Brandon: 00:28

Welcome back to the Grounded Union Podcast. Tonight, we're gonna be talking about Why Your Relationship Could Feel Flat and Disconnected and share with you some of the things that we did when we were at rock bottom and needed mental clarity and some things that we still do today that we implemented from that season during our marriage breakdown. We actually just got back a week ago from our Arizona workshop. Thank you guys for those of you that listen to the podcast that were there in person. It was incredible.

Brandon: 00:54

We are hosting another workshop in June in Portland, and we still have space for that workshop as well as San Diego in August. And then we will be here in Maui for a three day marriage intensive. If you would like to apply for that, all the info is in the link or the the show notes of this episode. There are no sponsors and there are no ads for our show. So if you get value from these these episodes, please share it with a friend so we can get the word out.

Brandon: 01:16

When we were at rock bottom, I was stuck emotionally, which we talked about in the last episode. If this is your first episode, go back and start that started our marriage breakdown, the very first episode of this podcast, and we kinda go in order of our story. One of the biggest things that keeps most couples stuck and kept me stuck was the incessant need for entertainment and have a artificial screen in my face. So that for me, that was video games, social media, times in growing up that was movies, TV shows. For a lot of people, they get confused when they're stuck, when they can't seem to make progress in their marriage.

Brandon: 01:46

And a lot of people will say, a lot of couples say, when are we supposed to have all these deep conversations that you and Caitlyn are suggesting we have? Like, we have no time. We have no money to invest in these programs to do any of these things. Where is all of that creative energy to change? And I think what's crazy to me is most couples, and myself included, was unwilling to look at the three to four hours a day that I was giving to social media, to entertainment.

Brandon: 02:09

And what happens is when you are stuck on your phone, and we're gonna give you the alternatives that you can use instead of being stuck to media outlets, is you cannot think for yourself. You cannot think differently than everybody else. You have no additional capacity to grow and to heal because all you can see in your mind is the two hour movie you just watched or all of the bad news you saw or all of the lives other people are living through social media or all the things that you wish you hadn't seen that was also screwing up your mind. And so one of the things we are just gonna just call out is it's not that there's, like, a an addiction or an issue in this. It's just it reveals us as a society.

Brandon: 02:43

We would rather see somebody else's life being lived in a movie or on social media than actually create the life that we wanna create for ourselves. And when you, as a man, are constantly looking to have your life look like somebody else, you end up hating your own life. You end up being jealous. You end up being envious, and that's where you fall into a lot of ways of objectifying women, sexualizing everything around you because it's an object world. It's just this this chess game instead of reality.

Brandon: 03:06

Because when it's hard, when things got hard for me all throughout my childhood, all throughout our early married life, it was I'm going to distract myself with a screen, whether that was video games or social media. And the price I paid for that was huge, which was I could not do the deep work. I had no time. I had no capacity. And when I needed it the most, I was numb.

Brandon: 03:25

When we finally hit rock bottom in 2019, I was completely numb because of the way I had engaged with social media, and I had engaged with my phone. So we're gonna talk about giving you some insights into how big of a role your phone, your computer, your TV, and light. We're gonna talk about light in this episode, artificial light, natural light, how big these things play the role in your healing process.

Caitlyn: 03:45

Mhmm. Yeah. I'm backing up a little bit. Almost ten years ago now, we got married at the time of this podcast when it's being recorded. We got married in 2015, and we actually, when we were getting married, had this great idea that we were gonna try the first year of our marriage, is what we told ourselves, without having any TV.

Caitlyn: 04:03

And that was actually before watching TV and movies was really big on the laptops. But essentially, we just eliminated for the first year, the concept of we finish work, we make dinner, and we watch TV together. And that's our way of relaxing or entertaining ourselves or relaxing or entertaining ourselves or even to go as far as to say that's our way of connecting. And so we just thought we would do this fun adventure and see what else we could do. And so we bought board games.

Caitlyn: 04:28

We were very young at the time. We bought board games, had no kids, and we just would finish work. We would make dinner together. And this is obviously, if you guys listen to the first episode, which I hope you did. This is when we're just doing our cycle.

Caitlyn: 04:41

So it's like, we're not even at our fullest connected capacity that we're at right now. We're still living in a lot of brokenness. And at the same time, not having TV in our home, like not having a giant TV on our wall as like the centerpiece of our house made a huge impact in the first couple years of our marriage in being able to connect deeply to get home from work. We made our dinner together. We sat down and we would play cribbage.

Caitlyn: 05:07

I don't know if any of you have ever played cribbage before, but we would play cribbage sometimes, like, for, like, two hours every single night. And it wasn't just always deep talking. Talking. It was sometimes just laughing and being together and playing and just enjoying life together. So we made it a year, no TV.

Caitlyn: 05:25

Then by that point, I was pregnant with our first baby girl. And we're like, let's keep going. We're about to have a baby. Like, why would we put a giant TV on our wall again? Like, let's enjoy the first couple years of our baby's life.

Caitlyn: 05:37

Then we make it no more TV. So then we have another baby. And here we are now ten years later, and we have actually never owned a TV. We have never put a giant TV as a centerpiece. We've never used our computers, our laptops, our phones to watch TV shows, to watch movies.

Caitlyn: 05:52

If you wanted to make a movie or TV show reference, you would have to make one from ten years ago because we literally have no idea what movies have even been released. Because we jumped right in to experiment with that and realized, woah, look at the connection we can create. Even though we hadn't even done the foundational work, which we've talked about in all the episodes, we still, on the outside, most people thought we had an incredible marriage. And I think a huge part of that is because we didn't spend every waking moment on our phones, watching TV, watching movies, doing all those things that lead to massive points of disconnect.

