How To Create Your Dream Relationship: Codependency, Social Media Boundaries, Gaslighting & Narcissism | Mark Groves

This episode explores the complexities of modern relationships, discussing issues like codependency, social media boundaries, gaslighting, and narcissism.

1. Social Media's Impact: Social media can significantly affect relationships, contributing to issues like jealousy and distraction.
2. Handling Codependency: Recognizing and addressing codependency is crucial for maintaining healthy relationships.
3. Setting Boundaries: Establishing clear boundaries is essential, especially concerning social media and personal space.
4. Dealing with Narcissism and Gaslighting: Understanding and managing interactions with narcissistic personalities and gaslighting behaviors are key to relationship health.
5. Personal Growth: Personal development, such as understanding one's values and needs, is fundamental in creating and sustaining meaningful relationships.

1: Introduction

Mari introduces Mark Groves, setting the stage for a deep dive into relationship dynamics. Mari Llewelyn: "Today we're exploring deep into the dynamics of modern relationships."

2: Social Media and Relationships

Discussion on how social media can strain relationships and strategies to mitigate its effects. Mark Groves: "Social media evaluates us constantly, adding a layer of pressure that can detract from genuine connection."

3: Understanding Codependency

Mark explains the signs of codependency and ways to heal from it. Mark Groves: "Healing from codependency involves recognizing its presence in your life and actively working towards independence in relationships."

4: Narcissism and Gaslighting

Insights into how narcissistic traits and gaslighting affect relationships and methods to deal with them. Mark Groves: "Recognizing these behaviors is the first step towards mitigating their impact on your relationship."

5: Concluding Thoughts

Summing up the key lessons from the episode and encouraging personal reflection. Mari Llewelyn: "This discussion provides tools and insights that are vital for anyone looking to improve their interpersonal connections."

1. Evaluate your social media use: Consider its impact on your relationships and adjust accordingly.
2. Recognize symptoms of codependency: Work on strategies to foster independence.
3. Establish clear boundaries: Communicate openly with partners and friends about your needs.
4. Educate yourself on narcissism and gaslighting: Awareness is crucial in handling these complex behaviors.
5. Prioritize personal growth: Focus on self-awareness to improve your relationship dynamics.

Ep. #102 In today's episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Mark Groves, a renowned human connection specialist, the mind behind Create the Love, the host of Create The Love Podcast, and co author of Liberate The Love. In an age where it’s so hard to disconnect from our screens, we talk about ways to prioritize your relationships, step away from social media, and find ways to really reconnect with yourself. Whether you're navigating the complexities of modern dating or seeking to strengthen your existing relationships, this podcast offers invaluable insights and practical advice. As someone committed to nurturing my own relationship, I found our conversation truly enlightening and left with a wealth of actionable tips. Join us as we explore the intricacies of genuine connections and embark on a journey towards liberated love.

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Mark Groves
If you start to treat your body well, you can't tolerate B's relationships. If you start to stand up for yourself within relationship, you can't eat unnutritious foods. It's impossible because the other choice becomes in conflict with what you know to be true. Now this is the pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llewelyn.

Mari Llewelyn
What is up, guys? Welcome back to the the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. Today I have a really fun episode, something we haven't spent a ton of time talking about. We are talking about relationships today with Mark Groves. Mark Groves is a human connection specialist, founder of Create the Love, and host of the Mark Groves podcast, and co author of his new book, liberated Love.

We covered so many topics today, all about relationships. Whether you are currently in a relationship like I am, or you are looking for the right person, there's tons of good advice. In this episode, we talk about the most prevalent problems in modern relationships, social media and setting phone boundaries. Advice for dating and social media. Returning to the analog dating and cutting out toxic relationships.

The complexities of deleting social media. The way that I found Mark was through his viral YouTube video, all about how he's deleting his social media forever. And it was what inspired me to actually take the month of August off social as well. We talk about codependency in relationships. Healing from codependency.

Finding yourself in a relationship. Healthy ways to manage conflict, gaslighting and narcissism. How to know when someone is right for you examining traditional gender roles. The revolution against birth control. As you can tell, we went all over the place in this episode.

We talked about knowing your personal values, choosing each other in a relationship, and so much more. I felt really, really inspired after this episode. Obviously, I've been with my husband for over ten years now, and we are constantly trying to improve our dynamic and work on our communication skills. And I really felt like I walked away with so much good advice. I really think you guys are gonna love this episode.

With that said, let's hop right in. Mark. Welcome to the pursuit of wellness. I'm excited to be here. There's nothing I like more than wellness.

Same. We're in the right space, and I. Like the idea of it being a pursuit. Me too. Because it never ends.

Like, you're always learning more, you know. And you can always get better. Like, you can always take up more space, you can always get louder. You can always become not just healthier, but radiate. Yes, radiate.

Mark Groves
Radiant, radiant, radiation. Change your mind along the way evolve. I mean, for me, having you on today to talk about relationships, I haven't really done an episode like this yet, and I think it's something that I haven't even really tapped into. So we're evolving today. Well, man, I would argue at the basis of health is good relating.

And, you know, it's the longest running study on well being from Harvard. What is that study? It's called the Harvard. I want to say. It used to be called the Harvard men's study because it only studied men, which they finally added women to it.

Like, way to get up to date. But now it's a multi generational study. So originally it was looking at men from Harvard versus poorer neighborhoods in Boston, and they wanted to see if there was a socioeconomic impact. Like, how did where people grow up impact their health as they grew older? And what they saw was that the greatest predictor of your health in your eighties was not what neighborhood you were from, not your cholesterol, your blood pressure.

It was the quality of your relationships at age 50. And for a lot of people, there's like, oh, so I have to be in a romantic relationship? No, it was just the quality of all your relationships. So if you didn't have a romantic partner but you had really good friendships, I mean, I think about that is the basis of nervous system regulation. That's the basis of everything so powerful.

Mari Llewelyn
And I feel like I've gone through periods of my life where I really didn't have a ton of friends. When I was building my business, when I was really focused on my fitness journey. And it's something that was really missing. And I've been implementing it more now. And just seeing the change in my mood and my overall quality of life has been incredible.

I'd love to start at the beginning of your journey and how you became interested in human connection. Where did everything start? Well, when I was young, my dad and I used to. My dad was the one that I would talk about, like, relationship stuff with. So, you know, I have so many memories of sitting in the living room with him and him and asking me questions about my relationships.

