Speaker 1: 0:00

First, let me just say this I see a lot of folks who want to and have the desire and the capacity to reconnect with their partner and it sometimes works out great. And I see people who have been totally forced to embrace the idea that that should be the better option and bless their hearts. Often they try to convince themselves that they ought to do that, but they really don't have the desire to try and make that happen. And I think it's really important to be honest with yourself about what you want in this kind of a situation, like do you want to reconnect or do you just think you should want to reconnect?

Speaker 2: 0:36

Welcome to this Empty Nest Life. Join Jay Ramsden as he leads you on a transformative journey through the uncharted seas of midlife and empty nesting. If you're ready to embark on this new adventure and redefine your future, you're in the right place. Here's your host, the Empty Nest Coach, Jay Ramsden.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Today, on this Empty Nest Life, we're talking about gray divorce, and if you don't know what that is, gray divorce simply people who get divorced over the age of 50. And that is on the rise Since 2010,. Now, all divorces equate about 40% of people who fall into the gray divorce category, and while not all of them are due to infidelity, many are. That's why I'm excited to have today's guest with me, dr Marie Murphy, because she is both a relationship coach and an expert in infidelity, and we're going to explore that topic a little bit, but we may explore it from a little bit of different point of view. So just a heads up there as we get rolling. And so, marie, thank you and welcome for being here.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Thanks, Jay. It's so nice of you to have me on your show.

Speaker 3: 1:43

Welcome for being here. Thanks, jay, it's so nice of you to have me on your show. Yeah, so I was. You know, we met at, you know, a business retreat, and the conversation we had there was, like you know, this is an interesting topic, right, because so many great divorces are happening today. Right, like I said earlier, 40% are happening, not all of them infidelity, but your take and the work that you do with your clients. It's just a little bit different, a lot different.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:12

Yeah, and so I wanted to bring it to light, because there is always two sides to every conversation, and that can be true in situations where infidelity occurs too. So now I know you have a PhD in the sexuality, the sociology of sexuality. Tell me more about that and then tell me about how that led you to the work that you're doing. Maybe it was vice versa the work you were doing led you to the PhD, vice versa the work you were doing, you led you to the PhD.

Speaker 1: 2:50

Yeah, so there's not really a neat line between the PhD and the sociology of sexuality and the work I do as a coach. And what Jay's alluding to is I approach infidelity from a non-judgmental perspective. I work with people who are either engaging in some kind of infidelity something they think counts as infidelity or have been, and there's not a lot of support for those folks out there. The lion's share of our collective sympathy goes to the folks who have been or are being cheated on, and, although they're totally worthy of our compassion and support and useful guidance, not a lot of folks see the folks who are doing the cheating as worthy of respectful guidance. But I do so. That's the unique feature of the work I do.

Speaker 3: 3:34

Yeah, tell me about that piece, the respectful guidance. I like how you phrased that and I know some people listening may be like hell. No, yeah, but I'm curious to know what you mean by that.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Yeah, so maybe here's a useful connector.

Speaker 1: 3:49

One of the insights of the sociology of sexuality is that humans do all kinds of things in terms of their sexual lives, their relationship lives, their romantic lives, and instead of saying what people should or shouldn't be doing, it says what are people doing? What are people doing and why? Right? And the sociology of sexuality assumes that nothing that we do in terms of our sexual lives or our relationship lives is fundamentally bad or good. Rather, it's the meanings we as a society assign to people's behaviors that determine whether they count as good or bad or somewhere in between in our collective imagination, right or understanding of things. So one of the reasons why I'm able to be so effective as a coach is because I have that as this baseline understanding. We collectively may not like it that infidelity occurs, and that's fair enough, but it does occur.

Speaker 1: 4:54

And if we want to live in a sane way and deal with whatever comes up in our relationships, we need to be able to deal with infidelity if it happens rather than just wringing our hands and saying this shouldn't happen or, since it has happened, something has gone terribly wrong. That doesn't get us very far.

Speaker 3: 5:14

Yeah, yeah, and I like that. You like something has happened right. There are lots of things that can happen in a relationship that can also signal the end of a relationship as well. It doesn't always have to be infidelity, and so when you think about that like that's, I like that phrasing. I don't know if people who are listening are going to like that phrasing right. Something you deal with all the time I'm sure is like, yeah, no, it shouldn't have happened. Well, there's lots of things in life that shouldn't have happened and lots of things that happen in our relationships the same way.

