Latest / Harder Than Life / 64: The Best Part of Life w/ Stefanos Sifandos

Transcript

64: The Best Part of Life w/ Stefanos Sifandos · Harder Than Life

• 0:00
  This episode is sponsored by National Technology Management. Visit trustntm.com for more information. I'm Kelly Siegel, and this is Harder Than Life, a podcast about self-love, self-awareness, business, and health. We tell outrageous stories and boil everything down to simple, practical advice you can start using today. Let's get living.
• 0:21
  Ladies, if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify, you're going to want to head over to YouTube and watch this hunk of a man speak. But really, Stefano's genius in his dramatic transformation of being a drug addict, sex addict, and all-around thug to being married to his beautiful wife Christine for five years now.
• 0:38
  He is so much more than a relationship coach and is an expert in a masculine and feminine, which seem to be dating buzzwords these days. At 43 years young, he's a student of life and has recovered from the mental damage that happened when he was a child at the hands of his father and his needy mother. This sounds all too familiar with for me and we even connected regarding our grandparents. So sit back and listen to two reformed ladies men rap on how to live life the right way and be in alignment with one's heart. Welcome to the Heart of the Life podcast.
• 1:08
  my good friend. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me, man. You know, it's so weird. I had, I don't know if you know who Sabrina Zohar on yesterday, she's a dating and relationship expert and she's blowing up and it's just so happenstance that back to back on the harder than life episodes, we have two brilliant dating and relationship minds and we're gonna dig deep into it. And I have some prepared questions, but I deviated a ton because
• 1:37
  You and I just bond so much on the way we were brought up, so we're going to kind of deviate all over the place. But can you share your personal journey and how your upbringing influenced your views on relationship and love? Yeah, I think if I had to paint it in the negative or the positive, it really...
• 1:57
  it influenced my views in the negative in the sense that I didn't have healthy role models that I grew up with. And even though I was very close to my grandparents, my maternal grandparents particularly, because my paternal grandparents died when I was quite young and we lived in Australia for most of my life. And
• 2:13
  That's where my maternal grandparents were. My paternal grandparents were in Greece. And so having my Italian grandparents there, I love them. They really are what kept me safe in a very volatile and violent house. And even though they still didn't have this ideal relationship themselves, my grandmother was a taskmaster and my grandfather was such a beautiful man, beautiful soul, very kind, but very passive. And my father was very, very aggressive. So I had these two extremes that I grew up with.
• 2:43
  And, you know, both my mother and father were quite violent and aggressive in their own ways. And so my view of relationship coupled that with, you know, as I became older, actually, and I started hanging around some of the kids in the neighborhood, which were all, you know, I was Greek, Italian, they were Croatian, they were Italian, Portuguese. That's just the areas that we grew up in. There were a lot of European families there, all very similar parents, very aggressive father, very subservient mother or...
• 3:12
  both of them just having really, really aggressive tendencies and violent households, you know. And so never had great role models growing up. I didn't know what it was like. Then layer on porn on top of that, discovering porn when I was 13, 14. And, you know, some would say probably late, but discovering porn when I was 13, 14 and watching that with my friends and their older brothers and just thinking
• 3:36
  didn't not healthy examples of, of intimacy and relationships, you know? So, uh, my upbringing didn't put me on my best foot forward. If I could say that. You're being modest. I got a question. I'm going to deviate right away. Do you, did your parents tell you they loved you? My mom did. Yeah.
• 4:00
  I can't remember if my dad did. I think so. Wow. If you have to think about it, you're a lot like me. So did it make, does it make you feel now before you did the work, did it make you feel a little weird when people said it? I love you.
• 4:17
  Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Because I held this fear of intimacy. I didn't really, like I wanted and desired to get close to people, but when it actually happened, I pushed it away. And so I wanted to hear all the things and I wanted to say all the things and I wanted to feel all the things. But when it really started coming with consistency.
• 4:36
  And it started coming in this more genuine way. I'd often push it away. That's when I'd cheat. That's when I'd go visit prostitutes. That's when I'd go party. That's when I'd just cause arguments and be aggressive and just push. I'd just push, push, push. I'm sure everybody can relate to that. This is going to – you know what I love about doing the work? I've done a lot of it. And it's that I'm going to get triggered. You've already triggered me. Yeah.
• 4:58
  And I just love it because I'm very happy because you know what it is. You trigger and you know how to deal with it from doing the work. And actually what I think of right away is how proud I am to be sitting here smiling with you and knowing that that's not us anymore. So I see you, I'm proud of you and I love you and you're doing fantastic work. I'm so grateful that I got to meet you and that my listeners are going to get this is going to be a masterclass because what you just said, everybody does. So,
• 5:28
  How did you do it, Stephanos? How'd you do it? How'd you, what was, the name of Sabrina's was do the work. How did you do the work? Yeah. You know, I was having this conversation with a young man yesterday. He was interviewing me for his podcast, 23 years old, exceptional young man. I said to him, I wish I had your maturity and groundedness when I was 23. Fuck.
• 5:51
  He added a couple of years to me. He said, I'm 41, I'm 41. I don't have too many years on me. I'm going to get too old too quick. But I'm 41 now. And I think 18 years ago, 18 years ago, this kid is sitting there on this chair like a boss, asking these amazing questions, being deeply, genuinely reflective, sharing vulnerably with me on his own life. And I'm thinking, man, I mean,
• 6:19
  If only more young adults were like that, his brain is still forming. Anyway, I'll answer your question on the how. I didn't do it when I was 23. It happened in my early 30s. Not to say that I wasn't doing deep work in my teens, in my early 20s. I was, but I just wasn't going deep enough long enough because I was too scared to face my stuff. I didn't know how to, man. I didn't know how to, and I was too busy distracting myself with...
• 6:45
  sex and alcohol and chasing money and trying to be the big man and trying to really just hide from my own pain, you know? And the how was the contrast? It started with the contrast to me. Let me explain what I mean by that. I think humanity, it's not the only way we learn. We learn and grow in various ways. But I think the collective consciousness of where humanity is right now is that
• 7:13
  We almost have to experience vast contrasts known as a rock bottom moment or rock bottom moments in order to say, uncle, I surrender, time to change. I've got to go deep. I've got to shift. I've got to shift this shit. It's too much.