Mark Groves
And, you know, when I was young, I was. I would have maybe, like, thought I didn't consider myself a good partner or an attractive choice. Like, I was very afraid of facing relationships and being chosen by people. I got bullied a bit in elementary, junior high. I was overweight, so.

And when I lost weight, all of a sudden, people wanted to talk to me, and I was like, wait, but I was the same person you know, last year, as I am this year. So it was hard for me to really understand my relationship to fitness because I played sports started to be more like, I want to maintain fitness so I can maintain being attractive, so I can be chosen. Obviously it was helpful for sports, but the motivation was still from a place of low self worth when I was in. So I would talk to my dad a lot about relational stuff. I started dating in maybe grade eleven, and we would break down how humans related.

He would give me advice on my relationships. So it started there. That was like the birth of it. I consider myself blessed that my father was emotionally. Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

I'm really lucky, especially in that generation of men. And then when I was in university, I was in sales at an electronic store in Canada, which was called future Shop, which was like Best Buy in the US. It was a lot like the 40 year old virgin, if you've ever seen the movie. Yeah, it's really funny. Whenever I saw that movie, I was like, that was exactly like future shop.

So we learned all these aggressive sales techniques. Like, I learned nine different ways to close a person. You were having thousands of conversations, so you had to learn how to build rapport really quickly and to ask for things, like to get someone to engage in a behavior change quickly that cost them money. And hopefully it didn't lead to them regretting the choice they made. Otherwise they'd return it and you wouldn't get your commission.

And I then went into pharmaceutical sales, and it was in my late twenties that I went through a breakup. And I thought to myself, like, why am I so good at talking about everything but my feelings? Like, that's not a skill set issue. There's something else going on. Why, when I've chosen to leave a relationship and I feel most connected to myself, why do I feel most judged as a failure, as being afraid of commitment?

And it really made me want to understand, why am I so good at every relationship but romantic ones? And so it made me, because of the background in pharma and science, I was like, I'm going to study them, I'm going to read all the science on them, and I'm going to learn how to logistically and comp, you know, through skill sets. How do I become successful at love? At the same time, because I was having an existential crisis, I read man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. And that was the first time I ever thought, oh, maybe I'm actually here for something.

Maybe I'm not just, like, here to become a good provider and, you know, have a house and a car and kids. And that was the first time I ever even thought of having a purpose. And I could sense that what I wanted to build was, you know, that idea that your mess becomes your message. Right. I know you know, that love.

Mari Llewelyn
Yes. Yeah. And so that's really where it was born, was this obsession and really thinking, I'm learning all this. Why did no one teach me this? Why was there no class on this?

Mark Groves
This is the most important thing I could have ever learned in my life. I know how to do the pythagorean theorem, but I don't know how to navigate conflict and turn it into deeper connection like that. I don't think I've ever used the pythagorean theorem since high school. I don't remember it personally. And I feel like what you're describing is something that many of us still struggle with, is like, how do we solve conflict in a healthy way?

Mari Llewelyn
I think a lot of us take what we experienced in childhood or what we saw and bring it into our adult relationships, whether that be friendship, whether that be, you know, with our spouse. What do you think is the biggest issue that we're facing in relationships in 2024? Like, what are you noticing as the most prevalent problems? I'd say it's twofold. I say the first one is that there's really.

Mark Groves
There's a low attention span to everything. So when we're in connections, we're thinking about other connections. So in the research, if your phone is face down on a table, you're less vulnerable in conversations. I think a lot about how social media in general is constantly evaluating you. So not just your followers and non followers, just people 24 hours a day.

There's an availability of a criticism of you, so your nervous system is constantly on hyper vigilance. Add to that that there's an algorithm also assessing you, and that's a non human thing, right? And that one is determining whether the content you're creating is actually worthy of being shown. And they won't ever tell you what the actual answer is to that. And even if you think you figure it out, it's going to change anyways.

So I think that deeply impacts us because we're constantly thinking about that when we're in a conversation like this. Yeah, like, I now have a great relation. I'm leaving social media on June 1. Cause I know that's how I found you. Oh, really?

Mari Llewelyn
Your I'm deleting Instagram video? Yeah, I loved it. Well, I felt like there was so much relating to it for people who have spent so much time creating on these platforms and are feeling depleted, exhausted. But the reason I say that pours into our relationships is that there is so much of a fear of missing out even in our connections. It's like, well, what happens if there's something else better?

Mark Groves
And so if you add to that, that I don't think our skills at handling difference, I think it's pretty amplified how bad we are at that currently, especially, we don't really break bread anymore with people we disagree with. We're not exposing ourselves to diverse thoughts. And I think all that is putting us in some sense of crisis in terms of relationship, you know, but in terms of a lot of things.

Mari Llewelyn
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I think the phone is, like, such an important thing to talk about, and it's almost difficult to put to words the amount of conflict it's causing. I mean, I can think of, like, a small example. I don't know where I heard this, but there's a study. If your partner or someone you're with goes on their phone, we immediately feel rejected and isolated subconsciously, and we're more likely to then go on our phone, and it becomes this, like, back and forth of who's ignoring who. And I feel like.

I mean, I run into this with Greg. I have a husband who's a CEO. He's pretty ADHD, very high performing, really busy. And I feel like the phone is, like, a key.

A key source of conflict for us, and I think for many other couples as well. And it's. How do you solve that problem? Do you create boundaries? Do you create rules?

How do you go about that in your household? Well, one, being able to hear it, because I've definitely gotten that and then gotten defensive about it, which isn't helpful to solving the challenge, but creating clear agreements. Yeah. I just bought a thing called a light phone. Light phone.

Mark Groves
Yeah. L I g h t. Okay. And it only text calls, has music, podcasts, and, I believe, directions. And so there's the way they designed it is it doesn't have a doom scroll.

Like, it doesn't have an unlimited populating of stuff, so you can't get lost in any direction. Yeah. And so I'm playing with, how do I implement that? So I put, like, a out of office or whatever on the do not disturb things on Apple where it says, like, if you want to get ahold of me, call me on this number. Oh, my God.

Yeah. And I was genius. I don't get any calls because no one calls anyone anymore, so it would be rude. Exactly. Which I think is really fascinating in dating, because someone will be like, oh, they called me.

It's too much. And it's only because the behavior of calling hasn't been normalized anymore. Just texting has. So when someone has a behavior that's outside of the normalized behavior, it's seen as a red flag, but it's actually a green flag, which is the ironic part of it. So, yeah, having good boundaries is really the most important and also the impact it has.