Brandon: 06:25

Now what Caitlyn didn't realize and what I hadn't chosen into was when there was stress in our life or difficulty, I still needed my screen time.

Caitlyn: 06:34

Yep. True.

Brandon: 06:35

And so this is a major theme in our marriage was I was when I was clear headed and emotionally regulated, I wanted the same things Caitlyn did. And so I made the same commitments internally and verbally. Hey. You know what? I don't wanna we're not gonna watch movies, and let's just be together.

Brandon: 06:50

Then the habits came in of I'm going to play start playing mindless games on my phone.

Caitlyn: 06:56

Video games.

Brandon: 06:56

Video games. Random things. And that started coming back when we had our first daughter, and I'd be rocking her to sleep, and it would take a long time so that I'd start playing a game on my phone, which kept her awake longer. So none none of it made sense. And then when things were more difficult, especially at the early parts of our marriage in different phases, I would start going to social media.

Brandon: 07:15

And we had made a very clear decision and commitment, both of us, that we wouldn't get on our phones after either of us had fallen asleep. And especially if we went to bed upset with each other or frustrated, I felt incredibly justified to get on my phone and scroll on social media. And that was the predominant time when I was exposed or exposed myself to suggestive provocative content, which pushed me further and further away from Caitlyn. And so for a lot of you, you might be thinking, you know, entertainment's how we connect. This is how we, you know, we watch our shows together.

Brandon: 07:43

We talk about we've actually heard this in lots of comments. We watch our TV shows together, and then we talk about the characters in the show.

Caitlyn: 07:49

Gives us conversation because we don't know what else to talk about. Yeah. With the TV show.

Brandon: 07:53

What we would suggest and what we're gonna offer in this episode is there's so much richness that you can create in your relationship and in your reality, which means what's, like, outside of your home, what's available in nature around you. We're gonna give you some alternatives to just turning on a screen with somebody else's life story, with somebody else's narrative, with somebody else's agenda to push on you. Especially if you are in a season right now where your marriage is at rock bottom, it's time to let go of entertainment as your medicine. Mhmm. I'll say that again.

Brandon: 08:22

If your marriage is at rock bottom right now and you feel like you need your TV time, your decompression time, what you need to do is take a cold shower and do some breath work. Instead of turning on a TV, hoping that it can regulate your emotions and keep you from feeling the pain you're in, whether you are the whether you are in a situation where you are a betrayed spouse, you don't need to be numb right now. You need to feel through it and you let that pain process through your body. Or if you were an addicted spouse and you were the one that caused pain, you don't need to be distracted right now. You need to live to the fullest.

Brandon: 08:48

You need to see with clarity. And so what we're gonna suggest is that media, social media, movies, TV shows, mindless use of the Internet stops you. It holds you right where you are, right where you are, as well as exposing you to things or ideas that may or may not be what you wanna fill your mind with. And so we're not just talking about inappropriate content or things that are not conducive. It's literally just a distraction.

Brandon: 09:09

If you are crying out for connection in your relationship, it's not gonna be found with both of you on opposite sides of the couch with a phone in your face in two different worlds. You're gonna have to put the phones down and actually face the elephant in the room, which is we're keeping things from each other. We don't know each other. We don't know how to connect with each other. It's awkward.

Brandon: 09:28

It's uncomfortable. You get to relearn those things. And when you do, you'll never wanna go back to living through an artificial reality.

Caitlyn: 09:34

Mhmm. A common phrase we heard a lot or even an empowered narrative that a lot of people have is we talked about this in our previous episodes, the sexual brokenness ones, is, oh my gosh, we live in such a sexualized culture. And Brandon loved that narrative in the first couple years of our marriage because it kept him spinning in that cycle, and it enabled and empowered that belief system. And he realized, we realized, oh my gosh, no, we don't live in a sexualized culture. We put ourselves into a realm of media that is sexualized, but we are selecting it.

Caitlyn: 10:09

We are choosing it. We are asking for it. We are putting ourselves into a position where we could accidentally I have quotation marks if you're not watching the video. We could accidentally stumble upon something sexual and, oh my gosh, who posted this? Who put this there?

Caitlyn: 10:27

Who put this sex scene in the movie? Oh my gosh, this risque image on this ad and oh, this pop up on this video game that I'm playing. It's like as if we are victim to these things. And we began to realize, oh no, we are not a victim to this. Brandon is not a victim this.

Caitlyn: 10:43

Brandon is choosing this because he is choosing like he's saying, when he's in pain, when he's uncomfortable, when he's anxious, when he just doesn't know what to do with this time, when he's tired. I feel like that comes up so much for people. When I'm tired, I don't wanna do anything else. I'm just gonna get on my phone. I'm just gonna turn on the TV.

Caitlyn: 11:01

I'm just gonna open up my laptop. And we're choosing into entering into a realm, like Brandon said, it could be, you know, a sexual realm or it could just be a dissociative realm. It could just be, I'm gonna open up my laptop and I'm gonna work some more because I'm tired. I'm uncomfortable. I don't wanna connect with my spouse.

Caitlyn: 11:19

I don't wanna engage with my kids. I came home and the house is a mess. My wife is stressed. My kids are screaming. Oh, wow.

Caitlyn: 11:25

This a really convenient time for me to say, I have a lot more work to do or I need to go call this person or play this video game or watch this TV show or oh my gosh, the sports show is on. I have to watch this. This is my favorite team. It's only on at this time. You know, it's just a once a week thing.

Caitlyn: 11:43

We kind of head down this path where we give ourselves this enablement to enter into a realm where we're not fully grounded. Yeah. We're not fully present. We're not fully alive in the moment. Like, if we step back for a second, do we we were talking about this at our at our Mesa event in Phoenix.