• 7:29
  And until we hit those rock bottom moments and we experience this vast contrast of the, you know, bullshit life that we're living, the masks, the masquerades, the pretend, the falseness, narcissism, all of it, right? And when I say narcissism, I'm not being blasé with that. I'm not necessarily referring to NPD as a legitimate condition. I'm talking to afflictions of...
• 7:52
  hyper-selfishness, self-absorption, fear of vulnerability, fear of deep fears of intimacy that are masked with ego, that are masked with control, that are masked with aggression, which is so much of what I was. And until we hit a rock bottom moment that pulls us out, that catapults us out of our bodies so that we can actually see the forest through the trees and have that moment of clarity, in that moment we'll either act differently and say, I'm out of this and I've got to do something different. Right.
• 8:19
  Or we're going to just go back and slingshot back into our old lives and we'll just be rinse and repeat until we hit more rock bottoms and eventually decide to change. For me, it was my very early 30s, 30, 31, where I was in a relationship. She found out I was cheating. And from there, it just opened up.
• 8:37
  Shame spirals that opened up, repressed trauma that I'd experienced that opened up, deeper levels of empathy, seeing what my actions had done for her, to her, et cetera. And it really put me on a path of I need to change this stuff and there's no way I'm not. I'm just going to die trying basically. I said to myself, I'm either going to end up in a mental asylum, I'll commit suicide or I'll get through this and I'll be dead.
• 9:00
  the version of myself that I know I was born to be, which is what I've always known, but just couldn't hold it because I never had enough self-worth and security to hold it in the way that I really wanted to.
• 9:11
  So that was for me, that's where the beginnings of the how started. And then from there, man, I sought support. I worked with therapists. I worked with psychologists. I worked with counselors. I worked with wisdom keepers. I worked with spiritual guys. I worked with healers, energetic healers, physiological healers. I worked with so many different kinds of people. I went into solo retreats. I worked with plant medicine. After I'd done a fair amount of work,
• 9:38
  in familiar states of consciousness, deep shadow work in a child work, leveraging all different types of modalities, breath work, which was one of them that really saved my life amidst others as well. Parts work. I went everywhere, man. And keep in mind that up to this point, I have degrees and qualifications in behavioral science, developmental psychology and trauma and somatics. I knew all this shit, but I wasn't putting it into my own life practice. I was way out of integrity.
• 10:07
  And so the how came from this really diligent commitment to self, to just lean in and do the thing that I don't want to do and do the thing that I've, that is different to what I've been doing. And that's really where it started. I didn't have to imagine that being the Greek goddess that you are, that that wasn't the first time cheating. Was it? No, no, no. I cheated in every relationship. Was it the first time you got caught? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
• 10:34
  Was this one special? This woman, was she special in that why it hurt? She was. And that's the oxymoron, right, of it all, and the paradox of it all is that I cared for her very deeply. And she was the only woman that I got a diamond for to propose to her at some point, you know, yet I was doing all these things. And...
• 11:02
  taking these actions that were incongruent with what I wanted, but I didn't have the self control and I didn't want to have the self control. And part of me wanted to get caught. I felt like it was the only way that I would change is if I hit this rock bottom moment, but I didn't want the rock bottom moment, but I did, but I didn't, but I did. So I was, I wasn't in my masculine, clean, masculine energetic. I was confused. I was push and pull. I was, you know, bring a close to me pusher away. I was inconsistent in who I was. I was, I was horrible in so many different ways. And,
• 11:30
  And I genuinely did care for her, yes. That was very much there, especially as I reflect back on that. And I still do. I still do care for her. Not that I want to be in a relationship with her in any capacity, but I care for all the people that have been in my life and have made tremendous impact in my life. But, yeah, she was special in that way that after that point, she really was a wonderful partner in so many different ways. Is she doing well now? Did she move on and –
• 12:00
  I think so. I mean, I don't know. I think so. I mean, I know that she, yeah, a few years ago she had a child. Yeah, but yeah, I think a few years ago she had a child. And yeah, I don't know exactly, but I think she's, I don't know is the answer actually. Okay, okay. I just, I kind of went backwards. I was thinking about all of my serious relationships and all my transgressions and what I did. I didn't have a rock bottom moment. I just got sick and tired of my shit.
• 12:29
  Just I had amazing. This is literally, I had a hole in my heart and no amount of sex ever,
• 12:36
  Women, booze, anything could fill that. I just had to start with the healing process with me. And I just got, I didn't like the man in the mirror. And I said, I'm done. I started with not drinking. I started with the, well, no, I actually started with trying to be, with being faithful and loving somebody who wasn't emotionally available. So it's like a full boomerang effect.
• 13:02
  I say, all right, this is the one. I'm going to make it work. And then, yeah, she wasn't ready or never did the work and ended up cheating on me. And that it was just, it's like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do this stupid merry-go-round of dumbness. And boy, once you decide to get healed and healthy, it gets lonely. God tests you. So talk about
• 13:30
  Because there's a lot of people that are in that situation. I've been there. But talk about you and that shame a little bit and how low you felt and what motivated you. Because there's so many people listening to this right now. There's a lot of male and female listeners that listen to the Heart of a Life show are sitting here going, oh boy, oh boy. So talk a little bit about that terrible feeling because pain is a hell of a motivator.
• 13:57
  Your pain is a hell of a motivator and shame is debilitating, deeply debilitating. And shame is a contraction in our bodies and a contraction in our minds. And what we'll often do with shame is hide from the world or at the very least mask it. And we often mask it with aggression and tendencies towards violence or big energy.
• 14:22
  to seek control because we feel so out of control. We feel so vulnerable. And ultimately, the more shame we feel and the less we tap into our vulnerability, the more narcissistic we become, right, or shades and expressions of narcissism. A lot of people think that narcissism is about control and it's about dominance and it's about forcefulness. And it carries, depending on which kind of narcissism, it carries those characteristics, but ultimately it's a response or reaction to a fear of deep vulnerability.
