Did you know that the #1 longevity factor is not your diet or the quality of your sleep, but the health (or dysfunction) of your long-term romantic relationship? Yes, according to Dr. John Gray, it doesn’t matter how much you’re exercising or how healthy your lifestyle is – if your romantic relationship is a source of stress or unhappiness in your life, then that will inevitably take a toll on your health and affect your longevity.

You can trust John knows what he’s talking about, as does happen to be the #1 best-selling relationship author of all time, and of course wrote the iconic bestseller, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: The Classic Guide To Understanding The Opposite Sex. He has even more radical insights to share, and some of it might throw you for a second because his ideas are so fresh and alternative. But as you’ll hear, there is always a good explanation and/or scientific fact behind why John says what he does. As he noted during his previous show appearance, culture has changed, society has changed, but we as humans, biologically and hormonally, have remained pretty much the same. This is what usually creates issues between couples – the external factors we all have to deal with because of modern life.

Interestingly, John points out that most women lose their attraction to men when they start to open up about their feelings. But wait, aren’t women always saying they want men to be more open and share more? Sure…but what happens with this dynamic is, the more hurt feelings the man shares, the more the woman wants to protect him. It’s not the sharing of emotions that is necessarily bad, it’s the timing of it. John strongly cautions men to not share their feelings when they are feeling emotional because the change of this dynamic – the woman becoming the protector, not the man – is what results in the woman losing her attraction to the man. John says, “part of intimacy is revealing what is inside of you,” so how do you achieve intimacy – how do you share in a way that keeps the balance of your relationship, instead of throwing it way off? It’s simple: men should wait to reveal what’s going on inside of them until after the woman has done this first. Once she has shared, then that’s the appropriate time for the man to open up about what’s been on his mind.

John also talks about the importance of the unconscious mind, and not letting it “rule” or “control” us, and then we delve into a discussion about hormones. Did you know that for males, a high sex drive is directly correlated with high (or normal) testosterone levels? And whenever you do something dangerous, or something that gives you a thrill, or even something successfully, testosterone goes up. But what makes testosterone go down? When a man feels like his partner does not appreciate or value him. As John points out, life happens, and when it does, it can really knock you down. And it’s in those moments that couples will behave in a way that will either make or break the relationship. As a man, having a supportive partner who loves, appreciates, and admires you for what you provide/bring to the relationship, is a testosterone booster. But when the man has more needs than the woman, she becomes the man, and her testosterone will go up!

The goal is for everyone to have a healthy balance of female and male hormones in their body because an imbalance in hormones will seriously affect your relationship. When a woman starts to slide into the “male” role in the relationship, her female hormones decrease as her male hormones increase, which changes her behavior: women get more stressed, feel more dissatisfied, and find it difficult to express appreciation, love, and acceptance for their partners. They will also start to project all their frustrations onto their partner because when they are testosterone dominant, this indicates that they are stuck in a place of doing things that cannot bring inner satisfaction. Inner fulfillment for women comes from being in alignment with female hormones – and as John explains, tenderness, vulnerability, intimacy, and love all stem from feminine energy. But men nowadays are being told to embrace being more emotional, which John sees as part of the problem, because any time men are emotional expressing their feelings, they’re making female hormones. It’s not the presence of female hormones that’s a problem, it’s just that the male hormones always need to be higher for a healthy balance – because when a man’s female hormones start to increase, his testosterone lowers. Basically, too many emotions for men lowers testosterone, which causes “female” emotions like love, tenderness, and happiness, to become negative, and so men who have dominant female hormones instead feel anger, hurt, fear, and anxiety when they connect with their emotions.

“Anytime you’re arguing with a woman, you’re afraid,” John says. Women do not feel this fear, but it’s there, and it really manifests as defensiveness for men. This causes their estrogen levels to rise, and men often go into the default reaction of, “Well, whatever, I just don’t care anymore, I don’t give a -” etc. And as John clarifies, it’s not that men don’t care (even though they’re acting like it), it’s just that they have to detach in order to deal with these overwhelming emotions. But as John also points out, the fact that men can be closed off emotionally is terrifying to women, and it also makes them feel unsafe and worried. John then lays out two integral pieces of advice: Men need to watch the way they exit to their “cave,” while women have to watch out for how they pursue their man into his cave! A lot of his advice is actually quite simple: mostly, don’t take things personally, because even though it feels personal, it’s usually not. We have to honor the natural balance of our hormones in order to honor our partner, because, otherwise, it’s impossible to sustain a healthy relationship!

Enjoy this stimulating conversation with the always interesting and inspiring John Gray, and remember these wise words: “Don’t let your fears control your behavior. Look at them, listen to them. Try to understand them…then take action, without letting your fears control you.”

TIMESTAMPS:

The health of your long-term romantic relationship contributes to longevity. [03:29]

The point is to find balance with all the forces in the culture. [06:47]

Don’t let your fears or anger control your behavior. [10:22]

Sex drive is all unconscious. [13:42]

Success stimulates testosterone and danger stimulations testosterone. [16:20]

Too much emotion lowers testosterone. [20:02]

If a woman is rational and logical, they suppress their emotions and can’t be orgasmic. [22:34]

When a guy gets a negative emotion and goes off to do testosterone boosting activities, it really works. [24:28]

The problem with relations is we men feel controlled and women don’t know it. [27:24]

Women, you can’t look to your man to be responsible for your happiness. [31:56]

If you are having communication problems, then you are not having great sex. [37:39]

We love you but we want you to change. Really? [40:06]

Nobody wants to be criticized. [41:59]

There always has to be a problem to solve. It’s human nature. [48:08]

We all have unprocessed feelings from childhood. [50:47]

Women cannot hear men unless they feel heard first. Listening is the most masculine thing you can do. [53:28]

When the man undresses the woman, it is very exciting for her. [54:42]

How can we “not take things personally?” [56:15]

The trouble with video games is they overstimulate your dopamine production in the brain and you become addicted. [58:55]

You have to regulate your sexual energy. [01:01:51]

How does a woman regulate her sex drive? [01:10:16]

We need to find a balance between yin and yang. [01:12:25]

Some people don’t know how to grieve properly. [01:18:38]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns Shopping Page
• Keto for Life

QUOTES:

• “Women, your job is to be happy; his job is to make you happier.”
• “Ninety percent of the things we get emotional about are an overreaction.”

LISTEN:

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad (00:00:08):
Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit, and happy in hectic, high-stress, modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge, and expertly balance that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go,

Brad (00:03:29):
Greetings listeners. I am so pleased to introduce to you for the second time Dr. John Gray, the one and only the number one bestselling relationship author of all time, one of the coolest dudes of all time get a load of his energy, his enthusiasm, his passion, and we take it to the next level. Just when you thought we’ve exhausted all the topics we could talk about including my one hour summary recording of our first conversation. Oh man, this one is going to be a real mindblower. It’s going to motivate you to be the best you can be to get focused to clean up some of those rough edges. I acknowledge this myself when I’m listening to him talking and thinking about my conduct and those times as a man we know the man assignments are to be the Kung Fu master to be calm, cool and collected under pressure and those times when I’ve had a busy stressful day and I crack a little bit and get bitchy and emotional and know that I can do better and you can do better too. And females, we got your assignments too. It’s all good because it’s all contributing to the greater love force of the planet earth and especially with romantic relationships which, as research is cited with our new book, Keto for Life that Mark Sisson and I have just released is the number one make or break longevity factor.

Brad (00:04:49):
There is probably nothing more important, not the foods you eat, not how good or bad your sleep habits are, how much exercise you’re getting, but the health or the dysfunction of your longterm romantic relationship is pretty much predictive of your health span, how long and how well you live. So we got to get this stuff handled and who better than John Gray? I feel like it’s been a great personal honor for this guy to accommodate my requests to talk and talk at length. He was willing to go on and on over time. So we have a wonderful full length unplugged show or it goes off into many beautiful directions and offering you an assortment of life-changing insights. I’m going to organize and collate all the information and give you a followup show so we can keep everything close at hand close to our heart as we go through daily life and remember people, one of his quotes that came up in the show was that 90% of the things that we get emotional about are an overreaction.

Brad (00:05:56):
How about that yeah, things aren’t as bad as they seem. It could be worse if you’re going to claim that things are really bad and if you stick around to the end that you must stick around till the end. John talks about dealing with the tragic passing of his lifelong partner Bonnie 40 year partnership and now he’s soldiering on ahead, getting into his work, being productive, but grieving and mourning and dealing with that sadness on an ongoing basis. It kind of helps put your little trivial matters and problems of the day into perspective. I wish you a great journey through this show. Please listen to it again. Take notes, make it happen, actualize it in your own life. Dr. John Gray, author of Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus most recently Beyond Mars and Venus and dozens of other books. Here he goes, wind him up and he’s off.

