivity, and, you know, of course, contempt, all of those things that get built into you or that come out, all the ugly that comes out when you're put into a relationship with somebody.

If I wasn't able to turn all of that around for myself, I wouldn't have the ability to support him.

And without me supporting him, it's very cyclical.

Without me supporting him, he wasn't able to do what he'd been trying to do for years.

So the turning point really was me getting my shit together and saying, okay, I'm going to support you.

And when I supported him, then he could shine, and then he was able to grow into the man that he is now.

It's really true.

I mean, the nice guy recovery thing, I see it all the time.

I really think that it fully comes together and is complete when their wife is that loving, supportive person.

When we get her back to her natural, loving, empathetic, nurturing state, then he completes the cycle, right?

But until then, you really work hard.

But because of the fear of failure, because of the need for approval, you can let go of all expectations, pull over contracts, validate yourself, all that stuff.

But because you start this journey knowing you've almost lost your life, then it's almost like it's the completing piece is to get a Kathryn in your corner.

You know what I mean?

Kathryn, please just make the distinction for us between what you just said that you needed to be gentle and empathetic and be the qualities that he needed versus people thinking, oh my goodness, does that mean I should be a donut and let him talk to me anyhow?

For some people, that's how they take it.

Yeah, that's a great question.

The way that I teach my women how to do this is to think about who do you want to be regardless of how your husband is acting.

So if your husband is acting in an abusive way, you might be able to justify your defensiveness.

You might be able to justify your reactivity.

I did.

I justified all of it because I was in response to him.

But if I look at my behavior, don't look at anything around you.

Am I proud of swearing at another human being, yelling at another human being, negative gestures, bad body language?

I had no gratitude, complacency, entitlement.

None of those are good qualities.

And so when you want to be that strong woman, in the worst situation, if you can come back to it with gratitude and empathy, I believe you are not a doormat.

You are the strongest person that you can be because only the strongest women can show empathy under attack.

It doesn't mean that you're accepting the attack.

It means that you are being the strongest person and you are role modeling the proper behavior for someone who's literally out of their mind.

You're not.

If you're stable and you can stand there, if you can be proud of yourself for being composed and stable and keeping a clear mind through all of that, that is the opposite of a doormat because you are the epitome of strength.

It doesn't condone the other person's behavior.

So if you respond with empathy and you respond with gratitude, and the gratitude isn't for the attack.

You don't say, thank you for yelling at me.

No, no.

Gratitude runs around the situation.

But when you're an empathetic and you validate, you can validate their emotion, but you don't validate their behavior.

It's okay for him to have felt so angry.

It just wasn't okay for him to treat me that way.

But I didn't know how to validate his anger.

I didn't know how to validate his frustration.

Now I know how to do that.

That's a good quality.

You should want to validate everybody else's emotions.

It might not be your position, and you might not have the right to correct.

We're not put here to correct our partners.

We're here to influence our partners.

We're here to stand strong so that they have someone to model after.

Otherwise, I call it getting on the crazy train.

If your husband is getting on the crazy train, and that means he's dysregulated, he's starting to yell, he's starting to be crazy, he's starting to attack, the moment that you get defensive or you get reactive, you are getting on the crazy train.

And before you know it, that crazy train turns into a roller coaster.

You're both fighting, you're in a cycle of attack-defend, but if you remain composed and you use the skills that you know that you would use in every other instance, if you wouldn't swear at your boss, if you wouldn't yell at a stranger on the street, why are you doing it to your husband?

It doesn't give you the right to do it, and only the strongest person can stay strong under that sort of attack.

So, I try to explain to women that it might seem like you're just tolerating it, but you're not.

He will be held accountable for his actions, but it's not your responsibility to treat him with the same treatment that he's treating you, because that makes you just as bad as him.

My mom used to say, don't stoop down to the other person's level, thinking that's how you're going to defend yourself against their attack.

Because what happens is, one, you're going to be a lesser person, like you said, you're going to let go of all these good qualities that you have.

And at the end of the day, when you stoop to their level, when you get there to say, okay, let me face to face, eye to eye, they're actually going to beat you at their game, because they are the pros at this.

Well, they're the pros.

I think it's such a valid point.

But also, most people inherently only care about what they want.