And, like, setting aside time to do the things, because I think a lot of us, we actually need to have time set aside to do emails or texts or social media and batching those things. Cause the expectation now is, I remember when I first got a BlackBerry and they're like, here you go, here's a BlackBerry. And I was like, amazing. I don't have to open my computer anymore. Little did I know I was being sold convenience.

But really, now working 24 hours a day, so many entrepreneurs leave their nine to five and step into it 24/7 which I know I'm sure you're familiar with. I am just becoming constantly available at all times. And it's almost like you need to set a precedent to teach people, like, hey, I'm only available between these hours and not after certain hours as well. And it's really about setting boundaries. What advice would you give?

Mari Llewelyn
And this is something that I hear a lot of other girls speak about. I've been with my husband for ten years, so I haven't really ran into this, but I hear women talking about, you know, their partner liking other girls photos or acting a certain way on the Internet or not posting them online, what advice do you, do you give in terms of that? Because social media has become such an important, like, part of our romantic relationships, it's difficult to even know how to. Navigate so many good layers to that question. The first part is, social media was not around when I was 20, so I have to acknowledge that if I was 20, I probably.

Mark Groves
I don't know that I'd have the willpower to not be checking out, like, booty instagrams and all that kind of stuff. Like, there's the biological part of us that doesn't realize even that doing that is disrespectful to our partnership, you know, but if I'm in a relationship and my partner says to me, I don't feel good that you're following all these models. And porn stars or whatever they are, I would think that's pretty valuable information for the relationship to be able to have a conversation about it. I think if it's source like, if I'm following friends of mine who, let's say, teach yoga or do something like that, and it's causing a trigger, at least any trigger is really an invitation to a conversation because there could be a previous infidelity that the other person experienced, that the jealousy is coming up. And now we can work with that.

We can have a conversation about that being posted on social media. To me, that is usually trying to meet a want. Trying to meet a need with a want. So I need to know that we're good. Post a picture of us.

I need to know that you choose me. Post a picture of us. Now. Granted, I think it's healthy if you're in a relationship to probably expose that you're in a relationship on your social media, but I think often it's because what's really going on is the need to know. Do you know what I mean?

And so we try to meet that through a request when we're really. We don't feel safe and secure. I mean this in the most respectful way. But when I see couples over posting about their relationship and, you know, being super affectionate on the Internet, it. To me, it kind of rings an alarm.

Mari Llewelyn
I'm like, what is really happening behind the scenes? You know, especially when it's too much, too performative. Too performative. And it's like, well, I know personally when Greg and I are having a moment, for me to take the phone out would completely ruin it. You know, like, I think it just takes away.

I get a picture of this. Yeah. If you don't get a picture, did it happen? That's the crazy existential crisis that I feel like everyone's having. It's like, did this moment even happen.

Mark Groves
If it wasn't captured and other people get to see how good it was. You know, I noticed that when I was at a concert and everyone was filming the concert, which is so crazy. Because no one else wants to watch that, right? And I'm sitting there like, why don't you just watch it? Yeah.

You know, I'm sure it'll be released on Spotify anyways, you know, or YouTube or someone else will post it. I know. Yeah, I agree with that. You know, there's. I believe that we are coming to a moment where people have a desperate craving to return back to analog.

Like, I think social media will be the smoking of our time. And Jonathan Haidt. I just wrote a book called generation anxiety or the anxious generation. Sorry, I just ran into Jonathan last night. I'm a big fan of his.

Oh, he's amazing at the time. 100 event. Oh, right on. Yeah. And he speaks about kids being raised on social media.

Mari Llewelyn
I heard him on Chris Williamson. Yeah. Fully obsessed with him. He's unbelievable. His book, coddling of the american mind, one of the best books I've read in the last, I think it came out like, four years ago, basically speaks to all the circumstances that are creating the lack of capacity for difference, for cancel culture, all these types of things.

Mark Groves
But the anxious generation furthered the deepening of the understanding of how technology has especially impacted teenage girls and young women. Yeah. And I do think that there is this sort of, like, why in the road where some people are going to go to the singularity and get chips implanted in their brains, and other people are going to move to farms, you know, and return to community and connection. And that's why I also think there's such a yearning for food that and supplements that are not covered in glyphosate. And, you know, we, like, are desperately seeking nourishment, but nourishment on every level, you know, in relationship, but also our food, also our bodies that if you start to treat your body well, you can't tolerate B's relationships.

If you start to stand up for yourself within relationship, you can't eat unnutritious foods. It's impossible because the other choice becomes in conflict with what you know to be true now. Wow, that was so powerful. Couldn't relate more. I mean, going through my fitness journey, I had to cut out a lot of friendships, and I get a lot of girls writing in.

Mari Llewelyn
You know, how do I handle letting go of some of the toxic relationships I'm in? And it's one of those things where you're right, like, it has to be equal. If you're treating your body right, you don't want to have people who are disrespecting you. At the same time, on the topic of, you know, you deleting social media, I want to dive into that a little bit more. Truthfully.

It's something that I've been fantasizing about a little bit and kind of weighing out, you know, the pros and cons. Actually, after seeing your video, it inspired me to decide to delete it for one month in August. I'm gonna delete it completely. Just get it from your phone. Okay.

Yeah, delete it from my phone. I'm not gonna delete my profile. I think my whole career will crash. I'm not. I was gonna delete mine.

Yeah. But I got, like, hundreds and hundreds of messages being like, I have posts of your saved. Can you leave it up? Yeah, what's the harm in leaving it up? There isn't now.

Mark Groves
It was just, you know, when you're, like, having a realization, and then you're like, f the system. Anarchy. And then I was like, wait, no, okay. Balance. It's relational, right?

Mari Llewelyn
Yeah. Get the feedback from the other parts of the relationship. And I realized that I. It's like, I don't drink. You know, if you stop drinking often, you don't want to be around alcohol.

Mark Groves
It's like, kind of, that idea was like, I just want to not be around it. But really what I need to do is to be able to trust that it can exist without me touching it. And I'll just have someone on my team monitor a DM or something like that. But I don't want anyone on my team operating it, because, to me, if I believe that something is inherently toxic and I pay someone else to run it, is that not unethical? You know, not a fair point.

I've been thinking about that a lot. I don't know the answer. And a lot of people respond saying, well, there's positives to social media. You have a business from that. I met my wife on Instagram.

