Episode Transcript
<p><!--block--> Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Cup of Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and today we're gonna be tackling a couple subjects to include you know, sobriety and alcoholism is a common topic on this show, but something not so common, we're gonna be talking about organ transplant, and that's just something a little bit different, something that a lot of us don't think about until we need it. And I think with a lot of things, it's so important as human beings, we are called to serve and inspire and impact one another, and that means being aware of all these different topics, 'cause you never know when you're gonna need it. Same with I do the prevention awareness of domestic violence, sexual violence, human trafficking. You never know when someone in your life is gonna need these resources or knowledge. So, that's the beauty of podcasting, spreading this awareness, having these conversations. Here with a guy who's been on a lot of podcasts lately, Mr. Gaylon Wilson. So great to have you here sharing your story to help make an impact and telling us about what you do. So I'd love for you to just give us a little brief overview of who, who you are, and we'll get into it from there. Well, I just turned 70 a week ago. So, it wasn't as traumatic as what I had feared. Mm. I, I suppose because I've just been so energized this last 10 months, I've, I've been on a mission to save millions of marriages. So, I, I, I've actually been working 10 to 12-hour days for 10 months now, six to seven days a week. Heather has to keep saying, "Gaylon, slow down, slow down." "I want some of your time." So it, it's been interesting. I mean, I s- I've led a life that if you looked at my bio, you might expect to meet a bitter old man, because I've just had so many disasters, financial disasters in my life where I, I was on one podcast called The Gamify Business Tavern, and it was kind of a role-playing game, Oh, wow po- podcast. And the guy, the host said, "Gaylon, you're a real live role RPG player. You've had, like, six character wipes in your life." "If you had to just build a new character." Mm. And so you, you would expect to meet a bitter old man, but on my podcast journey, I've been asked so many questions about that time that I've actually solidified an answer of why I, why I'm not that bitter old man. And it's always because I was more grateful for what I still had more than being bitter about what I'd lost. Mm. And so, and, and especially now with the heart transplant, I, I feel incredibly blessed. And, and incredibly, I, I have this incredible desire to pay that blessing forward. So that's kinda who I am. I really appreciate what you said because I'm a huge, you know, person who puts forward gratitude as well, you know? And, and that's the thing people always ask me. I've been through, I came from a household of addiction, domestic violence, sexual violence, verbal and emotional abuse, weaponized religion and control, all those things, and people ask me, like, you know, "What was the turning point? What do you..." And I always say, "I can't change what happened, but I can cultivate as many life lessons from it and be grateful and leverage it to the best of my abilities." And I, I always- Exactly ... tell people, I start everything with gratitude. When I wake up, before I go to bed. It doesn't mean it's always easy, you know, for me to tell God, "I'm grateful that, you know, y- whatever inconvenienced me today happened," because there's plenty of times where inconveniences are inconveniences, right? But having that, that spirit of gratitude and really, "What can I do now?" is, is so impactful. And we see so many people who fall into victimization, into- Mm-hmm ... playing the character and role of being a victim and either trying to leverage that to get everything handed to them, or as an excuse to not do work. And so I, I think it's really important that we are grateful and we don't sit in that victimization role. So let's get a little bit into what you went through. You talked about, you know, like six board wipes of your life. So, let's get into it, starting a little background, a very basic origin of where you grew up and what life was like as a child. Yeah. I grew up in a small town on, in, on the desert plains of eastern Colorado. We're not what you think about when you think about Colorado. Right. More what you think about when you think about Oklahoma or Kansas, 'cause we are 30 miles from Kansas and 70 miles from Oklahoma. So, you might detect a little bit of that Oklahoma accent in me. Yes, sir. I never realized I had it until I went, went, moved to Denver and everybody kept saying, "Where are you from?" I said, "I'm from southeast Colorado." "Well, where'd you get that accent?" Because if you do go s- if you go 70 miles south, you're, boom, right into that Oklahoma accent. So I guess it's bled up a little bit north. Yes, sir. And and so I w- I was adopted, and my parents always were honest about it, and I, I... It never bothered me because my parents loved me and, and treated me like their own, so, I had a pretty idyllic childhood and I ended up getting married at 20 and having four kids by the time I was 26. Wow. So I w- I was a busy guy, and during my 20s I was really driven. I can remember about 27, 28, I already had had the four kids. I decided to go to college. And I went and took all their computer courses, 'cause I was really in- I had bought my first computer for Christmas in 1982, and so I was really into it. So I took all the computer courses, all the programming courses, and when I finished everything that they had, I said, "Well, I might as well finish my degree." So one summer I was, I was working a dry land farm, an irrigated farm, had a, a disc rowing business sharpening farmers' implements, and had a roofing business, and taking 17 credit hours at