Brandon: 00:29

Welcome back to the Grounded Union Podcast. If you missed us last week, we were sick. We still sound a little bit nasally, but the show must go on because we've got some important stuff to talk to you guys about tonight.

Brandon: 00:41

Tonight's episode is called, "You Didn't Marry Your Mom." So hopefully, you've listened to the first two about Our Marriage Breakdown, Getting Kicked Out of our Counselor's Office.

Brandon: 00:49

We went really deep. You guys have been incredible in giving us feedback, so thank you for that. We're gonna talk about your story tonight. We're gonna talk about your childhood. For those of you men listening, you think I don't have anything to look into my childhood.

Brandon: 01:02

I thought the same thing. This is gonna be a very empowering episode, but just so you get just as you're listening starting off, you didn't marry your mom. And, we're gonna talk about why that's the case and what most couples come into marriage thinking, and we're gonna give you some really good news in this episode.

Brandon: 01:19

If you are listening and you live in Arizona, Oregon, or Southern California, we're gonna be doing an event, let's see. Just a couple weeks from now from the time this episode airs, we'll be in, Phoenix, Arizona Mhmm.

Brandon: 01:30

For a two day workshop. We'll be in Portland, Oregon in June. Yep. And then in August, we'll be in San Diego. So if you live in any of those locations or wanna fly in, we'll be doing two day workshops.

Brandon: 01:41

There are a few spots available. You can check the show notes for more details. And if you wanna come to Maui this October for a marriage intensive, we will be here in October for that. All the links are in the show notes. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show.

Brandon: 01:54

Let's jump in.

Caitlyn: 01:55

Mhmm.

Brandon: 01:55

So you're not my mom.

Caitlyn: 01:57

I am not your mom. And this is gonna be step number two. So step number one in our seven step framework on how we healed our marriage and got to the point of where we are right now. Step one was denial, and step two is looking at your story, looking at your childhood story. And what we've come to realize from our own experience and from now having gained a lot of stories from other couples is that a lot of people get married and they kinda like check the big boxes like, yep.

Caitlyn: 02:33

I slept with that person. I've kissed these amount of people. This was a really big event in my life. And a lot of times, there's a large amount of things that we don't actually talk about before we even get married. And then even more things that we continue not to talk about the as the years go on in marriage because we just don't think that they're important.

Caitlyn: 02:56

And I think what we began to realize is that there was a lot of experiences that we both had and a lot of stories and mentalities that we had from our, what we'll just call childhood, that first eighteen years of life.

Brandon: 03:12

Yeah.

Caitlyn: 03:13

From that first eighteen years of life, which some people get married and they actually knew each other before they turned eight.

Brandon: 03:18

High school sweethearts.

Caitlyn: 03:19

High school sweethearts. So you maybe even have experiences in childhood together. For us, we had no childhood experiences together. And so a lot of people get married, and they just don't realize that those experiences before 18 are still actually impacting their current day moments and realities, even though they may be 45, 55, 85, even though they may be our age, in their 30s, our moments in our childhood, our experiences, the things that we the things that shaped us, that gave us our perspectives, the way that we think, what we believe, how we view and see the world. Those things still impact how we think and view the world today if we choose it or if we choose not to look at it.

Brandon: 04:10

Yeah. I think so a lot of couples haven't had a lot of conversations about what life was like before they got married, before they got together. And so why it's important, like Caitlyn was saying, until you address these things, you can actually go throughout marriage thinking, Oh, I don't know why you're triggering me, why you're activating to me. We use that word triggering, activating. Basically, why does your spouse emotionally agitate you or bring up your insecurities, bring up the ego.

Brandon: 04:39

Why does that happen? And I think it happens because subconsciously, we're unaware that we expected our spouse to just fit into the the rest of our life experience. And for most of us, if you haven't slowed down to look at your life experience, what your childhood was like in the environment you grew up in, what the accepted norms were from your parents or your guardians, whoever raised you, what was normal in your home? Was it a clean home? Was it a home where you were on screens?

Brandon: 05:06

Did you guys express emotion? Did you spend quality time together? Were you exposed to pornography at a young age? Was sex in movies really common? Or were you was there cigarettes in the home?

Brandon: 05:17

Did you start smoking at 14, and then you quit before you bite your wife? She doesn't even know how used to smoke. So there's all these things that we don't end up sharing. And then you get serious with, with your significant other that's now your spouse, and you don't want to embarrass yourself. You don't want to tell them something that would maybe make them not want to marry you.