• 14:51
  And it's not just a fear of vulnerability, it's an inability to be with one's own vulnerability because often we've been shown that our expression doesn't matter and we've been humiliated or we've experienced rejection or we've experienced abandonment or humiliation. And as a result of that, we've had to develop a survival or social survival strategy or a coping strategy and it often comes in the form of that dominance and control over others and forcefulness over others. Not the only way, but it seems to be the society that we live in because we live in such an individualistic society.
• 15:21
  And we live in such a society where we're highly competitive with each other as well. And so it's almost like the survival of the fittest socially and physically and economically and all those things, right? And so sometimes the propensity to move towards that behavior can deepen. But so many of us just hide from the world. I've had experiences in both where I've really, really hid from the world and been very withdrawn, very contracted, very shy. And then I've been attempted to be very big in the world and
• 15:49
  very loud and controlling and it's a false bravado. You know, it's just to deflect from my insecurities. And that's tough, man. It's tough to not have anyone to – or think that you don't have anyone
• 16:04
  to actually go to, to share that load with, to share that burden with. And that's what so many men particularly are missing that. They're missing people that they can share themselves with. And people are just missing people that they can share themselves with and be seen in nonjudgmental and compassionate ways and be affirmed in their pain and not confirmed in their pain where, oh, keep being in your pain, keep being the victim. No, no, no. Just to say, hey, I empathize with you. I hear you. I'm here with you. I see you.
• 16:29
  Because most people aren't seen and they don't feel understood. And so they're going to contract in the world because they don't feel safe to be seen. Because again, they've had this very dense experience of when I've been myself, it hasn't gone down well. So I'll just pull back from the world. And that's better.
• 16:46
  But it's not because what that does is it evokes more of that in others as well because you become untrustworthy. So people are like, well, if you're not going to be open, then I'm not going to be open. And for someone to say, hey, I see that you're not open, but I'm going to still be open, means that that person's done a deeper level of inner work, right? And so, which is very possible, of course, but it just becomes more difficult to attract that and bring that into your life. That's what I just said. Shame and vulnerability is, is, woohoo.
• 17:15
  hard. You have to do some serious work on yourself to be vulnerable. So you got right up to it. How can someone who is feeling shame and can't, is struggling with vulnerability, how can they work towards breaking those patterns in their relationship? And what would the first thing you would recommend they do? Everybody's different, but what would be the number one first step for the 80% of the people?
• 17:43
  If you're experiencing shame and you're experiencing vulnerability, where you're feeling exposed in your emotional body, if you can name the thing that you're experiencing, even out loud or in your mind, that can be very helpful. So you just slow down for a moment, not even pause, but just slow down, slow down your breath, tap into that area of your body where you're feeling that big feeling. It could be here in the left side of my chest. It's like, what is this feeling? What is it?
• 18:13
  okay, I'm feeling shame right now. I'm experiencing shame right now. And then you may just pause there for a moment and just be in that.
• 18:21
  Let it feel you. You may feel your skin tingling. You may feel your heart rate racing. You may feel sadness come over you. And you can just keep naming that, right? I'm feeling shame. I'm feeling tingling. I'm feeling sadness. I'm feeling despair. I'm feeling distress. I'm feeling sad again. I'm feeling angry. Okay, and just start to really go down until it begins to neutralize a little more.
• 18:46
  right? And then you may at some point even want to give it, you might want to animate that thing, that sadness. You may want to cry. Allow yourself to cry. Keep pulling the thread. You're feeling shame. You may want to contract. Allow yourself to contract. And then can you allow yourself to also expand and open later as well? If you're angry and you want to clench your fist, allow yourself to clench your fist. If you want to hit something, hit something. Really animate the movement through breath, through sound, through movement, right? Animate the feeling, I should say, or the sensation.
• 19:14
  And by naming it and then animating it and moving it, sometimes we can find reprieve and spaciousness in our bodies. And that's all that's required. Now, we may need more context than that. So that's something that you can discuss then with your therapist, with your coach, with your counselor, whatever. You can do some journaling to that later on, not immediately. After you've had that experience, maybe go for a walk, have a big glass of water, tall glass of water, move your body a little bit, whatever it is, do 50 burpees nice and slow. Just move your body, move the energy.
• 19:41
  And then you can come back to it and you may need to talk through it, but now you've got access to it. You don't want to repress it. You don't want to shut it down. You don't want to cut it off. Now, caveat, sometimes you need to. Sometimes you can't do all that in the moment. So make a commitment to yourself to come back to it later at 8 p.m. tonight or 9 p.m. tonight or whenever it is.
• 19:59
  But that's a way to access. We don't want to repress and suppress what we're experiencing. We want to give life to it. We want to be in relationship with it because it has a voice. It wants to express. And the more we suppress it, the louder it's going to be. Say that again.
• 20:16
  The more we suppress it, the louder the expression wants to come out and it's going to keep forcing itself out. And at the beginning could just be tense frustration that you're feeling. But as it grows and as it festers and as it gets bigger and bigger, like a tumor inside of your fucking body, growing and growing and growing, it's going to burst. And then it comes out as...
• 20:37
  you get snappy and impatient and abrasive and you get, so it builds up, it builds up because you're not giving it a release and you're not giving it any context. You're not understanding what it is. You're not relating to it. You're not in deeper communion with it. It is telling you something about what you need. You're not meeting your needs. That's the issue.
• 20:52
  So we begin to meet our needs by naming it, by accepting it, by embracing it, by being in deeper communion with it. And we grow from there. And again, having people in your life that can reflect back to you, that can see something that you can't, that can help you see the forest through the trees where you cannot, is very helpful for our growth. Very helpful.
• 21:10
  You say this so easily digestible, number one. It's just every one of us can name how we feel and write it in a journal. The second thing is that you didn't take it the next step further is usually that's when rock bottom hits. If you don't just name it and you hold it all in, that's when you get a DUI...
• 21:29
  I mean, just inevitably God will level you up. And then the third thing that you didn't say that I know you want is you have to be careful about who you commiserate with. He says there's a lot of friends, and I'm going to put quotes up, friends that tell you what you want to hear, not what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. So talk about that, like your friend group and how important that is to healing. Some of them want to keep you right there.