Brad (00:06:48):
Look at all those books on your bookshelf, man, and I’m so honored for you to come back and spend time with me. John, we talked about a year ago and I got to say our, our conversation was life changing. I’ve been talking about it since then. I’ve been thinking about it every single day. And I want to start with that incredible insight that the, the male’s responsibility in a relationship is to be the Kung Fu master, calm, cool, collected going off into the cave to sort things out. And, uh, some of your great quotes like, uh, if you express, you say your feelings are hurt or you express anger, you said that’s death to a relationship. And the, um, the insight that I’ve been thinking about and talking with all my friends about is like, wait a second. How does this line up with, I guess this cultural momentum toward the man being vulnerable and sharing feelings and talking things out rather than going off in a huff. So I want to kind of dig deep into that and reconcile, uh, the, the John Gray assignment with some of the noise that we’re experiencing from, uh, from other forces.

John (00:07:54):
Okay. So there, there is a dilemma. Alright. So, uh, definitely my message is trying to find balance with all the forces in the culture. And it’s not that you can’t share feelings with your partner, it’s that they need to share feelings more. That’s the whole thing. So what I hear from women again and again, again, I’m just gonna look at just from observation, then we’ll look at biology, okay? Because biology is a big part of this, but just observation. So many women lose attraction to men when they start opening up and sharing their feelings. They say they want you to open up and share your feelings, and then they lose attraction to open up. When you open up and share your feelings. If you feel hurt, then now she’s walking on eggshells. She becomes your protector. Now you can feel hurt and you can always share hurt, but not when you’re feeling strong emotion.

John (00:08:45):
You can. You know what I tell women, even when they share their emotions is to preface it with this is not a big deal. So if you’re going to share emotions needs to be when you’re not upset with her. When you’re sharing with her, when your heart is wide open and you’re not feeling needy, see, needy is a big thing. Women can’t stand needy men. Women are terrified of being, even showing that they need you because it’s very hard for them to determine the difference between needy and needing someone. Now you can, it’s easy for men because we see women all the time being needy and it’s a turn off. Well, when a man is a needy, is needy, it’s 10 times more turnoff. Okay, 10 times more turnoff to a woman. They just feel like, Oh, I’m his mother. I have to take care of him.

John (00:09:34):
Now some women, they get into this maternal thing, then they say, yeah, he needs me. I understand him. I’m there for him and they can’t be turned on to you. There’s an energy of self sufficiency, of self-reliance, of independence, uh, which makes men extremely attractive to women. But you know, we can get this conversation about what makes the best relationship in order to maintain that attraction. But we can also look at it just from, I’m a man, I want to be strong. Okay. And as a man, I want to be strong and that will be the most attractive thing to a woman. But I do it for me first. So for me it’s when I set goals and then fear comes up, that’s an emotion. So okay, I feel it, but I act in spite of it. That’s like denial in a sense. But no, that’s called being masculine.

John (00:10:22):
That’s don’t let your fears control your behavior. Look at them, listen to them. Try to understand them. Maybe talk about them with somebody, not your spouse, because it terrifies them when you’re in fear and then you take action without letting your fears control you. Not see what’s the, I it. Everybody knows that. I mean we all go out on stage or we go out to our jobs, we have some anxiety, some stress. You know, actors say they’re always nervous or something, but they do it in spite. That means you have a higher intelligence and you have a lower intelligence, which is your emotions. Your emotion is just programmed into us from thousands of years from monkeys, the parents that pay people all this up. So you listened to it. You don’t want to deny a part of you. You embrace it, but you don’t let it control you.

John (00:11:06):
So the same thing. When you have anger, you don’t let it control you. You behave in a way that’s civil, kind, courteous. And by behaving above your emotions, you now control your emotions and you’re able to say, okay, let it go. You can’t let go of emotions unless you can act without letting them control you. Then you can let them go. And that’s the key for being masculine is not letting your emotions control you. But then part of creating intimacy is revealing what’s inside of you. So you want to reveal what’s inside of you as a man, only after she has revealed what’s inside of her. Then if there’s anything you feel you need to share with her, you’re doing it. But for not from the point of view of trying to change her cause you know I can say, Oh it hurts when you say that I’m trying to change you as opposed to you.

John (00:11:59):
You know, I’d prefer, you know, when you do this and this and this might be a way to do it better for me. It feels better. You do it from a place of preference, not attachment to changing. If you use emotions to manipulate people, and that’s ultimately what all emotions are. When you’re talking about all the negative emotions, there are manipulations programmed into us. Think about it. Anger is to intimidate and then people bow down to you. Sadness is to elicit empathy so people will help you. Fear is to get somebody else to do it so you don’t have to do it. And shame is to build trust and see, I’ve learned my lesson, see if you can trust me again. So all of these things are prehistoric, basically, evolved through monkeys to humans and so forth because we didn’t have communication skills, but we don’t want to turn off that part of the brain.

John (00:12:53):
That’s a very important part in the brain is the animal part of us as behind the animal. Part of us is the unconscious mind in conscious mind. Does everything okay? We’re, we’re like riding on an elephant, a giant elephant where this little guy, if they’re guiding it, it does so much what you like, what you want, what turns you on, what motivates you all so much programming is inside of us. Now we can change that programming but gradually, slowly we can change it, but the first thing we want to do is not let it rule us and control us. That was the benefit of embracing all those parts of us. Being aware of them and so forth is that’s where your body’s ability to regenerate comes from the, if you get a cut, you don’t fix that cut. Your body goes into motion. If you get a cold or flu, your body does this whole thing.

John (00:13:42):
You’re a no control at all. You know? How do you grow growth, regeneration, development or degeneration. All these things is from the brain, unconscious brain, but now we’ll talk relationships, sex drive. Sex drive is all unconscious. Who do you get turned on? When do you get turned on? How do you get turned on? Big mystery because it’s all unconscious. They done. But you can control that part of you with wisdom above, you know, using the higher intelligence. For example, I see a woman, my body wants to conquer and take her. I don’t go do that. Okay. So that’s again, but you embrace those feelings. Okay, I’ve got, I’ve got a sex drive, I got passion. How do I maintain that passion in a relationship? Only commit, maintain it and have it grow. If it’s directed to one person that takes power. See, you know, young guy, I’ve turned on any girl that’s showing some skin.

John (00:14:36):
At least that’s the way it used to be. I don’t know what’s happening. They really young guys cause they’re seeing it all the time. So it neutralizes it. Yeah. And then they play the video games and then there’s the pornography and all that, you know. But basically, uh, sex drive is very, very important as a man. If you look at in that sex drive is directly correlated with high testosterone. Okay. So you need to have an high testosterone. Really. I mean, normal testosterone is just today we have is a drop in testosterone levels in men. So normal testosterone levels for your body type, and it’s different for every man based upon your body type. If you have a more, let’s call it a mesomorph body type, you have born with more muscle mass, you have to maintain more testosterone. If you have an ectomorph body type, which is, you don’t really have the genes for a lot of muscles, then you need to have less testosterone for your normal amount.

John (00:15:31):
So it’s different for different men. Having said that, let’s say you’ve got a lot of muscles and you’re a mesomorph and you have to maintain higher levels. You have to then generate higher testosterone in your life in order to feel good. See, I’m not a mesomorph. I don’t have to generate a lot of testosterone compared to a mesmeric in order to feel good. So what does that mean? That means I’m going to pick a job which might be different from a mesomorph. A lot of Mesmerists will pick jobs where they can easily become heroes, where they do things that are difficult, where they do things that people go, Oh, I’m so glad you did that. I didn’t have to do that. So mesomorphs pick sort of dangerous jobs, risky jobs, thanks that nobody else can do jobs. And that keeps their testosterone up to a normal level.

John (00:16:20):
So you’ll see a lot of prisoners, for example, uh, are mesomorphs not at all. Okay? You can be a criminal on anybody type, but, but you’ll see a lot of mesomorphs there because they did risky things in order to create higher testosterone. Whenever you take a risk, testosterone goes up. Uh, whenever you do something dangerous, testosterone goes up. So, and you don’t have to do dangerous things to have testosterone go up. You can do successful things. So you’ve got success stimulates testosterone, danger stimulates testosterone. If I don’t feel successful, then I’ll go danger. You see that work? So that’s what we have. All these people, we men need messages that were successful, otherwise our testosterone goes down. So let’s talk about the crisis. You know, I wrote a book with Warren Farrell called the Boy Crisis. We’re just seeing massive challenges for boys to become men with low testosterone because they don’t have fathers.

John (00:17:20):
So you, you need to have a role model of a successful father in order to start building all the channels and everything to be testosterone, not, you know, I’m not saying these are absolutes, but we’re looking at massive numbers. When you look in America, half the males, I don’t have a father living at home. That’s a huge statistic. So anyway, we got off on that book, the Boy Crisis, but it’s so significant. We’re talking about testosterone building, needing messages that were successful. And so when a woman senses, we’ll come back to relationship, which is what we brought out in the beginning. When a woman doesn’t appreciate you, when she doesn’t hold you up and admire you and be grateful for you that you’re in her life, then your testosterone, if he doesn’t do that, your testosterone goes down. If she does that, your testosterone goes up.