Brandon: 05:34

And what happens is once you get years into marriage, these identities that you wear from your childhood, these these personas you put on, that you accepted as normal, that you solidified and put in cement, this is who I am. This is how things are. Well, your spouse has a completely different understanding of reality than you do. So if you guys are rubbing up against the family systems you were raised in or the unique story that you had, and it's just like, there's just parts of you I feel distanced from, and I don't know how to get in. We're gonna give you some prompts and some things to talk about during this show or after this episode that will allow you to get to know each other the before each other person that you were.

Brandon: 06:12

Who were you before you knew your spouse? These things are so crucial to find out because they give you insight to what you're expecting from your wife or your husband, and whether they are your your voice or your parents' voice or something else entirely.

Caitlyn: 06:25

Mhmm. And there's two routes that I wanna go with this, and Brandon may wanna go more routes too. And the two routes are the reason why we talk about our childhood and the experiences that we've had is because a lot of people, like we said, come into marriage, and they didn't share all of their experiences. And that could be because they don't think that they matter. They don't think that they're a big deal.

Caitlyn: 06:48

There could be shame wrapped around them, like Brandon was saying. They could be really embarrassed, humiliated. They might not want to jeopardize the relationship or therefore the marriage. And then when they get married, they're like, you know, well, that was before marriage. So we just keep on rolling with it.

Caitlyn: 07:03

And like I said, they don't realize that it's actually impacting the everyday moments moving forward for the rest of their life until they wanna take a look at them. So the first route I want to take it is the reason why we believe that going into your childhood story, those years from birth to 18 is so important is because there could potentially be things that you are holding as or withholding or holding as secrets that maybe don't feel outwardly quite like a big lie because maybe you're you didn't even know your spouse. So why do I need to tell my spouse that I was exposed to pornography at eight years old? Why do I need to tell my spouse that I was addicted to pornography heavily in middle school and in high school? Why do I need to tell my spouse that I slept around a lot?

Caitlyn: 07:53

Why do I need to tell my spouse about that one time that somebody touched me and I felt really uncomfortable? Why do I need to tell my spouse about that coach that always made really weird remarks to me that made me feel belittled. Why do I need to tell my spouse about these things? They happened long before I met my spouse. They don't impact me now.

Caitlyn: 08:15

They have nothing to do with how I think or view the world or the way I interact with my spouse. Right? Because that was a decade ago. That was two decades ago. That was three decades ago.

Caitlyn: 08:26

And what we came to realize in your story was the parts of you that I didn't know, I needed to know. And you actually needed to get it out because you needed to be known. You needed to be known by yourself, and you needed to be known by me because I'm your spouse, your closest person, the person the in the most intimate and close proximity with you. And so we've said this before on the other podcast, a lot of these steps are for you to get to know yourself. Because if you can't see clearly, then you can't connect clearly.

Caitlyn: 09:04

And you also don't know where you're going with your life clearly. You live in a really murky bit of water. It's the river is not flowing. It's not clear, clean water.

Brandon: 09:15

Yeah.

Caitlyn: 09:16

It's stagnant, and it's murky because there's a lot in there that you don't even know about yourself. So the reason why we bring everything out from those years zero to 18 the first two episodes, we talked about our story, how we get everything out. So now we're diving in deeper. What does that mean, get everything out? Well, the first place to look is in those years of zero to 18.

Caitlyn: 09:38

And you look in there with your microscope, and you look at what you haven't seen for yourself, and you look at what you haven't shared with your spouse, and that can be anything. The first place I wanted to take it was those those kind of those hidden areas, those secrets, those lies, if you wanna call them, the areas that you've been like, I'm just, you know, denial. I don't I don't think it's necessary to tell her. And then second, the second place I wanna take it is the areas of your childhood that aren't necessarily secrets. They're not things you did you have shame around.

Caitlyn: 10:18

There may be are experiences that happened to you that might not even have to do with your sexuality. It might not have to do with pornography. It might not have to do with sleeping with people. It might not have to do with things that made you uncomfortable. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 10:32

This is an this is an area, a road to explore. These are experiences that you had that shaped you. So this is the way that your parents talk to you, the way your parents raised you. This is the way that your teachers talk to you, the experiences you had at school. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 10:49

This is the social interactions that you had. This is the type of friends that you had, the type of sports that you played. All these things shaped you. Your first eighteen years of life shaped who you are. They shaped who we are.

Caitlyn: 11:02

And you even though you became an adult at 18 and maybe moved out, went to college, got a job, got married, had the kids, did the standard way of life, those first eighteen years of your life shaped everything from there on out. And so, yes, we wanna explore everything that we haven't seen ourselves and that we haven't disclosed to our spouses, and we wanna just explore the narratives. We wanna explore the storyline. How were we raised? Because these are the ways that we can discover who we are, what's impacting us, what do we wanna keep with us, And what do we wanna leave behind?