• 21:58
  Yep. And I'll tell you why they want to keep us right there. Because it's not because they hate us, not because they don't like us. When we are moving through change and transformation, we are presenting different versions of ourselves to the world and to our friends. And our friends get scared.
• 22:18
  We fear what we don't know. We fear the unknown. And if they relate to us through a very particular set of expressions and they identify the friendship through a particular exchange and that exchange begins to change,
• 22:34
  then we get scared that we're going to lose the friendship. We're going to lose our identity in relation to this relationship. We start to panic. We start to push back. Why are you changing? Why don't you want to drink with me anymore on the weekends? Why don't you want to do a line of coke with me? Why don't you want to go visit the brothels with me? Why don't you want to play World of Warcraft with me for 10 hours every day? What do you mean you're changing? No, no, no, no. What does that mean for me? What about me? So people get very scared because their identity is now shifting.
• 23:03
  And that's why change is often so difficult. Transformation is so challenging because it's this complete ego shift. It's this complete identity shift. The way that we relate to the world and everything that we do identifies who we are. You start removing that, then who are we? People are scared to find out who they really are. And people don't want to change because familiarity feels safe. And so we would rather be safe than be free, essentially.
• 23:29
  Steph, do you do any one-on-one coaching? I didn't see anything in here in the notes. Oh, yeah. That's the bulk of what I do. I don't say anything in here. I'm like, how does someone work with you? You're brilliant. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. I mean, the direct answer is www.coachwithsteph.com, and you can apply for coaching there. Coach with Steph. Put that in the show notes. We'll put it. It's just, I have...
• 23:55
  some friends that could use it and I just tell you so I want to I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you a vulnerable question and then I'm gonna get vulnerable too because it's it's putting your business out there it's your first sexual experience with what it was with a prostitute it's the only point where you and I differ I have never been there was no intimacy whatsoever so I recently did some plant medicine and I was able to separate
• 24:23
  sex, love, and intimacy, which was very difficult for me. I had them all one in the same and I was able to separate those. I could never get, it just felt dirty to me. And I'm not judging. It just, it just, I couldn't, I could, but I will also, there was so many women available that I didn't need to do it. So talk to me about that.
• 24:46
  With the head vent of OnlyFans, it just seems like they're so, it's very easy, easily accessible to get, to pay to play. If someone's listening to this, if somebody's on the other end of this and they're paying, what would you say would be their advice to them if they were working with you and they said, man, hey, Steph, I have this, I have this prostitute problem.
• 25:11
  What is the first thing, advice that you would say to one of your mentors, mentees? Yeah, I'm not actually going to give any advice. I'm going to ask a lot of questions. And before I even ask questions, I want to empathize and I want to reflect back what I'm really hearing. I want to create a bond between us and safety and trust. That's everything. That's the launch pad.
• 25:37
  That's the launch pad. And then from there, I'm going to ask meaningful questions around their relationship to their parents, their first sexual encounters, what they make sex mean. What is it about the transactional nature of sex? Where else are they transacting in their life? I'm going to ask them a bunch of questions. Again, I'm not going to throw it all at them, but I'm just going to get really curious about where they are and I'm going to help them connect dots. And I'm going to really ask them honestly and openly and openly,
• 26:06
  Do you really want to stop visiting prostitutes? Do you really want to stop? What does sex mean for you? What does it give you? What does it do for you? How do you feel before, during, after? What's the anticipation towards it? Run me through what it looks like for you. What does it feel like for you?
• 26:22
  And again, I'm only going to be able to get really honest answers when there's trust and rapport and deep connection between us. So I want to spend a lot of time or as much time as needed, I should say, in establishing that and knowing that they can't trust me and that our container is a vault and that our container is sacred, a sacred container as well. And there isn't judgment. I'm not, firstly, I've done so much quote unquote bad shit in my life, man, that I don't have any right to judge anyone. I really don't.
• 26:48
  And, and, uh, I, I just, I just don't, I mean, I, I, I do, I'm a human, of course I judge, but when I'm in that client container, I just, I don't know, man, I, I judgment feels like it's, it's very far from me. And I, I just, I really see what's underneath the person's actions and they are not their actions.
• 27:08
  And I just want to get really clear, like in this point in time, do they want to change that behavior? Do they really want to shift it? And if they do, cool, what's it going to take? And let's explore that. And what do we do to replace it? I'm an additive person. I'm not a subtractive person. What do I mean by that? I'll give you a simple example.
• 27:25
  If someone wants to change their diet, I used to be in the fitness industry many years ago. As I was in the personal transformation industry, I was also in the fitness industry. I owned a couple of gyms, CrossFit gyms, and I was in that space as well whilst I was also coaching and training people in mindset and all of that.
• 27:43
  Very lucky, just exposed to being in the CrossFit community, actually, at very early stages, exposed to special operations guys in Australia, the SAS regimen and the commando units, and then working with Olympic gold medalists and elite professional sporting teams and athletes and fighters and world champions and all that was great. So not only was I training them athletically, but also mindset work and just exposed to really extreme personalities and extreme mindsets, people that are literally in do or die situations.
• 28:13
  And it taught me a lot about understanding people, understanding how the mind generally works, and then obviously specificity with every individual. Yeah.
• 28:23
  But go back to the example of if I'm training someone and they want to lose weight, let's just say that's their goal, and they want to change their eating and they need to change their eating, I'm not going to say, okay, stop smoking, stop drinking alcohol, stop eating carbs, stop doing this, stop doing that, whatever, right? I'm going to say, I'm going to look at their nutrition and how they generally eat. I'm going to get a lay of the land. I'm going to say, cool. What I'm seeing is that you don't have any really clean meat in your diet, right? So why don't we replace all the meat that you are eating
• 28:52
  with grass-fed, organic. So you still eat your meat, still eat everything you're doing. I just want you to do this one thing. I know it costs a little more, but get organic, get grass-fed, get clean animal products. Can you do that? Yes, I can. Great. That's all I want you to do. I'm going to do that for a bit. Then I'm going to say, hey,
• 29:10
  Can you fast a little more? So I just want you to fast for just 10 hours a day. That's it. So last meal can be at 9 p.m. Your first meal can be at 7 p.m., 7 a.m. Can you do that? Yeah, I can do that. Cool. We're going to extend the fasting a little bit. So I'm adding. I'm just adding. I'm not taking shit away from it. Then I'm going to take away. Let's do a real world example. I'm pretty healed. I've done a lot of work. I come to you. Let's do a role play.
