Travel Is Cheaper Than Divorce
"Travel is cheaper than divorce, I should know. My wife and I were at the door to it." - David Packer
In this podcast I share some of the places, experiences and moments that changed the dynamics of not only my marriage but also the relationship with my kids. Travel was a big key of growing together, becoming stronger as a family and truly saving my marriage with my wife.
I share with you, how you can gain and travel using points and other rewards programs to see and explore some of the most amazing places in the world. In this podcast I share some of the lessons both good and bad, that have guided me and my family as we have navigated the growth and expansion of a family unit.
TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE... when you do it smart. In this podcast I give the tips and tricks I have used and the secrets I teach others of using rewards & point programs to maximize the dollars you are already spending to create some unforgettable memories with your family.
Travel Is Cheaper Than Divorce
Breaking the Cycle of Silence and Stigma
What if embracing the complexities of your family's past could transform your present relationships? Join us as we share a deeply personal journey through the emotional maze of growing up with a homosexual father during the silence of the early 90s. By recounting the challenges faced by our family, including our mother's reliance on therapy to explain the reality of divorce, we explore how these early experiences shaped a tendency to avoid difficult conversations. Yet, the narrative doesn't stop there; it's about breaking free from this cycle. Discover how a commitment to openness and honesty with our own children is gradually dismantling the barriers of silence and stigma.
Travel becomes an unexpected lifeline, offering a sense of mental and spiritual freedom that carries us beyond the emotional scars of separation. Reflect on the transformative power of new experiences as a healing balm for familial wounds, and consider the potential of travel to foster stronger, more open bonds. Through heartfelt anecdotes, we invite you to look at travel not just as a getaway, but as an enriching alternative to the costs of emotional turmoil. This episode offers a fresh perspective on acceptance and the liberating impact of openness, urging you to reconsider how you navigate relationships and family dynamics.
You are listening to, travel is Cheaper than Divorce. This podcast for all those who may be struggling with their spouse or their children and the relationship with them. We help give you tips and tricks by using travel as the means to be able to help your relationships with your family. I will provide those tricks and other ways to help travel with little or no cost. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1:My dad is a homosexual. When my dad came out back in the early 90s it was a different time for those who were homosexual, not a lot of understanding going on, frankly. So not only was I a child of divorce which wasn't as common as it is today and I'm hoping through what I say and what others say will help that the divorce rate does not increase anymore but hopefully goes backwards but back then divorce wasn't common and definitely, definitely having a homosexual father was very abnormal and wasn't spoken about. I lived in a world where that kind of I don't know secret the reason for my parents' divorce was not spoken about. I felt like when I was a child, into my teenage years, into high school and other times, that I really couldn't tell anybody. In a sense I had to hide by omission, not by commission. I didn't necessarily try to hide, but I didn't really want to say anything about it either. I made excuses. I made excuses. I didn't want to tell them. I you know what, if I were to be completely honest, I had a hard time accepting that. I had a hard time accepting what this whole thing was about, because not only does that make him different, especially back then, but this made me different. It made me much different, I felt, than other people who were around me, other peers. So you see other families who are around you, who are together. You stayed at your friend's house whose parents had never divorced and seemed like they loved each other. Because of where I lived at the time, you didn't see a lot of homosexual activity around Wasn't prevalent. My dad, however, stayed in Southern California, where is, at that point, a little more prevalent than it certainly was in Northern Utah. You know what's interesting actually I never realized this until this very moment that because I hid it so much when I was a child, I never hid it from my children, never. From the very beginning to all, my children know that their grandfather is a homosexual and they don't hide it from their friends like I did. And there's probably a difference between being a grandchild of a homosexual than a son of one. It just felt like I was different.