Brandon: 11:43

That's so good. I think as we're discussing, as we're on that topic, kinda narrowing in on those who raised you. So that's for most people, both parents, single parent, and uncle. Maybe you were adopted, maybe you're in foster care. But I want you to think for a second about the adult figures that raised you.

Brandon: 12:02

Let's let's hone in on that for a moment. A lot of us, when you think about, I don't want to look into that because they did the best they could. Yes. Your parents, the person that raised you, they did the best they could. And that is a helpful mindset to make sense of your childhood.

Brandon: 12:23

But let's take it a step deeper. You can still honor and respect somebody who raised you and still be honest with the experience you had. So we want to invite you right now to be honest with yourself and to actually get curious about what was lacking in your childhood experience. Were your parents, we'll just use parents interchangeably. That could be your care provider, whoever raised you, but were your parents emotionally available when you needed them?

Brandon: 12:52

Do you remember being comforted by your parents when you were in pain or do you remember suffering alone? Did your parents have developmentally appropriate conversations with you about sex, about money, about adulthood, or was everything hush-hush and you had to figure it out yourself? So these are the questions you want to ask yourself is what you need now. Were you brought into that through maturity, through experience with your parents, or were you left to fend for yourself? And you'll know the answers to those questions when you begin to explore them, and you don't need to hide behind, well, I just you know, my parents did good, and and I'll just forget about that time.

Brandon: 13:33

Well, you might still have some deficits in who you are as a grown adult at 55 because you said your parents did the best you could and never actually looked at the deficit. Well, I guess my dad was really emotionally unavailable. And when you look in the mirror today, are you emotionally unavailable? Because you just thought that's how men are, because that's how your dad was. So, these conversations, what's really neat is when you open up to have these conversations with your spouse, you realize, like, wait, I didn't like that my dad wasn't emotionally available.

Brandon: 14:03

That actually bothered me. I had to do things to get his attention. Maybe you acted out. Maybe you joined the military for that reason. Maybe you've you're in the line of work you're in today because you wanted to get your dad's approval.

Brandon: 14:14

Well, you're you're not still trying to get your dad's approval. So let's rewind and say, okay. Who do you wanna be at your core, and how do you wanna be in your marriage? Because when you guys came together to get married, you created a brand new ecosystem, a brand new family system where you get to establish the values that matter for the two of you. And so when you begin to have these conversations, when we begin to have these conversations, we begin to see, wow.

Brandon: 14:38

Thank you, mom and dad. And what do we want to create? Because I could see the immaturities in me. But until I looked at my childhood with honesty, I saw, oh, isn't it normal to just play video games all day? Wasn't it just normal to do this X, Y, Z?

Brandon: 14:52

And it was like, wait, would have redone that big time. And that's the opportunity that you get to redo it big time for your kids and for your marriage.

Caitlyn: 15:01

And when you don't look at it, when you don't look at your story, when you don't look at your childhood, when you don't look at your experiences, you just automatically will repeat them. Yeah. I'm not saying that's negative. Some of that could be good. You might repeat great things.

Caitlyn: 15:16

And at the same time, you most likely will repeat things that aren't that great. Because it's like this automatic system that's imprinted into you from birth to 18. And so if you don't look at it and go, you know what? I actually I'm gonna leave that behind because I don't like that. That way of thinking, that way of being, that way of seeing the world, that way of doing things that my parents passed to me.

Caitlyn: 15:39

If you don't take a look at that and go, you know what? I don't really like that. I'm gonna leave that behind. You will automatically keep repeating that. So I wanna give a couple of practical examples because I feel like we can oftentimes find each ourselves in each other's stories.

Caitlyn: 15:55

And so some examples, these could be from either of our stories or just stories that we have seen and heard. And that would be, say, that you came home from school most days and your parents were still at work or your parents were home from work and on the computers or they're home from work and already watching TV, home from work and on their phones. Essentially, your family, your parents were home and not actually really home. And so maybe you, like Brandon mentioned, learned how to get everyone's attention really quickly. You had to kind of hype yourself up or become really charismatic or do something crazy.

Caitlyn: 16:41

Maybe you do something crazy wild or crazy disrespectful or crazy silly to get their attention. Or maybe you were the one that just followed suit. You went into your own room. You did your own thing. You didn't realize you felt lonely even though deep down, you probably did feel lonely.