Speaker 1: 5:48

Yeah, I mean, it's really, you know, it's hard being a human in this big crazy world of ours Like I don't like it that people drive, like you know, 20% over the speed limit and don't observe traffic signals. Right, I may think that people shouldn't do that, but that doesn't stop them from actually doing it, right.

Speaker 3: 6:08

Yes, yeah, Something we talk about right is, as coaches, we dive into thoughts and feelings a lot, and everybody has thoughts and feelings about all different types of subjects. And the other day I was having a conversation with a friend and they, I think we were just talking about perhaps colleges he's got a soon to be graduating senior and we were talking about different colleges His son was looking at and he said well, I don't know if it's right or wrong, it's just my opinion Right and my brain went well there. For the majority of things in life, there really is no right or wrong.

Speaker 1: 6:43

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 6:44

Right, it's how we view it, it's someone's opinion about it, it's you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Yeah, I totally agree. But with things like infidelity we've gotten so collectively convinced that there actually is a right and wrong that we can really wrap ourselves around the axle. And the thing is, this doesn't help anybody If you've been cheated on and I've been cheated on I sure didn't love it, but it is a thing that happens and if we get really attached to this shouldn't have happened. This person did something wrong to me. It's very hard for us to move forward in a productive way, either as individuals or as someone who continues a relationship with the person who engaged in the infidelity.

Speaker 3: 7:26

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's something to it too. Otherwise, you know, you wouldn't have been in the Washington Post and Women's Day and USA Today, right there's. There's conversations happening about this all over, about the good and the bad of it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:40

Yeah, and so you know, my approach is just to say, look, we've got to get beyond the ideas of what's good and what's bad and what shouldn't, what shouldn't happen, and deal with what is right. And a lot of folks who come to me and seek out my services, they want to find a way to cease engaging in infidelity. Some of my clients do come to me and they're like how can you help me figure out how to keep doing this? But of course, my audience is a self-selecting audience. But most of my clients are like I don't really want to be doing this, but I feel totally stymied by my competing desires and priorities and I don't know how to make choices that will allow me to escape the situation intact one and live a life that I feel good about.

Speaker 3: 8:30

Number two yeah, yeah, and I think that goes back to the whole animal brain piece, right, that we train on as coaches. We've learned about the animal brain and the prefrontal cortex and when the animal brain is taking over, right, that's often where just our decisions are just all over the place and we're just doing what's natural as a human being, right, and then it's like OK, then we get brought up against our prefrontal cortex, like our human brain is like no, this is either good or this isn't good. I go back to the good versus bad. This isn't good. And then there's this competing this is bad, this is good. In our own brains when these things are happening, Well, it's interesting that you say that.

Speaker 1: 9:06

What I actually see with a lot of my clients is something a little bit different.

Speaker 1: 9:10

We absorb the message that infidelity is bad and we freak out.

Speaker 1: 9:16

We go, oh my God, I'm doing something really bad, I must be a really bad person, and people just dissolve into self-loathing, confusion, guilt, shame, uncertainty, etc. And it's really hard to use your prefrontal cortex when you're in that kind of a state. And so what often happens is people that have a sense of what they want from their so-called higher brain get totally hijacked by their so-called lower brain. And this is one of the reasons why, even if you aren't engaging in infidelity, you want people who are engaging in infidelity to get good help is because the sooner we can get ourselves out of freak out mode, we can actually decide what we want to do if we're engaging in infidelity, and then we can handle our business as responsibly as we can and do as little quote unquote damage to other people in the process and deal with things in the most humane way possible. When we are stuck in a whole mess of shame and guilt and fear, et cetera, it's very hard to handle our business in a way that we feel good about.