Absolutely. I'm not negating the positive nature of everything that can benefit us, but there's also a downside, especially when the relationship itself is only one sided. You know, if it was like, you and I enter a friendship, and there was a feedback mechanism, but there's no feedback mechanism on this. The whole purpose of social media is to monetize attention, and the mechanisms by which it does that actually generate things like anxiety. So if you say this is causing mental health issues, if it's profit driven, it's not gonna listen.

So I like your idea, though, about testing in August. I'm gonna leave it. And I wasn't when I was gonna delete it, one of my PR people was like, well, I don't know how to pitch you anymore. Like, who are you without 1.1 million followers? What about the podcast?

Yeah, it does well, but, you know, it was like, the way that people perceive credibility and impact is your social media reach. Yeah. Which is like, we've generated this idea that you're only important the more followers you have, which is a dysfunctional thought process. Not that there isn't some correlation to reach. But I don't even saying that I feel like there are people with millions of followers who are, I would say, having some unhealthy impacts on people.

Mari Llewelyn
Totally. Yeah. It's a tricky thing that you're doing, because I feel like society as a whole is moving one direction, and you're kind of choosing to do the opposite. And when I think about deleting instagram, things pop up for me. Like, what if it makes me a bad friend because I'm not aware of what my friends are doing?

You know? Like, let's say they post a big accomplishment, and I don't say, congratulations, congratulations, because I don't know about it. It's, like, the way that I stay updated with the people that I know. And if I'm not commenting or dming, does that mean our friendship is gone? Which is a crazy thought to have, but it's something that came in my head.

Mark Groves
Right. Yeah. And an important one to consider, which is, wow. We've built our interactions and bids with friends over social media interactions, and I'm like, I'd much rather someone call me or text me or whatever, but for me, if someone got upset because I didn't like a picture or see a celebration they had, I mean, then our friendship is delicate. Do you know what I mean?

Mari Llewelyn
True. Like, it's not based on, like, give me a call, share. It's also a story they've created in their head that's not even real. Mm hmm. You know, which I think is really, I like to play with those things.

Mark Groves
Like, even when I quit drinking, I realized that one of the reasons I didn't want to quit drinking is because I wasn't sure how it would make people feel. When I was at a party and I was the only one not drinking. You were worried about other people. Yeah. And would it bring up insecurities in them?

Which I realized was codependent. So I'm like, the moment I realize that, I'm like, burn it. Like, I gotta stop, because I need to. Always, when I feel like I don't have a choice in a behavior because of an outside experience of my behavior, then I need to do it because I need to disprove that I can't do it. Wow.

Does that make sense? Mm hmm. It makes me wonder, like, how many of us have, like, almost fake friendships or fake relationships happening because we're relying on that social media interaction, and when it's gone, what would happen? Who are we? Yeah.

You know, who are we? Without so many things, so many stimuluses, who was I without sugar? Like that was, I was a different person too, because it was like everything that changes your state means you're escaping a state. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, I gotta play with all these versions of me that I'm anesthetizing and distracting myself.

Like, who am I without my life force going into creating stuff on instagram? Like, what's possible for me? I recently read the book ten X is easier than two X by Doctor Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. And he talks about how the wrong question is, how do you grow your business by two times? Cause all you're gonna do is turn up levers that you already have.

But if you ask a question like, how do you grow your business by ten times, you have to throw out everything you know, you have to do radical things. And I was thinking about that as like, well, what's, I know where I can get to using the same mechanisms, but what's possible if all of a sudden I step outside of the paradigm of what people expect of me? I know that everything else in my life, relationally, when I stepped out of expectation, I felt happier in my life. I started to direct my life, when I started to take responsibility for my fitness and my health, everything changed. I think you just end up realizing how powerful you are.

And then when you realize how powerful you are, you realize how much power you've given away your whole life and made your life about other people's feelings, which I think there's a difference about being conscientious of people's feelings and then actually creating your whole life around other people's feelings. Those are very different things.

Mari Llewelyn
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I feel like I've been experimenting with removing social media. You know, I've told the listeners I'll deleted on the weekend now because I was finding myself having my perfect Saturday, you know, everything that I could have possibly wanted to do on a Saturday, and then I would go on Instagram and immediately feel horrible about the day that I had had because I didn't socialize enough or I wasn't doing the same amount as x person was on their stories, making me question the quality of a weekend that I'd had. And it was miserable to feel that way. And since deleting it on the weekend, now I feel like I can just exist and really, like, listen to myself. I feel like so many of us are just dissociated and making decisions based on what other people are doing, which is a crazy way to live your life.

Mark Groves
You know, you see so many people just sitting and I've done it. You know, you're just like, you're bored and all of a sudden you're here and your neck starts to hurt, your shoulders hurt. You're going to chiropractors. You're doing everything to deal with this accommodation of looking down instead of up at the world. And you know when people say to me like, no, I just can't meet somebody.

And I was like, put your phone away. Yes. Like, someone's looking for you and you can't see them. Make eye contact. Yeah.

I'm like, you're going into erewhon looking. At Instagram, like, that's a great place to meet someone. It's gotta be like, I'm in a relationship and I'm like, is everyone here attractive? It's actually a rule. It must be.

The dogs are all doodles. It's just like everything there is just. I haven't spent $27 on a coffee in a while, so I need to go. I mean, I live in Austin now. Oh, you do?

Mari Llewelyn
Yeah. And every time I go in there, I'm like, what was I doing coming here every day? It's wild. It's so expensive. Oh, my God, it's so expensive.

Mark Groves
As a Canadian, I just laugh whenever I come here. I'm like, I gotta go to Iran and get the. They have a keto breakfast sandwich that is. Oh, yeah, it's heaven. Yeah, I've seen it.

Mari Llewelyn
Are you keto? No, but I, like, definitely pivot in and out of that. I don't eat as focus mainly on protein. Yeah, I'm the same way. That's, like, my main.

Mark Groves
And I feel like if I eat a potato, I become a potato. That's kind of like how even though I'm irish, that's. It doesn't make sense. I love it. Potato.

I should have been able to metabolize them better, but I really wanted to make sure that my insulin and my insulin sensitivity was really regulated first before everything. Yes. And then, you know, the more I dove deep into that world, I was like, it's all about that. Yeah. Glucose.

Yeah. It's important. You realize, like, all the other stuff, the cholesterol story, all that stuff. Yes. There are some important markers there, of course, but glucose before everything.

Mari Llewelyn
Agreed. So you mentioned codependency. I want to talk about that. How do we notice signs of codependency in our romantic relationships, friendships? How do we watch out for it?