the college. So, so I was- Busy ... my wife didn't see me much that summer. And and so, it two of my last three years were crop failures and because it was a, we live in the desert plains of Southeast Colorado, and it just didn't rain. Mm-hmm. And we're back in the middle of one of those droughts now. This, this land should have never been broken out of buffalo grass, in my opinion. And so, I, I loved farming. It was who I was, and, you know, I was making better money for the first few years than the average 20-something year old in, in Southeast Colorado, and so life was good. And so it, I took it pretty rough, but I had zero emotional tools to deal with it, so I did the, the good Colorado cowboy thing and just stuffed it. Yes, sir. Yep. Stuffed it and went on. And so I ended up going to Denver and getting a job as a stockbroker. And you know, people say, "How do you go from a farmer to a stockbroker?" And I said, "Well, I'd taken some business courses." And, and they don't give farmers near enough credit for how much business knowledge they have to have. You know, they've got to deal with bankers and do their taxes and- Yeah. Yeah ... and all of that. And so, And so I, I had started doing really well with that. The, the New Yorkers seemed to love my laid back Southeast Colorado attitude and- Right ... and accent. And so I could talk to them for, you know, hours sometimes. And so I did really well with the stock brokering until I wa- walked into work one Monday morning in January of 1990, and they told... I had been selling this little dental HMO to everybody in, in my... All my clients had it. And all my, and my mo- I had m- 3,000 of my mother's money in it. And I walked in and they said Dental Health America just filed Chapter 7. Their stock is worthless." So as you can imagine, none of my clients wanted to talk to me, 'cause I'd just lost them all their money. And, you know, my mother barely still wanted to talk to me. And so I can name that day as the day I crawled inside a vodka bottle and stayed there for pretty much 10 years. Wow. Yeah. And, So, you know, a- again, because I didn't have any emotional tools to deal with that disaster again, I decided to deal with it with alcohol and which was a really bad decision. Right. But I was pretty high-functioning drunk for the first several years. I still kept jobs and, and supported the family and, and, and did what I needed to do. And, but I would get home and drink until I passed out, and then get up in the morning and take a couple drinks to get me back going again and, and off to work. And, and until like towards the end, it wasn't-- I started losing jobs and, and fortunately one of the jobs I had had a good enough health plan that I was able to go to rehab, and so I got some tools to deal with it. And and so by January of twen- 2001, I had pretty much, I had gotten sober enough that I was staying sober for months at a, at a time with maybe just an occasional weekend binge. And of course, that's when it gets really dangerous because that's when you can drink yourself to death. Because an alcoholic that gets sober and stays sober long enough that his body doesn't, is not used to the alcohol anymore- Yeah then he goes to, falls off the wagon. I, I, I was going to AA and I actually had a ar- a Army veteran that had, was in a wheelchair, and he'd been sober for 21 years, and I was actually considering asking him to be my sponsor. And I walked in, went to meeting one, one night and they said he had fallen off the wagon over the weekend and had drank himself to death. Died of alcohol poisoning. After 21 years. After 21 years of sobriety. Mm-hmm. And so that kinda turned me off on Alcoholics Anonymous. And fortunately, I landed on my feet with a book called Rational Recovery. And in Rational Recovery, it talks about how alcohol goes into your, into your nervous system, into your primal brain, and makes itself an instinct, just like your need for food or need for water or need for sex. In fact, sometimes it makes it stronger than those other needs. And so- Once I un- you know, and that's why it's so hard to get sober from being from alcohol, because as soon as you try to get sober, your primal brain says, "Dude, you're gonna die. If you don't get your alcohol, you're gonna die." Right. Because it think, that's what the primal brain thinks, because it's an instinct to get that alcohol. And so once I understood that, it became much easier to use my, my logical brain to overrule my primal brain. "No, I'm not gonna die. I'm fine. We don't have to have that alcohol." And so- so anyway, in January of 2001, I got a job as a traveling computer consultant for a company called PeopleSoft. And and so I, they would send me out during the week and then fly me home on the weekends. So it was, it was a cushy job. And I ma- was making more money than I'd ever made. And so I'm going along great. I thought I'd finally made it. And then in September of twen- 2001, those planes flew into the building. Right, right. And that whole consulting business went down in ashes with those buildings. And so by December I got laid off, and I spent the ni- next nine months sending out resumes. This is back when you used snail mail to send out your resumes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I sent out, like, 360 resumes in that nine months and, and I only got one interview out of that. And they flew me to Chicago- Wow ... for the interview, and they loved me, but they called me back a week later and said, "Well, the economy isn't back yet, so we're not gonna fill that position yet." And so- Thanks for wasting my time. Well, I enjoyed the trip to Chicago. I'd never been to Chicago. Yeah, yeah. So anyway so it was about that time that my first marriage disintegrated, you know, between the repeated financial disasters and the alcoholism. I mean, my first wife was an angel. I, I have nothing bad to