John (00:18:12):
And that’s a point of a relationship is it becomes a place when, when life knocks you down, sometimes not everybody can be the richest man in the world. Okay? So when life knocks you down, you come home to a woman that loves you because you’re dedicated to her. You provide something to her that she doesn’t have that she needs. So when you have more needs than her, then she becomes the man. Her testosterone goes up, she starts becoming mothering for you. And yes, mothering is an activity of being like the home CEO. So there’s testosterone that gets produced, but the child gives so much unconditional love. It maintains her female hormones. So she can be in this sort of wonderful place of having female hormones and male hormones. But when women have all male hormones our dominant male hormones, there are female hormones go down.

John (00:19:04):
They can’t appreciate you. They can’t love you. They can’t accept you. They want to fix you. They want to change you. They’re dissatisfied with you. They project all of their disappointment in their life on you because being only on their masculine side, making money cannot bring them inner fulfillment. The inner fulfillment for women comes from their female hormones. The masculine hormones can pay the bills, can get her successful build her up esteem, boom, happiness, love, tenderness, vulnerability. That’s feminine energy. Now we know biologically this is true. This is estrogen. We see the female estrogen hormones, progesterone test off and all out of balance with women, and that’s whenever they’re stressed. So that’s our dilemma today is as for men, we’re being told to be more emotional, express our feelings. Anytime you’re emotional expressing feelings, you’re making female hormones just to put it that way. Now, is it wrong for me to make female hormones?

John (00:20:02):
No, it’s just that my male hormones always have to be much higher and female hormones will start to lower your testosterone. So too much emotion lowers testosterone, and then what happens is when our low testosterone goes low, then our female emotions like love and tenderness and happiness become negative and they become hurt. They become angry, they become fear, they become anxiety, they become argumentative. And anytime here’s a little, a little seed in there. Men, anytime you’re arguing with a woman, you’re afraid. See, they don’t feel the fear. It’s in there. The fear is defensiveness. You only defend yourself if there’s a danger. So you’re preventing the dangerous. That’s an unconscious fear. And so now what’s happening is your estrogen levels are starting to rise and rise and rise. When you’re angry, what’s happening is your anger, your, your estrogen levels are starting to rise. And what happens is testosterone, when it goes down, you get the symptoms of uh, uh, shutting down, your heart is closed.

John (00:21:04):
You just go, I’m going to pull away. I don’t care. I give up. I’m not going to do it. And the reason we go into, I don’t care is because the female hormones are so high, we have to detach in order to bring our testosterone back. So that’s when, you know, when men just kind of go, F you, you know, this, this sort of, I don’t give a shit thing, you know, bullshit, crap. You know, all that stuff, which is extremely, by the way, disturbing to women. It’s the dark side of men because our heart is fully closed and it terrifies women. And so when you do that many times in a relationship, what happens is women are living in a place of unsafety, they start becoming worried about triggering the dragon inside of you and you don’t think it’s a, I didn’t think it was a big deal on the big guy.

John (00:21:53):
I look, I’m done with this. I’m going to go. I’ll go into my cave. So how you exit to the cave is very important, but at the same time, how women pursue you into the cave. That’s the big problem is women go after you. Why are you pulling away? I feel hurt. I could just say that. What will you love me? Why are you not in with me that, Oh, I feel so bad. You’re not with me. When am I supposed to do all of that stuff? That’s why Men are from Mars was such a breakthrough for many, many people because women got it. Not all women got it, but the women who got it, Oh great, it’s, I’m not going to take it personally. I don’t take, when he pulls away, it’s not about me. It’s about a need he has. And when women get upset about stuff, men learn through my books and my message.

John (00:22:34):
Don’t take it personally. You can’t control a woman’s emotions. You actually want her to be more emotional because she’ll be more orgasmic. Another part of women today is they’re so rational, logical, they suppress all their emotions. They can’t be orgasmic. Half the women in America have never had an orgasm. The other quarter of the women have never had an orgasm with their partner. They’re doing it to themselves, which is again, there’s only like a quarter the women, they can actually have an orgasm with a man and almost all of them do it by having clitoral stimulation, which is only one of eight orgasms a woman can have and too many clitoral stimulations without vaginal penetration and that orgasms. What caused her to gain weight and now y’all are big women. They’re all masturbating. I shouldn’t say that. They’re not all masturbate, but women should know if they’re masturbating all the time with their clitoris and they don’t have the male energy, they will tend to, or many women can’t say every woman.

John (00:23:28):
It overstimulates the adrenal gland, the kidneys. What that then does is causes water retention. When their kidneys are overstimulated by sexual energy the body starts holding onto water and no matter how many dies they go on, they can’t lose that. Now, that’s not a scientific, a study that shows that that’s from a 5,000 year old Dallas tradition on sex where they talk about the importance of Aboriginal penetration, not just clitoral stimulation. Because every point the clearest and then the opening, the vagina, the G spot, the East bod, the cervix, and another spot. All these spots go to different organs in the body and they get stimulated and that’s a lot of sexual energy. Going to one spot means the other spots aren’t getting what they need and this says overstimulation occurs. Oh, you know, stimulation is great, but if it’s overstimulation, it creates problems and addiction. Okay, I didn’t know, I didn’t think you’re looking for that today, but it came out,

John (00:24:28):
Oh man, what have I, I love the, the meandering journey of the John Gray podcast. It’s, it’s, it’s solid gold, man. That’s, that’s why I got you on here. And not only, not only one of my favorite guests, but the easiest. We just wind you up and you go. But if I’m, if I’m doing my host role here and I’m focusing in on that, that first insight, which I said it was life changing because I realized that when I get that negative, uh, negative emotional charge as you described it, if I do go off and do testosterone boosting activities regardless of whatever the issue is, um, I’m following the assignment just because you gave me the assignment, let’s say for no other reason. I’m just saying John Gray told me to do this. He seems to know what he’s talking about and a lot of people agree.

John (00:25:12):
And so if you do go off and take that time, I’ve discovered that it really works and you’re able to come back to whatever the picture is that you’re facing. And maybe if it’s a relationship issue, you can at least communicate with loving kindness. If you do have to share something that’s disturbing, such as I prefer to be on time to things, uh, instead of run around and being late. And then you can set that out there into the world. And if the person’s never going to change the person, you learn to accept that yourself more. And I also find when I’m off processing things myself, I can always discover my contribution to the story other than the immediate emotional charge where you’re looking around blaming.

John (00:25:58):
Well said, well said. And you know, there’s a, a thing we’ll say to each other is our say to ourselves, or we’ll say to women when they’re upset says, don’t worry about it. Oh, let’s, let’s get on with it. Let’s get on it. And that certainly doesn’t work for them in most cases. Uh, you know, if she’s not that upset, you could just kind of say, Oh, don’t worry about, I’ll take care of that. And that would be nice. But if she’s upset about something and you say, don’t worry about it, then it doesn’t work. And so th the tendency here is to minimize, minimize. Now that’s what we need to do, not what they need to do. It’s what we need to do primarily as a source of stress reduction. It’s what they can do to get us to listen. Now, this is the million dollar phrase for women, which is, and it also, these are good for men too.

John (00:26:41):
If you want to express some feelings that are upset, you would, you’d only do it after you’re feeling better. Of course, then you would just say, this is not a big deal. I just need to talk about for a few minutes and just so you know what’s going on inside of me. This is when we say, this is not a big deal. It keeps all of the adrenaline responses from going escalating and imagine, you know, your wife says, Oh, you’re late. I can’t believe why. Why you get all upset? What if she said, you know, honey, I just need to talk. It’s not a big deal. I just need to talk so you understand what I go through and you don’t have to do anything about it if you don’t want to. What an amazing invitation to transformation. If you try to change someone, they will resist.

John (00:27:24):
If you inform them, then it’s their choice and their freedom to give to you. We’re freedom lovers. That’s where we are now. And that’s why there’s so many problems in relationships. We feel controlled and women don’t know. I think quite sincerely. Most women don’t know that they’re controlling men. And the reason they don’t know it, they know that they’ll complain to get them to do stuff. They know they criticized him. So he’ll change. But they don’t realize why men feel controlled. But it’s because we want her to be happy. We’ll jump through hoops, we’ll go in the fire, what? We’ll save her life running into a building. You know? So a big part of who we are is about providing what she needs. So when she focuses on what she’s not getting, we feel this inner, I have to do something and to make her happy now.

John (00:28:11):
So that’s why they don’t understand why we feel controlled. Because their intent is not to control you because they want to feel actually that they’re not controlling you and you’re doing all this stuff because you love them.

John (00:28:24):
But it’s giving you the list.

John (00:28:28):
So, you know, there’s a lot of, uh, this understanding going on here, but she needs to know that hurt when she’s unhappy. Most men start to feel controlled because we feel like, Oh, what do I have to do? Did change. And ultimately what do I have to do to have a sexual partner instinctively that is the strongest drive and both men and women is the drive for sex. Now maybe it’s not completely correct. I would say the desire for women to feel loved, then comes sex. But for men it’s sex and then we’ll be loved. Okay. So there’s a th th you know, evolution runs the part of the brain. Okay. So sex drive is so powerful and sex drive raises testosterone or testosterone raises a sex drive. So they all go hand in hand. So I was meandering off and lost my point. So my point was, do you have a clue?