Speaker 3: 10:28

Yeah, and I mean that's true of anything, right? Yeah, right, shame and guilt makes it hard to handle any sort of business, whether it's weight loss or alcohol consumption or drug, like anything along those lines, or bad personal relationships, like communication issues, whatever it may be, all of those things add up to being, hey, we've got something that we need to fix within ourselves. What does that look like? So, what? What do people like, the folks that are like self-selecting, to come to you and the work that you do, what? What are they hoping to accomplish? What do they accomplish? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 11:02

Yeah, accomplish. What do they accomplish? What does that look like? Yeah, so I mean, one thing that almost everybody wants is a respectful witness to what's going on with them, right? It's pretty hard to get that when you're engaging in infidelity. You may have friends you're able to talk to, but sometimes friends' compassion runs out at a certain point and even if friends' compassion is unlimited, their ideas about what you should or shouldn't be doing might not be all that helpful. A lot of folks who come to me haven't talked to anyone about their infidelity situation, even if they have like a whole team of therapists that they're seeing.

Speaker 3: 11:34

Right.

Speaker 1: 11:35

So, first and foremost, being able to share your story with a respectful, interested, compassionate witness is a really big deal. But beyond that, a lot of people want clarity. They want to know what they want, and often folks either don't know what they want or think they don't know what they want, and of course, that's a continuum, that's not an either or thing. And then, beyond that, people want to actually sort out their lives. They want to make decisions about their relationships. They want to feel good about the way they're living and also enjoy the way they're living Right. So, generally speaking, that's what people are coming for. The specifics get much more colorful, of course.

Speaker 3: 12:22

Sure, absolutely, and I'm sure it all depends on the person too, and the situation they're in and the relationship they're in is as to what actually transpires when you're working with them.

Speaker 1: 12:32

But the idea of just getting clarity, like one voice speaking to us that says what you're doing is bad. You really need to stop right now. Like everybody's going to hate you if they find out about this. It's very hard to consider that we might want something other than what everybody else thinks we should do, or what we assume everybody else thinks we should do, and so we've got to learn how to deal with those voices if we're going to get anywhere and clarify what we actually want.

Speaker 3: 13:05

In that regard, like trying to figure out exactly what we want. How do you, how do people go about that with you? Like what's run me through kind of like a conversation, or like maybe some of the pieces of your program that people would be like, okay, I know somebody who is, and maybe they need to talk to marie, like tell me more about that okay, so let's take's take kind of a common example.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Let me just be really clear about something. There are so many different kinds of infidelity situations out there.

Speaker 1: 13:35

I'm going to refer to something somewhat stereotypical, but this is not representative of the whole. So let's say two people are married, they're legally married and they have kids together Right, if somebody is involved in an affair, they're seeing somebody else. Their spouse doesn't know about it. They may often be especially I mean in terms of your audience like if people have been in a decades-long committed relationship or marriage and they like their marriage in many respects. They care deeply about their partner. They care deeply about their family. They're concerned about what might happen to their family if they were to leave their spouse.

Speaker 1: 14:15

People tend to get really what can I say? They tend to weight that very heavily. But on the other hand, they may not have what they consider to be a romantic relationship with their spouse or partner at all. They may have a really functional friendship, they may care about them deeply as a family member, but they are not engaged in anything remotely romantic and at times there's no sex in the picture, and sometimes there hasn't been any sex in the picture for a long time. And then, on the other hand, they've got this fabulous new creature in their lives who they're connecting with in a way that is totally different from how they've ever connected with anyone before, and people often get into a lot of drama about well, is this real or not? Is my connection with my new person real or not? And I have a lot to say about that.

Speaker 1: 15:12

But for now, what I'll say is this what is really hard for some people is to weigh these two very different good things against each other this amazing new romantic and sexual connection with a new person who they really want to form a life with, and the life they've already known, and the stability of their family and the continuity of their relationship with their committed partner. And what I hope people do is say, okay, we may be choosing between two different sets of good things here. How can we figure out which set of good things is more important to you now and how can we make the best of whatever it is you're going to be relinquishing? Or how can you make the best of relinquishing whatever it is you're choosing to give up?

Speaker 3: 16:06

Yeah, yeah, I can kind of see that right. I have so many people who will DM me or comment or something on the post and it is like I had someone DM me just the other day who said is it common, you know, for people to like wait for the last kid to leave home and then get, and then get divorced? Yeah, yeah, I was like, yeah, it is, and it it. There may not be any um infidelity going on whatsoever, but it's just this loss of connection between partners who have been together for 30 years.

Speaker 1: 16:45

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:46

Right. So I want to flip this a little bit right, because you focus on infidelity but you're also a relationship coach is like how can we're going to flip it the other way? How can people like reignite connection?

