Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe.
Oh my goodness. Y'all, I don't know if it is just summertime and I be popping off over here. This is my jam. I love summer. But um we have just come off of those two incredible covert narcissism episodes here on the podcast. I have been getting such gorgeous feedback from many, many of you. So um thank you. Thank you for conveying how much those episodes meant to you. As you all have probably been hearing, they took a lot out of me as I've been responding to some of you. So it just means the world to hear that they are landing and landing beautifully and landing pretty hard for a lot of you. And that's what I want when you're dealing with covert narcissism. So yum, yum, yum on that. And now here we are on this week and what will ultimately be next week as well, getting to drop into what it is like, what I believe are the areas to be working on if you are in a different camp entirely, which is the staying camp. So before I drop into this episode that I am just like already really obsessed about, I've been writing and digesting a lot of this all day long. And now I get to finally drop in and record with y'all. I want to share though something super exciting that happened this week that also was a huge impetus behind me bringing this work forward as well at this point in time. So, y'all open up my email this week and I am looking and I'm like, oh my God, there is an email from Maya Biolik, which I don't think I talked about this that much in my recap and everything, but leaving the episode with her, I definitely felt like, damn, I wish we could hang out more. Like she was so down to earth, so cool. Um, there was part of me that was like, uh, I wish we could vibe. Um, and also, you know, she is a famous person. And I imagine as somebody who's famous, I would not want people being like, I really want to hang out with you. So to see this email from her, I was like, What? And I click it, open it. Turns out it was a personal email from her that first off was just once again so warm and kind and the loveliest, like, oh my God, how are you doing? Um, I hope, you know, things are going well. Post the episode. And also, heads up, she was sharing with me that she has she had just been on the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called. I'm hoping that there are some of you that have actually like know this podcast because you're probably like, What? I had never heard of this podcast. Super cool. I've gone over and looked at it now with hosts Christine Taylor and David Lasher. And, y'all, they had her actually returning to their podcast. She's been on it before, but they were talking about her podcast, The Biolic Breakdown. And they had selected three episodes that they wanted to discuss with her, and she was emailing me to tell me that mine was one of the three, y'all. Which is just like, what? Oh my God, how freaking cool. So, of course, we will have Alex link this episode in the show notes. It was really cool. So I listened to the episode. They spend the majority of the episode on the other two, I mean, guys, amazing guests that Maya had on her podcast discussing like big, you know, near-death experiences and manifesting. So know that if you listen to it, I am the adorable last 11-ish, like around 12 minutes towards the end is when they start discussing my work. And still, y'all, I was absolutely giddy when Maya started talking about my work and vibing about it with um both Christine and David. And it was just a really surreal and awesome experience for me that
um I wanted to share on the podcast. And it was through this episode that, and this email from Maya that I learned a lot more about Christine Taylor and her husband Ben Stiller, and how they did a separation and ultimately reunion in their marriage. And that really helped add fuel to the flame for this episode that has been, you know, percolating in the background for a while. It's been something, as I've mentioned a couple of times on the podcast for all my stay girlies. It's been something I've been wanting to do for a while. And that just kind of gave me the extra push. And in that episode, Mayam and Christine actually talk in their conversation about how a huge part, right, of what I am passionate about is that allowing yourself to be in both spaces, right? Allowing yourself to fully consider the go and the stay, that process is what really allows for such massive growth. And I loved that, you know, they really emphasize that, that what makes me unique is I'm not just about go, I am about stay. And I'm gonna drop a little further into the episode into explaining like I had a conversation with a woman that was in my community where she like drove home for me why that is magic. But the very real reality on the podcast is that the majority of my podcast just naturally leans towards emphasizing go. And I want you guys to know that is not actually intentional on my part. But I think it's more because so much of the historical narrative and feedback and conversations about divorce for women lean automatically towards staying. Okay, that has been the prevailing narrative around divorce for women for so long. And I hear from so many of you, right? I get on calls, and most of you have mothers or grandmothers or even friends or religions that are already telling you to stay, that are already like, just make it work. This is what you do. You made a commitment. I've even had women who shared with me how much they felt like they were forcing themselves to stay, that their own brain was working against them, like wouldn't even let them consider the go because it was so heavily programmed into stay, stay, stay, make their marriage work. And even, you know, what I would consider like gaslighting themselves into staying. So know that if you have been listening to the podcast and you're like, man, a lot of this is about going, that is not so much a me thing, as much as that is a natural part of my work needing to lean more towards counteracting the prevailing narratives in our culture. For those of you that may have thought that before, I've all like wanted for so long to be able to like break that down and explain why that is. And with that in mind, I also, anybody who really knows me, who has deep exposure to my work, as Maya and Christine kind of emphasized on the podcast, are like, yeah, I they get it. I deeply care about resourcing my women that are leaning towards and actually really considering staying as well. I always laugh, like in some of the comments coming off of Maya's podcast, right? People who haven't listened to my podcast are like, this woman is like clearly go. Like she's just wanting everybody to go, or men that are like, oh my God, she's just a man hater. She just wants women to leave their marriages. I'm like, okay, you obviously don't know any of my work and you have not actually listened to my podcast. Because if you had, you would understand there's a lot of nuance here. And I want to kind of drop in, you know, when we're talking about what is this episode going to be about, to saying that staying can be a very radical act of evolution. Okay. We're all I'm always talking about like growth and humanity evolving and us moving forward. Staying can be that when it is done with awareness and intention and a willingness on both partners' sides to meet each other again and again and again.