Mark Groves
Yeah. You know, in the book, we define codependency as any relational dynamic where we source security and safety at the cost of ourselves, our own needs, our own sense of well being. And really the key words there at the expense of. So where we're starting to do it is when we are prioritizing other people over us, we're trying to fix people, we're trying to save people, or we're actually presenting as broken and needing people to save us. We're afraid of doing things and how it will impact other people's feelings, so we put it off.

You know, there's. I see it across all types of relationships, because the reason I was always fascinated by romantic relationships as I dove deeper into them is that I really saw that they were the amplification of our challenges. Like, there's nothing you're not going to one. It turns up the volume on your lack of boundaries. It turns up the volume on your self abandonment.

But you start to see, you know that saying, how you do one thing is how you do everything. You start to see it in everything else. Like, if you have bad boundaries romantically, you're gonna have them at work. And I also started to notice that there's very few things that people will change for, but love is one of them. And it's maybe the most frequent touch point we have, too.

You know, I think we all deeply desire love, and if we don't, it's probably cause we were hurt by it. So then we associate the pain with love and so they start to become the same thing. So we avoid relationship. But there's a famous saying from Harvel Hendrix and Helen Hunt where they say you're born in relationship, you're wounded in relationship, and you heal in relationship, so you can only do so much on your own. But then, you know, it's like you feel like you got your poop in a group and then you start dating and you're like, I thought I had that figured out.

And then you realize that you have to learn how to be a you in relationship to other people and people who are codependent, which I would argue is most of us, til it's not, don't know how to hold onto who they are and be in a relationship. They either abandon themselves for the relationship or they abandon the relationship for themselves. And we usually find ourselves in relationship with the other person. Right? Yeah.

So I see it in work a lot too, though, especially in the spaces of coaches, therapists, any providers. Yeah. Yeah. How do we heal codependency in a romantic relationship? Like, do you think it's possible to heal the codependency issue and then remain together in a healthy way?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you have people who are together for like 30, 40 years who have established patterns that you're gonna have to get into a space of uncertainty. You know, like, to be able to step out of codependency means to also step into uncertainty. So, you know, a lot of people don't know how to relate to each other without there being a problem. Huh.

So, you know, you might have a couple where when one person is healthy, the other one's sick, and then they get better and the other person gets sick. Like, they don't know how to relate to each other. You have the person, let's say, who's in a relationship with an addict, or the person with anger issues, or the person, whatever it is you're trying to get them to change. What happens in the relationship dynamic is this person is always trying to get them to change. And this person always needs something to change.

So that's what keeps them together, is I'm gonna try to get you to change. You're never going to fully because I source power from you being a problem, and you keep me close by being a problem. Wow. So, yeah, you can heal it, of course. I think the first part is you have to be tired of whatever dynamic you have, and you could be single or in a relationship and be tired of that.

And then you have to be willing to look at where does it come from and create agreements about wanting to change it. I don't think any person can do enough work for two. And that, I would argue, is very codependent. It's like the people who are always trying to get the other person to change, if they stop putting their life force into trying to change them and put it within themselves and stay in their own lane, they invite the other person to grow up and actually step into adulting and, yeah, so it's definitely possible. We walked through, in our book liberated Love, we walked through a process where we call it the sacred pause.

And it's really about creating agreements. If you're single, creating agreements about how you're going to explore relating again. And if you're in a relationship, you both are creating agreements about, okay, we're done with what was, and we're ready to create something new, but we're just going to take a moment to actually gather ourselves and also create what that new dynamic looks like. Right. If someone's struggling with codependency and they feel like they've lost themselves in a relationship, what are some ways they can start refining who they are alone?

Well, a lot of people, when they have lost themselves, probably didn't really know themselves. Hmm. So, usually when someone has lost themselves in relationship, they were taught that it was romantic to give up who they are or to sacrifice everything for love. I mean, we see those narratives and stories in things like previous Disney movies. I haven't watched any recent ones, so I'm not sure about the narratives.

The thing that I always recommend to people, when you ask them something like, what do you want? What do you need? And they're like, I don't even know. Like, it's been so long since I ever even thought about myself. I have kids now.

I don't. I'm the last thing on my mind, so it could be really hard for them to actually identify what it is. So, what a beautiful adventure to begin to go on. So I'll say, like, who do you admire and they'll be able to name someone. Usually people you admire, embody values that you desire.

So that's a good way to sort of, like, not have to do it yourself because you're feeling selfish or whatever, because that's usually when you start to prioritize yourself. You have guilt, and you feel selfish because guilt is normally what actually made it. So you abandoned yourself, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Mari Llewelyn
In terms of conflict, I want to talk about healthy ways to manage conflict, because I feel like, as we spoke about, a lot of us carry what we saw as children into our relationship. So, you know, potentially, we saw our parents fight in a really unhealthy way, have a toxic dynamic. What is the healthiest way of fighting? Well, man, wouldn't it be nice if we were taught how to take conflict and actually navigate it in a way, like, have a structure of language? My gosh, I think back when I first started learning about handling conflict, I.

Mark Groves
I mean, when you're a salesperson, you learn how to handle objections from a customer and how to navigate those and then get them, you know, sell them whatever they need. And I wish they had just taken that framework and been like, actually, if you use the same framework, you can actually navigate these things with a partner. They didn't teach us that, though. Well, the first part is that the intention going into conflict instead of. It's.

Most of what we do in conflict is something we learn from our family. Right. We learned it from our parents. We usually have four behaviors that are evident in all relationships that end in divorce. This is from the research from John and Julie Gottman, and they're called the four horsemen of the apocalypse, which are not softly named, probably for good reason.

Mari Llewelyn
Super intense. Right? Whenever I explain them, I'm always like, relax, everyone. We all do them. Yeah.

Mark Groves
So, like, when you hear these, it's like, everyone, relax. Like, we all do them. It's just that when people get divorced, they do them in high quantity. Okay, so the first one is criticism. So it's starting sentences with, like, you always.

You never. This makes it so our partner doesn't have any space where they didn't do that thing that usually pairs with defensiveness. So, defensiveness, I think we all kind of get. We, like, get protective of what they're saying. We might flip it around on them.

Oh, you think I'm late? Well, what about the time you did da da da da da. Stonewalling, which is withdrawing, shutting down, hanging up the phone, leaving. And contempt. Contempt is things like rolling of the eyes.

That's actually, the most predictive behavior of divorce. Yeah. Rolling of the eyes and making faces of disgust. The reason? Contempt.