You, me, Kathryn, everybody.

We have to work to validate, to love, to appreciate somebody else's opinion, because we always will go back to defensiveness first, defending who we are.

So that's why I teach men all the same things now.

I have one more thing, if you're defending yourself, how are you protecting your wife, right?

Think about this with your children.

We do this with our children.

Children are the hardest, if you ask us.

But we don't want to be yelling at our kids.

They literally have no idea what they're doing.

They're learning.

Again, always going back to who do you see in the mirror.

You got to be proud of that person.

And that's exactly why Kathryn was saying, it doesn't mean you're a dumb act.

You are the person that you know the best person you should be.

So it doesn't mean change in order to defend.

Yeah.

Basically, it was after COVID, about eight months after 22 or 23 months ago, Kathryn said, listen, the work you're doing right now isn't working, but you have been coaching for years.

Now you're helping men.

Why don't you turn that into a business?

And we went viral about 45 days.

Now we just help thousands, almost 4,000 people in 22 months almost.

And my business only started last summer.

I was transitioning from...

I have always worked with women, but what I started recognizing is that women actually, in order to succeed in all these other areas, they really needed to address some of the issues with their husband.

And so my husband pushed me to add more marriage stuff.

And by last summer, the program had completely transitioned into a marriage coaching program.

So my program is just over a year old.

And yeah, combined, we've helped over 4,000 people.

Yeah, it's been pretty wild, right?

And you just hit the nail on the head.

Something that we learned from working with so many people is, like, we're all wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

You're kind of in this fog if your marriage is not doing well.

You know, you can be so much more successful, because we lift each other.

We're not anchoring each other anymore.

It's changed our life and so many people's lives rapidly, just by learning a few skills, just by implementing and learning about being proud of who you are.

And what would you say...

I've never been married, so I'm going to ask a lot of questions regarding that.

What would you say is the difference between a happy marriage and a marriage of just going through the motions, so to speak?

I can answer that in one word, and that word is connection.

Because when you are kind of leading parallel lives, you might be doing life kind of together, but you're not connected.

That's what you're describing, where it's not necessarily a happy marriage.

It's just going through the motions.

And so maybe there's not a lot of conflict, but there's also no passion.

You might feel like best friends or roommates.

You're living parallel lives and there's some relationship there, but you're not deeply connected.

When you have a happy marriage and you're deeply connected, I see that as you know the inner workings of each other's lives.

You can explain what your partner did in the run of a day.

You know the relationship that your partner has with the children.

You have an intimate relationship with your partner, which that's the only person that you should be having an intimate relationship with.

If you don't have that part of the relationship, is it truly marriage?

That's the one piece of the puzzle that you don't have with your friends, you don't have with your family, you have it with your spouse, you have it with your partner.

So that connection, where you're connected on all of those different levels, allows you to be able to manage conflict, allows you to be able to have deep conversations, allows you to be able to have a passionate, intimate life.

It allows you to have all those things because you feel, you actually feel like you're one.

You know, they say when you're married, you're one, but so many people are actually just two, living parallel lines are actually probably like the number 11, not like the number two.

When you're united, when you're one, your hearts are fused, your minds are fused, you can show your different people, but that connection is what allows you to connect so deeply on all of those different things.

I think that's so valuable too.

So not everybody that comes to us are bitter enemies like we were, right?

A lot of people that come to us, probably 60% of them, they think they have this glorious marriage, they're just missing intimacy.

And they don't.

They're roommates, business partners, structured life, but like you said, just 11, running parallel.

They're not actually connected.

And then when they start to do our programs, they realize, oh my gosh, our conversations haven't been that great.

Sure, we can communicate, we don't fight, but we're not actually...

My men would say, I didn't even understand.

My wife hasn't been feeling anything for years.

Now she can feel.

So I think it's a really, really good point.

My brother used to say, because a lot of us usually think the opposite of love is hate.

So if you're not in love in your marriage, that means you hate each other.

But my brother used to say the worst one is indifference.

You don't even make me angry anymore.

Hate is worse.

Hate is definitely worse.

Indifference is, I think, what's the word, like apathy?

When you're indifferent about your partner, it really makes life flat because you're looking for outside stimulation.