And not by default, because we've been told you need to stay married, you need to work through this, but by choice. And I just want to take this second before we drop into these two, you know, episodes that are gonna come out to say, holy shit, do I fucking love, honor, and commend the marriages and the couples that are showing up for each other in this way and diving into this work together. And not from fear or guilt or inertia, but from courage and truth and determination to really try to have this radical evolution in their marriage and build something different together. And, you know, as we're gonna get into this, it is ultimately a choice that requires deep internal work, not just external loyalty to ideas that we've all been sold and concepts about what you need to do, who you need to be if you're in a marriage. So if this has been you, my love, if you are one of the ones that has been listening and your heart has been crying out and hoping for, like, how do I do this? What are the resources for us to do this? I, you know, you've been maybe hoping and wondering, like, is my partner someone that um, you know, he seems to be waking up, he seems to want to do this stuff, where do we start? Then this is gonna be a really beautiful, incredible couple of weeks for you on the podcast. And of course, like I said, we're gonna be doing a part one this week and then part two next week, because y'all, when I started writing this episode, I realized when I went to record, I was like, oh my God, the scope of this topic is just too big to fit into one episode. It will be another, like, I don't know, three-hour-long episode. Um, no, we're gonna break it into two. So, as you guys have already deduced from what I've been talking about, we are diving into what it looks like to stay in a marriage, not by default, but by choice. And to kind of give you a little bit of a roadmap for where we're going to go, I wanna start off today's episode by sharing two big key points that I feel like need to be our foundation before I dive further into this beautiful list I'm gonna share. But I want these two points to help you understand more of the nuances and the complexity of the decision of staying and kind of how you get to that spot. And then once we've got those two points locked in, I'm going to share with you what I have adorably named with ChatGPT's help, the shift list. How fucking cute is that? Which is seven areas that as I was sitting, you know, going through my own brain, going through all of my work, going, okay, if they're gonna stay, what are the areas that they need to be working on? This is what I came up with. It's this shift list that has seven areas that I believe are crucial for you and your spouse to work on and explore if you're wanting to stay. And like the title says, if you're wanting to rewrite those marriage rules together in order to create something new, these are the areas that you're gonna want to start diving into and exploring. So we're gonna touch on the first area from that seven area list today. And then next week is where we will dive into the remaining seven in that episode. So you now have the roadmap. You can buckle your seatbelt and let's get rolling. So, point one is that staying can sometimes, I've seen this, I've seen a lot of guilt in women that are leaning more towards staying. Staying can sometimes get a bad rap. Okay. And I really want to start us off by emphasizing that there are so many different kinds of stays. Okay. So there's the stay where let's say there's a woman who's like, look, I just really want to see my kids every single day of their lives. Like that just matters the most to me. I do not want to miss a single moment of their experience. And I'm gonna stay in my marriage because of that. Because if I get married, part of the, you know, facts of what that may look like will be potentially half the time, I don't have my kids. And that matters enough to me that I want to stay in my marriage because I want to see my kids every single day. Um, another stay scenario for someone might be, you know, I'm just very religiously committed to this idea of marriage and the institution of it. And it's just really, really important to me. And so I'm going to stay because of my religious beliefs. On this podcast, in fact, we have talked about a type of stay that's I'm not going to be talking about today, but that I want to make clearer, which is a stay where you ultimately just like your partner across from you, you decide, okay, I'm going to accept this person as they are, and I am not going to expect any more or keep holding out for them to change. And this should be ringing a bell, hopefully, for some of you that have been longtime listeners to the podcast, that this is the kind of stay that my best friend Quinn is talking about when she stayed in her marriage. And in a future episode where I interview Quinn, we will probably dive in more fully into this piece and how it's different. Um, and get you kind of get to have her explain that in her own words. Another type of stay that I'm currently kind of obsessed about that is a new concept that I'm developing and really honestly introducing in this episode right here, right now, is the idea of a strategic stay. And what I mean by that is this is the type of stay where ultimately you know that what you want most is not possible with your partner, that the life that you want, the relationship you want is just not possible. But because of the economic disadvantages women face in our patriarchal culture, because of the time it is taking you to heal from effects of narcissistic abuse or