Speaker 1: 16:59

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 17:00

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:01

So first let me just say this Like I see a lot of folks who want to and have the wherewithal that I should say, the desire and the capacity to reconnect with our partner, and it sometimes works out great. And so I want to make it clear that I see that absolutely being a very real option for some people, and I see people who have been totally to embrace the idea that that should be the better option and bless their hearts. Often they try to convince themselves that they ought to do that, but they really don't have the desire to try and make that happen. And I think it's really important to be honest with yourself about what you want in this kind of a situation. Do you want to reconnect or do you just think you should want to reconnect?

Speaker 3: 17:49

I love that. That was a great. I almost that's my response. It was a ask me anything on my Instagram and I was like do you want to be married, do you not want to be married? Like, do you think you can make? You know, make a run at it or don't you want to like? Those are all the questions we have to go through right when things start to get to a certain point. So I love that you you bring that up because it is such an important thing, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:12

Now to that. That said, when people want to reconnect with their committed partner, the number one thing I ask people is when was the last time you were deeply interested in your partner? And you know the answers I get are different, of course. Some people are like well, I think I was deeply interested in them for a few minutes last week. And other people are like it's been years. I haven't been deeply interested in my partner in years, right? And so the first thing that we have the opportunity to do is shift our focus. Do we want to be curious about this interesting human that we share our lives with? Do we want to get to know them in a new way? If we do, what that starts with is being present with them in a new way. They don't have to do anything differently, right present with them in a new way.

Speaker 3: 19:10

They don't have to do anything differently, right? Yeah, yeah, I, I want you to, I want, I don't want to interrupt your thought, but I'm sitting here, people in my head are going tell, ask her what deeply like? Um, what did you say deeply interested in, right?

Speaker 1: 19:21

yeah, deeply interested in what does that mean?

Speaker 3: 19:23

what does that even mean? Like I know people are going to be like what marie. What does that mean deeply interested. What that even mean. Like I know people are going to be like what Marie. What does that mean Deeply interested? What does it even look like?

Speaker 1: 19:30

Yeah. So the here's here's the easy thing for my clientele, like most folks I'm working with, are in, have are or have been engaging in infidelity, and so they've got someone else that they're really excited about, and so they know what it feels like to be deeply interested in someone. They just know, and I can pull some specifics out of them, and it varies a little bit, but some of the common themes are wanting to know whatever your person is thinking and wants to share in any given moment, and what I see with a lot of long-term committed couples is that they're not interested in what their partner is thinking and wants to share in any given moment. Right, and what I see with a lot of long-term committed couples is that they're not interested in what their partner is thinking and wants to say in any given moment. They're just like yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up, right. Like yeah, yeah, yeah, you're just gonna say that thing. You always say like whatever like I already know everything.

Speaker 1: 20:19

you think I already know everything about you and, for the record, like I and for the record, I am in a multi-decade relationship myself. I empathize with this completely. But you also do not know everything. Your partner is thinking. You don't know what they're going to say all the time. They do have multitudes within them and you may not be familiar with all of those multitudes. So, in terms of what you actually do to engage with them in a different way, the first step before you figure out what you're going to do, is decide to be curious.

Speaker 3: 20:53

Yeah, the curiosity thing. I talk about that a lot too. It's like anything your life, somebody else's life, you know, your friend, whatever it is Like. How do you become, how do you become deeply curious in a relationship?

Speaker 1: 21:05

Yeah, become deeply curious in a relationship, yeah, so one of the thoughts that can help drive curiosity is I want to learn more about this person. And most of us have that thought pretty automatically or without any effort. With a new partner, we meet someone, we find them really compelling. We want to know more about them, right, and it's so effortless and that's delightful. Them, right, and it's so effortless and that's delightful. But you can also have this thought intentionally. You can also practice thinking I want to know more about this person, right, and I find, anyway, that the more you think that thought on purpose, the more you can get into it.

Speaker 3: 21:40

Yeah, intentional, curiosity.

Speaker 1: 21:42

Yeah, intentional curiosity, like nothing wrong with that Intentional enthusiasm, nothing wrong with that Right. So often we just kind of like slide into laziness with a long term partner, and this is true in situations that don't involve infidelity of course, right, yeah, we get uncomfortable and we just stop making an effort to engage with someone as interesting and new to us.