Caitlyn: 12:01

Do we actually really want to just live our lives mostly consuming media? Yeah. Like, when we're just going through the motions, we just kinda start doing it. We're just like, yep. Get on Instagram.

Caitlyn: 12:11

Yep. Get on Facebook. Yep. The TV show. Yep.

Caitlyn: 12:13

The thing. But if we take a step back, is that even fulfilling our souls? Do we really feel good having that much screen time every single day? I'm gonna guess. The answer for me is absolutely no.

Caitlyn: 12:25

And I'm gonna guess that for most of us, if we actually paused and took a step back, just like I say in every episode, we took a step back and we look at it. It's like, oh my gosh, I don't feel good. Because you know what feels really good is being connected to the ones that we love most. Experiencing real life together with the ones that we love most. Making eye contact, holding hands, hugging our children, being out in nature, laughing together, creating memories.

Caitlyn: 12:56

All these things that I'm listing off get stolen when we just keep going through the motions and adding in a ton of screen time, and a ton of media, and a ton of dissociating. Dissociating from what is real, what is present. And you might think, well, how am I supposed to laugh with my wife? We hate each other. We're just roommates.

Caitlyn: 13:14

How am I supposed to have this connection with my kids? They're so disobedient. They're so entitled. They're so this. They're so that.

Caitlyn: 13:21

It's like, yes. And you know what's blocking you? Like we talked about in the very beginning of this. You know what's blocking you from getting to the other side is the fact that you keep showing up and turning on the TV instead of showing up to the moment to clean up whatever mess there is, relay a new foundation, and step into a whole new way of relating to your spouse, to your children, to your friends, to your community, and to your entire life.

Brandon: 13:44

So, Brandon and Caitlyn, what are you suggesting we do then? We we wanna work on our relationship. We wanna take this seriously. What what are you suggesting media? What role does media play in our life?

Brandon: 13:54

Before we give you our suggestion, I want you to think about this. I've said this many times before. If you look at the economy and finances, nobody ever complains about the cost of media. Streaming services are $10 a month. Social media is free.

Brandon: 14:09

Most of the things that you have access to on your phone are not a burden financially to you. And here's the reason why is it runs off of attention. That is the currency of social media. That is the currency of media is it's your attention, which is the value to that business because that's how they can advertise to you, market to you. And so what you don't realize is the cost that you truly are paying by giving away four, five hours of your day every day for sixty, seventy, eighty years to these devices, to these shows, to these places is that you are giving away endless amounts of value in your attention.

Brandon: 14:43

Your attention is the currency that the world wants, that big businesses want. And so you need to be aware of these apps, these shows, they are not meant for you to spend ten minutes on them. It is meant to be spent four or five hours on it. It's meant to consume you. It's

Brandon: 14:56

meant to consume you. It's meant to get you into a a hypnotic state so that when you're scrolling, you end up clicking on an ad and buying something. That is if you didn't know this, social media is run on ad traffic. So that's why you see friends post from your friends, and then you see an ad. That's how those platforms make money. And so it doesn't mean that they're evil.

Brandon: 15:13

Right. It just means you need to be aware of why you're picking up the phone to begin with, why you're turning on the show to begin with. If it is to fill a void in your soul, it will not do that. It will actually just delay the pain and keep you or worsen the state you're in in your relationship. So your attention is the most valuable thing you have.

Brandon: 15:30

So the fact that you're sitting here listening to us tonight, we are incredibly grateful, and we promise to deliver more than what you would just find scrolling on social media or aimlessly watching shows. So we hope to give you that value. Our suggestion in how we navigate our technology age is with wild intentionality. So for us, we don't watch any movies. We just we don't watch any.

Brandon: 15:51

We have four kids, eight, six, three, one. I think two years ago was the last time we watched the movie. We watched the new Grinch movie. And we were gonna watch it this year, but we just ran out of time. So we usually watch one movie a year, the Grinch.

Brandon: 16:02

And what we have found is children, if you just wanna think from a child development standpoint, their brains actually function really well in a calm environment. They actually don't need entertained. Our kids up until now have not told us they are bored. That's right. Our kids do not tell us they're bored.

Brandon: 16:19

We just got off a six six hour flight back from Arizona. Our six and eight year old are not fidgeting. They don't have a tablet. They don't have a screen in their face. We don't give them their phone to watch a video.

Brandon: 16:29

They're just in the present moment. So we've experimented for the last eight years with all of our kids. They're not familiar with using a screen. They are very present. They are very calm.

Brandon: 16:39

They are very regulated. And we think one of the primary reasons is we have not shoved the screen in their face. Now, for those of you parents like, oh, they're just judging me. They don't know my life. We are not here to judge you.

Brandon: 16:48

We're here to invite you into if your kids are if their behavior is not something you love, it's probably modeling something that you do. So if you're just giving them a screen so that you can have screen time, what if we were to rework that? So we don't do screens for our kids. They're not missing out. They're living a great life.

Brandon: 17:03

We don't watch any shows when the kids go to bed. So we don't have a TV, but we also don't flip open the laptop. We don't have a show that we watch after the podcast is done recording. We go to bed. And guess what?

Brandon: 17:14

Before we go to bed, we sit and talk with each other. We do work online. Obviously, here we are talking to you online. I've checked Caitlyn's screen time from time to time. She spends, like, seventeen minutes a day on Instagram.

Brandon: 17:25

Seventeen minutes. And so, yes, we do use social media to be able to give value. I don't consume any visual media just because not because I'm afraid of seeing something, but just because the passive state I got into consuming media wasn't advantageous for me. So I don't consume any social media just for the sake of I just don't have time or capacity to do it. I choose to give on those apps, but I've watched Caitlyn.