Caitlyn: 16:59

Or maybe you didn't even have a word for what you felt because that was just your normal way of being. And so now you fast forward to you're an adult, and you now feel like with your spouse and probably with other people, you have to hype yourself up to get everyone's attention. Yep. You have to be the life of the party, the class clown. You find yourself always trying to be silly even though you're like, why am I always trying to be so silly?

Caitlyn: 17:28

Or you're really secluded. You go back into your room when you get home from work and your wife wants all this time with you and you're just like, can't you please just give me my time and space? I need my own time away from everybody. I'm busy. I've got these things to do.

Caitlyn: 17:46

And you don't realize until you realize that that was from the way you were raised. That's the story. That's when I say the stories, the patterns, the narratives, the way you interacted with your family at home. That might not even relate to you at all, but there was a way that you were raised. And there's going to be incredible things about that and things you don't wanna keep going on and repeating.

Caitlyn: 18:14

Like Brandon said, liked that. He used honor and honesty because we can honor our family of origin, the family that raised us, the family, the home that we grew up in, and we can still be honest about our experiences in that home because both of us have had experiences in our home where to be like, you know what? I'm not gonna do that as a parent. You know what? I'm not gonna engage with you the same way I watch my parents engage.

Caitlyn: 18:41

And both of us still have close, loving, and connected relationships with our families of origin because we have honor for our families and also honesty to self reflect and look back at our stories.

Brandon: 18:57

And I think if you're if you're thinking, how does this tie into, like, if you're in crisis right now, this means everything. So if you're in a if you're in a marriage crisis, this isn't just like a maintenance episode where you're kinda like, okay. Well, I I could do some of these things. These are the very conversations and the very things that can help you get unstuck

Caitlyn: 19:12

Exactly.

Brandon: 19:13

When you're in the midst of there's just some behaviors, there's some attitudes we have towards each other that we just can't seem to shake. And if you basically keep your parents on a pedestal, and you're unwilling to look at the way they did things, it's going to handicap you from being able to make conscious decisions for yourself, because what you'll do is you'll say that behavior is normal. That use of my time is justified. That attitude is just the way it is. And so, think one of the most practical ways to think about it is a lot of the things humans do, and your parents did, was to maintain an equilibrium or a baseline, basically to stay emotionally regulated for them to feel okay.

Brandon: 19:57

Well, if your parents were alcoholics, that meant they needed alcohol to feel okay. If your parents were addicted to screens, if they were addicted to gossip, if they were addicted to nicotine, maybe they're addicted to work, or maybe they were, like Caitlyn alluded to, they could have been physically present, but emotionally detached. And so those attitudes and those approaches, I call them strategies, to life, you picked those up because they were the only thing you had demonstrated to you. So that's what Kayla's talking about. When you come into marriage and your spouse wants connection, and maybe she was used to quality time and you're like, woah, woah, like, I need my five hours of video.

Brandon: 20:36

This is for us. It was my five hours of video game time now. Then I had to start lying about when I was playing video games. Cause Kayla's like, you know, I don't think that I want you to play five hours of video games. Like, I wanna spend quite a time with you.

Brandon: 20:47

I'm like, Okay, well, play video games when you're going to bed. Do this, I'll do that. We've heard a lot of we've heard from a lot of couples, it's like, my spouse plays a lot of video games or watches this show without me, and it's like, these behaviors started before you guys met. And I think it's so powerful when you have conversations to understand what void in your soul are you trying to fill by doing something that ultimately leads you away from your spouse. Odds are, it its origin is in your childhood. And if you look at it, you're gonna be like, you know what? I actually want more for myself, and I want more for our relationship than just trying to survive. And that's what a lot of childhood was for many of us.

Caitlyn: 21:20

Mhmm. And you really have to detach from your childhood completely. No matter where well, if you're listening to this, and you're like, I had a great childhood. My parents are great. Everything's great.

Caitlyn: 21:29

Or maybe some of you are like, I know my childhood was just messed up. Normally, people find themselves on one of those spectrums. It's like, my childhood was messed up. There was trauma, chaos, abuse, and then there's the rest of us are like, I grew up in a wonderful Christian home. My parents are incredible.

Caitlyn: 21:46

My home life is incredible. And then there's all the people in the middle that are kinda like, they just try to essentially relate to one of those, and you need to fully detach from whatever you think your childhood was. Whether you think it was chaotic, whether you think it was great, whether it's somewhere in between, you just need to fully detach. Like, step almost outside of yourself for a minute and look at it, and just be like, I'm not gonna have any sort of judgment for my parents. I'm not gonna try to find myself in one of the the good or the bad box.