• 29:37
  five minutes because i because i'm going to tell you that people are going to identify with what we're going to do right now and i just thought this up so stuff i i'm i hired you to be a coach or and we're working together and i call you up and i just say that i have a hard time uh differentiating sex love and intimacy go through your go through your thing i'll be as vulnerable and as truthful as possible
• 30:00
  Because the reason why I want to do this is you're so soft and beautiful. And I mean this from a soul perspective, not from just your looks. Of course, you're beautiful. But I can feel it, and I want the audience to feel this. So, Steph, you're welcome.
• 30:16
  I'm having problems with relationships. I keep attracting emotionally unavailable women. And, you know, when I find them, I'm just attracted to their physical beauty and I want to go and immediately bed them. And, you know, for me, sex is love and it's intimate. That's what I crave.
• 30:36
  Well, firstly, man, thank you for sharing that because that's not necessarily easy to share, especially in a public forum. And especially as a man who's a father and who's a leader in your space, in your community, right? And not only are you a leader, like you've created external success. And often for people that have created external success in their lives,
• 30:56
  it's actually really difficult to be vulnerable and honest because they think they hold this perception of how they need to be and how they need to be seen by others. So by you just sharing that openly and owning that, it tells me a lot about you and your willingness and the openness that you hold within yourself.
• 31:11
  So that to me is a genuine leader. So thank you, first of all, for sharing that. And I hear you and I resonate that you're struggling. What I'm hearing you say is you're struggling discerning between love, intimacy, sexuality, and you're attracting women that you're really highly physically connected to, but that are emotionally unavailable.
• 31:30
  And that's an issue for you. And what you're asking is like, where do I start to maybe begin to tease that out and maybe stop doing that because it doesn't feel like it serves me. Is that accurate to say that? Correct. Correct. It's so sweet and so soft. I love it. So the first thing that I would ask you is specifically in relation to emotional unavailability. Is there a time in your life, do you remember a time in your life where
• 31:56
  emotional, you craved emotional availability and presence and you crave to be seen and to be heard and to be understood by someone. And it just wasn't there in the way that you needed it. Did that ever happen in your life? My entire childhood. From the time I moved out of my house when I was 16, I know my parents were alcoholics, man. It was, it was brutal. I, we, we,
• 32:19
  I grew up really rough. I wrote a whole book about it, Harder Than Life. The only time I got any kind of attention is when I was doing something wrong and it was a fist to the face. Yeah. So sometimes any attention is good attention, you know? Yeah.
• 32:35
  And sometimes, you know, we get then addicted to those patterns of let me be seen because the need to be seen is so big and so deep that we'll do anything together, including, quote, unquote, being bad. And even if it's a fist to the face, it means that we're in the center of attention of the people that we love most, right? But if I come back for a moment, like I hear you that all of your childhood up until 16, which is when, you know, you disconnected from that environment, you just didn't experience the emotional availability that you needed.
• 33:05
  Is it from one particular person that you really craved it from? Yeah. My mother, your mother. Yeah. She was never around. Yeah. She was never around. So she was physically unavailable as well. She was around. She was drunk and beating me. Yeah. So not only was she not around when she was around, she was violent and abrasive. She wasn't just unavailable. She was also intrusive and abusive. Wow. Yeah. You know, I never even thought about that every time I did. Yeah. True.
• 33:35
  Yeah. So she violated your own personal space. She violated the safety of your nervous system. So you had no choice but to fucking get hard to survive. Harder than life, baby. Yeah, harder than life. And that's why you're still here. And so that pattern has served you really well. And who would you be without that pattern is an interesting question. What could you be? How would you be? Yeah.
• 34:00
  And I love where you're going with this. What we didn't say is I have done the work, and I'm still doing it. It's always a thing, and it's just beautiful. I wanted the audience to hear how soft. And you were right. It's just beautiful. I wish I'd met you before, but there's no coincidence. So we're going to skip on to the next. You can see how it is. Go. If any of my...
• 34:23
  Anybody of these listeners, you just saw, he nailed it right on. And it was so soft. And I'm amazed how monotone you're able to keep. You don't get any. There's no freaking baritone to your voice at all. It's pretty talented. Well, the thing is about that is I want to be, I want your nervous system. And I know that. I'm clear that you've been working on this for many years.
• 34:50
  But I wanted to be as realistic as possible. And look, more time I would have gone down more in a child work. I would have really taken you into certain moments with your mother at certain ages. And I would have gone deeper into meeting needs in real time and so forth. But the regulated voice is very important because the number one thing I want to do is, as I said, create trust, safety, rapport. I do that through my own regulated nervous system.
• 35:15
  And so I've learned over years to be in particular tones, afflictions, space between words, verbiage that I use, all of it. It's all the nonverbal communication is everything when it comes to really helping someone open up for the first time, the second time, the 800th time, it doesn't matter, right? It's all part of that.
• 35:39
  So part of that is self-love and loving yourself. So we're going to get into, can you provide some key principles or strategies for building trust and emotional intimacy in romantic relationships, especially for people like me that have experienced trust issues in their upbringing? Yeah. Yeah.
• 35:56
  Yeah, so I think agreements are really, really helpful. And in your case where you've experienced rupture of trust where intimacy has been unsafe, which is one of the reasons why you're attracting physical intimacy over emotional availability, is because in the past you haven't been able to trust
• 36:14
  emotional, uh, regularity. You, you haven't had, all you've known is volatility. All you've known is chaos. And so physical, like high, high attraction peak physical sex that usually not always, but usually comes with trauma bonding, which is, you know, part of that is the absence of emotional intelligence, emotional, which is an interesting term, but we'll call it emotional regularity and emotional maturity instead. Um,
• 36:40
  is because you're addicted to chaos. It's all you know. And so often peak physical sexual experiences are chaotic. They're wild, right? And often those experiences, not always, but often they are coupled with a trauma bond. And often that trauma bond is missing or lacking emotional maturity and connection and emotional stability and emotional availability. They're not available to that because it was so stuck in the trauma, so to speak.