Brandon: 17:47

Caitlyn, maybe you could speak to it. She only uses social media to learn something and to follow and engage with accounts that she really feels connected to. So you don't have to just aimlessly you don't have to use these apps in a passive way. Use them as a tool and a resource, and that's what we do. We don't watch shows.

Brandon: 18:02

We don't watch movies, and we are not exposed to garbage. We actually have to find out from other people if there's big news events going on because we're not inundated with news. We actually live in a world our world that we live in and we travel around is a very positive place. It's filled with very good news. It's filled with a very we wake up in a very neutral place.

Brandon: 18:20

If you pick up your phone and turn on the news and see what bad thing the the president did or another country is gonna kill us, and you flip open to social media, you see a half naked woman, you see somebody that has something you don't have, your day just started off really bad. Yep. And so what you can do is by eliminating that noise, that static, is you can actually begin to create the environment for yourself and for your relationship that is outside of what everyone else is experiencing. And that's the ecosystem we've created. And I had stepped outside of that when our marriage was broken down because I was spending two or three hours after Caitlyn went to sleep numbing out on social media, and it was killing me.

Brandon: 18:55

And you're not missing out on anything. Let let me tell you that. You're not missing out on a single thing when you choose to invest in your relationship instead of putting a phone in your

Caitlyn: 19:03

Yeah. You get to create the world that you want. And that's why we often phrase this as creating versus consuming. Because you can create whatever you want if you wanna choose to stop consuming what everyone else having. You can have your own experiences, create your own life, and give yourself the relationships, the experiences that you want to have, if you wanna choose to stop consuming.

Caitlyn: 19:28

And so we've talked a lot about what we're doing right now, and these are a lot of the things that we began doing in our marriage breakdown. Because like Brandon said, we already had been many years without a TB, and that was not necessarily the cure. Because you cannot have the TB on the wall, you can still have your TB going with you everywhere. And so I didn't know this because a lot of this was done in secret and in lying and behind my back, which is topics we address in previous episodes here. But Brandon would wait till I'd fall asleep, and then he would get on his phone and listen to podcasts.

Caitlyn: 20:00

Not all the time was it even sexual. Sometimes it's video games, podcasts. Sometimes it was scrolling and seeing sexualized images. It could have been anything. But essentially, he was breaking our boundaries, our established standards, which is that we don't get on our phones when we are supposed to be sleeping.

Caitlyn: 20:18

And these are things that we had set up because they were a part of our value system as a union and then also for our family, what we wanted to reflect to our kids. And so when I caught Brandon in 2019 with this whole world of secrets he had been keeping, that is when we began embarking on what we now coin as creating instead of consuming. And that is the concept of removing, like Brandon's saying, removing all of these forms of consumption. Yeah. And so we're not necessarily saying, you need to be exactly like us to have a healed and connected marriage.

Caitlyn: 20:50

We're not saying that at all. We're not even saying, you'll never be able to watch TV again, delete all of your apps, never be on social media, never do all these things. It's not black and white like that. We are going to invite you into a season. We said this in our in our event.

Caitlyn: 21:05

We invited everybody into a season. If you especially, if you are on the brink of divorce, if your marriage is in the pits, if you have hit rock bottom, and you've nowhere to go, please, I invite you to try this for thirty days. Unplug your TV. If you have to, sell it, put it in the garage, put it somewhere else, take it off the wall, and put up some art. We put up images of our family.

Caitlyn: 21:28

So when you this is our couch right here. You guys are facing it this way. But on the other side is a wall that has three images of our kids. We don't have any TVs on the wall. So if you need to for thirty days, take it down.

Caitlyn: 21:40

If you have self control, you can unplug it. Delete your services if you need to from your computer. Pause your subscriptions. Whatever you need to do, commit to yourself and to your union. Okay.

Caitlyn: 21:52

We're gonna take a break. We're gonna take the We chose a year when I first got married. If you wanna start in tiptoeing. Take thirty days. Okay.

Caitlyn: 21:59

We take thirty days and I'm gonna get off social media. You're not gonna die. You're literally not gonna die. You're not gonna miss anything. Someone's not gonna post something that you're like gonna be so sad that you missed.

Caitlyn: 22:09

Take thirty days. Stop watching the news. Get off of all your social media. Get off of YouTube. Guess what?

Caitlyn: 22:13

Our podcast, you can stop listening to them. You can come back in thirty days. They're all still gonna be here. You can stop consuming for thirty days, and you're most likely, even as I'm talking, and I feel really panicky. And that's a great ding ding ding for there's something there's an attachment here that we have, and you're not the only one.

Caitlyn: 22:31

It's actually I think they say nowadays that all of us are addicted to our phones. Like, there's just no way around it because the the way that they are made, the lights, the flashing sounds, the noises, everything, all the apps, the stimulus, the access that we have to anything that we want at all times, it's addicting by nature. That's why we all need to take breaks. That's why we need to have boundaries and standards and a value system for our family. So unplug your TVs, pause all of your subscriptions, get off of social media, and pour into yourself.

Caitlyn: 23:04

Pour into your marriage. Pour into your kids. Pour into your community. Pour into your family. Sit and be with yourself, and you'll find your creativity come back alive.

Caitlyn: 23:15

Yeah. Some of you probably love painting. Some of you probably love drawing. Some of you probably love writing. Some of you probably love hunting, fishing, riding your bike, walking, exercising, name anything that you have inside of you that you want to create.

Caitlyn: 23:30

We found in this time, we got rid of all of that median consumption. I already had been abiding by our value system and our standards. Brandon was reawakened to the ways that he had been breaking all of those and committed to actually upholding our values and getting rid of all of consumption. This is a crucial component to why we believe he experienced sexual wholeness Yeah. Because you have to get rid of it to rewire your brain, like what we talked about in the in the sexual two episodes.