say about her other than she put up with my bullshit probably longer than she should, she should have. Mm-hmm. And and, and so, it was the fall of 2002 that I met Heather, and she was actually the first girl I dated after my marriage dissolved, and so I hit the jackpot right off the bat. We I had been doing some study into, studying into tantric sex, and one of the tenets of tantric sex is eye gazing. And so eye gazing creates an incredible bond between a couple when it's used during lovemaking. And, and so we started off our relationship with that eye gazing, with that incredible bond, and it basically carried us through the next 12 years. We basically never left the romance phase. You know, the relationship experts say the average romance phase is six months to two years. And and our society is building relationships on chemistry. You know, they say chemistry is what you need to build a relationship. Well, that chemistry lasts six months to two years. So that's why you see so many relationships that end in that- Right ... six months to two year range, because they haven't built the structure underneath it to, to keep the romance phase alive. And so actually, that's what Heather and I have developed, and I'll get to that here in a little while. But and so So we had we, we ended up moving back down here to our little town. I still owned a house that we ha- I had never sold. We'd rented it out for years, and it came empty. And so I said, "Hey, let's, let's, let's go home to Lamar." And she was from a little town in Southeast Colorado of 300. And so, I tried to get her to go to Denver and she said, "Ah, no." Went over like a lead balloon. And so, so wh- I was able to... I had gotten a job as a cashier at Walmart 'cause I couldn't get a decent job because of how much money I'd been making. I had had interviewers tell me, "We love you, but if that money comes back you're gonna be gone, so we, we can't invest in you." Hmm. And so I got a job as a cashier at Walmart. I'd worked my way to department manager within two or three months, but they don't pay their department managers much either. And so, we, I, I was able to transfer down to our little hometown, to our Walmart here, and, and I put a little ad in the paper for computer repair even though I'd never really done it professionally. I'd just been an, a hobbyist all my life. I'd built my own computers, so I figured I could fix them. And so within about six months of doing that, it was making more than the Walmart job was, so I was able to quit and go to do it full time out of the house. So Heather and I have actually been together 24/7, 365 per, since 2004. We- Wow. You've got to not only love your wife, you've got to like her. She's gotta be your best friend- Yes, sir ... to, to spend that much time together. And and I'm at the point that I still wake up every morning and go, "How do I love this woman more today than I did yesterday?" Wow. It's just amazing. And so, so by tw- tw- 2014 I had become a traveling computer consultant. Or no, a traveling field service worker, where I'd hooked up with an outfit out of West Virginia that had a contract with AT&T, and AT&T had the contract with the Far- USDA Farm Service Agency to provide their computer equipment. And so this outfit sent me all around. We actually hit all 48 contiguous states within three years of starting that. And, Our big job was in Jan- in J- July of 2014. We left in a little bitty Toyota Prius C. That's the smallest Prius they make. Hmm. And I had built the 4x4 Harbor Freight Tools trailer kit and put a Sears c- car top carrier on it, and that's what we put our luggage in. And I took Heather and her two teenage, 14 and 16-year-old daughters, and we drove through 35 states and did 250 offices in 31 states. 17 weeks and 25,000 miles on the road. Wow. Yeah. That was quite an adventure. And so we got back from that. The girls were done with the road. Heather and I went back out for a few more weeks to- on another little trip and they stayed with their 18-year-old brother. And so I got back just a little bit before Christmas, and then I'd gotten really sick right a- right after Christmas. And so I went into our little clinic at w- again, we live in a town of 7,500 that's a long ways away from the major cities in Colorado, so we have a hard time getting and keeping good quality healthcare professionals. Right. And so the, the p- physician's assistant that I saw said you've got pneumonia, Gaylan. Here's some antibiotics." Well, I found he didn't do a chest X-ray, which I found out is that's a huge no-no. You don't diagnose pneumonia without a chest X-ray. Right. But he did. And, and so I bought an oxygen generator because I didn't have insurance at the time. And so by January, we had another three and a half month trip planned, and Heather and I had bought a motor home for that trip. Hmm. Because we're... Oh, one of the things about driving around in the Prius for 25,000 miles is, is you learn to say, "I'm sorry," really quickly, and you learn to say, "You're forgiven really quickly." Because there's nothing quite as miserable as traveling 100 mi- hundreds of miles a day with somebody you're mad at. Right. Right. And so that real- really taught us how to repair quick. And, and I think it was preparing us for what happened during the heart failure. So basically we left on the other, the trip, and we got six month, six weeks into the trip and I had just gotten weaker and weaker and weaker. And we, so we went into a, a clinic in Corpus Christi, Texas, 1,000 miles from home. And- they did send me for the chest X-ray, and they called me back that afternoon and said, "Mr. Wilson, you don't have pneumonia. You've got congestive heart failure. You need to get home to Colorado today." So my type A personality said, "Well, we're making $300 a job. We're getting three to four jobs in a day. I think we'll finish this next six