• 37:09
  When you're dating and you're bringing people into your life, maybe bringing in a different kind of person than what you've been bringing in. So instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, try something different and experience a different result. Now, initially, you may not like it. And you're like, oh, I'm not attracted to this person. There's no magnetism. Maybe, maybe that's accurate. And I'm not denying that. Maybe it's not. Maybe sit with it a little longer. Maybe you're just not used to that person being calm and regulated
• 37:37
  It's actually what you need and you can discover, rediscover and reconnect and recreate sexual intimacy that is healthy and that is peak, if you like, but not unhealthy kind of peak. Right? So being honest with each other, sharing each other's beliefs.
• 37:53
  vulnerabilities, traumas, et cetera, with each other, making agreements on how you want to do life together and how you want to engage in conflict and how you want to get to know each other in what your pain points are and what your biggest fears are, in what your biggest excitements are, your dreams are, your sexual fantasies. Like start to build into that, like set the scene for how you want to relate to someone. Really set the scene for how you want to relate to someone and allow yourself to be seen in the way you want others to see you.
• 38:22
  Because ultimately when we're attracting emotional unavailability, it's because we are emotionally unavailable to ourselves. That's so good. Is it in your experience that there's more chaotic people? Or is this my reticular activating system literally just noticing chaos because that's what I'm used to? Are there more unhealthy chaotic people than healthy vulnerable people?
• 38:52
  Great question. Anecdotally, I would say yes. Because I tell you, as I'm making that change, as I'm making that transition, I'll go out and I'll meet someone. Oh, they're unavailable. And at least now I can be very aware and can walk away. I don't feel the need to save them or, oh, I can change them. Or if I love them hard enough, I just move on.
• 39:15
  See, that's a big thing, man. Like I just want to commend you on that. And I don't know if you're aware of this, and you probably are, but just for listeners maybe, is your ability to notice – there's a couple of steps here. Your ability to notice the emotional unavailability to then – unavailability to then step back and say, hey, I don't need to save you. We can compartmentalize this relationship as friends or not, but I don't want to date you because that's not the relationship that I want and I'm noticing old patterns coming up.
• 39:42
  That is very indicative of I'm aware that I wanted to save my mother and I'm no longer playing that role in my life anymore. Very powerful, man. Yeah, it took a lot of therapy. It took a lot of therapy. And we're going to get into that because – but I'm loving this because there's a lot of people that relate to what I'm doing.
• 40:00
  I'm sharing because it's going to help people. And I, and I, I really appreciate you playing along and, um, it's, uh, it's nice. Communication is crucial in any relationship. Literally it's, I have, uh, my, my, my things are, they'd have to be doing emotional and physical, uh, work on themselves that to be honest, loyal and communicate, know how to communicate. So communication is crucial in any relationship. How can individuals from challenging family background backgrounds improve their communication skills to foster healthier connections with their partners?
• 40:30
  Yeah, you know, there's a beautiful practice of parts therapy and family, internal family systems work and inner child work where you start to learn how to communicate with the different parts of you that you've grown up with. And the compartmentalized parts and the angry parts and the sad parts and the scared parts and all versions of those parts.
• 40:50
  When we're able to be guided to practice communicating with these parts of us in more profound ways, what often happens is that we're able to communicate with others in more effective and proficient ways. We're able to ask for what we need. We're able to make requests. We're able to make neutral observations. We're able to describe and express our feelings in greater capacity, vulnerability. And honestly, the system for that is nonviolent communication.
• 41:20
  make a need or share a need and make a request. And that framework becomes very powerful and very accessible as we learn to communicate with all the different parts within ourselves. Brilliant. This is a good, people are going to masterclass. I hope that,
• 41:35
  You're going to be able to rewind this and listen to this. This is going to be instant classic shareable. And this next question is going to, you're going to love it. What advice do you have for individuals who are hesitant to seek therapy or counseling, even if they recognize that they may benefit from it due to their upbringing?
• 41:54
  Yeah, it's tough to – so I think there's three kinds of people in the world, right, when it comes to transformation and change. Three kinds of people. There's the people that no matter what you share with them, no matter what they're exposed to, they're unwilling or they don't want to or they can't change, right? I put my father in that bucket of people.
• 42:17
  Then there's the other group of people, no particular order, that they're your people in the sense that they speak your language, they get it, you're preaching to the choir, it's that kind of conversation, so your values are in alignment. Then there's the people that – and by the way, no one – we're not here to force anyone to do anything or say anything differently, by the way. But then there's the last group of people that they're on the cusp. They're sitting on the wall. They're looking over your side. They're looking over the other side. They're looking over that side and that side. They're looking at all the different vantage points.
• 42:47
  And they're curious. I spend time speaking to the last two categories. I don't really communicate too much with the people that aren't ready to listen yet, right? Because they're not just not going to get it. Doesn't mean I don't speak my truth. I just don't pursue those kinds of people.
• 43:05
  So I'll offer and I'll make suggestions. And sometimes they're the types of people that I generally get into arguments with a lot more because I'm pretty ferocious myself. I'm pretty stubborn and egoic myself. And when I get into that mood, I just go out like a bull at a gate as do they. And so we just end up in conflict, right? So I do my best to, I think I saw Keanu Reeves say something once. I'm at a stage in my life where...
• 43:28
  I just don't care. And if you say one plus one equals five, blessings to you. Thank you. It does. Good day. Like that's where I'm not quite there yet, if I have to be honest. That's where I'd like to get, but I'm not quite there yet. I can get very frustrated because I'm, again, stuck in my own ego and my own self-righteousness in those moments, right? That's my shadow coming through.
• 43:49
  But I don't spend too much time, I do my best to not spend too much time speaking to that person that I named at the beginning. And so the question you're asking, it's a great question if it's for those last two categories, right? So how I would respond to that is, especially that last category where they're on the fence, they're on the wall and they're looking over, I would just say, I would just speak to their humanity and I would just say, and to their curiosity more than anything.