Caitlyn: 22:18

I'm just gonna step all the way out and look at it for what it was. What was my childhood? What were my experiences? What happened to me? What didn't happen to me?

Caitlyn: 22:28

Yeah. What did I want that I didn't get? What did I get that I didn't want? What did I get that I loved? What experiences did I have that I loved?

Caitlyn: 22:37

You're gonna step out of it outside of yourself and look at it. And another great tool that we found really helpful, at first, Brandon didn't find it very helpful, was you can ask your spouse. What do you see

Brandon: 22:51

When you're around my family.

Caitlyn: 22:52

Yeah. What do you see in me that you see in my family? What do you see in my family that you see in me? When we have dinner with my parents, what are the things that you notice that you don't necessarily wanna keep around and pass down to our kids or keep around in our marriage? And the spouse that's hearing this question, don't get sassy with it.

Caitlyn: 23:12

Don't get rude with it. Have a really calm and kind and loving conversation. Well, you know what? That you now that you ask, I noticed that your dad uses a lot of sarcasm, and so do you. You know?

Brandon: 23:26

Mhmm.

Caitlyn: 23:26

And that's not something that either of us value. And so, you know, it's sometimes it's crazy. This is what we found in our healing in a lot of different forms. Sometimes it's as simple as noticing it, recognizing it

Brandon: 23:39

Yeah.

Caitlyn: 23:39

And then letting go of it. Because you're like, oh, well, I've had decades of using sarcasm. I can't just get rid of that like this. Well, yes, you can. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 23:48

If you wanna look at it, if you wanna say, that's where that sarcasm came from. This sarcasm's not mine. I don't have to keep it if I don't want it. I don't have to carry on with it in my relationship. I don't have to pass this down to my kids.

Caitlyn: 24:02

I'm done. I cut ties with it right now. Yep. I'm all done with that way of thinking, being, speaking, whatever it may be. And so why we talk so much about this, and we're gonna talk about other areas of your life to sit down and reflect on and recognize, is because recognizing, stepping outside of yourself, detaching, looking at it, seeing what happened, seeing what is, recognizing it, gives you clarity, and it gives you perspective to then cut ties with what you no longer wanna be attached to anymore Yeah.

Caitlyn: 24:33

And recreate a whole different marriage, a whole different family, a whole different life.

Brandon: 24:40

Yeah. A specific way that the this situation plays out is approval seeking behaviors. So if you live in a certain way to seek the approval of your mom or your dad, once you're married, if you begin to do things differently than they did it, whether it's verbally expressed from them, you know that you could be living in a way that isn't how they lived, and they might give you a hard time about it. Or they you might know that this might mean that they aren't they are in support of this new way. For example, if your parents had a very specific way of disciplining you as a child, and then they see you disciplining your children differently, that's going to be a difficult situation.

Brandon: 25:18

And it could cause friction in your marriage because your wife's like, hey. I think it would be the for the best development for our children to raise them this way and for us to handle when they act out in this loving way versus just sending them to their room. And you can't respond with clarity. You have to say, nope. This is how we discipline them.

Brandon: 25:38

We're gonna spank them. And you're kinda like, well, where is that coming from? Is that actually what you want, or is that what your was hardwired into you from your childhood? And so these conversations where you slow down, it's like, what do you actually want? What did you want?

Brandon: 25:51

Because if you look at what you wanted from your childhood Mhmm. Then that would give you insight to what you could give your children now, instead of just doing what you think is right and what your parents did. So that's one is in parenting. But let's just think about lifestyle. If your parents were really big on you getting into a a certain college and getting a certain degree and becoming a doctor, because everybody in the family was a doctor, and you wanted to be an entrepreneur, or you wanted to be an artist or a writer, and you never pursued these things, you tried to fit in the box that you thought your family had for you, well, you're going to kick and scream and take that out on your spouse because you are not fulfilled.

Brandon: 26:27

And so everything subconsciously that you're doing seeking the approval of your parents is actually destroying your relationship because you cannot create your own family system when you're still trying to appease the people that raised you. So it's crucial that you look at these things like, where am I still trying to get their approval? Because let's let that go. Yeah. Because when you create this relationship with your spouse that's loving and intimate and pure and full of life, you don't need approval from anybody else.

Brandon: 26:55

Yep. You actually get to choose what's best for your family, what's best for your marriage consciously, not from a broken pattern because you chose to look at it.

Caitlyn: 27:05

Mhmm. Yeah. And let's touch on the concept, which is the title of this episode, which is

Brandon: 27:10

You did not marry your mom.

Caitlyn: 27:11

Did not marry your mom.