If you can't have good conversation with your partner because you're indifferent about your partner, you don't actually connect with them on any level, then you're going to be looking for that level of connection with your friends.

And your friends, they might be married, so they're having to connect those conversations with their own husbands.

And then you end up just living a really flat life.

Or down a negative spiral, complaining, sitting in your pain.

I think further to your point, though, if you think, I don't remember who said it, but the opposite of crazy is still crazy.

What we learned in our journey, which is more of a reflection back now, if I didn't want to be like my parents, I tried to do everything different than my parents.

And what happens is you end up being a lot more like your parents than you think.

Let me give you a super easy example.

She used to say to me, if you stop yelling, I would love you again.

If you stop yelling, I would feel better.

I want you more.

I'd be happy again.

But when I stopped yelling, that wasn't what it was.

We're going for the opposite end here.

The opposite end is not yelling to no yelling.

It's laughter, excitement, dreams, achieving together, safe feelings, not anger.

Like true safety and peace.

So we get stuck in this opposite spectrum that you really have to be careful.

Because otherwise, you don't really have the goal in mind.

You're not going to hit it.

Right.

Work towards something positive between the two of you and not just letting go of the previous negative.

That's right.

Yeah.

If you think about what Kathryn said earlier about being proud of who you are, do what that person would do.

So if you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how to communicate, do what the person in the marriage that you see, in the future that you see, and apply this for everything.

Business.

Get up earlier.

If you want to be successful, get up earlier.

But do what the future you would do, and future you will thank you.

And, Kathryn, does connection mean that you do everything together?

If he wants to watch football, you might.

No, definitely not.

So connection can be less of a physical togetherness and more of an emotional intimacy.

So really knowing that you can rely on your partner, knowing that you can say anything, feeling safe.

You could be miles apart or in, God forbid, different countries.

What?

I know, but still connected because you know that that person is your best friend.

Not only is that person your best friend, though, it's the married best friend.

There's differences between him being my best friend and my best girlfriend.

I would say the connection actually is strengthened when you're not doing everything together.

Now, some people, my husband included, would like to do everything together.

I am not that person.

No, I'm not.

We're different in that way.

But he respects that I like to go out and I like to do my own thing, and it actually makes our marriage stronger for me, because they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I think that it does.

I don't want to be too absent from him, but certainly making sure that you have your own identity.

When you have your own identity, I think that even makes you become more attractive to your partner.

And he has his own identity.

He doesn't just identify in me, but we have each to have our own lives and our own world.

This actually ties back to the whole nice guy thing.

Nice guy is a super available guy.

He wants her around all the time.

It's more of that, like, if I can be there and please you, then it will work.

I'll feel better about myself.

So a lot of me being okay now is because I've learned that it's okay.

I've got lots to do.

A lot of what I teach men is it's okay.

You don't need her to survive, right?

I would die without Kathryn, but I don't need her to survive, which gives her the freedom to go do what she wants to do.

And likewise, when I want to do something, you're also the same.

But there's a different understanding now because I don't need her to survive.

That would be the easiest way to explain it.

And when you come back from your various activities, you even have something to talk about because the other person was not there.

Yes.

Any last words?

Because sometimes we even have people confessing on the internet going, I can't wait for my last kid to be out of college so that I can just leave.

I'm tired of this marriage.

There's no spark.

There's no feeling.

That's it.

It's numb, basically.

I'm waiting for my 16-year-old to finish high school, and then I'm out.

Is there a way for them to save their marriages, and what is it that they can do?

Yeah, I think that this is really important, because we go viral when we see people say these comments on our posts all the time.

And it usually is tied back to the thought of, I don't deserve this.

This isn't fair.

It's a victim mentality.

Where people, I think, really mess up is they believe they've done everything they can.

They believe they've tried everything.

They believe they deserve more, and so they can't wait.

Now they're victimizing themselves here with their children.

I'm even staying with just because the children, what?

You have a choice.

You're responsible for all your choices.

The behavior is bad.

I'm not saying it's justified.

But like when I started to get worse and worse and worse with Kathryn, as the beginning years went on, she still enabled it.

She still allowed it to happen.

So the example I use is like if a woman kicks you in the balls, I don't care if she does, you enable that.