Brad (00:29:22):
Well, I, the thing that’s popping up for me is how you described that a female CEO and the shutdown male who’s just a little bit distant all the time. And it seems to be such a prominent pattern. It’s so familiar from that wonderful, uh, you know, romantic spark starting and you hear the research that after two years that chemicals were off and then it seems like these business deals are succeeding everywhere we look where you have a stable home life and the couples together for a long time, but they’re missing that point. It seems like that’s your life’s work is to help us maintain that romantic spark, that attraction. And so what you just said that, that these being the most powerful and most profound drives that we have, but it seems like collectively we’ve swept them under the rug in the name of succumbing to these major forces in society where the woman’s trying to control the man and the man’s trying to just escape and not allowed to and so forth.

John (00:30:19):
So thank you. That’s why I meandered off. I lost my point is you, you definitely had a question in there. So I get it and you brought me back so, well I just got, there’s a somebody thanks for talking about here. I want to come back to what I was saying. Control. Okay. When we’re looking at control. This is a technique that really helps me as a man in a relationship because ultimately I’m accountable for how I feel, right? I’m accountable for how I feel and it’s my ultimately, we may not know it. I can choose, but I have to find a pathway to get there. So that’s the place I want to be is I want to be in control. If somebody is controlling you, you gave up control. So owning that is very important. So if I say, Oh, I feel controlled by you.

John (00:31:05):
Yeah, that’s how I feel, but that’s a monkey inside of me. Uh, I can, I can change and not feel cause I want to be free. Everybody today wants to be free now. And then we, then we also want that spark of passion. And ultimately it’s true that if you can be free, you can maintain the spark of passion. See, that’s the whole thing is that I am in control of me. I can, can, I can now restore the spark. And that’s a big leap. I’ll get to that. So control. It used to be my wife would be upset and then I would feel this downer inside of me. Okay, what do I have to do? You know, what did I do wrong? What I have to say, I’m sorry for, you know, this whole thing is pressure would hit down. And then I realized that, uh, of course when a woman is happy, we men are happier.

John (00:31:56):
Okay? No doubt about it. I mean, she’s having orgasms. I’m in heaven. If I come home and she smiles at me and happy to see me, I feel so good. And that’s relationship when it’s working and that way of nurturing each other. But you can’t look to your partner for everything. So I teach women, you can’t look to your husband to be responsible for your happiness. Okay? You’re responsible for your happiness. We all know that if you were to ask group who’s responsible for your happiness, and it wasn’t a relationship seminar, everybody would say, I am. If you have a success seminar, you say, who’s responsible for your success? Okay. You, yeah. If you’re blaming other people for it, you’re not going to be successful. That’s a victim mentality, so you want to be successful. You have to accountability for making adjustments and changes within yourself so that you can be successful.

John (00:32:44):
It’s not working. If you keep doing the same thing, you’re going to keep getting the same result. Okay? Good success principles. You’re accountable for the results you get. Then you get married. Couples who are having problems, who’s responsible for how you feel. He is. She is. I come home, she’s not happy. Some guys, I’m such a positive guy, except my wife is so negative. It sounds like you’re blaming and not so positive. Okay. I went, what was that? Oh, my life is wonderful except for one thing, my husband. You know, you’re blaming your partner and your unhappiness. Now clearly people can make you unhappy. I get, you know, somebody comes in and steals from me. I’m going to be unhappy for a while, whatever. Okay, so there’s two realities here. Ultimately, if something bad happens to me, I need to come back to how did I create that?

John (00:33:30):
How did I come in a set up a situation where that happens so I can avoid it next time and now, now I’m back to being free. Okay, I can get what I want. So I tell women, you shouldn’t look to men to make you happy. His job is to make you happier. Your job is to be happy. His job is to make you happier. And sometimes he can help you be happy, but it’s still your job. So he’s helping, but it’s not his responsibility. Your responsibility is to be happy. That’s the most important thing you can do to make a relationship work is to be happy. And his job is then to make you happier. Flip side of that is my job. Now I have that message in my brain. Okay, it makes sense as it, she’s responsible for happiness. You fall in love and then you’re happier than you ever been before.

John (00:34:18):
Okay? So this is the idea. So then I turn that around on myself and I go, okay, my job isn’t to make her happy. My job is to make her happier. So then I create a metaphor in my mind. I go, okay, how? You got a plumber, I’m the plumber. If she complains about the plumbing, that’s my fault. But if she complains about the, the roof’s got a leak, that’s not my fault. So if she complains she’s not happier, that’s my fault. But if she’s not happy, that’s some other guy’s fault. So I come in, I become impervious to a certain extent to feeling guilty when my wife is unhappy, I don’t immediately put it on myself. That’s not my job. It’s not my job. And it’s easier for me to hold that position if I remember her job is, yeah, my job is to make her happier. Her job is to be happy.

John (00:35:07):
And so what my job is for her is to help her. Nope. Help is different from being responsible. I’ll try, I can help if I can, but my real job is to make you happier. So what makes it easier for me is to know the skills that I can help her to find her happiness. And that’s what listening is. And that’s what not taking things personally. The most powerful thing we can do as men is don’t take it personally. You started out with cool, calm, and collected, present, and that’s the, the, the Buddhist term for that is all over. The place now is be present. Okay? Women love that. My term for that is cool, calm and collected. It’s be present. You’re not upset, you’re not disturbed, but you can feel some sense of compassion and empathy. You know? It’s like, Oh, she’s having a hard day.

John (00:35:53):
She’s not able to. She’s struggling to find her happiness again. What can I do to help her create a space for her to be that way without trying to change her? See, that is, you don’t want to be changed. If you’re in a bad mood, you don’t. Your wife poking her head. In your case, they, what’s the matter? You should do this. You shouldn’t do that. Or maybe you’re not making enough money. Maybe you’re a little depressed. You don’t want your wife say, you should call. You should go do this. You should go do that. You don’t want that advice. At that time she’s upset, she’s more hot. You got to just stay cool, calm and collected. A little empathy and don’t, you don’t have to like have a outpouring. It’s just a steadiness is a steadiness of not taking it personally.

Brad (00:36:32):
Whew. It seems like there might be some deal-breakers coming into the picture here. For example, if you’re working with a, you’re working with relationship where your partner doesn’t seem to be really happy, you’re going to have a difficult time making the partner happier and then there might be something that’s out of your control, I guess. Do you ever address that in your, in your work?

John (00:36:57):
And so now we go into the yes but, yes, buts and they’re all very valid. They’re all very valid. You know, there’s, you know, there’s lots of routes, you know, if you get too far off in the left, what do you do to get back to the right route? There’s a road back in most cases and sometimes there’s not a road back and like you’re saying, a breakup is necessary. You know, if your partner is just perpetually unhappy and you have done the right things for quite a while in your heart, you’ll realize that I can’t get what I need in this relationship and it’s time to break up. And I see what couples are doing today to great extent is, Oh, I heard uh, one of the movie stars the other day saying, Oh, we did conscious uncoupling, which I know the writer of that. She’s a wonderful woman.

John (00:37:39):
She did conscious uncoupling and that’s a good thing that if we’re going to break up, we should do it consciously and in a nice way. But often why do people get to that point of being able to break up in a nice way? Because they’ve been denying their emotions to maintain the relationship so they don’t have any passion. They lose the sex. Rarely have I had a couple of breakup because without having, rarely have I seen a couple who ended the relationship and said to me, you know, we have great sex. It’s just we have communication problems. If you have communication problems, generally you’re not having great sex. And if you’re not having great sex, you’re going to have communication problems. And that is a little bit politically incorrect because everything is biased towards the woman. And I’m biased towards the woman, too, in a certain way, but I’m biased towards men as well. So if it, if you’re not having great sex, clearly there’s a communication problem, but you consistently have a communication problem. If there’s no great sex, great sex gives opens man’s heart more than anything. Have you had great sex?

Brad (00:38:53):
Yes sir.

John (00:38:54):
Do you notice how your heart opens more?

Brad (00:38:58):
Notice how the problems go away. Like you said in the earlier show, whatever you were angry about two hours ago. Whoops. You said males have a short memory. I hope no males are offended by that. But that’s what John Gray said and he’s right. ]

John (00:39:11):
Absolutely. And it’s not even a short memory, is that we’re getting all these problems couples have until they escalate or nothing. We get upset over the stupidest things over the dumbest things. We get upset about them and because we misinterpret our partners. You know, there’s a Harvard study that was done on an a study done in India as well. I’ll do the Indian study, but the same Harvard study shows it. If you’re on your boat and you’re going along the river and another boat accidentally bumps your boat, you have a little upset. But if somebody intentionally bumps your boat, you get really upset. The same thing happened, but it’s the interpretation of intention and what happens is the intention we get upset about of men is often feeling that a woman, her intent is to control us because we’re not good enough. Okay? We feel she’s saying, you’re not good enough.