Caitlyn: 24:02

If you wanna embark on rewiring how you see people, you're gonna have to take a thirty day break, if not longer, from getting online. Like, you just are gonna have to because you need to rewire how you're relating to everybody, how you're seeing people, how you're using technology. All of these things need to be rewired. And in that, and in our season, in 2019, we found so much purpose in what we are here to create in the world. Yeah.

Caitlyn: 24:26

Because like I said, nobody actually feels like their soul is coming to life when they sit down and just scroll and scroll or just watch TV and watch other people playing sports, you don't feel alive in that. But when you remove all of that and come back to what you were created to bring to the world, you feel alive again. We're not only talking about your marriage feeling alive, we're talking about you feeling alive and your purpose here on earth. And that's exactly what we tapped into is this is what we're here to create in the world. This is what we're here to bring, what we're here to offer, the love that we have to give each other to our kids and to everyone around us.

Caitlyn: 25:03

You come back to life when you stop numbing out and stop turning to screens all day long. So take a thirty day break, and in that time, evaluate how you wanna reenter. Like Brandon said, I use social media in a very specific way, and I don't feel controlled by it. I don't feel like this is this thing that I'm bound to, like, oh, it's so tempting and alluring that I that I have to create all these restrictions for myself. No.

Caitlyn: 25:29

It feels like a great way to use the app. It feels the most blissful, inviting way for me to use it. I follow I don't even know. I think it's 22 people that changes and ebbs and flows. I don't follow hundreds or thousands of people.

Caitlyn: 25:42

There's some people on the apps that follow 4,000 people. That's so many people to be like, when you open your phone, that's like can you imagine being in a room with 4,000 people shoving their opinions down your throat? Woah. You would run. Like, that is so overwhelming.

Caitlyn: 25:55

I have it narrowed down to friends that I genuinely spend time with that I'm relating with in life, and people that I might not actually have a personal relationship, like somebody who might be even following like Brandon or I. People that I'm learning from in the season of life. People that I feel like has something valuable to teach or to offer or to model or people who are experimenting with something that I would like to experiment with with my family. And so I have it very narrowed down. I could walk into a room with 22 people that I value and respect, and want to glean from, and want to do life with, and not feel overwhelmed.

Caitlyn: 26:31

See, I've created an experience online where I'm not dissociating, I'm not numbing out. I'm creating the experience that I want, and I'm even making it it's not real life. It never will necessarily be, but I'm trying my best to create the most real life experience in my online world. And I also don't watch TV. I don't watch movies.

Caitlyn: 26:51

These are things that we both do at the same time. We both don't watch endless amount of YouTube videos, and we actually don't really consume any podcasts ourselves. We have a couple friends who have incredible podcasts, and we'll listen to those as support. But we're not just pounding ourselves with and this gives us the time and space and availability to connect deeply with each other, with our kids, and to create what we want in the world, to do things like this, to offer our heart and soul, and to give back.

Brandon: 27:20

That all sounds great. People are thinking, that sounds great, Kaelin, but my spouse, I don't feel connected to. And so that's the whole premise of this episode is if you feel disconnected and stuck and it's dull and it's painful, getting off all these platforms, getting out away from all these distractions will make the pain louder so that you can face it. Because it doesn't appear as painful if you're both distracted next to each other. But when you put the distractions down, you have to face each other.

Brandon: 27:41

And so this is one of the reasons that we healed at such a young age is I will get you guys are like, why why do you always give Caitlyn so much credit? I don't She just is incredible. I Caitlyn was willing to, like, stare at me and say, hey. Are is anybody home? Are you here with me?

Brandon: 27:57

It was so clear that Caitlyn wanted a present, authentic, real relationship. And I was just like, can you, like, can you numb out a little bit, or can you just play dumb, or can you not want connection? I don't have that thoughts anymore, but you will face discomfort. If you both are off of your phones and not distracted and you're sitting on the couch and you have secrets and you have pain that you haven't dealt with, it's gonna hurt. It's gonna be uncomfortable.

Brandon: 28:19

The whole point is if you ever wanna get to the other side, you can't just ignore it because you just get to face it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So by not distracting yourself with media, you're actually saying, you know what? Healing starts now. Yeah. And so we're not saying this by getting off media that you're going to have a whole marriage.

Brandon: 28:36

It's going to open up the capacity and the time and the energy for you guys to work on yourselves. So what working yourself looks like is we recommend getting out in nature as much as physically possible. A lot of people work from home these days. You might not work from home. You might work nine to five.

Brandon: 28:49

We recommend making your schedule revolve around nature as much as possible. We do live in Hawaii now, and people are like, well, that must be easy there. We did in Idaho for nine years first, and we did it growing up too. We started, you know, whether you live in a warm climate or a cold climate, go on a walk. Bundle up if you're in a cold climate.

Brandon: 29:06

What we found was in Idaho would we would go on two walks a day. We would get our young kids bundled up. It would be 10 degrees, 20 degrees snowing, and we were still out there twice a day going on walks, exploring the foothills. And then what I've told people, if you live in a when if you get the the sads when you're in and it's gray and it's cold outside, you're like, well, it sounds a lot better to watch a movie than just to sit in a dark, cold house. If you have a fireplace, a wood burning fireplace, make a fire.

Brandon: 29:30

Light some candles. Make it special inside. You don't actually just have to entertain yourself because you're uncomfortable. And if you don't feel like where you live is conducive to your mental health, move somewhere else. Move to Arizona.