Brandon: 27:12

Sorry, babe.

Caitlyn: 27:13

And and I think we titled it this because we saw this in our marriage, and this is classic in a lot of marriages. And I'll dive into why I think this is, just my personal thoughts or theories. And that is that a lot of men, I'm gonna speak primarily to boys and men in this little section right here, You may find this also as a woman, maybe with a scenario with your father as well or with your mother. A lot of men grow up in a home where there could be some, like, clinical terms would be like enmeshment or triangulation. We don't really, in our marriage, get super clinical with things.

Caitlyn: 27:56

You could also go, like, attachment theories here. Did you grow up in an avoidant home, a connected home, a chaotic home, those types of things? Again, we've, for ourselves and for how we talk with others, simplified it way down. Yeah. But maybe you grew up in a home where your parents were disconnected.

Caitlyn: 28:13

They didn't have a very healthy marriage. They didn't have intimacy into me, you see. They might have also not actually had a lot of sex, that type of intimacy either. They might have not really had a lot of quality conversation, quality time in front of you. And so maybe the mom, your mom, if you were a boy, if you were a son, kind of co regulated with you as the son.

Caitlyn: 28:38

A lot of that is normally not conscious. Not like she's not thinking, I'm not getting what I need from my husband, so I'm gonna go meet my needs with my son emotionally. She's not thinking that cognitively. This is all subconscious. It's just the connection of the mother son bond, and then there becomes this a little bit too much of connection because there isn't a strong connection in the union of marriage.

Caitlyn: 29:05

And so then the son and mother grow up with a measurement would be kinda like the clinical term. And so then that son goes and gets married, and there's not the cutting of the ties with the mother in that enmeshed relationship. And then the wife is like, yo, you and your mom, you always complaining about me to your mama. You always going to your mama for things. You know what I mean?

Caitlyn: 29:29

It's like, there's gonna be a lot of women that relate to this section, and I related to that section to this section of the podcast six years ago. Because there's safety there for the safety there for the son and the mother because that's like we said, that's how you're raised. That's your normal. I go to my mom, and my mom comes to me. She tells me when things are hard, and I tell her when things are hard.

Caitlyn: 29:53

And maybe there's an ounce of that that will continue on. And like I said, though, you have to you have to detach from that for a minute. Yeah. Look at it and be like, is this what I want? Is this what I want moving?

Caitlyn: 30:05

Do I wanna always tell my mom every time I'm having a marital issue? Is my mom really the best counselor for me for my marriage? Is my mom really the best person I need to go whining about my wife to? Does my mom really have all the answers for me right now if her marriage is disconnected? Why am I going to my mom who has a disconnected and broken marriage to get marital advice for my disconnected and broken?

Brandon: 30:32

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Caitlyn: 30:32

Maybe I need to look at my parents' disconnected and broken marriage and the fact that I'm repeating that cycle with my disconnected and broken marriage, and I need to actually separate from that. That doesn't mean that you don't love your mom anymore. That doesn't mean you don't talk to your mom anymore. For us, on a practical note, what that looks like is we aren't going to our parents for marital help. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 30:56

Because our parents are not our marital counselors. Our parents are not in the ins and outs of our marriage, and they're just going to give us the advice that they have from their life, which could be kind of good, and could be not that great.

Brandon: 31:11

Because with that, your parent, or the mom, we'll say mommy,

Caitlyn: 31:14

Mhmm.

Brandon: 31:15

Is always going to want what's best for you if they aren't fully developed or mature. They're not gonna want what's best for your marriage. They're gonna want what's best for little Johnny.

Caitlyn: 31:23

Mhmm.

Brandon: 31:23

Oh, son. In the back of my mind, if things get bad, you can always move back home with us. And that's not good or bad. It's just that maternal instinct that you're pulling on, especially if she's not in a place of full health and and maturity herself. So the other piece with enmeshment, the idea of the mom coming or either any parent, this could be any parent.

Brandon: 31:44

This could have been the father coming to the daughter, but we're just giving this example. So if your mom confided in you when things were hard with her husband, your dad, then you'll also feel this burden from women in your life that they they are pulling from you, that they need something from you. And that can be a very significant driver for compulsive sexual behavior because you feel justified. Like, my mom's always needed things from me. My wife needs things from me.

Brandon: 32:12

Nobody ever takes care of my needs. Everybody is pulling like a leech from me, and so I'm gonna get my needs met in a secret way because nobody actually cares about my needs, is the narrative that gets imprinted as a young man. And so, you need to become aware of those dynamics that exist in your home if your parent if you, as a child, were confided in by either parent on marital issues happening in a marriage, that wasn't your role. Right. If you felt like you knew insight about one of the other spouses, and it was kind of like you were supposed to comfort mom or dad, that wasn't your role.