to learn about your CPTSD and manage it, because of having partners. Maybe you have a partner that is struggling with addiction and unable to care for your children. So you're really afraid of leaving for that reason. Like there are all sorts of scenarios that lead to this feeling of like, I don't actually want to stay, but I am for this moment. And I'm calling that a strategic stay because I've seen how this is often a key and crucial part for a lot of women who need time to get their ducks in a row and have enough of an internal and external support system to be able to leave safely for themselves, for their children in more healthy ways than if they were just to like up and go. So, strategic stay is something I'm going to be discussing with Quinn on an episode that's coming up soon. So just put a little like pin in that because we will come back to that piece. So I'm explaining all of these potential stays, right? All of these different reasons that people might choose to stay in their marriage. And I want to really going into this episode,
make clear that I have a lot of compassion for my stay women. No matter what your reason for staying is, I just have a lot of compassion. And especially since I have noticed for women that decide to stay or having, I'm thinking right now of like a 90-minute where a woman got on with me where she's really having to like strategically stay. And she's getting a lot of blowback and kind of flack from her friends that, you know, are like, it's not good. You need to get out, right? There's a lot of cultural narratives that can lead to leaving being seen as empowering and staying ultimately meaning weakness. And I want to just like unequivocally reframe that in this episode that whether you choose to stay or go, making that choice is yours. It is yours, and nobody else gets a say on whether that is empowering or disempowering for you. And my viewpoint is that whether it's stay or go, you making the choice that is yours, that feels right for you, that is what is most empowering. Okay. And the more that we can, especially as women, step back from the judgments, from thinking we know what choice somebody else should be making, or how fast they should be making it, or whether their choice is empowering or disempowering, right? Just all of it. Like we all just need to come back into our lanes and understand that that choice is so deeply personal that we can never really look at somebody else and say, you know, oh, she should have left, or oh, it was weak of her to stay. Okay. So I hope that compassionately, like I'm like reaching out through the sound waves to my stay girlies. And I'm like, I see you. I got you. Okay. Also, in my opinion, staying does not automatically equal settling. Okay. I think a lot of us kind of get that mixed up. And I want to delineate that I think settling actually comes from when you are choosing to stay, but in doing that, you have to sacrifice your greatest priorities in your life in order to make it work. Okay. And this is why the whole process of considering divorce and figuring out what you want most is so vital because you have to know yourself. Um, in my 90 minutes, we often in the process that we do, right? We're doing this before and after process. The after process is so important because we talk about like what is the life you most desire? What do you consider a well-lived life? What are the things that you're gonna regret one day if you're on your deathbed and you're looking back? Okay. If you don't know that, you don't know what you prioritize most, what actually matters most. And you need to know that, to know if it's worth it to stay. Because if you don't know your priorities, then you don't know what you're having to settle or give up. Like what is the cost of the staying? And that cost, and if you're willing to pay that cost or not, if that cost is enough, it really comes down to being a very super personal and different for each and every one of us kind of choice. So know all of y'all that no matter what your stay is, like ultimately, I believe adults get to make their choices. And I'm down for any one of those stays as long as in each of those examples I listed, the woman that is making that choice gets to choose it from an educated space of knowing her priorities and what she actually wants, what the costs are, and choosing that consciously. That is the big piece for me. So, some of the questions you can ask yourself. To kind of help you get clear on those pieces are like, what is the place I am currently staying from? You know, what is the energy? Am I staying from a place of fear? Am I staying from a place of curiosity? Am I staying from a place of wonder? Am I staying from a place of resourcing at the moment? It is so crucial to know for yourself what place am I staying from at the moment? And to be honest with yourself about that. Also, a client gave me this question that I just really loved as well, where she said, one of the questions that helped her the most in figuring this out was if fear is not driving the car, what do I want out of my relationship? So if fear wasn't driving me, what would I actually want out of my relationship most? And I think this inquiry, starting to really let yourself go to what is the life I most desire? What is the after? I sometimes describe this to my women in 90 minutes as like, if I had a magic wand and I could give you whatever future you desire, what would you choose? And as said before on the podcast, for many of us as women being raised in patriarchal societies, we don't fully have our eyes open to what we actually want, what we actually desire. So know that that is a key piece. I am going to talk about that later in my list of like the individual work that you need to