If she did it on the first date, you enabled it and kept with her.

If she didn't, then it progressively started with her snickering, it started with her yelling, then it got to name calling, and then it got to, I'm not saying he had no play in all this, but if all the time, all of a sudden we get to the stage where you're coasting, blaming your partner, you enabled that behavior all the way along.

Yeah, there's responsibility on both sides, that entire way.

You know, the piece of advice that he's trying to say is that you haven't tried everything, and oftentimes people are not looking within themselves, they're not taking responsibility, they're not taking accountability because they're blaming, and you can't make change aside from within yourself.

So when you start to show some accountability and responsibility and start to take action against the things that you maybe did or the absence of things that you didn't do.

Here's something that's really, really powerful to back this up.

3,100 guys in 21 months, okay?

Not all of them are on second marriages or third marriages, but a lot of them are.

And every single one that's in another marriage has recognized the exact same patterns, not necessarily between the two marriages, but when they take the course that I give them, they go, I did this all the time.

I've done this my whole life.

I do this in business.

Oh my gosh, I treat my children this way.

So I remove the two spouses, and who's the common denominator?

So if you're listening and you're keen on this because Roberta just asked this, like think about it.

You're going to do it again.

How do we know that?

The studies aren't out there talking about this, but we're seeing it all the time in our programs with people that are married second and third times.

Why do you think those divorce rates are so much higher?

You're not going to find a magical, peaceful relationship unless you do your own work.

Sometimes they usually think, oh, it's my wife's fault.

It's because she didn't do this, and I need a bet, and that's why we got divorced.

Yes, but I've never heard one man say, I wish I would have had this for my life.

Like, he's falling in love again.

Potentially, we'll see more and more, because we get guys, I get guys all the time.

Their wives have already left.

They're divorced for a year.

Their wife's in another man's house.

Their wife is cheating.

These are the harder cases, obviously.

The further away you are, the harder it is.

But I think potentially we'll see more and more of, yes, I could have done this.

I want to be a better man no matter who I meet in the future.

But I think that's just not the stage of work.

And no matter what, though, if they took the course with us and they're in their first marriage, then yes, we can help save that one long before you get to the second marriage.

Yeah, the problem is people seem to wait until it's rock bottom.

There was something special about us that narcissists were capable of love.

It's called a love bomb.

It's called a love bomb.

We really like it because it feels good.

But we also know how to sabotage it and wreck everything and destroy everything because we're afraid.

And so it's presented as, I only care about myself.

I just didn't understand.

So some of the things that you did really pulled me out, but there was something special.

So I challenge any of your listeners to look at what's special about why.

Because they probably weren't a narcissist in the beginning.

That's just a flash word that's going around the internet like crazy the last few years.

You're focused on it because it's hurting, but almost every time someone talks about their narcissist spouse on our social media, their comment is 100% narcissistic behavior.

100%.

There isn't any gray.

It's literally black and white.

You either are trying to grow or you are holding yourself back.

Yes.

And then for anyone who's dating, we always have this thing of boundaries, stay away from red flags, just like you were talking about how people are quick to quick marriages.

I think some of us are quick to quit a first date, potentially good guy or good girl, versus, hey, you know, he had spinach in his teeth, red flag, I'm out.

Boundaries.

Just like they throw the word necessarily around the internet, the word boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

Everything is just boundaries.

We don't give people a chance at all.

There's not going to be this perfect guy who can do no wrong, who's going to show up and eventually marry you.

You're bringing up a valid point.

The divorce rates are climbing.

The more that people are talking about sexist, they're talking about toxic, they're talking about narcissism.

It's scaring people that are single, that are dating.

And so they have to protect themselves.

I think your advice will probably be different, but I'm going to speak for men.

My advice would be simple.

Are you still showing up as who you want?

Because if you are going to worry about spinach in the teeth, if you're worried about checking out, making sure that she's...

Is she going to be a loyal type or whatever?

You're not even showing up in a safe way already.

You're already focused on the fact that she could screw up, and you're trying to do that because you're worried about her hurting you down the road.

You're looking at all these as flags that probably you will raise, more than likely.

Using cheating as an example, the studies are pretty spectacular.

It's 10% to 20%, depending on the study, when it comes to affairs.