Brandon: 32:48

If you feel obligated to call your parents three times a day to check-in, to tell them what's going on and how you're doing and how your marriage is doing, that is not a healthy role for them to be in at this stage of your development, at this stage of your life. And so these conversations you have about childhood allows you to see why you feel obligated to maintain a certain level of relationship. And what this can do is actually create a healthy dynamic for your adult parents, as an adult with your parents. Or it can actually create difficulty because you you're finally differentiating. That's what's happening is you're differentiating from who they are to who you are now.

Caitlyn: 33:30

Mhmm. And so what this looked like for our marriage and our season of breakdown was which, again, we didn't this wasn't like a formula that somebody gave us or that we knew that we were creating. We just kinda started doing these. We started having these conversations. We started looking at these things.

Caitlyn: 33:48

And like I said, one of the big things was we stopped seeking marital advice from our parents, and we stopped telling them all the intricate details of our marriage breakdown. We went really secluded to each other, and we found one or two other voices outside of our families that supported us on our journey and believed in what we were going for. And that we didn't realize it at the time, now reflecting back, was crucial to us getting out of the breakdown phase of our marriage. And so we highly encourage that if you are in a crisis in your marriage or on the verge of a crisis or coming out of a crisis, that you cut ties cut such deep ties with your family of them needing to know the intricate details of the breakdown of your marriage.

Brandon: 34:41

Yes.

Caitlyn: 34:41

And you go inward into your actual marriage between the two of you to begin to have these types of conversations. Stop taking them out to your family, but take them into each other Yeah. To actually explore and look into these things. And then we literally had conversations about these things. We actually asked each other questions about our childhood.

Caitlyn: 35:07

And so this piggybacks off of our last episode, our last couple of episodes of, you know, taking down the walls of denial, actually sharing what is. So Brandon began to share stories from his childhood that I didn't know about Yep. That he deemed as not important. He didn't think that they impacted our relationship. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 35:29

He didn't think they impacted how we were going to move forward together. Yet, as he started to share, he realized, oh, wow. Because as you start to speak things out loud, you'll actually have lots of moments for yourself of like, oh, yeah. I guess I see now why I do that. I guess I see now why I talk like that.

Caitlyn: 35:50

I guess I see now why I view you that way. Yeah. Why I'm always thinking these things about you. Why I'm withholding these things about you, or about myself. And so we begin to ask each other a lot of questions, like, what did you feel like you missed when you were growing up?

Brandon: 36:07

Mhmm.

Caitlyn: 36:07

What things have you not told me about your childhood? You know, what were scary moments that you had? When did you feel afraid? When did you feel alone? When did you feel excited?

Caitlyn: 36:18

When did you feel like your parents comforted you? When did you feel like your parents didn't comfort you? When did you really, really need comfort and you didn't get that? You know, when were you embarrassed? Just go through all the emotions.

Caitlyn: 36:30

Just start like asking each other about those questions. And you'll find that even as you share a story, you'll remember another story. So share that story and as you share that one, you'll remember another one. And when you take listener speaker roles, if Brandon were sharing with me a vulnerable story, I'm, as a spouse, listening, and I'm not casting any shame.

Brandon: 36:53

Exactly.

Caitlyn: 36:54

I'm not you know, like, if you hear a story that's very triggering because maybe, normally, triggering ones involve sex or, you know, something along those lines. Those can be triggering, and so you might want to cry or say something, and again, you can feel and do and say as you wish as a wife hearing something that's shocking, and also at the same time for the purpose of connection. If you really can listen Yeah. And take that role to explore with your spouse their childhood, then you're creating more space for safety to dive deeper and deeper and deeper into the stories and into the narratives. If we go straight to shame or blame or any of these other tactics of name calling or whatever, starting an argument, we automatically are making it harder to look into our past for each other.

Caitlyn: 37:54

So you wanna keep it a very safe and loving space to explore both of our childhoods so that we can actually finally see each other for those times of what actually shaped us.

Brandon: 38:07

When you invite that compassion toward each other, it allows you to be curious. And I think it's the container of marriage allows you to feel courage to look at parts of you that you never wanted to. And the reason we're such big proponents of doing this with your spouse, not just we're not anti you going to do this with your counselor. If there's just simply not enough hours in a day to do four hours of counseling every day. But your spouse, if you set your life up properly and you're not distracted with the TV show, you guys can talk for two hours every night.