be doing. Okay, so with all of that in mind, I want to make clear that this episode, what I'm about to discuss and dive into with my shift list and all of those pieces, this is not work that is going to help with those other kinds of stays. Okay. This is not work that is about endurance. It is about engagement. This is work for those of you that are wanting to stay because you are wanting the things that I've talked about on the episode where I am like, this is what a truly great marriage looks like. Um, this is for those of you wanting to stay that are like, I want soul connection. I want to be seen and known by my partner. I want a foundation of leaning in and prioritizing each other's personal growth and our growth together as a couple. Okay. So these tips are not going to be fits for those previous stays. This is for those of you that are really trying to see if the work of rebuilding a marriage, recreating something radically new and evolving together is possible with your spouse. And if
it is, the doors are kind of cracked open, the windows are open, like, okay, we've got some possibilities. These are the steps that you can start taking to start moving down that path and creating that conscious dynamic together. So my takeaways from point one are this episode is not about where you choose to stay and accept that your partner and the relationship is not changing, but you're okay with that because your top priorities are still being met. Like I want to see my kids every single day. And this episode is also not about strategic staying, which is where you know your spouse is not ultimately what you want long term, but you cannot financially, mentally, or emotionally leave just yet. Okay. This episode is about staying because you think you have a partner who may actually be able to do the work and rewrite the rules with you, and you want to see if
that's possible. Now, let's drop into point two. I want to emphasize that often, and actually, I would like go so far as to say this is like a pretty big statement, but I would say the majority of the time, the catalyst that makes an opening of this magnitude, okay, that makes this amount of change possible in a marriage, comes from the courageous act of saying you are ready to leave and being okay with going. So let that sink in for a second. What I am saying is sometimes for a marriage to even be able to go to this level of evolution and growth and change, what precipitates that is someone being courageous enough to say, I'm out. Right, y'all. So I have to give immense credit for this gorgeous thought nugget. She just framed it out so beautifully that I'm about to drop on y'all this immense nugget of wisdom from one of my listeners who ended up joining the community. And she later left it to pursue staying with her own husband. And I just want to give her a shout out. Hello, my gorgeous, gorgeous. Thank you so much. For she sent me back an audio. When she left, I was like, tell me more about this process. And she let me into her world. Um, so I know you're listening. Thank you so much. That's a huge piece of what drove a lot of the heart of this episode. She said, a big piece of deciding to stay in your marriage is being okay with leaving it, which gives you the freedom
to recreate something different. Y'all, this is like the heart of the deep magic in the considering process. I am so eternally grateful to her for putting it into words in this like very powerful, concise way. So I want to dive you in though a little bit to what she shared with me about the process behind that. So in her breakdown of like what led her to ultimately staying, she shared with me that the real shift for her seemed to come from her process of making peace with going. Isn't that the most like paradoxical thing, y'all? Let us all feel our brains exploding collectively. And she told me she was like, I decided I was going to stay in my marriage when I told my husband I was ready to leave him. Like, what? Right? It just makes me so excited because of yes, this is it. This is what I've wanted to talk about and explain on the podcast for so long when people are like, she wants people to divorce. It's so wrong, even considering divorce. I'm like, you guys do not get it. Um, she proceeded to describe to me how through the process and the journey of getting to the point of realizing it and like knowing for herself, like, okay, I can leave, I can look the fear in the eye and I can do this. That journey, getting to that point, is what allowed her to really drop into her truth and admit to herself that what she wanted as a woman, what she wanted in her relationship at the time was not there. And when you finally get to the point, like, I'm gonna leave, you are kind of like bravely at the point where you're like, yeah, this isn't enough. And that when she got to that moment of saying, I'm ready to go, in her instance, her husband was kind of going through a same and similar like journey on the other end of also going, oh, wait, if this is gonna collapse, I also I don't want this either. I'm gonna make the changes. And she says that's the moment where she was like, Oh, I realized he is open to building something new with me. And I'm no longer staying because I think I have to. I know I can go. Okay, let's give this a shot. And later on in next week's episode, I'll talk a little bit how I think this is similar to perhaps obviously that I don't know a ton of details beyond what I just could read on the internet, but