Anonymous studies, people admitting that they cheated.

If that's the case, 80% of people are not lying in an anonymous study.

Cheating is not as real, so stop looking for your flags, stop creating your own problems, love on the person you met, have faith, faith that it could go somewhere, and then see what can happen.

And then the advice that I would give, not just to women, but to everyone, is that when you get married, a mistake that people often make is they actually don't know what their core values are.

And so when their core values get violated, that's when they sense boundaries.

But when you're going into a dating scenario, you don't even have to really consider boundaries if you know what your core values are.

Because you should be flexible on any area that is not your core value.

So if you identify your core values first, and it has to be core values.

If it's flexible, it's not a core value.

If it's a deal breaker, that is a core value.

So identify your core values, and when you see a core value that could be violated, that is a red flag, and that means you do not continue.

That is even what I recommend to people in marriage.

If you violate each other's actual core values, so you have to identify.

When you have a core value, that means that you stand strong in that core value, but you can be flexible in other areas.

I always use the example of maybe your core value is that you want to eat healthy, but what's flexible about that?

What time you eat is flexible?

What types of proteins you eat is flexible?

What types of vegetables you eat are flexible?

But the core value is, I'm going to eat healthy.

So you identify what the core values are that you have and the core values that you're looking for, and the only red flags that you should be looking for, the only boundary conversations that you should be looking for are things that directly affect your core values.

When you're dating, because let's say marriage, let's use cheating as the example, of course, that's a core value.

Everybody knows the rules of marriage, you're not supposed to cheat, right?

And even just dating long term, or if you've made the deal, we're being exclusive.

Typically, if something like that happens, what value was broken first?

The emotional safety, the security?

What was removed first, before that happened, where somebody went to go feel safe somewhere else?

I think people get too hyped up with disrespect and rules and blah blah blah, when they have it looked deeper first, right?

I will say one more thing, because this is your communication show, right?

We really firmly believe communication is not key.

What we mean by that is, communication, of course, is key, right?

But we hear things like, communication is key, don't go to bed angry.

You have to talk about it, talk it through.

That's right.

You should be talking about why she doesn't want intimacy.

We hear this every day.

Here's the thing, if you haven't taken the time to learn communication skills, I'm going to just give you one example.

You don't know how to not be defensive.

Respond, not react.

Then you don't have any business having a conversation that's hard.

Take 30 days, learn some skills, and then go have the conversation.

Make the deal together.

And if you're dating, sure, that could be a flag.

Maybe you don't want to teach somebody if you've learned the skills.

I can understand that.

However, I feel like that's not really their fault, just like you were taught not to feel, not to communicate the feelings.

Because understand, you're going to get together and love each other.

You're going to validate each other like crazy.

You're so beautiful.

I can't wait to see you.

Oh, I told my friends I can't go.

You're the best person ever.

And all that validation and approval is going to be replaced on both sides with defense and disemblance until you learn how to communicate anyway.

So stop and off your high horse, learn some skills, then have a hard conversation.

And if you're dating, for the love of goodness, teach somebody.

Help them.

Don't make that a boundary.

Help them.

Yeah, because we do quit very, very quickly and always looking for the next person, and then it just never ends.

Thinking there's something better out there.

The grass is greener has been popular, no matter where you're at in life, right?

It's just too much.

You just got to focus on the...

What's the expression?

Grass is greener where you water your own pasture.

Where you water it.

Yeah.

Certainly, certainly.

Rather water the grass instead of always looking for the greener one in other people's lawns.

Thank you very much, Kathryn and Cass Morrow, for such words of wisdom for both us single people and especially married couples.

It was our pleasure being here.

Thanks so much for having us.

My absolute pleasure.

That was Kathryn and Cass Morrow, the marriage coaches who were able to share their journey today and are helping other couples to the number of 4,000 at the moment and going strong.

Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

If you are willing to be on the show to discuss your communication challenges and see how we can help, please book a slot on my Calendly, and the details are on the show notes.

We are so glad that you've joined us.

We have more special guests who will be sharing more leadership tips and strategies on this show in this month of February.

In addition to our first couple interview, who will be discussing the role that communication has played in their marriage.

So stay tuned for more episodes to come.