Speaker 1:You know, at that time there were also I mean this also kind of just added to it. I I mean these studies have been debunked over and over again, so I hate to bring them up, but it's what my lived experience was. But around the same time there were studies coming out that they said that they linked somehow homosexuality, some sort of genetic thing, in other words that could happen to me, as if it was some sort of a disease which again could make somebody like me and did make somebody like me say oh, this is, this is something you know, I don't know, it's just. Let's just say the 90s, the, you know, early 90s, late 90s, whatever the 90s were a different time for people who came out of the closet and it was much different for children of those same people as well. My mother had a hard time with this. Obviously, at the time that my parents got divorced, there was four kids in the house. She had had two miscarriages. So you know, if you count those two, there had been six, but two of them were never born, obviously because of the miscarriages, and she had a hard time accepting this fact. So much so, so much so, this fact, so much so, so much so my mother has a hard time, confrontation even with her own children, to the point where, when my parents were obviously getting a divorce, they gathered us all into the bedroom and she told, they told us, my mom and dad told us that they are being separated and that we are moving to northern Utah. They didn't use the word divorce. I don't know, maybe that's normal, I don't know, this is just my lived experience. Then we moved to northern Utah and then my mom started going to a therapist. When she went to a therapist, she still could not tell us what was really going on here.
Speaker 1:Now I was 11, 12 years old, somewhere in that area, my mom brought us to the therapist, her therapist, for the sole purpose to have the therapist not her, but the therapist tell me and all the rest of the siblings, everybody who was there, tell us all that they were getting a divorce. She still couldn't tell us. And then the the she couldn't, you know, she obviously could not tell us. And then the the she couldn't, you know, she obviously could not tell us that he was a homosexual. So the therapist did that too. She completely avoided the entire thing. To this day it kind of makes me laugh now.
Speaker 1:But, um, but being the kid that I was only 11, 12 years old, not knowing a lot about these things in my mind I didn't say it out loud, but in my mind I was like what's a homosexual? The foggiest idea what that was at the time. Honestly, I can't even remember how I figured it out. It's not like there was Google back then. You know, flip through a encyclopedia to find homosexual. I don't know. I honestly don't know where I found out. I did, obviously, because when I found out again, as I said earlier, I felt like I was different.
Speaker 1:And in retrospect, as I'm talking about this memory of mine, I can say that my mom avoiding telling us is probably another reason why I, for a lot of our marriage, avoided tough things too. Avoided emotion, avoided subjects that are too difficult to talk about. I try not to do that anymore. I try to be open and honest with everybody, and I'm being open and honest with everybody and I'm being open and honest with everybody on this podcast. I've told things on this podcast and other places that I would never have really told other people, because I want you to understand that you're not alone out there.
Speaker 1:There are probably people within the sound of my voice who have experienced the exact same thing. They had a homosexual father and if they lived in a conservative spot in America, maybe they felt shamed for even saying it. I want to make something abundantly clear I love my dad. I have a pretty gosh dang good relationship with my dad, even to this point. He's made mistakes in his life. But who hasn't this? All, all of all of this, this, this, this time where I felt different and honestly, I can honestly say at this point in my life I probably still feel different, because you know, it's not a thing that is. I mean it's. It's maybe more prevalent now. I don't know. It seems like that because you know, I don't know this for sure, so take it for what it's worth, it seems.
Speaker 1:My observation is, as it's been more I don't know if the word accepted is a proper word, but accepted in society more that less people are having children and then coming out of the closet, which is what my dad did. I don't know that for sure. It may be just my observation, as it is, that maybe there's not so many divorcees whose dads are homosexual that they can't. They have to hide it too. I think it's just too. I think it's more accepted now that they don't have to do that anymore. But that's not how it was for me. That was not my experience, and I know there were some people within the sound of my voice that this is their experience too.
Speaker 1:And it was hard. My dad was, from the very beginning, was was there for me. He called me and my siblings once a week, my siblings once a week. He he flew in, he traveled as much as he could to see us in, uh, in, um, our choir concerts or band concerts or whatever that we were doing extracurricular things at school. I mean that that's that, um I am grateful for to this point and see how that, how that that part of travel actually affected my life. Just him traveling like that affected my life.
Speaker 1:I'll say this about my dad Because I didn't shun him, because I didn't put him off, because I didn't put him in a corner and because he didn't do the same to me after the divorce. I will say that he's one of the people in my life who I feel like is genuinely loves me more than a lot of people who supposedly love me. But you know, in a way I'm grateful for all that Because it makes me think differently about things. It makes me see the world differently than I would otherwise. It helped me take something as simple as travel and find something different, if you will, about it, how to make it work. It makes me be able to work with clients, in my previous practice and otherwise, who are also homosexual, and to me that they're just all people. They're just all people. I think people are genuinely good, genuinely and generally good people.