John (00:40:06):
You have to change for me to love you. Okay? That’s our misinterpretation is women get upset with us. My wife would get upset with me and then I would go, Oh, so I have to change in order to get her love, and that’s not true. I just have to let her be unhappy for a while and she will be happy again, but I have to do it in a way that’s present. Cool, calm and collected. And that’s the change I have to make is not take it personally. And most of the time, women are not aware. They’re just trying to get what they want and they’re not making, they will say it’s not conditional. I love you, I love you. I just want you to change. And many times, think of it like a mother over a child. You always love your child, right? Unless you’re really been out of shape that day, but you deeply love this, this being, you’re dedicated to them, but you’re trying to change them. You shouldn’t do this. You should do that. And I’m going to take this away from you. If you don’t do that, they’re just mothering. This is like monkey business, okay? This is the way the monkey brain does is it we love you, so we’re going to change you. We love you, so we’re going to protect you. Oh, you shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t do that. You know, I think if people look at my bio, they see my wife passed a year and a half ago. I would not be wearing this beard if my wife was still here.

John (00:41:26):
She would not be into it, but I could do without. But so she felt if I wore a beard, people think less of me. So it would be her fear. It was controlling me, not that she didn’t love me, but she also is dependent on me. So you know, we have a nice lifestyle, whatever. I contribute a lot to it. So she depends on me. So there’s all kinds of dynamics which bring into control. So when I talk about control, I want to give some people a few techniques on this. This is for women and this is for men. It works both ways. This is just straight communication techniques.

John (00:41:59):
Nobody wants to be criticized biologically. We’re wired up to not like criticism. We’re wired up for men to feel successful, not criticized. And for women they’re wired up to feel good. When women feel good, they feel worthy and then they’ll get what they need. So we’re just, we’re going to repel that. We don’t want to be criticized unless we have some sort of real self esteem issue or something. Or are we are as part of a training program. I mean, if I’m learning from you, I say, okay, I give you permission to tell me what I’m doing wrong. Okay. So there’s dynamics here, but basically we’re wired up to be defensive because it’s dangerous. We lose love if we’re less than. So the technique looks like this and it seems like Oh, overboard. But first I get the technique and then I’ll do the yes buts the, the technique would be, my wife used to complain to me about, uh, John, you forgot to turn out the light and look at me. Are you wanting me to go turn out the light? You know, I say, Oh, I’m so sorry honey, but I’m not sorry. It’s a little thing I can’t feel regret or about a little thing enough to generate some feeling of, I feel sorry. So at a certain point I said, I said, I’m sorry, three times a day. That’s my quota. And I gave it up completely unless I did something really hurtful, you know, like I was late for a couple of hours. I feel really bad and, Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Yeah, I get it. I get it. But it would be only occasionally you get a not sorry for me. I had to stop doing that. I’m sorry. Is all the time now. Some single men won’t relate to this, but married men relate to this a lot for the, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Knocks you down and knocks your testosterone down. I blew it. I blew it. I blew it. I blew it and said I’m a successful guy.

John (00:43:44):
So she would say to me, Oh John, you left the light on again. And she was, you know, she’d be very frustrated about and look at me, which I interpreted as the look of disapproval. I got beyond thinking that, Oh, if I don’t turn out, like my wife’s not gonna love me. She always loves me, but she has things that upset her. So let her be upset about it. And I would look at her and I say, it’s basically say I hear you. I’ll try to remember. That’s it. I hear you. I’ll try to, another one is, you know, she’d say something, you should do this. And I would say, I hear you, I’ll think about it. That’s it. You have to give a response to them, but it doesn’t have to be, I’m sorry. And it doesn’t have to be, yes, I will. Okay. Yes, I, they want to change you and they’re looking for you to say, well, when are you going to do it?

John (00:44:34):
I said, why don’t think about it. Well, when are you going to think about, I don’t think about it. And then sometimes you go, when can I get back to you to know what you thought about? That’s okay. All right, I’ll give you a date, whatever. But you don’t want to just feel like you’re this person being controlled all the time. Okay. So having said that, that’s one. Then we refined the technique. I didn’t have to say, I hear you. I didn’t have to say, I’m sorry. She learned actually to got me to turn out the lights. That’s even better technique. And what it was, is, and, and there, there’s a study that says, when you say “don’t” to a child, they’ll tend to do it more. Yeah. And don’t run out into the street. There’s an urge to run out into the street like right now, cause they everybody don’t think about a pink elephant.

John (00:45:17):
Now don’t think about a pink elephant. Don’t think about that pink elephant. You know a big pink elephant. Do not think about it. All you’re gonna think about it’s a pink elephant. So don’t, doesn’t always have the effect that you want. So when you critical people, you tend to resist, you’ll get resistance back. Okay? It’s just resist. Resist. You say, don’t do it. I’m going to do it. You’ve got to push back because we’re all looking to be accepted just the way we are. That’s what we need. I want to be accepted the way you are. If you’re gonna change me, control me. I’m going to resist back. I deserve love the way I am. So,

Brad (00:45:50):
Especially in the partnership, right?

John (00:45:52):
Say it again.

Brad (00:45:53):
Especially in a partnership. I mean, if your boss tells you don’t do something, you’re probably going to be pretty good there. Partnership, you’re always looking for that.

John (00:46:03):
Yeah. Everything I’m saying here just applies to partnership. Okay. When you have distance from somebody, you don’t react as defensively. Somebody in the streets is all you wrote that book didn’t do it. Yeah, I got a divorce after that book. I said a lot of people say that and walk away because I don’t care what that person thinks. I mean, a part of me cares, but not as much as I care about my children or my wife. Okay. So the closer you are to somebody, the less defenses you have to criticism. Okay. Because you’re naked. You’re becoming one with them and when you’re one with them, if they think you’re not good enough, then that knocks you down to feel like you’re not good enough. You have no defenses against somebody you’re having sex with. And so it’s the, it’s the potential criticism, control and loss that occurs and intimacies is why we lose our sex drive. One of the reasons. Okay. Is it we, we get, we just, I can’t be that close to you. I have to back up after backup after backup. It’s too much to be that close. That’s only one of the many reasons we stopped.

John (00:47:03):
So coming back to a practical technique, this one is, she started to say, she said, John, I know you turned the light out a lot in the living room. Sometimes you forget. And I’d really appreciate it if you try to remember. And I was I hear you. It was a beautiful conversation and a short period of time I started turning out the light. And even today, my wife’s not here. I turn out the light all the time. Uh, it’s a sweet moment for me as well. But again, you might think, why is he talking about just turning out the light? Aren’t there bigger things? I got no. When you have a lot, when you’re married to me and you have my lifestyle, women are going to find little stuff. They have to find something’s wrong. That’s the nature of life.

Brad (00:47:44):
Why is that?

John (00:47:46):
Okay. Well, let’s go into that. Um,

Brad (00:47:50):
I guess if what you’re describing is if you’re not immersed in a real struggle, like you’re about to get kicked out of your apartment and you’re wondering whether you’re going to sleep in the car or, or a shelter, and we’re past all that, so we have to invent some sort of conflict, just cause a human nature or something ?

John (00:48:08):
Because of human nature, because of female nature. Okay. This is, there’s always gotta be a problem to solve. You need a problem to solve and she needs to have a problem to look at. Now, that’s just the nature of life. Now I’ll go beyond with a reasonable explanation. It’s not as reasonable as may people like. It’s true for me and my belief system. See, when you love someone, you feel one with them. Your heart opens. You can feel oneness as you grow in your, what we might call spiritual awareness, you feel a greater oneness with the world. When I was a little boy, for example, I have a very big spiritual background. I was a, you know, spiritual monk for nine years, celibate and all that. I met it, started doing yoga at three years old today. You know, I was late for the interview cause I was lost in meditation.

John (00:48:57):
I meditated four hours this morning. You know, I just, yeah, I, I’m a master of meditation. Okay. It’s effortless for me. So this big pet that’s behind the skip, behind the John Gray relationship expert, it’s love and love is spiritual. Love is oneness. So I can go into these meditative states and I, and I love it. You know, that’s my great pleasure. I have, uh, so back to the reason, the more spiritual we are, the more connected we feel to the world, to the people. So when we see some people might see, um, suffering people in the middle East and they will feel pain, some people don’t, they’re not spiritual. When you feel that when you’re spiritual, you feel a compassion and an empathy for the world, for some part of the world. Maybe for children, maybe for animals, maybe for climate, maybe for the earth. Uh, my wife had a big compassion for the earth.

John (00:49:55):
You know, she tended the earth. Cared for there as you demonstrated for, you know, cleaner water, cleaner air, you know, this is what you do when you have all your own needs met. You’re not care about all the other things. So there’s a, there’s a pain that’s felt and what is often called the collective consciousness. It was demonstrated in one of those Star War movies where the the the wizard guy, he goes, Oh there’s a disturbance in the force, cause a whole planet blew up. So we are all affected by the pain of others. The Russians did studies of a mother cat with the baby cats and they brought the baby cats in a submarine around the world and they started the torture, the baby cats and the mother started to cry and be in pain. Yeah. This is, we are all connected and to the extent that we’re aware and have the extent our heart is open, we’ll put it that way.