weeks and then go get it taken care of." Well, that next morning we did two of the first jobs and, and by that time the reality had sunk in that I had a se- serious heart problem. And so I called my people and said, "We've gotta go home." And poor Heather, sh- like I said, she's from a town of 300, so she doesn't do city traffic. But I was so weak at that point I couldn't help with the driving. And so she- Right ... she ended up driving us that thousand miles home over the next three days. And she did make me grab my... We had a long hose on the oxygen so I could go up and sit by her in the seat when we went through San Antonio. But most of the time I just laid back there in the bed with the oxygen on. And so she got me home, and we went into the little hospital here. We, our hospital is basically a triage hospital. If, if there's anything serious going on they s- ship you off to Colorado Springs and- Right ... and so I ended up in the ER in Colorado Springs, and they did some tests. And a normal healthy human heart puts out 50 to 60% out of the left chamber every time it beats. And and mine was putting out five. Wow. So I, I was knocking on- Right ... death's door- Right ... really, really hard. And so, they actually gave me a medicine called Lasix, and it's a diuretic, and it took off 22 pounds of water off my body in two days. Wow. That's like three gallons of water that was inside my chest cavity squeezing on my heart and lungs. Wow. Yeah. The doctor was explaining it to me and, and afterwards I said, "Well, in other words, my heart and lungs got in a ballroom brawl in the middle of a pool." He said- Right, right ... "Yeah, pretty much." And so, so I had gotten on a bicycling kick three years previous that probably saved my life because I, I rode my bicycle for 100 miles a week for like six months and and then put it away when the snow, snow flew, and planned on getting it back out the next spring, but that never happened. But that six months of bi- riding that bicycle got my circulatory system in such good shape that my poor little 5% heart was able to keep me alive. Mm. And so they, I asked him, should I, I said, "I wanna get back on that bicycle." And he says, "You know, I think we better put a defibrillator pacemaker in you." And so they implanted the, they, they call it the implanted cardio device. And so, so poor Heather had to basically watch me dying in front of her eyes for three and a half years. I just continued to get worse and worse over that time period. Hmm. And that's when a lot of relationships will crumble because either the patient withdraws into themselves and pushes their caregiver away, or the caregiver just gets so exhausted that they say, "I can't do this anymore. I'm out." But Heather never hinted that she wanted out. She stuck by me and nursed me, and she was my rock during the whole time. And I actually think we actually grew closer because even when sex became impossible because of the heart the last year and a half it just was impossible, and we still didn't lose our affection, we didn't lose our eye gazing. We, we clung to each other more the worse my heart got. And so I think we improved our bond during that time. And so she stuck by me right to the end, and i- in the, in late May of 2018, I had my defibrillator go off and, and shock me back into rhythm for the first time, and I found out that my heart had be- heart rate had been 240 beats a minute right before that thing went off and shocked me back into rhythm. And the, the guy that I call... I, I had a little mouse thing that I could hold over the defibrillator and it would read it, and then I could put it in a cradle and it would send it over cell service to Denver. And, So I did that, and I called them, and they said, "Oh yeah, that's where the term drop dead comes from." 'Cause they, if you hadn't had that defibrillator in you, you would've been dead on the spot. Oh, okay. And, and so it saved my life, and but I, I ended up having to get cardioverted again. That's because your heart go- my heart was going into what they call AFib, where the top part doesn't beat in synchrony with the bottom part. Okay. And, and so if you've ever seen the movies where they have the paddles and they put them on you and go- Right ... "Clear." Well, that's what they do except they just put a sticker on the front and a sticker on the back and knock you out, and then shock you back into rhythm and then wake you back up. So it's- To try to just, like, reset your heart so they're, they're in sync? Right. It, it resets your heart to get them back in sync. And so I had that done a- a- again a week a- and that's actually what the internal defibrillator does, too. And so I got cardioverted twice in a week, and it just took it out of me. I, I could tell I wasn't gonna be around much longer. And so I ended up sending, sending Heather down at 9:00 at night on June 19th of 2018, and I told her, "Honey, I'm not gonna be here in two to three months. We need to finish getting ready." We'd been to the mortuary once, and we'd been putting off our final decisions, and so we needed to go make those. And of course she's crying her eyes out because her, her soulmate was, just told her that he was gonna be gone in two or three months. And she was still crying a half an hour later when we got the call that there was a heart available. And so we grabbed our little to-go bag like a preppy couple keeps, and out the door we went. And it, we were having an eastern Colorado hailstorm. Mm ... and it was like 100 miles wide at least so because we drove through it for the first 100, 100 to 120 miles. And so the waterworks were going outside the car, and the waterworks were still going inside the car 'cause Heather had switched from crying because she was s- sad to crying because she was excited- Right and scared because there was a 5% chance that I could die on that table. So that night