It's the most predictive of divorce as a behavior, and that's because it creates a hierarchy so you can't be met. When you're, like, one person is looking down upon the other person. There's usually a lot of pain, a lot of, like, repeated fractures of trust and ruptures. So we first, just by knowing that those exist and that we do them is a great way to recognize, like, when I learned about defensiveness, I was like, that is my go to. Yeah.

And the antidote to defensiveness is saying, I can see some truth in what you're saying. That's one of them. And the first time I remember learning that I was in a conflict with a friend, and they were giving me feedback about something, and I was like, this is the moment. And I was like, I can see some truth in what you're saying. And I was like, you didn't really.

Mari Llewelyn
Want to say it. No, I did not. But what was interesting is my friend was like, what? And I found myself in a conversation I'd never been in. Wow.

Mark Groves
I found myself on the other side of a place that I normally left, that I normally shut down, that I normally attack the other person, and I experienced what it meant to, like, oh, now there's more trust here. Now there's more communication. There's a two way dialogue. So I think for people to recognize that the conflict in relationships are always opportunities to heal. And I think, like, man, imagine if we turn towards our relationships and we're like, and this being true of every relationship, that the friction we experience is an opportunity to heal something and understand each other better.

Yeah, I never thought of it like that in my twenties. I apologize to my ex girlfriends. Cause I'm like, that was definitely not how I oriented to it. I was a master gaslighter. What does a master gas lighter look like?

Well, being that I was in sales, I was good at deconstructing what they were saying and then somehow make it feel like they were actually responsible for it. Oh, my God. Yeah, it was bad. If the word narcissist was available in my twenties, which is overtly used, for sure, on social media, but I would have got labeled that for sure at that time. It is overly used, I feel like, because I learned about it through my therapist, and it's a pretty, like, harsh disorder that gives someone a harsh diagnosis.

Yeah. Like, when you're really dealing with one, you know it. Yeah. But mine was just like, I didn't like gaslighting is really denying someone else's reality. Mm hmm.

You know, and I denied their reality for sure, and then I turned it around and made them feel like it was their responsibility. So I repent that. I'm very sorry. He's a changed man. Definitely, definitely.

Mari Llewelyn
With relationships. And for any of the girls listening who are single, how do we know truly if someone's right for us? I think there's a lot of, as we were talking about options, confusion, fomo because of dating apps, because of all the options we can see on the Internet now. And I think a lot of girls are running into problems where they have almost, like, all of these boxes that need to be checked, and people are becoming very particular with the type of person they want to meet. How do we know if someone's the right person?

Mark Groves
Well, I think having a list of the things you desire is important. I'll get asked sometimes by people, you know, how do I know if my standards are just so high that they're trying to keep people out? And the best thing you could do is just check in with yourself? Like, are my standards actually walls? Like, am I actually using this as a way to not allow people close?

I do think that when you're dating, reconnecting back to why are you dating? What are you actually looking for? A lot of the times, I especially see this with women. They do not claim what they truly want. And we could argue all the societal, cultural, evolutionary reasons for that.

There's validity to that. But if you. If you don't know what you're looking for and you're not dating with that deepest intention, then you'll take whatever looks like it aligns, because you're not clear. And most people date from the perspective. Okay, well, whatever they want, I want.

Oh, they like me. I like them, too, I guess. You know, we're, like, dating, waiting to be chosen rather than seeing we are choosing. Yes. So when we use language like the one or twin flame or soulmate, those are all beautiful sayings.

And I would argue that your soulmate is really anyone who wakes you up to something that you're doing and to the possibility of your own discernment, your own choice. So instead of just saying someone is the one or your soulmate, allow them to show you that they are. Most people will accelerate the dating process and really escalate it too quickly, not realizing that you're always in this opportunity to say no to something. I remember when I was in, like, grade nine, it was grade ten. I remember being in a relationship and being like, well, I guess this is it.

Like, I just thought once it started, you couldn't get out. I actually thought that as well. Yeah. I remember dating a kid in middle school, and I was so anxious after I said yes, because I was like, wait, I don't want to do this. And I felt trapped.

Mari Llewelyn
It was horrible. Well, and so often, if you look at the. The inherited pattern of relationship that we've witnessed, right, and you don't have to go that far up generations and really, like, if you're a woman, you go up your maternal line, you might look and be like, well, when was the last time a woman in my family had choice? When was the last time she had access to her voice? So if you look at what we were taught about, like, the provider caretaker role, right?

Mark Groves
What happened is, is that then, now, if your partner is providing for you now, these roles will be switched a lot of the time now. So it's important to just know how these dynamics work whenever one person is dependent on the other for anything, but let's say for money. Money is tied to safety. So if you are paying for everything and I don't have my own bank account, or you're just giving me an allowance or whatever the way it is that works, if I don't have my own account that someone else doesn't have access to, then my nervous system, like my body is going well, you can't speak up about everything. You can't say how you truly feel about everything.

Cause if you do, you're gonna potentially lose the relationship. And if you lose the relationship, you're gonna lose your access to food, shelter, safety. So when we can actually contextualize that, like my wife and I, my wife isn't working right now. We have a 14 month old. She's taking care of Jasper.

And so I'm paying for things. And I said to her, what would you need? How does it impact you that I'm the one paying for things and you're taking care of Jasper? So this is a conversation we just proactively had because we recognize that power. And we talk about this in our book.

We call them codependent hooks, that they're like ways we unconsciously source safety and security. So it's not saying that power dynamics don't exist, right? Cause they do. But can we take what is implicit, what is not talked about and what is happening covertly and secretly or unconsciously and make. So I said to her, what would you need in order to have access to your voice in order to feel free to say whatever you want to do.

And she's like, well, I'm like, would you want your own account? How much money would need to be in it? I don't take it personally, because I know there's things that are going on in human dynamics, that if she said, I need this amount of money in this bank account and you don't have access to it, I'm like, okay, done. That means my wife has an opinion that she feels safe speaking up. Great.

I don't have the model where she's not allowed to have one, but if you look up family trees, you can see that might be true. Wow. Does that make sense? 100%. I think that's such an important point to bring up and something that, I don't know.

Mari Llewelyn
I've personally run into the problem of feeling financially illiterate. I'm not someone who really does well with numbers. I'm not very money savvy, and my husband is, and his family is, and they've taught me a lot about money. And having an open dialogue and being educated around it is really important. And it does kind of like, it shifts the power dynamic.