perhaps what Christine Taylor and Ben Stiller were doing in their separation that ultimately ended up in a reunion. Now, to kind of break it down even further, what she was doing there is she had to admit to herself and really see how much what she had in her marriage was not what she actually wanted. And then go through the journey of strengthening herself enough through all of her questioning and her self-coaching to get to the point where she had built right this willingness in herself of like, I will not abandon what I want most to stay here. And even though I'm scared, I am willing to leave and face the fear. And I have finally built up the ability and the like resourcing in myself to be ready to do it. That then in her specific case, on the opposite side of that, you know, while she's going through that journey, her husband as well is waking up, seeing the reality, admitting the, you know, the ways that he is not happy as well, and he wants things to change. And now together they can come back to this space, not out of, y'all, we have to stay married, we made a commitment to each other, we made promises, or even out of fear, but from empowered spaces of, you know what? We both want this. And it's gonna be a journey. And we're both going to do the work to change and create something new. And I want you all to hear in that that is a very different energetic signature from both of those individuals than when you're just resigned to it or you're just like, okay, well, we're just gonna stay in this marriage. And wow, is it powerful, right? The power in her getting to the point where she could stay and lean back in, not out of fear of leaving, but from a space of like, yeah, I know I can go. And let's see what's here. So, my takeaway from my second point is when you are no longer desperate to stay and make it work at all costs, even the sacrifice of your greatest priorities and what you want most out of life, that is when the magic can happen because you get brave enough to speak your truth. You get brave enough to know your truth and finally be speaking it. And then, y'all, it's like a two-part process. If you have a partner willing to dive in and do their work as well, that's when together you can evolve the relationship, rewrite the rules, and change the game that you've been playing in your marriage.
Y'all, right? I'm like, ah. To those of you doing this work, like woof, woof, it takes two people really willing to come through the bullshit and find a new way forward. So with these two important points made, y'all, we're now headed into my shift list of seven areas to basically like start, dive into if you are wanting to stay with your partner. And where I want to start first, and honestly, what I consider out of this entire list, this first one is neck and neck with number two as being the most important areas that I think are just like have to be worked on if you are going to stay, have to have major, major overhaul in them. So, first one on the list is regulated communication. Okay, and this is talking to understand and to be understood. And y'all, boy, do we have a tremendous breakdown of this like worldwide? I have seen it massively in the US this year. It's it's shown most poignantly and just like right up in your face in the political sphere, where you just see people who are not regulated in their bodies communicating with each other in ways that are inflammatory and violent and ultimately lead to just kind of energy. So let's dive into this. True intimacy, it really does require more than just speaking words back and forth to each other, y'all. Like those of you in marriages know that just because you're quote, communicating does not mean you're actually getting closer or experiencing the safety or emotional intimacy from that communication. Okay. And the heart of that, I believe from what I've been reading, and especially as we've been doing our NBC nonviolent communication the summer, is that we need to be having that communication from spaces where our nervous system feels safe, where our nervous system is regulated. Okay. And this is such a like did the egg or the chicken, like carp before the horse kind of feeling because you absolutely in the relationship need to be speaking up, okay, in a relationship like this. Okay. When it comes to those of you that are married to NPD individuals and you are experiencing severe narcissistic abuse anytime you speak up, I'm not talking to you, okay? This is not your episode. Your episode was last week and the week before. But for those of you that actually have partners that do not, that are not, you know, um reacting to you with narcissistic wounding or could not be fully diagnosed NPD, you've got to be opening your mouth. You've got to be speaking up. Okay. And then on top of that, not only do we need to be speaking to each other because we cannot read each other's minds. And when we try to read each other's minds, we get lost in our thoughts, we get lost in our stories and our realities. This makes me think so much, by the way, of um Brene Brown's Netflix special. Um, but in that Netflix special, she describes this so beautifully where she shares an example of her swimming across a lake or something. And her husband and her, like they both get triggered and they have these stories going on inside their heads. And by the time they get to the other side, like both of them are in a total absolute tizzy. And she breaks that spell by saying, Hey, the story I'm telling myself is this. And it was something like, You don't love me, you don't think I'm attractive anymore. And when she actually asks