Speaker 1: Have you stopped by Ero dot net yet? A r
r oe dot net. It is a podcast network, twenty
different podcasts to choose from. Like The Daily Mess, we
ask a question, then search for the answer and ninety
nine point nine percent of the time you're going to
be shocked by what's really out there and how we
kind of bend the truth on what's really going on
The Daily Mess on ero dot net a r r
oe dot net. Enjoy your exploration. What is it like
for you to be so open in the way that
you're giving a lot of your energy to your listeners,
But what fills you back up? Because I mean I
can feel your emotion, your pitch, your volume, your tone,
and right away as a podcaster and as a broadcaster,
I go, okay, how is he filling back up? Because
obviously you are helping people, But now what about helping lee?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I've got lots of pursuits I do. I
play a lot of pickleball with a lot of friends
and play with my wife, so we enjoy getting out
on the quart a good bit.
Speaker 3: And then I also paddleboard and walk my dog every day, do.
Speaker 2: A lot of things just to make sure that I'm
taking care of myself.
Speaker 1: The podcast is called Save the Marriage. I'm impressed with
the fact that you keep it right there under thirty minutes,
because to me, that's what a listener has right now
driving to work or maybe being at work or wherever
they are. They've got that, and you bring in so much.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's designed to be able to be something that someone
can do in a short walk or short workout, or
in a commute. I think that anything longer than that
ends up being background noise for people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those sleepless moments that so many people have in
the way of having to make a choice, because we'll
turn that thing into the world coming to it in
a simple small choice, or a computer that cracks down
and you're sitting there going the world's over.
Speaker 3: The world's over.
Speaker 1: But yet you give us some peace.
Speaker 2: Well, that is the fact that our brain is built
to catastrophize. I mean, that's just kind of a nature
of what we've inherited from our ancestors, and so we
go on alert mode and that happens pretty quickly because
that's what kept our ancestors safe. But when we recognize that,
then we have a choice on whether we're going to
react to that or whether we're going to respond to it,
and take a big deep breath and ask the question,
you know, what's really going on? I always do a
best case worst case. You know, what is the worst
case for this? What is the worst thing that could happen?
And then I asked my second question is what's the
best thing that could happen?
Speaker 3: From that? And generally reality somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 1: See I call that defragging. Asking yourself the questions, then
questioning the answers. To me, that's how you get to
the core of a situation.
Speaker 3: It does help you get there.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously, we're still going to have our own
slant on things, and if you get three people together
doing that same thing, they're going to still have different perspectives.
But one of the things I think is helpful is
to just slow down that immediate reaction that we're having
and moved to something that is a little bit more sustainable.
Speaker 1: You put a lot of focus on self driven growths
as well as communication. And right away, while I was
doing the show prep, I go, aren't they one and
the same or are they opposites? Self driven growth as
well as communication.
Speaker 3: They're not opposites, but they're not the same.
Speaker 2: I think what you're communicating is so I think of communication.
Speaker 3: Is just a way of delivering information. That's it.
Speaker 2: So if you haven't done the work on yourself, If
you haven't, if you're not regulating yourself, what you are
transmitting may not be so healthy.
Speaker 3: So we've got to make sure that you know your self.
Speaker 2: Regulating that you're also and this is a big piece
of that, saying you know, where am I responsible for this?
Not I am all responsible for this, but also I
am not at all responsible for this.
Speaker 3: There is a place in there to say, you know,
what is my role in this?
Speaker 2: And then that can change how you're communicating, especially with
somebody who's close to you, because that's the communication that matters.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the interaction that you bring to this with
with your listeners, because I mean even the interaction will
take you to a website because you've got different programs
that you've designed. I mean, you're no joke on this.
This is the real deal and this is what it's
all about.
Speaker 3: Well, and that's part of my having been in this
for so long.
Speaker 2: My website went up in nineteen ninety nine and I've
only continued to create things since then, so over time,
it's just accumulative and some of the things that I've
committed to do come out on a regular basis. So
I do have articles that come out on my substack
twice a week. I have a podcast that comes out
once a week, and then I have the books and
the programs that have really been designed to augment that.
Speaker 1: So now, how are you only doing one a week
when you know that the world of marriage is constantly evolving.
There's change, change, change, change, change. You know, Lee, we
would be sitting there saying, Lee, I need to talk
to you every day, dude, come on, bring it.
Speaker 3: Well. First of all, it's what's possible.
Speaker 2: I have lots of other things called my name, But
the fact is that human relating. I mean, we have
different models of how we think about marriage, but human
relating isn't new. And you know, here's the thing that
I realized. Since I do that once a week, now
we're at five hundred.