• 44:17
  hey, why don't you just try something different? Don't like it, don't do it anymore. That's it. It's just an invitation. People need to be empowered to choose their own path, man. If they're not and they feel forced, it's not going to go anywhere, anywhere exciting. And I should say it's not going to go anywhere of substance. There's not going to be any substance they experience in their lives.
• 44:39
  That's true in all facets of life too. I own an IT company and we used to shove down cybersecurity down people's throats. And now we say, you know what? Let's stop. And since we said here's option one, two, and three and they get to pick, everybody ends up picking the one that we wanted them to pick, but at least they feel like they have options and choices. So given no choice, man, people don't like that. So that Keanu Reeves story, by the way,
• 45:06
  I think I'm there. I just, I do not want to argue with people, but I will tell you, and I'm going to age myself. I'm, I'm, I'll be 48 in two weeks. So it probably hit me in the last, this year, but I, I've been so busy with launching harder than life and it's blowing up that I just don't have the energy. I just got off a call with John Asroff.
• 45:28
  And his answer was, it was, you have to ask a question. Is it worth, is what you're about to do worth trading your life's time for? Yeah.
• 45:39
  And I would, you could add this to your, so if someone's in a trauma bond relationship and you look at them and go, is this really worth trading time of your life that you're never gonna get back for? And that just blew my mind. So I've been in so many relationships where, I was doing this today and you share this, I'll share this. I was thinking about the women that really messed me up in the past.
• 46:01
  I wouldn't date, and this is not nice, but I just, this is part of the show and I'm trying to help people. So sorry if you're listening ladies, but I wouldn't date them today. If, if I met them today and I was, when I broke up with them, I was like,
• 46:17
  broke hurt. And that's the level of healing that I've done. So it's, everybody's going to get there. And it just, I think some of that just comes with time, man. It was four, I was 43 until I said, okay, enough is enough. And that's when I addressed the, the, the alcohol and the drugs and, and,
• 46:35
  And just said, enough. I've had it. I was in Key West, Florida on New Year's. And I toasted a drag queen for New Year's. Took a big sip of my scotch. Set it down. And I haven't touched it in five years. And life got better. But, Steph, I will tell you. Think about it. I went cold turkey. And then 43 years of emotions flooded me.
• 47:00
  Holy cow. So you see 215 pound gorilla in a ball crying. I haven't cried. I cried yesterday. I cried this morning. I was reading a book. I cry more now than I've ever cried in my entire upbringing because there was nobody to cry. Nobody listened. Sound familiar?
• 47:22
  Oh man. Life is, life is, it's, it's simple, but it's not easy, man. And I'm glad I met you. So I have two more questions and then we want to talk about how people can work with you. So what role, we talked about a little bit earlier, but I want, I want to dig deep in this. What role does self-love and self care play in building healthy relationships and how can individuals cultivate these qualities, especially if they've experienced the neglect or the abuse in their childhood?
• 47:51
  Yeah, so there's two ways that we can cultivate. Firstly, it plays a very important role in being able to receive love from someone else. And, you know, often when we stop receiving and we push people's love away, we're really pushing them away. We're pushing the relationship away. And so one of the ways that we or some of the ways that we can cultivate love
• 48:12
  self-love is actually through relationship because we are relational beings. And that's the, that's the art of co-regulation and that's where understanding relational or social neuroscience comes in, understanding how the brain and the body respond to being in a safe relationship and being in safe spaces and being seen by other people and being not judged and
• 48:32
  experiencing compassion from other people. We can do that for each other in relationship. And so we can help others see how amazing they are by just being honest reflections for them. And so that can increase their self-worth and self-love. Now it's not for us to do it for them. It's for us just to be these beautiful versions of ourselves that we want to be in the world. Right. And as a result of that, they can then tap into that and be inspired in their own lives. And then through conversation, through sharing of intimacy, um,
• 48:58
  through agreements, through conscious and healthy communication, through conscious repair and having a willingness to repair conflict, through fuller expressions and creating spaces within the relationship to express more fully, through deep and sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy, actively shared, creating space for each other to be with each other. All of these things help, right? And also having your own lives, having your own hobbies, having your own interests, and then also doing your own inner work, working with your own coach, working with your own coach,
• 49:27
  working with your own therapist. Even when things are going really well in the relationship, just having a soundboard that's outside of your partnership can be really helpful for the partnership as well. I've heard you say what you just said in three words, acceptance, compassion, and space. Yeah. That's it. That's what you got to have in a relationship. And I thought it was beautiful. One more question and then I'm going to wrap it up. Why won't people take the time to be alone?
• 49:57
  What I mean by that is you're in a relationship, you break up and you immediately jump into another partner. Everything I've read says, take a little bit of time to heal. Talk about that. Yeah. So there's a couple of reasons why, or maybe a few reasons, many reasons. Let me start from the start. There are many reasons why people fear to be alone when ending a relationship.
• 50:24
  And one is because we are addicted to cycles of the honeymoon period. And so we're perpetual daters. We need to be in relationship and that stems from a fear of being alone or an insecurity associated with being single. In other words, I'm not worthy if I'm not in relationship, so I need to be in relationship. I don't like spending time with myself. I feel unsafe when I'm by myself, so I need to be in relationship. I need constant stimulus.
• 50:51
  There's a story I'll share with you. I've shared this many times before, but let me share it here. If God was to contemplate where shall God place all the secrets of the universe, all the secrets of the cosmos, I'll give you the condensed version of this. And as God sits for eons and eons and eons contemplating this, where shall I place the secrets of the universe? Alas, one day God says, I shall place the secrets of the cosmos
• 51:21
  in silence and in darkness, because that is where humanity fear to go the most. And a journey towards this place is a life well earned. And so we just fear to be alone.
• 51:41
  And the opportunity we have is to really embrace that and embrace all the versions of ourselves that come through being in our own space, being with our own selves. My mind is blown. You just said again, three words, stillness, silence, and darkness. It is literally darkness.
• 52:02
  That easy. And I've been doing it for two years. Another question. So you've been married for five years. You courted for probably a couple of years. How long did you take between? How long did you take between? Go, go tell me. Oh, in between, in between. Yeah. Cause you were 31 and that's 10 years. When the, when the, how long were you alone before you met this one, before you met Christine?