him, like, what are you actually thinking and feeling? What comes out is that he was like freaking terrified that she was gonna drown or something. Like he was trying to save the children. It was just it's the most go watch it, y'all. I love that special in general, but this is an incredible example of what I'm talking about. Of we can think we know what our partner is thinking. We can think we are communicating. And if we are not doing that from spaces where we are connected to ourself as well, like that's what happens when you are feeling safe in your nervous system. You can't actually hear what the other person is saying because you're so triggered and so riled up by all of the stuff happening in your body that then what they're saying comes through differently. It's the whole like you've got lenses on and you're seeing the world and you're hearing the things they're saying through those lenses. I'm just gonna probably gonna do this like three times in the section, but like I'm gonna caveat again. This is not for my NPD girlies. Okay. So there is a difference between listening and hearing. Okay, because this is the other piece. Not only do we need to be speaking up, but we need to be listening. Hearing is something we do passively. You can hear a siren going off. You can hear a dog barking. Listening, though, is active and intentional. And if you think about it, y'all, it's very hard to be active and intentional unless you are in a state where your nervous system is more downregulated. Okay. When you are listening, you bring your full attention to understanding the other person. You're not just taking in their words, you're not just thinking of the next thing you're gonna say or how you're gonna address what they just brought up. You are tuning in to the other person's tone, their body language, their subtext, and their emotional energy. And y'all, when I talk about empathic connecting, this style of listening and communicating with a regulated nervous system is what I'm talking about. And for my MPD girlies, this is what is so aggressively missing whenever you communicate with an individual with narcissism. They are not able to tune in in this way to actually be listening to truly understand and like put themselves in your shoes and feel you in that way. So you are listening with intention to understand, not to defend or fix. So I want to just pause here for a second and all of us just notice how much this is not the way we were raised to communicate, how this is not the way we communicate in our marriage. This may not be the way we communicate with our children. This, like, this is not a skill that we are being taught, at least here in America. There may be some of y'all, I don't know, perhaps in like, is it Norway, Sweden, where y'all are perhaps being taught to like actually listen, but America, man, we tend to just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And we could really use some work around listening to understand. And not necessarily to agree, but to understand. Now, like I'm emphasizing earlier, to listen this way, you have to have a regulated nervous system. Or at least, okay, because that's like a really high standard. Guys, I don't even have that. But at least an awareness of when you move into dysregulation so that you don't instantly in the conversation start going into the defensiveness or the shutting down and pulling away. Um, and this is, you know, making me think so much of the CPTSD work of understanding when you get triggered, when you are moving into an emotional flashback, when your brain is flooding and you are back at like age five, being told you're, you know, you're interpreting what your partner's saying is being told that you're a bad person and you are just spiraling into that emotional flashback. When you understand that that's what the majority of us are doing in our conversations, you start to see through a different lens that many of us were not necessarily coming from true defiance or hatred, but rather from being triggered and like a little kid not knowing how to handle that. Most of us were raised by emotionally immature parents that did not teach us how to regulate our nervous systems. So, what do we react with? We react with our coping mechanisms. For some of us, that ends up looking like, you know, reacting from anger and speaking out and our voice increasing, our yelling. And for others, it can look like the freezing and the fawning. Now, for all my girlies that are in the community right now, they are probably vibing big on this because this is the heart of the work we've been doing in summer camp. This is nonviolent communication. Y'all, since discovering this book and understanding the principles in it and then teaching it in the summer camp that we're going through, uh, it has really driven home for me how much until we move into spaces of more regulated nervous systems, which I'll talk about in the second part of my that's my second one on my list. Next week, communication just ends up becoming this triggering violent experience that actually, instead of bringing us closer together, creates more and more rifts and more and more distance between us. So we really have to dive in and start investing in these practices that you learned through the book Nonviolent Communication around how to listen differently, how to actually really listen instead of just hear, how to communicate in ways that center your feelings and express your needs clearly rather than what most of us do, which is project and blame and try to get our needs met by shaming others. So nothing can change, y'all. I truly believe this in