Speaker 3: And eighty three episodes.
Speaker 2: So you know, somebody starts to listen to me once
a day, we're talking what ten years of listening before
they catch up to the end or twelve years I guess.
Speaker 1: I totally get that. One of the focuses that you
do is on transforming marriages. Now in this day and age,
My god, there's so much coming at us from every direction.
I can't imagine what what you know you're building on
and how people can take from that to learn how
to peacefully transform their marriages.
Speaker 2: And so a part of my material is hoping that
people find kind of where they are in the crisis.
Speaker 3: There are different lives levels of that. There are some people.
Speaker 2: Who really are on the verge of divorce, and that's
that's why I created to Save the Marriage System to
help address that. There are also people that just realize
they're kind of chronically limping along, and so that's why
I've created some of the other materials, like my new
on Pause app that's designed to help people navigate that
and change their systems. I'm a big believer that we
have to put systems in place to get where we
want to get to. If you want to get in shape,
you better have some systems in place on how you're
going to get yourself to exercise instead of just going, well,
you know it'll happen, because it won't.
Speaker 3: And the same is true with what's important to us.
Speaker 2: So if we get out of the habit of relating
and in marriage, I call that hitting the pause button. Right,
we think we've got to get back to life and
get back to or get to parenting, and get to
career success and get to all these other things. And
when that happens, we pause the connection and the relationship.
We create new systems or new habits of relating. And
so part of what I try to do is help
people say, you know the system that I've created, And
many times people will say, well, I don't have a system.
And my response is that that's a system. It's just
not a good one. It's not a functional one. It
is a system.
Speaker 3: But if you work on replacing that back.
Speaker 2: To the ways of connecting, then you recreate the systems.
And so, for instance, that's the framework for the Unpaused
app to help people create new systems in place for
unpausing their marriage and getting back to the relationship.
Speaker 1: So, now is this something that I can go to
the place store and pick up on this app and
then get started immediately.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the easiest way to get there, because it's housed
in another app, is to go to Unpauseyormarriage Dot com
and then that puts your right to the app.
Speaker 3: So, because I mean, I really think that's the problem.
Speaker 2: People have paused their relationship, and so unpause your marriage
is kind of the thing I'm trying to get people
to do. Unpause yourmarriage dot com and that puts them
right to where they can check out the help.
Speaker 1: How many people, though, take that pause and they realize
it's going too long, so they create a little bit
of rough areas just to get the conversation started somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Well, that's part So somewhere else depends on what you
mean by that. But I do think that people are
in need of connection.
Speaker 3: They're going to find it somewhere. It's whether it's going.
Speaker 2: To be helpful or harmful to the relationship, to the marriage.
Speaker 3: We're just wired that way. Humans are in desperate need
of connection and there's no way around it. So we'll
find a place for it.
Speaker 2: Whether it's in our kids being overly dependent on them
for connection, and a job being overly dependent on the
job to give you feedback, or coworkers, or an affair.
Speaker 3: It's going to find its way into our lives somehow.
Speaker 2: So the question we have to ask is where am
I put that energy, right, How am I shifting.
Speaker 3: That energy away from the relationship? Now?
Speaker 2: There are people who, so to your thing of stirring
things up. There are plenty of people who find themselves
subconsciously stirring things up in the relationship, trying to bring
life to it. They just don't do it in particularly
healthy ways. They generally use arguments as a way of connecting.
They confuse that argument with energy.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting that you bring that up, and
right away my mind is going now because this is
not just for young adults, this is not for middle
aged people. But I can see that nowadays the silver
haired people are divorcing quicker than I've ever seen in
my life. Is it because they've held off until the
kids go away? Or is it we're going Look man,
I've been growing old with you for a while. I
gotta go, or we got to fix this situation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is, and some of both. I think those
are interrelated. When people hit the pall's button, they often
think they will get back to us when they retire,
and by that time they are two different people on
two very different paths, and they don't know they can't
find a way back. There's just too much image done,
too much disconnection done, and so we have the Great
divorce is the kind of what they're referring to now.
But you know, I think the space of that is
because we've got an aging population. I'm not sure the
statistics on who's getting divorced is changing as much as
there are more people who.
Speaker 3: Are gray haired to meet that.
Speaker 2: It certainly is true, though, that we live in a
time when people are more willing to say this isn't
working for me.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to bail.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Lee Bocam right
around the corner. He's got an app, he's got blogs,
he's got a podcast. He is Lee Bocam. Well, I'm
the freak that doesn't want to go back to my
wife back in nineteen ninety two. I like her the
way she is today, the way that we've grown together,
and so like when I see photographs or we talk
about things that happened in the in the nineties or
even the new millennium, it's like, you know, we're so
beyond that. There is that a healthy way to look
at your marriage or is it just one of those
things where it's like you're doing whatever you can to
keep this monkey growing.