her emotions were all over the board. And they had given us till 1:30 in the morning to get there, and we slid into that parking lot at 1:15. So we just barely made it in time. And so they rolled me into the OR at 4:00 in the morning, and by 9:00 the next morning I had a 38-year-old heart in my 61-year-old body. Wow. Yeah. And so that was eight years ago. They, they basically have given me 20-plus more years with my soulmate. So I, I just feel so blessed by that. Right. And so now you shared that whole story with us. A lot of down points, a lot of unexpected financial crises. Mm-hmm. You know, raising multiple children marriage, a second marriage, the issues with your heart, the employment search, which we can still relate to nowadays. People are still struggling to find a job even with college degrees, even with years of experience. So all things that people go through. The alcoholism and e- especially what you mentioned, the functioning alcoholic for the first few years, right? A lot of people are alcoholics and they're functional. They're at work, they're being a parent, they're present. And so you talk about all these hardships, but you also talked in the beginning about being grateful for them. Let's kind of talk about the culmination of those two things. You're guesting on podcasts, you talked about marriages and helping people and everything. Mm-hmm. What was the turning point after you, you got your new heart that kind of inspired you to say, "Hey, I wanna serve and make an impact now"? Okay. Well, yeah, like you can imagine with my Type A personality and having been given this great amazing blessing of 20 more years with my soulmate, I just felt, got this burning desire to pay that blessing forward. Right. And so about three years after the transplant, my erectile dysfunction was getting worse. I'm getting on towards 65, and I had actually developed ED 26 years ago at 44 years old. But that first erection I lost, I was at the doctor the next week saying, "I want that new little blue pill they're advertising." And fortunately, it was amazing. I was able to catch a 22-year... a 17-year younger wife two years after that and, and we've had an amazing sex life because of Viagra. And but the Viagra was getting where, getting to where it didn't work reliably and you know, we were attempting to make love a couple times a week and failing half the time. And so I joined a couple Facebook groups for erectile dysfunction discussions. And I got so involved, I had found my way to pay my blessings forward because I got involved in helping other men and women deal with the, the fallout from ED and how to fix ED and, and how to repair your relationships. And, and so- I got so involved that within three months the larger group the man who had founded it eight years previous was pretty much absent most of the time from the group. And so I asked him if I could be a moderator and help him with the group, and he said, "No, you can be the administrator. I'm gonna give the group to you." And so, and then three months later I got made administrator in the other group. And so I've been administrating those for over five years now. And I've kinda handed them off now that I've got a new mission. But One of my big frustrations was, was when women would come to the group looking for help, and it was the same story almost over and over for hundreds of women over the last five years They, the man had developed ED, but instead of dealing with it and going to the doctor and getting treatment, he refused to do that. And so he had dealt with it by withdrawing into himself and cutting her off completely from all physical touch. No cuddling, no kissing, nothing that might get her started, Wow ... and then him not be able to, to please her. So he, he thought you know, I originally thought that this was a character flaw in these men, that they must be cowards. But as you'll see in a little bit, what I discovered was is these men were going into flight mode because their primal brain, the second they lost that first erection, their primal brain told them, "Dude, you're gonna lose your woman." And so they had withdrawn. They went into flight, fi- flight mode and withdrawn to try to protect the bond. And, you know, of course that's a really bad way to protect the bond, but the- Right ... primal brain doesn't understand that. And so, so I actually got Heather and I into a course to become certified thriving relationship coaches just to try to figure that man out and figure out how to help these women, because I couldn't really help them. I could empathize with them, but I couldn't tell them how to get their man to come back to them. Mm. And so, the very first book we read in the thriving relationship coaching was Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson, and in it she talks about her attachment theory. And her attachment theory is that we were bred through thousands of years to have an instinct for a strong attachment to our mates. And those that didn't have it didn't survive, and their offspring didn't survive, so it got brought forth into modern man as an instinct. Like we talked about the alcohol, this instinct is as strong as our need for food or need for water, is to... We, they call us a pair-bonded species for a reason, because we tend to bond with another human being, and, and our instincts tell us to protect that bond. That's why a lot of women who are in domestic violence situations don't get out, is because their primal brain is trying, telling them to protect that bond at all cost. You, you mentioned domestic violence, and I've actually got two domestic violence crisis guides that I give away The Turn for Her and The Break for Him, that teach them to use the monument method that I'm about to teach you to stop the violence. And so, so D- Dr. Sue went on to say that, that most of the fights that we get into are not about what we're