John (00:50:47):
We are always being affected by the pain of the planet. And so how do you, if you don’t know what you’re upset about, then you will find things to be upset about. So there’s always something to be upset about. And then you go on a wave, you process it, you talk about, you feel it and you feel better and then you get upset about it. You feel better and you get upset about and feel better. So there’s always going to be something coming up. That’s one way to describe it. Okay. There’s another way to describe it, which is we all have, it’s like psychology describes it this way, which is we have repressed feelings from childhood. Okay? So a dramatic example of that is I was seven years old and I’ve lost from my family. So I thought I’d never get back. That was a bearing for seven days.

John (00:51:36):
I was away. Then I found my mother again. Okay. So that was traumatic. Right? So what do we do with trauma? We buried, it gets put into the unconscious and it’s waiting to be processed. It doesn’t come up to be processed and dealt with until there’s nothing to be afraid of. And then any part of you, this unlike your present state of mind will come up when it comes up. It doesn’t say hi, I’m your unprocessed feelings from childhood. It gets projected onto the now. So it’s a sense of an uneasy and everything’s going in your life.

John (00:52:08):
You see people win the lottery, they go crazy, they get divorced, they lose their money, they have all kinds of problems. You know, you get famous. People have so much success. It’s literally they can’t repress anything anymore. See, repression is, I’m going to push me down in order to get your love. But when you think you’re so hot and taught, you don’t need money, you’re wonderful. Everybody loves you. I don’t have to push anything down. And so it starts to come up. One of the comedians said something on his, on his answering machine, which is, Hey, thanks for calling me. I’m probably here, but I’m not going to run to the phone because I’m too important. So suddenly you think of like a spoiled brat. We’d have a lot of money, a lot of success. You can, it will come up. So what I find is that wealthy couples often have big problems about little things, whereas not wealthy people have big problems and sometimes that’s actually easier to solve emotionally than the other stuff because it’s so irrational to be upset with your partner because they don’t listen well. What do you mean I don’t listen? Well, you didn’t turn out the lights. See, that doesn’t mean I don’t listen. That means that my value system just happens to be different. And also I use all recycled electric energy. So what’s the problem?

Brad (00:53:21):
That’s a good comeback, John. Especially that first part can, we can use that. My value system is just different. Don’t take it personally.

John (00:53:28):
Well, you can use that. I mean in your mind you need to use that, but it can’t be done to shut somebody down. Every comeback is done with people are just equal when their heart is open and they’re being heard. But one of the big things is women feel over and over and over. I don’t feel heard What that means is she can’t hear a word you say. Say it again. Women feel I don’t feel heard and she doesn’t. Okay, so I have to learn how to bring her to a place where she feels heard if possible, but in the process of bringing her to a place where she feels heard, she will not be able to hear a word. You say. Women cannot hear men unless they feel heard first. That’s the dynamic of it. Because when somebody doesn’t feel heard, when you listen to someone, if I, if I’m listening to a woman talk or anybody, actually, the hormone that gets produced in them is estrogen. When you’re listening, you’re penetrating. I see. We go back and forth, but basically, and there’s nothing wrong with estrogen in men. I just can’t go too high, okay? It just has to be in balance with your testosterone, but everybody has this backward. They think listening is a female quality.

John (00:54:42):
No, listening is the most masculine thing you can do. Listening is cool, calm and collected and you’re penetrating into someone. See, right now you’re penetrating into me. You’re listening to me. So you’re going inside of me and I’m revealing something in me. So I’m sharing. It is like a woman when she’s taking off her clothes. That’s a very exciting thing for her. And I’ll throw this in to the mix and part of my sex seminar is one of the good things to do man is undress her. She shouldn’t, cause I just said when she’s undressing and that’s strip tease and that excites men. But if you want to excite a woman, you undress her. Okay. It’s a very, that’s what they like to undress you in all the movies cause they give what they want. What she wants is you to undress her and you to time it because all about teasing her and creating desire in her because your desire is 10 times more than hers generally speaking.

John (00:55:36):
And, and what will happen then is she can’t get fully aroused. You have to become more cool, calm and collected as your desire goes down. Her desire goes up. See it’s always and desire is that rushing this. I just saw that Ford Ferrari show, great movie. Anyway, we’re, we’re race car drivers. You know, we want to get right in there. So you’ve got to cool it down. You’ve got to slow it down, you have to be all excited. She goes, Oh, he wants me. Then you gotta be cool until she wants you more than you want her. That’s brings her to a higher higher pitch state of getting out of her mind, which the French call a little death.

Brad (00:56:15):
Okay. We got a lot of, we got a lot of notes and stuff to reflect upon it. I’m also thinking too, uh, that wonderful assignment to, to go off and don’t speak when you have a negative emotional charge. And then the other assignment that you delivered recently was, um, don’t take things personally. And it seems to me in the first case, uh, just to be able to execute extracting yourself from a conversation or a situation that seems easier to me to be able to physically leave the situation. But then when we’re talking about not taking things personally, how can we get to that point where everything’s falling off us?

John (00:56:55):
Okay. It’s generally when you pull away women take it personally, not so much if a woman walks away, but if a woman was the walkway, that would be great too. And men shouldn’t take that personally because sometimes there’s a reversal and a woman would just throw up our arms and say, you know, I can’t talk to you, I can’t talk to you. And then what we want to do is go in there and solve the problem. And what we need to do is say, okay, let’s take a time out. Take back in control of yourself. Is that okay? Let’s take a time out. And I really do want to talk to you when you’re ready. So you always sort of say something soft and reassuring if you can to a woman. But it’s a good thing if she walks away. Just just don’t go after and try to create more, cause you’ll be angry if she starts to walk away and you’re not angry.

John (00:57:37):
Okay. Oh honey, I can talk to you. I can talk to you. Really, it’s just, no, I can’t. No I can’t. And I get what? Tell me, tell me about that. And then she’ll talk some more. See the whole thing is to get women to talk, talk their feelings in a way where you can’t, you don’t take it personally. Now ultimately you will change any woman’s emotions if she would feel them and she won’t reveal them. If she senses you’re taking it personally or you’re going to make her wrong for it or you’re going to try to change it.

John (00:58:03):
That’s why. Back to your big question, it’s a big question, which is, you know, you’re with a woman and she’s just not happy. What do you do? Okay, so you what? Where’s does this sex success come from? Well, the first thing you do is you don’t make her responsible for how you feel. You need to find your happiness without her being happy. That’s a key thing cause it keeps saying, she makes me unhappy. You’re in victim, but okay, she’s, she’s in a wheelchair right now. I can’t expect that from her, but I go in my life, I find other places in my life that make me happy yet it can be working out, it can be a choir, it could be team sports, it could be studying. Anything that you feel good about because remember what makes men happy is achievement. That’s building the testosterone, accomplishing, doing something physical or something mental that you’re good at.

John (00:58:55):
When I say that I, there’s that, there’s a button on that one, which is video games. Okay? The problem with video games, they do bump your testosterone up, but they overstimulate your, you’re a dopamine production in the brain. When that happens, then you desensitize dopamine receptor sites in the brain and then you become addicted to the video game and that prevents you from feeling normal connection to life. Okay? So everything needs to be done in moderation. If you find that you do excessively something, then it’s an addiction. And video games and masturbation are the two most powerful addictions there are. Uh, they, they produced massive dopamine. So you’ve got porn and you’ve got video games, digital stimulation, overstimulating the brain, creating addiction to masturbation or addiction to video games. Uh, and these are big problems today. It lowers your testosterone. And what we’re seeing today is a abundance of people online are now talking about it. I’ve been talking about for 20 years, guys, I saw it coming is when you masturbate to video porn, you get an addiction to it and that desensitizes your brain receptor sites to normal levels of dopamine. Normal levels of dopamine is what a woman can produce. So you eventually become impotent to a real woman, but not infinite to the internet. And that’s happening now. And men need to know that. And ultimately, uh, how much time we have left.

Brad (01:00:26):
Well, as is as long as you, as long as you’d need to finish your point. And I, I appreciate your time so much and it’s just, there’s so much to take away. Here I am. I’m, uh, I’m fired up and re referencing, um, dr Robert Lustig’s book, The Hacking of the American mind, talking about this dopamine pathway getting flooded not only with porn and video games, but social media, uh, uh, street drugs, prescription drugs, sugar, all that kind of stuff. And it’s all getting flooded into that, that same problem of, uh, overstimulating the pleasure sensor at the expense of feeling happiness, contentment and longterm things like that.

John (01:01:04):
Nicely said. You said it better than I did, he’s, it must be a good book. Um, so that’s exactly the whole thing that’s happening now and it happens in relationships. So here I’m going to say something very controversial, okay? But it’s all based on science. So we’ll go to it. A big part of what everybody wants. We started out couples today, we want to feel free, and I said that that’s the foundation, a lasting passion. But regulation of our energy, a brain is also very important, which is this whole thing about addiction. And that if we want to have those feelings that we had in the beginning, uh, people want that. So is it possible? It’s never been possibly for, okay? People were not ready for this cause they didn’t have the freedom. Okay? You have to have this sense of freedom because if somebody’s controlling you, you feel repressed, your emotions get repressed.