Speaker 3: 22:05

But we don't have to with someone as interesting and new to us, but we don't have to. Yeah, we don't have to right. Yeah, we have choices, everybody has choices. So, yeah, it's just, it's such an interesting topic, especially, like I said, you know, so many more people are heading down that path in their fifties great force, right. It's like why does that happen? And we're talking a little bit about like it's how do you connect with somebody? Or if somebody's gone off and connected with somebody new and maybe wants to stop, you know, that's that's what this conversation is about is like how do we figure out? Maybe it comes down to what do we? What do we really want in life?

Speaker 2: 22:39

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:39

How do we, how do we balance competing priorities as our brain sees them? Says our brain sees them.

Speaker 1: 22:43

Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1: 22:44

I mean, I think it's funny, like I talked to my audience about, like you know, like, is your infidelity situation just a manifestation of a midlife crisis?

Speaker 1: 22:53

Well, what the hell is a midlife crisis, and when exactly is midlife right?

Speaker 1: 22:57

None of us know when we're going to die, so we don't know when we're at midlife right, and some people think midlife is your 60s, some people think it's like 29, when you have your Saturn's return, in astrological terms, right.

Speaker 1: 23:08

So I think that what I do think is useful about the notion of a midlife crisis is that, even if we don't know exactly when it is, we may find ourselves at a point in our lives where we have to just look at everything in our life in a different way and to a different degree than we ever have before and say, okay, I may have wanted all of these things that I currently have for decades, but now I don't anymore, or now I don't know if I do anymore, and it's time to re-examine everything from soup to nuts, and I think that's a great opportunity. I think that's a great place to find yourself in. That said, a lot of us find it horribly inconvenient because it may mean that we stop doing things that we've done for a long time, or at least we stop to pause to think about things for a long time.

Speaker 3: 23:57

Yeah, I love that because it ties in great for my, for those of my listeners who may still be listening. Right, you haven't been triggered and hopped off, but it's. It's the idea of, like, this is your time in life when you hit, I say, when the kids go off to college and you retire, like that's what I consider the emptiness life. Right, yes, you're still empty nesting when you're retired, but there's something about this time, when you still may be working and the kids are gone, that like examine everything, why not?

Speaker 1: 24:24

Yeah, why not yeah?

Speaker 3: 24:25

Right, well, we can answer that.

Speaker 1: 24:27

I mean, I'm sure you see this all the time. People are scared to examine everything because who knows what might change if you start looking too hard at things.

Speaker 3: 24:35

Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think maybe where people end up coming to you is that they haven't examined it and they look for something else, right?

Speaker 1: 24:46

Well, maybe they have or do they?

Speaker 3: 24:48

I don't know. You tell me.

Speaker 1: 24:49

Yeah, I mean this is this gets us into tricky territory. Like there's an idea out there that, like you know, people are cheating because they aren't satisfied at work or they aren't satisfied in their lives, or they haven't examined their lives or not enough or whatever, and I kind of call BS I don't know if I can say the.

Speaker 3: 25:07

S word.

Speaker 1: 25:09

Okay, so I kind of call bullshit on that. Like there are many different backstories to an infidelity situation and it's really important to remember that some of these are socially generated and are not indicators of any sort of individual pathology per se. Like, for instance, especially if you know yourself to be heterosexual, there's a lot of pressure out there to partner up and get married, and especially for folks who are you know, actually I shouldn't say that. Like I have clients in their 20s who have the same kinds of experiences as some of my clients in their 70s. But there can be a lot of social pressure to just get married. It's just the next step, it's the logical thing to do and even though that may be changing to some extent that may not be as dominant of a sentiment as it was, say, 50 years ago it's still out there, right?

Speaker 3: 26:01

Oh sure.

Speaker 1: 26:02

And a lot of people have no idea what they want when they get married. They just do it because they've got some nice excuse me, nice person that they're seeing and it seems like the next thing and that may work fine for a while until all of a sudden it doesn't. And sometimes people don't even know that something's missing from their lives until they meet someone who they really connect with in an amazing way and they're like wait a minute, what have I been doing all this time in my marriage?