Brandon: 29:41

Move to Florida. Move to move to places that have more sunshine. If you need that, if you like being in the cold, build a fire, do something with your hands. What we forget is that we're going after a feeling. That's what life is all about.

Brandon: 29:50

You actually want to feel something. You want to feel connected. You want to feel alive. And so out of fear of feeling negative emotions, we try to distract ourselves from feeling anything. And so often what you're trying to create in your media consumption is a feeling, is a end result.

Brandon: 30:06

And you can actually have that with a much simpler activity going on a walk. We've had so many healthy, constructive conversations walking together. So in this season where you're rebuilding trust, where you're rebuilding communication, go on a walk. Just be with each other. It doesn't have to be fancy.

Brandon: 30:20

It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Just go on a walk. It could be raining sideways. Get an umbrella. Go on a walk.

Brandon: 30:25

Be outside. And when you come inside, you don't have to rush. You can slow down. Even if you work a high paced job, slow down when you get home. Make your home tidy.

Brandon: 30:34

If you're like, well, Brandon, I have to face the junk room that we just throw everything. Clear it out. Start the art Caitlyn was talking about. Start a craft. Start something that you actually want to create.

Brandon: 30:43

Write the fiction novel you've always wanted to do. Write your the memoir. Start the side project. Start the business that you've always wanted to start. There is so much creative potential when you stop consuming and you start creating within your marriage by going out in nature.

Brandon: 30:57

And then when you come home, you can actually re we can restart your life. I I actually don't have a lot of compassion for people that are frustrated with being broke. If you just swapped out this time, I understand you probably already worked your day job. Maybe you both worked your day job and you were exhausted, and you're still hardly able to make your bills. To get clarity, it's not gonna be through consuming media.

Brandon: 31:15

It's gonna be slowing down long enough saying, what are we here for? What am I uniquely talented at? And how can I give that to the world? Few people do that. You can start a business.

Brandon: 31:24

You could start a lawn care business. You can start your window washing business. You can start whatever it is you already do and do it your on your I'm not saying you have to go quit your job and start your own business, but I would be suggesting that if you got rid of the media time

Caitlyn: 31:35

Yep.

Brandon: 31:35

You'd have far more earning earning capacity than you could ever imagine Mhmm. And fulfillment. So we're just saying you're not turning off the TV and turning off the shows and getting off of consumption so that you can live a boring life. This is you can start living life. You can start living it together.

Caitlyn: 31:51

Yeah. And this is also the time that you have all these conversations that if you've listened to the past, you know, couple episodes, we talk about talking through your childhood, talking through how you were raised, the people that were around you, the the narratives, the paradigms, talking through your spiritual paradigms, what churches did you grow in, what belief systems do you have, talking through your sexuality, talking through lies that you've been keeping, talking through the secrets you've been holding, talking through the things you thought you would sweep under the rug and take through the grave. Like, these are the things that come up when you silence all the noise. When you sit down with your spouse and there's now nothing else between you and things start to come out, things start to pour out. The conversations begin.

Caitlyn: 32:36

The questions you can begin to ask each other. You start to see each other, to understand each other. It's almost as if you might even feel this is how we felt, like you're getting remarried, birthing a new marriage. Almost like that one's done and old, and here is a whole new marriage. The one that we thought we were signing up for when we had our wedding that we didn't have because we chose into all this hiddenness and this dark.

Caitlyn: 32:59

So it's like you have this underground area of all this hiddenness and darkness, all the secrets that we keep. And then up above right here in the surface, we cover and hide all of that with our dissociative tendencies and our screen time. It's like, oh, so when you remove this screen time, it's like, oh, now we can peek into that dark hole of all that stuff I've been hiding with all this screen time. So it's like, they really go hand in hand. Normally, if you have a lot of secrets and hiddenness, you're keeping all of that behind in that dark hole with all your screen time.

Caitlyn: 33:29

So when you remove all your screen time, you can see all that clearly. You can start to talk together. So it was crucial for us to remove that, to get to a place where we could heal in our marriage. And then guess what? When we got to the place when we healed in our marriage, we realized we don't actually want any of that anymore.

Caitlyn: 33:47

Yeah. We didn't actually wanna add that back in. I'm not saying that you get done with your thirty days and you wanna add some of that back in that you're doing something wrong. Because I don't think that everybody, not everybody might not wanna have their TV. I'm just saying, take that thirty days, and for us, what we found is that was crucial for us healing and getting back connected again, getting all the secrets out, intimacy, into me we see, into me you see, and then it's like, woah, look at how much we're creating.

Caitlyn: 34:16

Yeah. Look at how much we see each other, how much we know each other. Like, oh my gosh, we put the kids to bed. I don't wanna watch a movie with you to connect. That's not connecting.

Caitlyn: 34:25

Yeah. Sure, we might be snuggling. Why don't we just snuggle without the TV on? Yeah. You know, so many couples are like, well that's our time to come together.

Caitlyn: 34:32

Can't you come together without that? Well, that's how we we talk about the characters in the TV show. Do you have anything else in life you can talk about? Like, not to be blunt, but if all you can talk about is characters and TV show, what kind of a marriage even is that? Like, you have nothing else better to talk about in your marriage?

Caitlyn: 34:48

There's nothing more life giving and soul fulfilling that you can talk about. What about what you wanna create together? Yeah. Sit down and talk about that. What do you guys wanna create in the next year?

Caitlyn: 34:58

What do you want your life to look like five years from now, ten years from now? Next These conversations, like, what makes you come alive? Do those things. Does watching TV make you come alive? No.

Caitlyn: 35:08

So have less of that, and have way more of all the things that make you come alive.

Brandon: 35:13

Yeah. I think with this, a a really powerful way to think about this is not just what you're consuming, but the impact of the light that you're putting in front of your face. So artificial blue light, there's a lot of studies on it. You can look into it on an artificially blue lit screen. A lot of people are wearing more red or blue light blockers.