John (01:01:51):
You need to be free to express yourself, your choice. You’re coming from choice. Now, that’s one part of it. But the other part is regulation of sexual energy. Now, what we know scientifically is that if you had sex on Saturday night with your wife, say what will happen is you’re during that sex, your testosterone levels double, okay? They go up and you’re all excited. You’re in a peak state, you feel fantastic. That’s for people that really have good sex. Okay, so that happens. Then they measure after that, the next day your testosterone levels are half. Okay, they’re half what they were. When you’re having sex, then for six days they will slowly rise a little, and that’s kind of your usual testosterone level. Remember, when you’re having sex are going way up, but on the sixth day they’ll double again, not while you’re having sex. When you wake up in the morning, if you don’t ejaculate during those six days, if you have sex and ejaculate on Saturday night and then you have sex on Monday night or Tuesday night and ejaculate on Saturday night, it doesn’t double. You have to go for six days without ejaculating for your testosterone to go high and have sex and go high.

John (01:03:09):
So sexual energy creates vitality. It creates life force. You know, it’s like nature. Maybe we just theorize this. But nature says if you’re making babies, we want to give you a lot of energy. And if you’re not making babies, we’re going to give you a surge of energy. But if you don’t use it, you lose it. So you stopped having, so just not having a ejaculation doesn’t keep your testosterone up. You need to have sex. And when you ejaculate, only one ejaculations a week. So you already look at what happens for couples in the beginning of the relationships. When they’re hot and juicy, they’re having sex all the time and then the testosterone goes down and it’s done. See if we want women to be more loving, the real reality. When I think of myself as the plumber in the house, she’s gotta have orgasms at least one on Saturday night.

John (01:03:58):
And it’s because my energy helped her to get there. And it’s women have to get out of their mind. Now, ultimately what you want is to give women multi-orgasmic, but start with one orgasm. Then you start doing sex during the week without ejaculating and then ejaculate on Saturday night.

Brad (01:04:18):
So the woman we want maximum frequency and the man’s sweet spot is once every seven days in terms of ejaculating orgasm.

John (01:04:26):
Well the sweet spot for men too is sex every day without ejaculating and ejaculate once a week.

Brad (01:04:32):
Okay, okay.

John (01:04:33):
There’s nothing in that. That could just be in the beginning. Now I teach a whole class on how to do this. Uh, I’ll do another podcast and teach this, which is how to have orgasms without ejaculating because that’s the ultimate first is the learning. Just to have sex. You have to go on stages. Yeah. Sex Saturday night and you don’t masturbate for six days or have sex for six days. And that’s a big jump for a lot of people. Uh, you know a lot of men, they have sex with their wife but then their wife’s not interested and then they masturbate weather-wise, not interested cause your testosterone is not double. See this is a relationship. Interdependence is your testosterone has to be high. That will raise her estrogen or her estrogen is high. That will raise your testosterone. So I think back and forth, cause I’m not putting this all on, men are all on women. But if I’m a man and I want to have great sex, I want to make sure my testosterone levels are high. So if you’re having regular sex but you’re not ejaculating every time, your testosterone will stay high. If you have sex on Saturday night, at least on Saturday night, your testosterone levels are going to double. So she’s going to feel alpha man is here with me and that’s a conditioned response that she has loved.

John (01:05:45):
She’s safe, she’s taken care of. And that will raise her estrogen to high levels. See what a woman has an orgasm. Her estrogen levels double. It is all biology. Uh, and this is, you know, th th they’ll naturally double around time of ovulation if she’s ovulating. But we’re adaptable beings. We’re not just animals. She can ovulate. I mean she can have high estrogen all the time if she’s balanced in her testosterone. So again, everything is balanced, but when it comes to sex, sex once a week is the first step with no masturbation for men. Then the next and no ma, no masturbation for her, you know, the internet porn for men, the equivalent of that for women is the vibrator. Uh, the so, so politically incorrect, women are attached to their vibrators, like men are attached to their porn is when you’re using a vibrator, you’re doing it yourself. You don’t have a man doing it. There’s no relationship there. So what you’re doing is becoming more and more independent, not depending on men. You’ve got to depend on him for something. And sex is one of the best things to depend on him for. You know, you can go, I teach a lot in China. I learned a lot of this stuff from the Taoism is a 5,000 year old system of spirituality, but also sex, you know, they’re, they’re all into longevity is by ultimately you get to the place where you rarely ejaculate. You learn how to have many, many orgasms without ejaculating. I learned how to do that.

Brad (01:07:11):
Oh, so we are, we’re going to do another podcast on that and talk through that strategy. But from, from you having your foot in both the East and the West. Uh, and you said this is controversial because I guess the mainstream Western medicine would probably discount, uh, some of these ideas that your testosterone is going to be aligned with your ejaculations frequency or,

John (01:07:33):
well, no, that’s science.

Brad (01:07:34):
Okay.

John (01:07:35):
That was Japanese did several studies showing that you’re at your testosterone drops after one ejaculation. Then it takes six days to recover and now add to it the psychology of this is what’s called conditioned response. Okay? Now this is delicate. We all know there’s a conditioned response when there’s pain or pleasure, okay. Particularly pain. We have a bias towards danger and pain in our brain or something causes pain. We will then try to avoid it in the future automatically. So if every time you come home, your wife, uh, complains to you after a while just coming home, you’re going to feel tired. You know, you know why you feel that you’re coming home and then you walk in the door, you feel tired. Well, there’s another conditioned response, which is if every time you have sex with your wife, your testosterone, let’s say on Saturday night, which is a common thing for couples, you have sex on Saturday night, your testosterone levels doubled, so you felt really great.

John (01:08:32):
Then the next day you don’t, okay, so you, yes, why you pull away, you want to sort of pull it face the other direction or pull back. You’ll cuddle for a little while. Then you need to pull away. You have to come back to your independence. You have to come back to yourself to rebuild your testosterone. So if you just lost your testosterone by having sex with her, there’s a conditioned response over time that when I have sex with her, when I’m with her, I lose my energy, I lose my energy. So most of these guys who’ve been having married 20 years, 10 years, sometimes six years, they come home, they’re just tired. . They were feeling sexual outside the house, and this happened to me too. I would be outside the house and about six years of my marriage and I’m looking around and going, I can’t wait to go home and have sex with my wife.

John (01:09:17):
I walked in the door and I’d be tired. And so it’s not like I went, Oh, my body goes, I don’t wanna have sex with her because I ejaculate so many times with her, it’s just my body’s tired. That’s a conditioned response. There’s something called counter conditioning. Counter conditioning is you create the opposite. So if on Saturday night my, my energy level goes down, if I wait a week, my energy with her goes up. So now I’ve just countered the conditioning. So I don’t get this longterm conditioning of losing interest in my wife. But the same guy, it says I can’t get it up with my wife. He looks over there, he can get up with her, you can get up with her. So this is why, you know, it’s, it’s not like he’s in, but it is just that he has a conditioned response. If I have sex with my wife, I lose my energy. What you want is I have sex with my wife, my energy goes up and then it goes down. Then it, but it comes back, but it comes back. So there’s a conditioned response that it comes back that neutralizes the conditioned response that it goes down. That’s counter conditioning.

John (01:10:16):
The flip side of this is women, while they lose sex drive. Now there’s other things involved here, but one of the things is is conditioning. It’s every time her estrogen levels double, that means she has an orgasm. He pulls away, his testosterone, goes down, she orgasms, he’s done cause he orgasms to his energy goes down. So her body goes, Oh, if I go open, I lose love, I lose attention. So eventually she’s not going to open up all the way cause she’s going to lose him and she loses interest in sex. And losing interest in sex means a lot of other things.

John (01:10:48):
The vaginal lining gets thinner, the estrogen production goes down. So we see all these women going through menopausal problems and yes, your body does make less estrogen after menopause, but it doesn’t mean you, you, you’re going to have these problems. It doesn’t mean you have to have hot flashes. It doesn’t mean you have to have thinning of the vaginal lining. It doesn’t mean you lose your sex drive. But for women today, it just happens to coexist around that time where they’ve got this conditioned, they lose, they lose their vulnerability. They say, I can’t open up to you. I can’t share my feelings with you. You don’t listen, so I’ll just make the best of it. You’re the person I picked, I’ll live my life this way. And many people did. They’re just going, I don’t want to do that. So they get divorced and now we have, you know, so much divorce and you know, people say divorce has kind of stayed at the same level, but actually it hasn’t.

John (01:11:34):
Second. Third divorces are even more common, you know, second divorces, 60 70% eight third divorce, third marriages, you know, sometimes 80 90% different parts of the country. It’s because people didn’t learn the techniques of making it work. Okay? Problems this going to get worse. Changing partners going to do it. You have to see how what you do to contribute to your partners unhappiness or craziness or whatever. Cause I can’t make my partner happy, but I can certainly make her unhappy. I can’t make her happy. I can make her happier, but I can certainly get in the way of finding her happiness. And you know, back to why women start complaining about the little thing is they got to find something to process what’s happening inside of them. And this is another really horrible thing that’s happening because women are way on their male side that’s very logical and rational.