Do you feel like, and I want to phrase this the right way, do you think I'm noticing a shift from. How do I put this? Like, people are becoming a bit more traditional in their values, of their relationships. I'm seeing a lot of women on TikTok and social media wanting to be a housewife and have a man be the provider. Why do you think that shift's happening now?

Mark Groves
Oh, man, that's such a good question. Because I've definitely noticed the same, you. Know, like, the homesteading trad wife trend. Yeah, trad wife hash tradwife. I think it's multi layered in that one.

You have. If we get into, like, okay, the layers of what was the benefit to having women? Obviously, there's a benefit to women making their own money because they then have access to choice. Right. So you have this sort of rebellion against the abandonment of sovereignty.

Right. From, let's just call it the breadwinner marriages of the fifties and sixties. So I think it's 1967. The divorce act changed, so now women can actually leave. This is in the US.

In Canada, it's similar. I'm not sure about the UK. So they have in 1967, I believe that's when. Okay, now you could leave marriages just because you didn't want to be in them anymore. Before that, you had to get, like, approval of states, approval of government, approval of courts, and you had to be separated for three years, and then you could leave now.

And then it was, I think, in 1986, they changed it to just one year. So all of a sudden people are like, well, I can hack one year. So in late sixties, you have that. You have the feminist revolution, you have a sexual revolution. So you have all these things going on at the same time.

And then. So you have all these marriages start to end, right? And you have this discovery of power, discovery of all the things. Women entering the workforce, women going to university, all these things. Great.

But you also now have more workers. Right? So companies are like, wow, now we have more people who can work for us. We can make more money, we can increase productivity, we can create more shareholder value. And I think much like, I see that you have the book beyond the pill.

Mari Llewelyn
Oh, yeah, right. I interviewed Doctor Jolene. No, I interviewed another woman. Hollywood Griggs. Paul, I want to say is her name.

Oh, I haven't talked to her. She's great. And Ricky Lake, she has the one documentary called the business of being born. The other one's called the business of birth control. And they talk about how women were sold this idea that the birth control pill was part of feminism.

Mark Groves
Now they have access to choice, they have access to their own sexuality to not have the risk of pregnancy. And I totally get that. So this is not. I understand that aspect of it. But there's also this idea that stepping out of traditional roles means a revolutionary act.

And so then women becoming boss babes, all that kind of stuff. And so if women became mothers, they were seen as an abandonment often, or shamed for not being part of, like, well, you don't have your own business. You're not doing your own thing, you're not working. And then now I feel like how everything goes to one extreme, it's swinging the other way. I feel like we're dancing in a lot of those right now.

Mari Llewelyn
Yeah, I agree. So I think it's a reclamation of some traditional things. Yeah. You know, and I think that's important in that. I don't think there's a.

Mark Groves
Listen, this isn't even an opinion. This is fact. The most important role in any human's development is their relationship to their mother. The United States has, I believe, one of the lowest, shortest maternity leave. I think it's six weeks, something like that.

The development of your child's sense of self happens not just in the first six weeks. I mean, it happens in the gestational, like the 40 weeks in utero, in the womb. And then you have, I mean, years. Kids can't self regulate till they're about three. So the way that they learn how to regulate is through their mother's regulation, as well as their fathers and the people around them.

But there's nothing more important to a child's development than their mother. And so I think there is now a reclamation of that role. I think you also have how the medical system, again, not saying there isn't a time for acute medical care in birth, but they've also medicalized a lot of what was already a perfect natural process. You know, the c section rate in the United States is much higher than the UK, where birth is actually more navigated by midwives. Right.

I remember we gave birth in Nevada, and the c section rate is something like 36%. In the UK, I believe it's something like 1.8%. Right. Wow. So it shows you there's actually a profitability to these interventions.

Mari Llewelyn
Yeah. So I know that's like, coming back to the question that's a long way around. I think it's all really valid points. And I also think there's this anger happening that we were all put on birth control and we were all kind of pushed into this box. Like, I've had Doctor Jolene Brighton on the show, I've had Doctor Mindy pels on the show, and, oh, she's great.

Mindy, oh, my gosh. Amazing. She's fire amazing. She went through all my lab work for me. I mean, just seeing, like, the health implications of being on birth control and feeling like so many of us are struggling with fertility, feeling like it was almost taken away.

Mark Groves
There's almost, like, sold to you as this idea of liberation. Yeah. People forget that behind these things are profit and marketing messages. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on it, too. I'm happy that you're in, like, a similar space of curiosity, because to me, it's like, yes, there is.

Like, wait, it wasn't bad to want to be a mom? It wasn't bad to want to sleep with your child, to co sleep like, oh, wait, how the hell were we sold the idea that formula is better than breast milk? Yeah. Formula with high fructose corn syrup in it. Like, I just look at that stuff and I go, it's all so many lies.

Mari Llewelyn
I know. And then when I think about the story we're taught about relationship, it's this idea that if you. If no one picks you, you're not worthy of being chosen. If your relationship ends, you're a failure. All of it is such b's.

Mark Groves
It's like, it's all so disempowering. And to me, it's like the core of health is having choice, but also having access to community, connection, trust. Like, if the people you're supposed to trust are the people who are misleading you. Like, I think about sleep training, and no offense to anyone, I was sleep trained. So.

A high tune. I don't know anything about sleep training, truthfully. Well, this is a very controversial subject. Is it? It is, yeah.

Mari Llewelyn
Oh. Because the problem, first off, the fact that we have a society that's structured, that we need sleep training is really the challenge. Like when someone says, well, I had to sleep train my child because I didn't have a choice. I'm a mother of blah, blah, blah, and I wasn't getting any sleep. I was going crazy.

Mark Groves
Totally get it. But really, that shows that there's a lack of resources for the mother. Right. So that, to me, is the actual problem is that we've been taught to move into apartments and away from family. We're not in communities.

There's a lot of people who don't live in multi generational homes, so there's not lots of support. Because of globalization, we move away from our families. Again, a lot of complexities. Everyone is stuck in binaries. It's either good or bad.

No, it's complex. But my point being that, like, there's a cha. Women are not supported. Mothers are not supported. So we have technologies like sleep training.

But if you look at it, a baby's nervous system is designed to cry when it needs something, right. But the baby's nervous system is like it's in a cave and it's going, hey, I need you. I'm alone. I need food. I need soothing, whatever.

If you don't come, I don't stop crying because I learned to self soothe. I stopped crying because if I keep crying, something's gonna find me and eat me. So what happens is they become disassociated. Wow. Yeah.