Brandon: 38:38

You might have more time, and you don't need to just, like, sit down and be like, let's do our counseling session with each other. It's not like that. It's there's gonna be seasons. You might be in that season right now where you're like, I don't even know you. I don't like you.

Brandon: 38:49

I don't know why, but we're we're not gonna make it. And you're like, let's peel back the onion. Yep. Let's get to know each other. Let's understand where we came from and where we picked up the perspectives on life that we have right now so that we can have compassion for each other.

Brandon: 39:04

And then together, as we see each other, choose what do we want now. Yep. Now that we see each other, we see into each other, it's like, what do we wanna create? Mhmm. That's the reason.

Brandon: 39:14

And so I think it'd be powerful, Caitlyn, for you and I to give some practical questions that our listeners can ask each other right as they're finishing this episode. And so we wanna give you a few conversation starters. Again, these are deep questions, but, look, if you're in if you're in the deep Mhmm. The deep mud marriage is deep, and you might be in deep mud, we wanna bring you into a deep sense of love. The first thing is, why don't you ask your spouse or tell them?

Brandon: 39:42

You can ask, and then you can respond. What is one thing you felt was missing from your childhood? Why don't we just popcorn back and forth? You share a question, and I'll I'll share another one.

Caitlyn: 39:51

Yeah. I think one that we went into that's really deep is is there anything from your sexual story from zero to 18 that you have not shared with me?

Brandon: 40:01

And piggybacking off of that question, were there any times that somebody made you feel sexually uncomfortable? Mhmm. So you could have questions about abuse Mhmm. As well as, what's the word? Not with permission if or the explored those.

Brandon: 40:20

Yeah. Yeah. Mutual sexual experiences you had with with somebody else.

Caitlyn: 40:24

Mhmm. Yeah. I think you piggybacking off of that too. We talked a lot about when we were first exposed to things.

Brandon: 40:32

Mhmm.

Caitlyn: 40:32

So when were you first exposed to sexualized content or pornography? Or we talked a lot about movies too and TV shows and music videos and, like, you know, when we first got phones and when we had access to, you know, iPods and those types of things. So, like, when were you first exposed to all of this different type of content, to this whole big world?

Brandon: 41:01

I love that. What did you use or what how did you spend your time when you were bored? Bored, lonely, tired. How did you spend time?

Caitlyn: 41:11

Mhmm. Yeah. I think another one that comes up too is, like, what happened in your home when you didn't do something right? When you got in trouble, when you got a bad grade. Those moments really, really shape us, and so those are really good good stories to explore.

Caitlyn: 41:29

The one around grades, I think, is really good. Like, what happened when you brought home a bad grade? What did your parents say? What did they do? And what happened when you disobeyed them, when you broke the rules, when they caught you lying, all of those things.

Brandon: 41:45

Do you have memories of your parents comforting you when you were in pain or were scared? Another one would be, when you think about your parents' marriage, was it healthy? Or and then answering, like, what we talked about, did you feel like your mom or your dad or whoever raised you confided in you for emotional support as the child?

Caitlyn: 42:09

Another topic to explore is, who were other supportive voices in your life? You know, maybe your parents had friends that came over a lot, and they They felt like family to you. Maybe you went to your grandparents' house a lot. Maybe you had mentors. Maybe you grew up in the church.

Caitlyn: 42:27

Like, Brandon and I grew up in the Christian church, so we had pastors. We had small group leaders. We had youth group leaders. Oftentimes, we also have sports leaders, coaches. We have these different people in our life that are mentors, leaders, pastors, whatever it may be, that they had a lot of room in our life to maybe speak into us.

Caitlyn: 42:50

Yeah. And so diving into who were those people in your life? What were their names? What did they teach you? Again, what did these people teach you that you love, that you wanna carry on with?

Caitlyn: 43:01

What did these people teach you that you're like, I actually they taught me that, and I don't want to keep on with that anymore. So we have our parents, and then we also have these other sideline players that shaped us as well, and exploring the names of those people, who they were to you, and what they taught you can be another great conversation to have.

Brandon: 43:22

Well, I think we've given you guys a lot to talk about, a lot to think welcome. Because these things, these conversations, and this approach to an openness to exploring what is the marriage that we wanna create has the power to actually differentiate the marriage you have and the family you have from the one you were raised, and that is a massive, massive gift. We wanna thank you guys for joining us on episode three of the Grounded Union podcast. If you got something out of the episode, please, leave a review so we can reach more people. We don't run any ads.

Brandon: 43:55

We just, we thank you for following along, and we look forward to seeing you next week.