Speaker 1:Divorce is a terrible thing for children, no matter the reason. I can understand the reason, left, right and backwards. It doesn't mean it makes it any easier on the child. You may say to yourself there's absolutely. I mean. The situation with my father, I believe, is a different thing than what most people go through. I have observed and seen people get divorced for the most selfish of reasons I want to do what I want. When I want to do. It Is the typical, I would say typical reason. And then this woman or this man gets in my way or these children get in my way of what I want, I, I, I, I, I.
Speaker 1:If your sentences continually start with I in a marriage, why don't you start your sentences with you what do you want? How are you feeling? Not what I feel, what do I want? It's such a key to marriage. It's one of the things that my wife literally had to teach me. I remember this one day, okay.
Speaker 1:So we had a pretty nasty fight. We had a pretty nasty fight and after this nasty fight, I wrote her an apology letter. She took the apology letter. She took a pen and circled. Every single time I said the word I. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You don't see what I feel. I feel horrible. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Whole bunch of I's. She said don't you see how this entire apology letter is about you? It's one of those blow your mind moments for me. I didn't say I said I'm sorry that I made you feel this way. How about you rephrase that and say you are feeling awful and I am the one that did that to you. What do you need?
Speaker 1:Selfishness is such a huge part of why marriages break up. I had to hide. I had to hide so many things in my life. It feels like, and you know what happens. This is my observation in my life what happens when you hide things? You're usually hiding them because of shame, and then that shame gets bigger. And if you're hiding and hiding and hiding, that shame gets in the way of everything in your life. You have to let it go. You have to let it go I'm not saying you have to do it in a medium like this.
Speaker 1:There was a study done years ago that hasn't been refuted in this case, that those who are children of divorce are the ones that have the hardest problem with things like not the hardest problem, but certainly they have problems with things like sexual addiction, pornography, other habits that are tied to sex. I can't remember why, but what they conclude is the reason why. But that's what they found out in the study, in this, and I remember reading that article one day. This is when I was about I want to say it was about 20 years old, so I'm way past my adolescence at this point. This is when I realized that. Okay, so some of this has to do with that, although I can't blame everything in my life on something that happened so long ago, but I can certainly see where it came from. That's more of my point.
Speaker 1:It's not to excuse my behavior so much as to say I can see where it came from, because in later in life, even early in our marriage and even sometimes in the midsize of my marriage anyways, in various points of our marriage, I had been addicted to pornography. And that all comes from a place, I believe, where this whole thing started with the divorce. There's other things also, and I used to hide that out of shame. I'm not going to do that anymore. All of these things have shaped me, whether good or bad, and so was me. Hiding my dad's homosexuality and hiding divorce even, and hiding the reason for divorce was all a play on trying to protect myself and my heart, and then I took that into my marriage in a lot of ways too. So don't be selfish, don't hide, don't have the shame.
Speaker 1:If you're going through things that are like pornography addiction and you don't want to tell anybody, tell somebody I don't care who it is. Tell somebody. Try. If it's an addiction that you can't and you want to get rid of it, then you know what? Find somebody to help you, because you think it isn't costing you a lot to do that, but it will turn you into more and more of a selfish person. That's my observation. It turns you into more of a selfish person because it's more about getting what you need than it is looking at others. And in fact, pornography, by its own thing, is to objectify or to show that this person isn't a real person. So even more of a selfish thing. It's a very expensive habit because you will eventually find yourself alone.
Speaker 1:So get away from all this stuff, you know. Get away from you by letting it come out. Don't hide things. Let them free, be free. That's why I look at travel as a way for me to be free. What I'm saying now helps me mentally and spiritually be free, because what I know for sure, what I know for sure, is that what divorce does to a child is an experience that I've had, many, many people have had, and it's not just the money, it's not just the dollar figures, but I'll tell you one thing that travel is definitely cheaper than divorce. But I'll tell you one thing that travel is definitely cheaper than divorce. You have been listening to Travel is Cheaper Than Divorce with David Packer. Please let us know what you think about this episode or any other comments you might have, by visiting our website at wwwtravelpointdadcom. Please join us for our next episode, where we continue to explore how travel can help bring your family together.