Speaker 3: 26:31

Because it's all modeled right. Yeah, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, university, get married, have kids. Or or get the job, get married, have like. You see it all right. I talk about this with my clients. It's like life is modeled all the way out, except for this piece between when the kids leave school and when we retire. That's the only thing that's not truly modeled, but everybody can see it. And then, when you fall into that modeling, all these expectations get put on you right, at every single level.

Speaker 1: 26:59

All these expectations get put on you right, right, at every single level. Yeah, and most of us don't have any idea that this is happening. Number one, and don't have the tools to deal with it if we notice that it's happening with us and isn't working out too well for us.

Speaker 3: 27:12

Number two yeah, and I can imagine there's a lot of like, perhaps a lot of shame and guilt, that some of your clients come to you with around. Right, you know, I'm choosing differently now.

Speaker 1: 27:23

Yeah, a lot of people. I mean, yeah, this is a really good point. Like I have clients who have, you know, left their marriage. If they were married, they've dealt with their infidelity situation, like everything's been resolved, but they still have a lot of really mixed thoughts and feelings about having been the one to leave the family, having been the one to disrupt the family unit, having been the one to, like, leave the family home, et cetera. And this is true even when if they have kids, even when the kids are grown right.

Speaker 3: 27:58

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 27:58

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 27:59

Yeah, yeah, because there's a lot wrapped up in that too. Right going back to the like the dm I had around yeah, is this common? Where this happens, right, how? And I'm like well, it is. It's pretty common that people get to this. I mean, otherwise there wouldn't be a thing called great divorce, right? So they wouldn't put a moniker on it if it wasn't something that happens frequently.

Speaker 3: 28:20

And I think that's part and parcel of like whenever you get married, whenever you start, if you don't feed a relationship or you don't do something. Like our minds change all the time, whether we want to know that or not. Like our brains work that way. It's like we're always kind of searching for like how do we get what's best for us? That's human right. We're so inner focused on us. You talk about people being like what the world says, but for individuals, we just we're just trying to figure out how do we survive, what works best for us and how do we move forward in life, which isn't always great to say. That always works well for relationships, but that's how human brains work.

Speaker 1: 28:57

Well, I mean, here's the interesting wrinkle that I would add to that. Like, yeah, please do For some people what's doing, doing what's best for them has turned into how can I make everybody happy so I can be, okay, yeah, how can I attend to other people's needs so that I won't have to be in trouble?

Speaker 1: 29:16

Right, right. And so what I see is that, although some folks have a very well-developed sense of, like, I want to do what's right for me and gosh darn it, I'm going to, a lot of folks have never done the thing that they aren't supposed to do in their lives, and so claiming what they want and doing what's right for them and claiming permission to do what's right for them is really hard.

Speaker 3: 29:40

Yeah, welcome to the work that I do. Yeah, yeah, right, right. You know, most primary caregivers end up being in that situation if they don't know how to put themselves first.

Speaker 1: 29:50

Mm. Hmm, yeah, we have kind of this like split personality culture. On the one hand, we really celebrate individualism and doing what's right for you and all of that, but we also teach people that your worth is dependent upon making other people happy, and this gets really weird. But one thing I do want to say about this is like a lot of people equate doing what's right for them with ruining other people's lives, and what I want to suggest is that that line of thinking ain't helpful. You can do what's right for you without ruining other people's lives, but, moreover, guess what Horrible things are going to happen to all of us. It's not like we came into the world with a guarantee that like, oh, you're going to find a partner and they're always going to do everything you want. You're going to get to be happy. Like that's not the point of being in a relationship, right, although we often think it is.

Speaker 3: 30:44

Of course, right yeah, so it's been normalized for us.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 30:47

So, like I'm curious to for you know, when we're talking about where people are in relationships and the work that you do is like what's like the number one thing that you find that helps people through.

Speaker 1: 31:05

Number one. Gee, I wish I could have thought about that question in advance. On the subject of what we've been talking about, one of the more common things that I see is that, through the coaching experience, helping people see that when they take responsibility for what they really have the power to control and they let other people deal with what isn't theirs to control, things go a lot better. And that's a really hard shift for a lot of us to make.