fighting about, but about the fact that, that attachment instinct has detected a threat to the attachment and has thrown us into fight or flight mode. And so when you get both partners in a relationship in fight or flight mode, the logical brain leaves the building and leaves what I call the lizard brains in control, the primal brains. And, you know, a lot of relationship therapy people say, "Well, you need to learn to communicate this." Well, there's absolutely no valid communication going on when you're both in fight or flight mode. The lizard brains say nasty things to each other. They see each other as the enemy of the bond, and, and so they, they're gonna do anything they can to try to protect that bond from the enemy. And so if a couple gets in that mode and stays in that mode often and doesn't do the repair work afterwards, they start to do damage to each other's emotional system safety. And I always say that there's no sexual desire with em- without emotional system safety, especially in women. And so, so eventually, if enough damage gets done over the weeks and months and years, you get a couple five years down the road that say they still love each other, but there's actually, actually no intimacy happening at all because their, their nervous systems are so damaged that they can't allow desire that the desire just can't go anywhere. It doesn't have any... It can't graze. And so, that's why you have what we call dead bedroom syndrome, where, where there's just absolutely no sex happening. And so- So me being the fixer guy I am, even though Heather and I had a, have had an amazing relationship, I'm always working on trying to tweak it and get it better. And so I went to her and I said, "Okay, how do we stop triggering each other's attachment instinct?" You know, because being 17 years apart and, and both fiery personalities, we used to get into pretty good fights. And and so the first thing I decided was, well, we need to watch what tone we talk to each other in. And so we gave each other permission, and permission is so important in the Monument Method. You've basically got to be key- become a team against those lizard brains. And, and so Heather and I believe we're building this big, beautiful marble monument to our relationship, and each loving word or kind gesture, or especially when you make love with presence and eye gazing, you're building onto that monument. But each cruel word or cold shoulder or fight that you get into is like taking a hammer and chisel to that monument. And so a lot of couples will end up with their monument crumbles on the floor and, and divorced. And so, we we decided we wanted to fiercely protect our monument. That's the Monument Method Institute motto is fiercely protect the monument. And, And so to do that, you've gotta make the monument, your relationship, the monument more important than your ego and more important than winning that fight. Because if you win the fight and you damage the monument, you haven't won anything. Right. And so, so we gave each other permission to start calling each other out when, when we were say- u- using tone that wasn't necessary. You know, like, "Honey, did you really need to say that that way?" And so that helped. That brought us closer and, and stopped some of the fighting, but we were still getting into the fights and still getting into fight or flight mode. And so I got to thinking on it further and I said, "Okay, how do we stop? Where's the emergency brake on these fights, fights?" And, And so I, I came up with the idea that in a period of san- sanity, when we're both not not fighting, we agreed to give each other a sacred word, and ours is monument. So any time either one of us sees us heading towards the monument with a hammer and chisel, the other one could call monument, and that does a couple of things. First of all, it reminds us that the, that the mo- the monument is more important than that fight we're about to get into. But secondly, I called it a sacred word because we made a sacred vow to each other that no matter how mad we were, the fight stopped right there. We made that vow during a period of sanity, so we wouldn't rewrite it when we were in the middle of crazy. But you don't separate and go away and try to calm down, u- unless of course you've allowed yourself to get full into fight or flight mode and you're about to kill each other. Then you need to separate for a while. Right. But the idea here is to cut it off before you ever get into fight or flight, or the second you see yourself heading towards fight or flight. And so when monument gets called, we turn towards each other, and we come together and embrace each other's arms and gaze lovingly into each other's eyes and patch that little spot on the monument that we just chipped at. And, and the science behind that is, is that when you gaze into your lover's eyes, it goes into that primal brain and tells that primal brain your attachment's safe. And so once the, the primal brain figures out that its attachment is safe, it says, "Okay, body, you can get out of fight or flight now. We don't need you." And so you c- your body calms back down, and the logical brain returns to the building, so you can logically discuss, you can communicate what you are ready to ready to have a big fight about. And so as you practice this, and it does take practice, 'cause we as humans seem to be wired to fight each other. Right. It does take practice, but as you take, practice it, the little fights go away. You know, 'cause the instant somebody says something that would have started a fight, the other one's saying, "Monument," and you're coming back, and you're preventing any damage from happening. I, I always say the best repairs are the ones you don't have to make. Right. Yes, yes. And, and and so we cut that, cut that off before we ever got into fight or flight. And even the big ones- that we do