• 52:27
  Yeah. About two years before I met Christine. Yeah. Yeah. But when we're in terms of courting her, we, you know, we were introduced. We spent a few months virtually. We introduced by mutual friends. We spent a few months virtually getting to know each other. We physically met each other, moved in that day, got married less than three months later. Wow. That's a whole podcast. It was so 52 minutes in and you bring that up. We'll talk about that another time. Um,
• 52:53
  So you have 20-month-old Athena, and you're going into a darkness retreat this next week. And it's going to bring us all together because I said to you off the air, I said, she's going to bring up emotions and feelings that you didn't know you had. And it's going to be awesome. So I will...
• 53:15
  I will be there for you every step of the way. I'm a neophyte. I've taught myself everything I know, which isn't much. So enjoy it. But what I want to say is, can you share, even if it's your success stories or examples from yours or other people's experience that demonstrate how doing the work and how difficult coming from a difficult family backgrounds can achieve loving, fulfilling relationships? Yeah.
• 53:39
  Yeah, man. I mean, simply put, I correlate every single one of my external successes and the external or material joys that I've experienced in life, including people, material meaning the physical world, right? I really like the more inner work I do, the more revenue comes in, the more money I make. It's really that there's a real truth to that for me.
• 54:00
  And sometimes it's very directly correlated and connected and other times it's an after effect. But I notice it. I notice just the more inner exploration that I do and the more attentive I am to who I am as a person.
• 54:15
  the more success I experienced, the more, the richer my relationships, the happier I generally feel, the more money comes into my life, better the clients, my businesses, you know, grow and expand in more interesting ways. It's just, it really is a correlation there to that. What you're saying is positivity. You're attracting positivity and I get it because I'm that way too. Look at, I'm talking with you.
• 54:40
  Since I've made these changes, I get to meet some of the most amazing people that are going to become lifelong friends. So I can attest to exactly what you're saying. Money isn't a big issue for me. I'm not driven by money anymore. I used to be. That used to be how I'd say I was the man. But I want to be content in alignment with my heart and my soul.
• 55:06
  Yeah, man. I noticed that more and more and more in my own life is I really crave spaciousness. And I also recognize that I'm in a phase of deep creation and building. And I also enjoy that thoroughly. And I know that that has a limit because what I'm craving more is really spaciousness. Where are you going to be in 10 years? Let's just say 50. Where are you going to be in 50? When I'm 50? Mm-hmm.
• 55:36
  It's about nine years away. I think I still have a foot in the US. I really love this land. I'm very, very proud to be a US citizen. Very proud to be part of a country that... So there are certain values that this country holds that I really align with. And since coming here, my life has expanded deeply and dramatically. Not only in my, you know, meeting my wife, but having our child and...
• 56:06
  you know, simply put my net worth as well in that sense, but more importantly, my emotional net worth, you know. I was expanded as a person, being amazing people, lifelong friends. I think I still have a foot here in the US. I think I'll be retired in the sense that,
• 56:26
  I'll be where I want to be, quote unquote, financially. And I won't need to work per se. I will do what I do from, I guess, a greater place of, I'll say, purity. And what I mean by not that what I'm doing now is impure or my motivations are impure, but more so it becomes more of a want and a desire as opposed to, hey, I want to live a particular life and,
• 56:52
  I want to support my family in a particular way and I need to do certain things. I won't need to do certain things. It would be a choice. And look, it's a choice now as well, man. But where I'm at, I'm very clear on the things that I want to create and achieve.
• 57:08
  And I'll definitely have a foot in, I miss Australia, I miss the land. I'm very connected to land, right? So I miss Australia as land. And I miss Greece. That's my home, as is Italy as well. So I'm very connected to Europe. And this is, I feel very torn, you know, my life because of this. So, you know, where I really see myself is providing my family, Christina and I providing our family an opportunity to experience different cultures and relationships.
• 57:36
  I'm a big traveler, so I imagine myself I'd continue to travel and just continue, really continue doing what I'm doing, man. I don't think that will ever change per se. Keep doing it, man. Just to come from change. I love what I do in the world. Yeah, I love it. I just want to keep serving and supporting and helping and speaking to the things that I speak to, and that will evolve over time as my experience has changed. But honestly, I'm just going to keep being and doing what I am now. I just think it will be a deeper extension of that. Nothing really changes too much. How many more kids?
• 58:06
  Maybe one more. We're in conversation now about it. Maybe one more. Yeah.
• 58:11
  I wish you a healthy, happy one. And you have a friend in me and there's anything I can do for you. Please let me know. And I'd like you to take me to, we go to Greece together because, uh, Greece and Italy are still on my bucket list. I've been to Australia. I've been to Thailand. I've been all over. I just haven't been those two. And every time I book them, something comes up and I got to cancel. So that would be fun. Thank goodness we're sober. And, uh,
• 58:38
  healed because it would be a very different trip for the for us and is there any significance between your behind your tattoos oh man yeah so so so much man um you want me to go through some of them or all of them or how about the one that i see one on both of the arms that we can see oh geez i didn't even see the whole arm this it's a sleeve
• 59:00
  So, yeah, two sleeves and a chest piece, but maybe this one is – so this is the first tattoo that I got. I'll just speak to this one. This is the first tattoo that I got, and it's a Sanskrit mantra, and it's not even actually. It's a passage from an old Vedantic text. It says, everything in me is born. Everything in me is merged. Everything in me is sustained. Therefore, Brahman or God am I where everything is born, merged, and dissolved. Yeah. Yeah.
• 59:30
  That's awesome, man. You're a bad motherfucker. I'm going to leave it at that, dude. When we hang up, I'm going to grab your cell phone and let's stay in touch. I'm sure. I love the silence, stillness, darkness. I can hear Athena in the background. I'm going to let you go. So good. Give me two seconds. Please rate and share this podcast. Also, I do my best to respond to comments on all social platforms. So if you want more of something or less of something, leave a comment.
• 59:54
  Each and every episode is sponsored by National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with, delivering peace of mind with technology every day. Visit TrustNTM.com for more info. Until next week, be harder than life. Thank you for listening. Please rate and subscribe to Harder Than Life, and let's take this to the next level. Get connected at the links below.