Brandon: 35:29

So you've seen you've probably heard of blue light blocking glasses. If you work behind a desk, you're probably staring at a screen a lot. The impact that artificial blue light, which mimics what comes from the sun during the brightest hours of the day during the afternoon, it messes with our circadian rhythm. It messes with our body's natural production of different hormones to either wake us up or calm us down. So our bodies are very out of whack with when we see these artificial lights.

Brandon: 35:55

And so when you wake up and you put a blue light in your screen, in your face, it automatically spikes your cortisol where your body's like, woah, we're in fight or flight. We got it. We have stuff to gotta do. When you keep a blue screen in front of your face, right before you go to bed, it makes it so much harder for your body to wind down. And so instead of using artificial light to try to regulate your nervous system, actually use less and less blue light as possible.

Brandon: 36:21

We love trying to see the sunrise with our eyes. So if you have the opportunity, depending on the time of the year, go outside and make the sun ray sunrise an occasion. Even if it's cloudy, even if it's cold, if you can see the sunrise with your eyes, it just reminds you that you're a freaking human being that lives on the planet, and you can just take it in. It's coming back into your body, coming back into being a human, coming back into this this experience that we have right now instead of trying to escape it. You turn your phone off and you go look at the sunrise, and there's so many health benefits to that.

Brandon: 36:51

And then when the day's winding down, if you can, if you have the opportunity to turn off your phone. And if you can see the sunset in a beautiful location, maybe drive the five minutes down the road to the forest area, to the the hilltop lookout, or it's to your backyard and just noticing the colors changing in the clouds. The benefits from seeing the sunrise and the sunset are so huge and trading that from just looking at the non sunset of a blue screen. And it reminds you, it triggers to your body, oh, it's time to start winding down. So instead of turning on this podcast, we're gonna change our light setup for the next season.

Brandon: 37:23

We are gonna lower the light just for our podcast because we actually don't even use lights at night. We use some incandescent bulbs. They can have a non red light setting, and we'll use oh, sorry. Non blue light setting, and we'll use red light lights that we use to brush the kids' teeth, and we keep the lights very, very low. No big LED flicker lights that basically are like strobe lights like you're in a club.

Brandon: 37:43

So LEDs keep you alert, keep you awake. Fluorescent lights are the same way. We like incandescent bulbs, and it allows your nervous system to be calm. It allows your kids to fall asleep early. It allows you at 09:00 instead of just getting worked up.

Brandon: 37:56

You're actually ready to oh my gosh. You know what you should do when you when you're tired, everybody that's listening to this, maybe rev this may break your paradigm. If you're tired, go to bed. There is nothing good that's gonna happen in your life from nine to midnight, to midnight. If you have to wake up early for your job or if you wanna have that extra time to get up and take care of yourself and work out, have some time to read, go to bed at nine, and wake up at five.

Brandon: 38:20

Do you know how many hours? That's is that's eight hours of sleep. Go to bed at nine, wake up at five, and you're gonna have an abundance of time. And this might take some rewiring. You're like, well, Brandon, I'm a night owl.

Brandon: 38:29

No. You're not. You've been on your phone for years and years and years, and you've trained yourself to stay up late.

Caitlyn: 38:35

Turn off the lights when the sun goes down, and then come back and tell us if you're still a night owl. Because oftentimes, we think we're a night owl because we just flip on all the switches in the house. And of course, yeah, you'll stay awake if you keep all these lights on because it's triggering to your brain and your body that it's daytime. It's really hard to go to sleep when you think it's daytime. And so what we've been doing for three, four years now is when the sun goes down, there is no lights on.

Caitlyn: 39:01

And so it's just red in our house. It looks hilarious if you're out if you're outside looking in, it's like, is their whole house red? Our favorite is natural fire. So we've had houses in Idaho that had wood burning fireplaces. So no lights on in the house when the sun goes down, and we light a big beautiful fire, and we all sit by it, and we come together.

Brandon: 39:22

Or kittles.

Caitlyn: 39:23

The kids will if you have kids, oh my gosh, and your bedtime takes forever, turn the lights off when the sun goes down, and your bedtime will go like this. I guarantee it. It will go so fast because your kids are they'll probably be begging to go to bed. They'll be crawling to the bed. They're gonna be so ready.

Caitlyn: 39:40

So we love a fire. We also we don't have a fireplace in our house now, So we will have all the lights off. The kids are in bed, and we'll just light a couple candles, and we'll snuggle on the couch, and we'll talk, and you cannot keep yourself awake. You just can't. Like, if you're a spouse who has an addiction to your phone, and you're looking at pornography when your spouse goes to bed, if you had all the lights off and a candle on, that does that scene doesn't even go together.

Caitlyn: 40:06

Like, you're not looking at pornography while you have a candle on next to you. It's just not how it goes. You are doing that because you have your blue light on, you have the blue lights on in the house, and you're staying up, and you're staying wired and stimulated, and you're essentially, what we're breaking down is we have all of I think somebody left this hilarious comment about me that I'm a hippie or something, and Brandon's like

Brandon: 40:27

A dude. A casual dude.

Caitlyn: 40:28

And how do we even how do we even click or whatever? What we're presenting is a what most people would think is a hippie way of living, and it's actually not hippie at all. It's just actually the way we were created to live. We weren't created to live looking at a screen with all this blue light dissociating and staying stimulated. We were meant to live in our union, experiencing life outside, the actual sunlight, not the LED lights of our house, getting our bare feet into the earth.