John (01:12:25):
The ability to find balance is now these are the two forces, yin and yang. Yin is feminine, young is masculine. If your way on your masculine side, what we all want is to find our balance where I’m both male and female, both parts of me in the right balance. So if you go way on the male side, you have to go away on the female side to find balance. So female is emotional. Emotions are not rational, okay? Emotions are not rational. We have rational, logical thought. This dissipates emotion. You have emotion. That’s non rational. Towards the middle you can have logic and emotion at the same time. Well if you swing over here, you’ve lost your logic. So when women are seeking to find balance, which is they’re finding the body wants to find balance, the heart wants to find balance. So they come home and what happens? They swing over here, these emotions start to come up and there’s nothing to put ’em on cause she has a good life or whatever. So she’s got to find something to put it on. And so she’ll target, you know, the lights, she’ll target the houses is a mess to target that the government’s terrible talk. The president, you know, whatever they’re going to target, they have to find something to be upset about. And most of the time they find their husband to be upset about and they’ll find logical reasons to validate what their emotions are rather than to recognize, right now I’ve got these crazy emotions and it’s not a big deal, but I need to share them, explore them and sort them out and let somebody be there for me. Because when you have emotions, again, this is all psychology. When you have emotions, if somebody can validate that by feeling what you feel, not saying it’s logical, so we all got caught up into logic.

John (01:14:01):
Validation means you have a logical reason to feel that way. Well, I give you a logical reason. You’re temporarily a little crazy cause you need to go over. That’s the reason you’re finding your balance by expressing things and we have common phrases. I’m just venting. I’m just venting. But the more successful woman is out there in the world, often she doesn’t create a space for just venting. Everything has to be logical because their self esteem is based upon, I’m a scientist, I’m a corporate this, I can do this, I can do the accounting. So logic, logic, logic, the emotions come up. I have to find a logical reason for them. It has to be somebody makes me feel this way. Nobody’s making you feel that way. There’s no logical reason for you to feel this way. Maybe if you’re in balance where your heart was open and you had some emotions, they get emotions.

John (01:14:50):
They could be somewhat logical, otherwise, they’re way over here completely blown out of proportion. And Freud tried to approach this by saying it’s overreaction. That’s politically incorrect. You can’t say it’s overreaction, but basically 90% of anything that’s upsetting you is an overreaction. Uh, for men or women, we’re overreacting all the time. Our lives are so much better put. You’d go, go get a refugee camp. That’s, that’s suffering. And those people are sometimes are happier than us because they have real reasons to be unhappy and there’s something they can do or try to do or get help or whatever. We have such a good life, but we’re feeling the pain of the planet. That’s, I come back to my spiritual reason for it, and women are way on their male side. The emotions come up trying to find a logical reason to justify why I feel the brain will do that.

John (01:15:39):
Otherwise, the brain thinks it’s crazy. What I’m getting is a logical reason. It says you’re temporarily not logical. These are just emotions. You need to feel them. You need somebody else to feel them, and it discharges the tension. It discharges the tension and that’s the tension of hormonal imbalance in the body. Cortisol, cortisol response back to back. I just wanted to say back to this thing about conditioned response. So over time women lose their interest because men pull away, men lose their interest because every time he gets connected to her, he goes back down. So they start to find they need distance in order to maintain balance, they just lose that attraction. So what I’m saying to men, if you’re married man, don’t masturbate, don’t masturbate. And if you’re away for two weeks, you’re going to have the best sex ever when you get home.

John (01:16:33):
Okay? Just don’t masturbate and, and don’t, definitely don’t even look at porn. And is masturbation bad? No, he shouldn’t have shame. It’s a natural instinct. We’re talking about optimization. We’re talking about hacking the whole body brain for lasting romance and love something nobody’s ever done on this planet. It’s never happened. Maybe a few rare instances. Women often say, what about Romeo and Juliet? I said, no, they died after they got married after one day. Well, what is this day? This and people shouldn’t, you know, we shouldn’t really feel bad about ourselves at all if we can’t do it because the best people on the planet, the smartest people, most successful people on the planet can’t do it. And they all, you see divorces everywhere. This is new knowledge, new knowledge that we have to learn and apply and experiment with and overcome and it makes us better as men. It makes women better as women, but it also allows us to maintain that, that passionate connection. So I’m really into balancing good communication. I gave a good skill today, which is always, it seems trivial, but it’s important. Say something. I know you always do this. Sometimes you forget. I’d really appreciate it if you would think about doing it this way. It makes me feel happy

Brad (01:17:44):
Little sandwich there.

John (01:17:45):
Yeah, that nice little sandwich technique with and for women that just to know men want to make you happy and if they don’t it’s because they’re feeling pushed down and women have love in their hearts. They seem like they’re not loving because they’re on a wave needing to process these irrational emotions that come up and then come back into balance.

Brad (01:18:04):
That’s a beautiful summary, John. I’m just so happy to get all this knowledge from you. I want to know your secret man. Before I let you go. You have the same amount of energy that when I first saw you probably in your first videos, what, 25 years ago or something. And you know, with that loss that you describe and having to move on and carry on, you seem like you’re, you’re so positive and I’m just, uh, I’m, I’m asking you like what’s it like to, to try to move on from that long partnership and now you’re here facing the day with such energy and enthusiasm still.

John (01:18:39):
it, wait, it’s not as easy as, you know, we all have channels where the energy flows. This is, this is just the energy flowing. I’m good at this. I loved one of my passions in life is teaching. So it comes through. Mmm. I’ve never had a more bigger challenge than the death of my wife. I’ve, uh, been depressed, but I can process depression. Um, I cry, I wail, you know, uh, I’ll write a book on it called how to say goodbye. Um, I’ve written a book on healing. I used to write it, I wrote a book a long time ago called healing the heart. So I’m good at this, but no matter how good you are, it’s painful. It takes time. It’s an adjustment. And thank goodness I have work because grieving is estrogen. Okay. And for man it’s healing yeah. I don’t like, normally I write a book every year. I haven’t written a book. It’s almost two years now. I won’t write one probably for another year. Yeah. I don’t have the same motivation I had, as you know, I was late in the interview. I was meditating.

Brad (01:19:38):
That’s great. What a great reason. A four hour meditation to get them in the right mindset to go off offer nonstop for the whole thing.

John (01:19:46):
So I’m grateful for the knowledge of emotional processing. I’m grateful for my work and I’m grateful for my ability to meditate. These things have helped me through this very challenging thing for me. I deeply, deeply miss my wife every day I have tears flowing. Uh, you know, the, the sweetest thing is, um, you don’t have to cook for myself. I have to look through the mail, I have to balance the checkbook. These are all things she did. And so every time I do all of those things, I’m reminded these are the things she did. And, and that it used to be a lot of pain cause I’m missing her. And now it’s just, uh, a strong emotion and sadness and uh, tears but always very quickly turns to love of gratitude. And that’s the whole process of grieving. If we learn how to grieve properly.

John (01:20:35):
And I, you know, people say people grieve in different ways. Yes we do. But so many people don’t know how to grieve properly so that they spend the rest of their life feeling pain. Hmm. No, I don’t feel the pain that I used to feel in the first year of this. The pain is healing. It doesn’t mean I have to go numb on my feelings about her either. I have her pictures everywhere. I haven’t gotten rid of anything yet. She’s with me all the time. At the same time, I want to be able to be with her and not feel any pain, not sadness, but just joy that she graduated, you know., She graduated and hurray for you, honey, and I’ll see you soon. Kind of a thing, uh, is that you have to create stories in your mind of credit, your belief systems. Uh, and I have done that.

John (01:21:18):
At the same time. The brain has to adjust attachment. We’ve become attached to somebody that has to be this process of letting go. And the letting go of attachment is feeling the pain, do a variety of emotions. The emotions are basically feelings of sadness and regret and fear and anger. And Oh, there were times I was so angry, I just wanted to turn back time. I was just wanting to put my hand through the time, take away now I want to be there. And I was just angry about that. It’s so funny because there were so many cliches from songs that I heard in the past that automatically came up like turn back time. I can’t live without you. You know, all those phrases we hear in the songs are actually a lot of the phrases that come up naturally if you’re grieving, but I would say is properly in a way that heals the pain rather than becomes addicted to the pain.

John (01:22:12):
And that’s the flip side of this is that they’ve done research now on people’s brains who grieved their whole lives. You know they have a big loss and they feel pain whenever they think of that person and they look and they see that in the brain. The same part of the brain lights up that if you had a cocaine addiction cause pain is, it can be addictive as well. So you have to balance it all the time. Everything is about balance. You didn’t have to go into it then you have to go and be happy and do good things and you have to go into it and be happy until the brain finally adjusts and lets go. You know for Bonnie it’s a 40 year attachment, you know, 40 years. She is the most important person in my life and we share such a life anyway. So that’s part of the grieving process. Thank you for asking. I appreciate being able to talk about that.

Brad (01:22:58):
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful John Gray, the one and only with us again, we took it to level just as I expected. I got to tell you before we go, today’s my birthday and I can’t think of a better way to spend it then with you, so thank you so much and you tee this up for some future podcast topics too, I noticed during the recording.

John (01:23:17):
All right, sounds fun. Have a good one, John. Thank you everyone for listening. Bye bye.

Brad (01:23:24):
Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop, iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves cause they need to. Thanks for doing it.

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