get into fight or flight on are you know, that you used to be mad at her for a day and a half for are over in five or 10 minutes with us because one of us is saying, "Wait a minute, what are we doing to, to our monuments?" And we're calling monument and coming back together and repairing that damage before it becomes a big gaping hole in our, our monument. And and so as you do that over and over and over, over time, you start healing each other's nervous system. And as the nervous system starts feeling safer and safer with each other, remember what I said a while ago, there's no sexual desire without nervous system safety. So as your nervous system, as your partner becomes your nervous system's safest place, and that's what this can create is your partner as your safest place, that desire can really blossom again, even in decades old marriages. Right. Yeah. And so that's what we call the Monument Method. And I had actually written the book last fall. And, And I was out working on one of our cars, and I'm a pretty decent mechanic. I, I overhauled tractor engines back in my 20s when I was farming. I- so I can turn a wrench, but these new cars are a pain with all their computers. Yeah. Oh, I believe you. I believe you. And, a- and, you know, I've got the problem of my Type A personality does not wanna take one to a mechanic. And so I had worked on this car for two months and finally got it running. And so I was so proud. I drove it- Right ... around the block and pull it up into the driveway and, and park it and shut it off. And Heather wants to go visit friends, and we've made best friends with the man who got his heart 17 days after I got mine. And his wife and Heather have trauma bonded over their car, car over their heart transplant husbands and are closer than sisters now. And so we got in. We, they live a couple hundred miles away, so we loaded the car up, got in to go. I pushed the button, nothing. Not even a light on the dash. It's just dead. And so Heather's sitting over here. She was, was really excited about going to get to see Chris, and now she's disappointed. So I've disappointed my wife, and I've worked on this car for two months and it's not, still not working. So smoke starts coming out of my ears. And I grab my, my little multimeter and I pop the hood and I go test the battery and it's at, like, 8 1/2 volts and, you know, it should be 12, 12 1/2. And so- I'm so dysregulated by that time that my lo- logical brain is gone, and my lizard brain's driving the show now. And so I, I, I'm too dysregulated to think, "Wait a minute, Galen, you had that on the charger all night. It's gotta be an alternator issue." Nope, my brain went, "Oh, we get, we need to bring the car up over so I can jumpstart it and get going on this trip." So I bring the other car over, I pop the trunk to go around and get the jumper cables that I know are there. I don't see them. Well, I don't see them because they're under a blanket, but I'm too dysregulated by that point to move the blanket and find the, find the silly jumper cables. Right. And so... And, and I'm not normally an angry man, but I'm really angry at this point. And so I remember another set of jumper cables I've got hanging in the garage, and they're, they're, like, 40 years old. And, and that's when you know you're getting old, is when you can talk about something you bought 40 years ago. Right. Right. And so I went in and I got them, and I'm carrying them out, and I'm going, "Oh, I left these out in the weather too many times over their 40 years," and they're all rusty and corroded and I, I said, "They're not gonna conduct any electricity." And I clip them on the car, and I clip the other end together to see if there's a spark, and there's just nothing. It... And so now I'm really going. I grab them off the car, hold them over my head, and throw them on the concrete. Well, Heather's in the car with the hood up, so she doesn't see this, and the windows are up, so she doesn't hear me scream. And so she has no clue that her husband's spiraling out of control just feet in front of her. And so I go back into the garage to to find another set of jumper cables, and you'd have to see my garage to understand that challenge. Right. And so we go in there, I find them, I get them, I get them hooked up, getting the battery charging, and I'm gone at this point. I walk around to the driver's side of the door, and I'm just so angry I'm nearly a puddle on the concrete. And I open the door, and picture this, a 69-year-old man crawling in on the driver's seat on his hands and knees, and I get, like, eight inches from Heather's face and say, "I need a monument." And darn it, the second she turned and looked into my eyes, that anger just went gone. I expected it to, you know, to get me to calm down, but it was just gone. And, and it shocked me. And, and so my first reaction was, "Okay, you have my permission, anytime you see me upset e- even a little bit, you can come monument me and get me to calm down." And so now all of a sudden there was another book to write. We c- we're calling this The Sanctuary Bond because as I wrote that other book, I wro- I started realizing how powerful it was. Because what we had done is Heather and I had been using the monument method for a couple of years, even though we didn't have a name for it until last fall when I wrote the book. We-- It was just something we did in our relationship And so, we had trained our nervous system that eye gazing means time to stand down. And so that's what had happened even though we weren't fighting. You know, she was fine, and I was the one that was all crazy. The same th- same effect happened when we eye gazed. It told my nervous system, "You're okay. You can stand down." And poof, took me out of fight or flight. And so a- as I got to writing the book, I realized that this is crazy powerful because let's... I'm gonna get a little