Speaker 2: I want to kind of note that you said you
like who she's become, right, you like Sillar and you've
grown together and that so one of the mistakes that
people make is believing that they get to some endpoint,
that they have finally arrived. That's a fallacy that we
carry around, that we're supposed to have arrived at some point.
Speaker 3: I don't believe that at all.
Speaker 2: I think that we are constantly growing, whether we admit
to it or not, we're constantly growing and changing our perspectives.
And if we're not doing that in conjunction or and
not not necessarily together with our spouse, but in conversation
with a spouse, we lose track of where they are
and where we are. We tend to think that we
haven't changed. I had a person came to me years
ago and he said, my wife keeps saying out change,
and I need you to tell her I haven't changed.
And my response is, if you haven't changed, what a loss.
That's the normal way we go about things, and so
if you haven't, you've missed the opportunity. So acknowledge the changes,
but see that as a conversation point of it.
Speaker 3: The way you do grow together and work together as
a team.
Speaker 1: Man, I would love to see the numbers of how
many relationships are injured because these apps will sit there
and say this is where your husband is or your
wife is right now in the car, and it's like,
that's a little bit too close.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I do think that there are plenty
of people who feel like they want their spouse to
know where they are. Then there are people who feel
like that's an invasion, and that is a conversation point.
If couples are both good with that, that's okay. I
certainly would. My wife can find me on the find
mine and me for her. But I don't you know,
it's not like I'm going, oh, let me micromanage where
you are. It's a safety piece if one of us
were not around, especially for her, for me, since I'm
often paddleboarding somewhere in the middle of somewhere else, or
I'm on a long walk, and she's just like, man,
I hope he's okay.
Speaker 3: She could call me, or she could just take a
glance and go, okay, he's fine.
Speaker 1: You've got five critical resets that you talk about. I
think this is amazing because is it through the power
of choice that we have five critical resets? Or is
it one of those things where Okay, let's get past
A first, then we're gonna jump up to B. But
we got to get through A and understand it first.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so whenever we're faced with a reset, it's
usually because we've gotten stuck, and the stuck places are
pointing to places where we have stopped the growing, we've stagnated,
and or at least half the team is stagnated. Sometimes
the other person is moving and we don't always go
forward at the same path. A lot of times one
person will go, hey, wait, this isn't feeling right, and
the other person's, oh, it's just a phase.
Speaker 3: It's just a stage.
Speaker 2: But the disconnection continues to feed on itself unless it's addressed.
So you do a reset in order to get past
that stuck point.
Speaker 1: So do you bump into people though and cover subjects
when it comes to the dos and don'ts. And I'm
often wondering if there's a lot of don'ts that are
taking place that basically create that place where you can
you got to bump in the middle of the path,
is what you've got.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean, you got to have both, right
that you need to know what to avoid, but you
also need to know what to move towards. That I
think if a lot of times we're left with one
or the other and information, it's like somebody says, don't
do this, and the person's response is, well, so then
what do I do?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't have that anymore, so what do
I do?
Speaker 2: And conversely, a lot of times were said, we're told
you focus on this, but they don't know where they're
stepping in trouble along the way, And so you need
to kind of have both of those what is the
mirror of each other and choosing the better direction?
Speaker 1: What are you personally learning from each one of these stories,
because I mean, I mean, you're more than a messenger.
You've either lived it or you're gonna sit there and
say I'm going to prevent it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That was one of my ways of struggling through this
whole therapy training thing at the beginning of my career,
when I realized how ineffective marital therapy really was and
the only way I could find a way forward is
to well, one, research what other experts were saying and
finding in research, but also to ask the question what
am I seeing in front of me?
Speaker 3: You know, where are the stock points? Constantly and then to.
Speaker 2: Basically have an experiment if we do this, what's the effect?
If we do this, what's the effect? And to track that.
So I spent a lot of time doing that tracking
over the years, and part of what that does is
that it tuned you to hearing the stories for what's
behind it. You're trying to break down what's behind all
of that so you can find a new path forward.
We're pretty clear that some of the paths that therapy
has well trodden didn't really make the difference. Communication theory
didn't make a difference, So let's find some other ways forward.
Speaker 1: Do you believe in the practice marriage? My first marriage
went twelve and a half years. I'm currently at thirty
three years. I always tell people it's because I had
some practice.