Caitlyn: 40:58

I always tell women that are in their season of hearing all these massive secrets revealed or dealing with all of the breakdown of their marriage. It's like, how do I survive all of this? Well, you need to put your bare feet in the ground. You need to get your your eyes in the sun. You need to go for walks.

Caitlyn: 41:16

You need to be out in nature. You need to be getting plenty of sleep. Don't stay up late watching TV. Get lots of sleep. You need to nourish yourself with meals.

Caitlyn: 41:25

These are the fundamentals that help lay the foundation for your own life, for your marriage, and for the legacy, for what you're passing down to your kids, and your kids' kids, and what trickles down. Like, this is what you get to begin to think about creating in your life when you take out all this stuff that's counterfeit. You know, we talked about all the the sexual counterfeits. This is like the counterfeits of being fully alive is all of the stimulus. And so when you break it back down to some of the basics and the simple joys and beauty of life, you lay this beautiful foundation to build upon and to pass down to all the generations that come after you.

Brandon: 42:02

And if you want a really practical example of how taking media out of certain parts of your life plays out, here's a TMI, too much information example. It used to take me thirty minutes to take a poo because I had my phone with And you might be thinking, oh, my husband's like that. My wife's like that. I tested we've tested this with multiple people. I won't name names.

Brandon: 42:20

But when I stopped once we were in our season of brokenness, I committed and agreed to not taking my phone in the bathroom. And this crazy thing happened after a couple weeks. My bathroom time taking a poo went from thirty minutes to one minute. Yep. And it's never gone back.

Caitlyn: 42:35

In and out.

Brandon: 42:35

And so if you're like, man, it just, you know, takes me thirty minutes to you to go number two, that's because there's a phone in your hand. Yep. And that's not sanitary.

Caitlyn: 42:43

Nope.

Brandon: 42:43

And it's not beneficial. Your body if you need thirty minutes to yourself, go on a walk.

Caitlyn: 42:47

Yep.

Brandon: 42:47

Move your body.

Caitlyn: 42:48

Exactly.

Brandon: 42:48

So if you want a crazy experiment, stop taking your phone in the bathroom, stop responding to work emails, texts, social media, whatever it is you do on your phone, leave it out of the bathroom, and doing your business will take place in one one minute to two minutes. Your body will literally relearn how that process works. So there's a TMI example. That's what I experienced. I've seen other men experience that, other women experience that.

Brandon: 43:07

If you leave your phone out the bathroom, it won't take you thirty minutes. And so there are endless health benefits to using social media, to using your phone as a tool and not as entertainment. When you are looking to be entertained, when you are looking to be to have your mood shifted by something randomly, it will happen. And you may or may not like the results. And if you are in a season right now where you need big changes in your relationship fast, cut out all the distraction and you'll face each other.

Brandon: 43:33

And when you don't know what to do, move your body.

Caitlyn: 43:35

Yep. Go outside.

Brandon: 43:36

Don't move your thumbs. Don't pick up a phone. Don't set your thumb to scroll. Put your phone down. Move your body.

Brandon: 43:42

Get in some water. If there's a river near you or a lake or an ocean, wherever you can get into nature and let yourself unravel, let yourself break, let yourself be uncomfortable, let your body let your body lead you. What does your body need? We've been so trained if you grew up in maybe in a Christian home or a secular home, whatever home you lived in, most of us don't have a good relationship with our body. It's like my body we don't know what our body wants or needs.

Brandon: 44:06

If you sat with it, even just right now, we'll do this exercise. You can close your eyes. What do you feel like your body needs? You might think, oh, I'm kind of thirsty. My hips are kind of tight.

Brandon: 44:15

If you just started tuning back into what your body needs, you would move more. You would eat whole foods and you'd create experiences for yourself that revolved around relationship with other people, starting with your spouse, starting with your kids, and starting with the people that really matter to you. Social media and your phone, they confuse you, and they make you think you want things you don't want. They make you afraid of things you didn't know you could be afraid of. They make you distracted.

Brandon: 44:38

They make you fearful of a life around you or envious of somebody else's life. You can create the environment and the world that you want. You just have to put the screens down, go back outside, and be around the people you love. It will empower you to do way more than than just being numbed out.

Caitlyn: 44:55

Yeah. So to summarize, you can create the life that you want. You get to create that, and we're inviting you into creating that. And so if you're listening to this by yourself or with your spouse, we're inviting you into thirty days. Start today.

Caitlyn: 45:08

Start today with your thirty days. And if you are brave enough to listen to us and to embark on thirty days with removing consumption, please send us a message on the Grounded Union podcast page, or send us an email, and let us know that you're embarking on this, and then come back to us thirty days from the day that you start, and let us know. We wanna hear your experience. What took place in your life? What took place in your marriage?

Caitlyn: 45:35

What did you create? What came alive? Yep. What was birthed in you? What was birthed in your marriage?

Caitlyn: 45:42

Because I can guarantee you, if you're brave enough to do it, things will transform. And if you pair this with all the previous episodes, oh my gosh, thirty days from now, I can guarantee you, your whole world will look so different.

Brandon: 45:57

Step into that abundance. Let go of everything, all the limiting beliefs that your life isn't good enough. It's not worth facing. You can create the beauty. You don't need to be distracted.

Brandon: 46:07

You just need to step into the reality of where you are and who you're with. We wanna thank you so much for listening to this episode about what to do when your relationship feels flat and disconnected. Unplug from all of the distractions, all the media, Get back into your body. Get back into nature, and be intentional with how you use light in your home, and you will experience shifts in your mood, shifts in your perspectives, and it will unlock the capacity to do the healing work we've been telling you about. You have the time.

Brandon: 46:32

You have the capacity. You just don't need to be distracted anymore. We hope you guys enjoy this episode, and we will see you next week.