traditional. Let's say the wife is in the kitchen cooking supper for the family, and the man has been out in the world all day, and the world has just been mean to him that day. Right. And he comes in that door, and he's in fight or flight mode big time. And, you know, traditionally she would have maybe hid in the kitchen and gave... hoping that he calms down. Or worse, she would come out and engage with him, and all of a sudden she's in fight or flight too, and the outside world has brought its hammer and chisel in and is going at their monument. And, and so now with the sanctuary bond, he comes in the door in fight or flight mode. She sees that. She comes to him with his permission. It does take that agreed permission when you're in a s- in a sane mode to agree on all this stuff. But with his permission, she comes and monuments him, gets him to calm down, and that does a couple of things. First of all, it's gonna increase that bond, increase each other's nervous system safety with each other. And, and so it basically, if you repeat that over and over through your marriage, you become each other's refuge from all the crazy in the world. And I think that's what we all really want out of a relationship is a re- relationship that's a refuge instead of another battlefield that you've got to manage. And so the second thing that does is once he gets regulated out of fight or flight mode, he quits producing all the stress hormones, the cortisol and adrenaline- Right ... and all the, all the s- hormones that are slowly killing us all. 'Cause he... So he's gonna end up living longer. And, and then the third thing that happens is, you know, traditionally they would have spent the rest of the evening bickering back and forth and, and, and had a horrible evening, and then went to bed mad at each other, and turned over and went to sleep. Well, now instead they have a wonderful evening together, cuddling and, and connecting more. They go to bed happy. They likely have some wonderful lovemaking, and then he gets a good night's rest and is ready to tackle that mean world again the next morning. And so she has become his refuge from all the crazy of the outside world. Right. So thank you so much for sharing all of that great information. And I know you mentioned the books, podcasting- Mm-hmm ... so people can learn a lot more about this. I wanna mention before we close the episode here as well, are you w- actively working with couples as a coach one-on-one and, you know- Yeah what's the best way for them to work with you and reach out? Yeah. Yeah. I've actually, I've just about got it finished. I've got a, a coaching system that I'm building on my website that people will be able to go in and- Perfect ... and, and, Book time with Heather and I. And so yeah, we've got the books. If you go to monumentmethodinstitute.com is my hub central and you'll find the books. You'll find my Monument Validated Person. It's my dating site because I've actually written four books on dating, Monument Man and Monument Woman for the older adults that are, have been in a failed relationship and are trying to date in this crazy dating world that's out there these days. Yeah. And then Man Before the Monument and Woman Before the Monument for the 16 to 25-year-old crowd, and their dating world is even more crazy than- Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know about that ... and so you remember me talking about how we're, our society is teaching us to build on chemistry. Well, these books tell you how to build that structure under the chemistry so when the chemistry runs out, you're still in romance phase for the rest of your life. Yeah. And, and, and so I wrote the books in such a way that the people are, are, have been taught the Monument Method and the Sanctuary Bond, you know, even deeper than what w- you've seen today, and and have been taught how to implement it in their lives. And then they go, "Okay, where do I find somebody to build a monument with?" Mm. And so I, I built the Monument Validated Person, MVP, and I'm making that free for life as far, as part of my pay it forward from my heart transplant. Because I just think it's so important that the people that read these books have a place to find each other. Mm. And and so if you've a- actually got to read one of the books and pass a little quiz before you can get into it. Most of the people have seen this episode- Right ... could probably pass the quiz. Yeah. So it's not, not rocket science. But you've got the vow that you're there to build somebody, a, a monument s- with somebody, not for casual dating. It's my anti-hookup dating site. Yeah, thank you. And and, and I'm also making those four books free for a limited time just to try to get that community off the ground, 'cause right now it's kind of a ghost town. I just launched it a, a month or so ago, and so we need to, I need to get people out there. The first thousand members get a founding member badge on their, on their profile. And and if you go to the MVP site and scroll to the bottom, you can download any of those books for free right now. Awesome. We're gonna have the links for that in the description below for everyone to check out. And I just wanna thank you for your time today, for, you know, all the great advice you shared. I think that relationships are vital. They affect every part of your life. Mm-hmm. They can change the whole course of it. So I think we definitely should be building something that is very meaningful, worthwhile that is safe and beautiful. So thank you for all this advice. Again, in a world full of hookup culture, of crazy casual dating, and failed marriages, and broken homes. So I appreciate your time today, and thank you for guesting. Okay. You're quite welcome. It's my bene- my honor to be here with you, Ricky. I can talk today. Yes. Yeah, it's been my honor to be here </p><p><!--block--><br><br></p>