Speaker 2: So some people decide that there first and only marriage
is their practice marriage.
Speaker 3: You learn all the way.
Speaker 2: Other people find that they have done the damage the
first time. And here's the bigger problem I see is
people never learn the lesson to escape that, so they
get stuck. And we have a just resource shows that
people have a tendency that if an issue came up
in a marriage and they did not resolve it, it
will repeat itself. You'll find it again. So practice doesn't
ever make perfect right. Perfect practice like refining your practice
and saying what do I need.
Speaker 3: To learn from here? And you can do that, you
know a lot of.
Speaker 2: Times in the first go and just say, okay, we
made some mistakes.
Speaker 3: My family has always used this little thing.
Speaker 2: We called it a rejo, and that's when you back
yourself into a corner and you can either ask or
be offered a redo.
Speaker 3: We did it with our kids when they were growing up.
You know, they would start.
Speaker 2: Down a path where they got in locked into a
power struggle and I would simply say, hey, do you
want to do a rejo? And they would often do
that because they knew they had hited down a one
way alley to the end. And my wife and I
do with each other, and the rules of that are
that you go back to before you headed.
Speaker 3: Down that alley.
Speaker 2: You're not sticking with that alley walk. You're you're going
back and saying, let's let's start there. This is where
we were doing good. Let's start there. And if you
do that, you have something to learn from, right, there
is something that you go, hey, did how did that happen?
How did I walk myself down the alley? How did
we do that? And how can we do it differently?
Speaker 1: Do you believe that marriages should be treated like businesses?
Speaker 2: There are some ways that I think that that's an
interesting metaphor so a business in most places I know
in the world see it as an entity. It's a
separate entity that exists, right, And so that entity. The
more it is treated as a really a place, like
you give it a home, you give it a business location,
and you do advertising and you talk about that the company,
the more real it becomes. It's still just a fictional
entity that we make up. And the same is true
in a marriage where you sign a license kind of
like you do an incorporation, and you now have an entity, right,
So you have an entity there, and.
Speaker 3: The more you treat it real, the more real it becomes.
Speaker 2: There are some other pieces, like a company how it
deals with its finances, that our finances as a company
is true for a relationship to a marriage, can say
our in fact. Any other way of seeing it is
what the psychologists in the money world.
Speaker 3: Called mental accounting.
Speaker 2: They're making divisions where there aren't actually divisions. So what
happens when a company starts playing around with their money
usually they get into trouble. What happens when a couple
doesn't see it as our resource? They start fighting about
what's yours and what's mine, and they get into trouble.
So there are some definite parallels there. The problem is
businesses are transactional by nature, and marriages are not transactional.
Speaker 3: They're about connections.
Speaker 2: So I used to do a lot of consulting with
family businesses and I would go in and I would say,
you know, you've got a hybrid here, and you've got
to differentiate. The hybrid is the business. The family is
about relationships.
Speaker 3: The business is.
Speaker 2: About profit, and profit is created by transactions. Relationships are
created by connection. So when you forget that, you cross
over and make it transactional. I have certainly met couple
that run their business their their marriage like a business.
It's very transactional. It's lacking in connection. They play a role,
and some of them have said that's just the way
it is. We like it this way. If that's their choice, yes,
But the difference between business and marriage is the difference
between the transaction and connection.
Speaker 1: My god, I got to get people to your website
to find out more about your blogs, the podcast, the app.
I mean, you're so actively involved. Where can they go
to get this journey started and then send you emails
and say, my god, it works. Dude, Lee, You're like
the miracle worker.
Speaker 2: So the easiest place to define a couple of resources
to go to save themarriage dot com slash podcast. Save
the marriage dot com slash podcast, because here we are,
you know, kind of in the podcast world, and that
gives access to the system for people who really find
themselves at a crisis.
Speaker 3: It also gives a connection to that on pause app.
Speaker 2: But there is another piece, and that is to help
people figure out where they are. It's an assessment, have
a GPS assessment, and they can figure out if they're at.
Speaker 3: Green light, yellow light, or red light.
Speaker 2: And red light just means you might need to pause
here and figure out what damage there is and what
can happen. The yellow light just means there are some
issues here you need to be aware of. Green light
is let's get you out of the pause mode and
onto being happily married. But a lot of people can't
figure that out, so they take the assessment and that
walks them through it.
Speaker 1: Wow, you have got to come back to this show
more than just this one time.
Speaker 3: Dude.
Speaker 1: I love where your heart is and that is so
important to me too, that I truly trust your heart.
Speaker 3: Thank you, I appreciate that. I love to come back.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Well man, you have a brilliant day today, Okay, sir,
thank you too,