the foundational pieces of your marriage, if you and your partner cannot learn to communicate from more regulated conscious selves. I really want to emphasize that point. Communication seems to be the way we as humans come together, the way we build things, it's through language. And so I want to drive home this first and most important piece that if you have a partner who is wanting to change, is okay, are we going to be able to do this? This is where I would start. Both of you start diving into this book, start learning the tools of nonviolent communication and start practicing with them. Start noticing what changes as you start using them. Because until you have these foundational tools, you are just going to be running in circles chasing each other. Okay. That's kind of what ends up happening in that scenario. And it's acknowledging that, okay, no shame in it. Most of us have not been taught this. The majority of the world and the way we are programmed by the things we see. And once you start learning about nonviolent communication, you start seeing it everywhere. It will blow your mind how many of us are communicating violently without even knowing it, because that is just what we as humans, as children grew up seeing and what we are now reproducing. All right, y'all. So that is the first in my list. Next week, we are going to dive into the rest, the remaining six items on my shift list for what it takes to really start changing and shifting in your marriage and with your partner. These are areas that both of you, as you can see from the nonviolent communication, this is a space where both of you can drop in and start doing that work and learning it on your own and then practicing it together. Some of the other fun things I'm going to be talking about on the list are, you know, why it's important to reevaluate your want matches. So many of us got married and picked individuals when we were one person. We may be a very different person now. You got to recheck in on those want matches. How I believe it's time for martyrdom to be replaced with mutual thriving in marriages and a lot more. Also, um, I had such a blast this week meeting so many of you on 90-minute sessions. A lot of you have been coming through with the covert narcissism episodes. And I just can't tell y'all how much I love getting to drop in on your personal experiences with you. Like on the podcast, I deliver these ideas and these concepts in very broad, sweeping strokes so that they apply to everybody. But when we get on a 90-minute together, I get to be up close and personal with you. And you get to share with me finally all the things that may have been on your brain while you've been listening to the podcast where you're like, but Britta, what about this? Wait, but in my instance, it looks like this. So if you have been waiting to get on one, ask yourself, what the fuck am I waiting for? And let's make this happen. I mean, there's so much I know that you're gleaning from the podcast, but when we get to do it in person and it is just about you, that is really life-changing. So if you've been wanting one and you're like, yes, let's do this, I want you to text 90 Min, that's 90M I N to 33777, babe, and go sign up for one. I would love to see you this week or next. Also, y'all, as I said, the number one thing on my list, right, is nonviolent communication. And it just so happens that that is what our entire summer camp is on for this month and next month. And the way the community works, each month we have like our topic. And then at the end of that month, that topic closes, and that area of the community is only available to the women that joined during that month. So, y'all, we are in the last week of June. And if you get into the community this week, that means you will have access to all of our first month of summer camp and the materials that we were doing there, which I want for you all. If you've been like, oh my God, I really like nonviolent communication, this seems to be a thing for me. Um, I would love for you to get in this week so that you get to have the whole first half with all of the explanation of the reading you need to do and the chapters and the topics and all of the calls that we've had this month. And all of that before we head into the second month in July. I have really been seeing such beautiful work coming out of these tools in all the areas for my women in the community. Um, we had a most recent campfire call just yesterday, I think. Yeah. And um, it was really fun to get to hear, you know, women talking about this nonviolent communication, helping them with their children, helping them uh with people that are a little bit spicy on their softball team. Like this has application for every area of your life, regardless of, you know, the amazing impact that it definitely has as well in the space of your marriage and communicating while you're trying to figure out whether you want to stay or go. Also, y'all, final piece. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and rate us if possible. I would love some more reviews. I just have to say, y'all, I saw a review yesterday on the podcast that was all about how disturbing my viewpoints on affairs are and how affairs are never acceptable. So if you are one of my gals listening that perhaps has a different opinion, I'm winking at you all right now. Um, I'd love for you to take the time to go share your thoughts on the podcast by writing a review mentioning perhaps why you may feel differently. With all of that said, I fucking love y'all and I can't wait to see you next week. Till then, I'm gonna go to the house.