Speaker 3: 31:38

Yeah, Emotional adulthood right when we actually take responsibility for our actions. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:44

And let other people take responsibility for theirs. So, yeah, you can take responsibility for your actions, but that doesn't mean that you are responsible for other people's feelings about your actions. Right, and learning to tolerate the fact that that means that sometimes you're going to do things that are right for you and other people aren't going to like it is really some deep work, but when we do this work, life gets a whole lot simpler and a whole lot better.

Speaker 3: 32:09

Yeah, which is true of like. Well, take the topic that we've been talking about off the table. That's true of everything.

Speaker 1: 32:14

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 32:15

Right. It's like going deep inside to be like, yes, this is who I am as a human, this is how I live, this is what I want. What does it look like and how can I remove myself of? Like I can't take other people's burdens of how I am operating my life, right or what I want? Like I have no control over whether I make somebody angry or sad or right my actions? Yeah, I can be thoughtful about my actions, right, but I'm certainly not going to like, if I say something, somebody's going to take it one way or the other. Right, that's their, that's their choice.

Speaker 1: 32:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I find that like really learning into that, really living into that, like straight, for a lot of people seems like a paradox we can take responsibility for our actions, but we can't determine how other people will feel about our actions. Learning how to live with that that sets us free.

Speaker 1: 33:09

yeah, oh yeah, but a lot of us don't want to do that. We just don't want to deal with the discomfort of what other people might say if we do the thing that they don't like yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah, exactly, which is blends right in the type of work that you do. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 33:22

Right, the type of work you do. And, speaking of which, if there are people listening and you know somebody right who may need Marie's services, Marie, how can people find you?

Speaker 1: 33:31

So my website is mariemurphyphdcom. You can find all the things there. I have a podcast called your Secret is Safe With Me. You can find that wherever you there. I have a podcast called your Secret is Safe with Me. You can find that wherever you access podcasts or on the website. Beyond that, I work with clients one-on-one via Zoom and I also have a self-guided course called You're Not the Only One, and you can learn more about how to work with me one-on-one or how to enroll in my course through my website, which, once again, is mariemurphyphdcom.

Speaker 3: 34:01

Awesome, and I'll get all of that in the show notes. I'm curious on this journey. Right before I let you go on this journey, what's one thing you've learned about yourself on this journey?

Speaker 1: 34:12

So one of the most gratifying things about the work I do is I provide a service that I think is so important and so essential and so scarce, and so it's such an honor and such a pleasure to be able to provide nonjudgmental assistance to people who get mostly just garbage judgments right. So that's awesome. But I also get a lot of what I will generously call love notes from people who totally disapprove of what I'm doing and think that I should just be telling people not to cheat instead of helping the cheaters figure their lives out, and one of the things that I've learned is that sometimes doing things that are really worth it to you are also just like punishingly unpleasant.

Speaker 3: 35:04

Right, yes, yes and it's.

Speaker 1: 35:07

It's okay to dislike the unpleasantness, but that doesn't mean you need to stop. I ain't stopping, that's for sure. I mean that's never been a question. But sometimes it surprises me just how hard it is for me to deal with, like some of the stupid shit that other people throw my way.

Speaker 3: 35:25

Yeah, and my thought is just like imagine if everybody had someone to speak to in a nonjudgmental way about not just this topic about any topic on the planet that they are troubled about or struggling with. Yeah, yeah, the world would be a whole lot different place, I think.

Speaker 1: 35:45

I think you're right.

Speaker 3: 35:47

Well, marie, thank you so much for being here. You know it sheds light on a different perspective of a topic that's pretty big and especially for my clients and also the world that I live in, and empty nesting Like it's something that's front and foremost for a lot of people. So I appreciate the different perspective. I know people out there may agree with it or disagree with it, but I think having different perspectives and different ideas is like paramount to kind of helping everybody move forward in life.

Speaker 1: 36:16

Yeah, thanks so much, jay. It was such a nice treat to talk with you today.

Speaker 3: 36:19

Yeah, and you as well, Marie. Thanks so much, Jay. It was such a nice treat to talk with you today.

Speaker 2: 36:22

Yeah, and you as well, marie. Thanks so much. Are you ready to start living and enjoying your empty nest years? If so, head over to jasonramsdencom and click work with me to get the conversation started. This empty nest life is a production of impact. One media LLC. All rights reserved.