So again, we can get into the. You know, it's not the right or wrong of it. It's that this was created and sold by pediatricians as perfectly normal, and the original was by a man. I forget his name, but the original teacher of this, they talked about the tyranny of the child. Like, a baby is trying to manipulate you to come feed it and hug it at night.

But this is the perspective. Yeah. I mean, it's layered. So sleep training is essentially ignoring the crying and allowing it to continue. Interesting.

Now, there's a lot of different levels of how to do it that they think mitigates that. But I interviewed an expert on this, a neuroscientist, talking about how there is no way to do it without impacting the neurodevelopment of the child from an attachment perspective. So the best thing to do is run to your baby when it's crying. Yeah. To go soothe it.

Mari Llewelyn
Yeah. You know, you're not being manipulated by your child because you pick it up. You know, it's like if your child breastfeeds past the age of two, it doesn't mean you failed. You know? Like, I think we just have all these stories where we're saying, what is nature is not real.

Mark Groves
It's like, this is just nature. And we're trying to say, well, we have all these interventions, so you don't have to be a biological. I think the prefrontal cortex has created such an arrogance in that we think we're not biological beings with nervous systems. Yeah. It's almost like we're trying to morph into the society we've created, but it isn't natural, you know?

Yeah. We're trying to. You know that book from Doctor Gabor, the myth of normal? Oh, no, I haven't seen it. Oh, it's fantastic.

He talks about, essentially, that we are trying to adapt to a toxic environment instead of seeing that the environment, like, these are all symptoms of being in toxic environments. Yep. So everything that's happening are, like, rapid amount of autoimmune. Yeah. Like, you look at all the escalation of mental health issues, and we're going, like, there's so many canaries in the coal mine.

Like, at what point do we go, okay, what we're doing is not working. Yeah. You know, it's almost like waiting for people to wake up. I mean, just even watching your video about deleting instagram, it had such a big impact on me because I was. I had this, like, underlying feeling, not just about social media, but in general, about the way I've been living my life and the way I see everyone else living their life.

Mari Llewelyn
I almost wonder if you are, like, leading this movement. Like, I hope that people watch you do it and almost feel compelled to try it themselves. You know, I worry about. I mean, I don't know about Gen Z because they don't know any different, but I feel like my generation, like, I didn't have a smartphone or social media till I was a junior in college or something like that. Yeah.

Mark Groves
I mean, I didn't have Facebook till, like, 2007 or whatever, when it came out, emails came out when I was in my first year or second year of university, like, where teachers were emailing you and that was new. Yeah. You know, so. And before that, you were on the old dial up, you know, and that you're not downloading any porn fast on that. You're, like, waiting for a picture to load.

Like, you had to really earn your porn back then. But, yeah, I. I look at it and I think, yeah, we're. I mean, I hope that it causes people to ask questions. Yeah.

Just like, my progression in terms of where I started to be curious started in relationship, because I was like, well, what I'm being taught doesn't make sense. But then I started to see all the systems. I was in pharma. So, like, I look at it now and I'm like, wow, I was in that machine for 14 years. Wow.

And I remember when I, the thing that first woke me up in that world was that I studied cholesterol. And I was like, everything I was taught about cholesterol is wrong. Like, holy crap, I used to sell a drug for cholesterol. So I was like, wait, if that's wrong, like, what else is wrong? And then I thought not only was I sold a lie, I sold the lie.

And then when I started to study relationships, I saw that so much of the impact of why we are dysregulated, why we have gut issues, why we can't absorb nutrients, was because of emotional dysregulation. And I saw that emotions and the inability to be in healthy relationships was actually in trauma, was actually a core reason of our challenges. And I think it's almost the most difficult challenge because it's easy, I mean, in my opinion, to follow a diet, to take the supplements. I saw you posted a quote about this today. If you exercise, eat the right things, take the supplements.

Mari Llewelyn
That's just one part of living a healthy lifestyle. The emotional regulation is the other part, and that's almost the hardest part. Like, that, to me, is what takes the most work. What would be your top tips for someone listening who feels like they're doing all the right things for health and fitness? They're exercising, they're eating the right way, taking the supplements, but they feel like they haven't mastered emotional regulation?

Mark Groves
Well, I would argue that emotional regulation is the beginning of all of it. So all of those are really good things. And proper nutrition can actually give you more access to regulation. Agreed. So by nourishing yourself, really, if you want to look at how someone feels about themselves, you just need to look at their choices.

So if their choices don't align with their values, then they're going to be dysregulated. So when someone has anxiety or depression, the first thing, especially when someone has anxiety. I love the work of Hilary Jacobs Hendell. She has a book called it's not always depression. And in it she talks about how anxiety is an inhibitory feeling.

So, anxiety is a feeling you get when you can't feel one of your other core emotions. So it's not safe to. You don't know how to anger, grief. It could be something like disgust, joy. So when you don't have access to anger, it'll show up as anxiety.

When you don't have access to sadness, it'll show up as anxiety. So for a lot of people, if they weren't allowed to express or have boundaries, they'll get anxious. So when you start to learn about emotion and the value of emotion, then, like my wife and I in our relationship, what really changed things is instead of seeing her inability to choose the relationship in our first relationship as a problem with her, that we needed to figure out how we could fix what was going on in her so she could choose us, it was like, well, what happens if there's brilliance in your not ability to choose us? Like, what happens if your body is the somatic canary in the coal mine? Like, what happens if what's coming up for you isn't a problem, but it's actually wisdom that there's something in our relationship that's not actually allowing you to choose it.

So our book walks people through how to truly, like, what are we talk about the different layers of what shapes you in relationship. The understanding is important, what someone might call the psychoeducation. Like, why am I the way I am? We call it the relational blueprint. That's good.

Just because what it does is it contextualizes why you do what you do, which makes it you realize that why you do what you do is because you needed to do it to survive. So it's not your fault, but it's not serving you. It's not creating the type of life you want, it's not creating the type of health you want, because if you're having challenging experiences with your health, I guarantee that it's correlated to something you learned or experienced in your childhood or growing up or maybe as a young adult. And the second part then is, you know, where it came comes from. Okay, how do I create space?

We call it in the book a sacred pause. How do I create a pause? A space for me to actually create something new and to actually. And that's where the regulating tools come in, things like meditation. That's why, you know, although it's all the rage, cold plunging is powerful because what your body is doing is.

It's saying, you're gonna die, but you're not gonna die. It really feels like you're gonna die. It does, yeah. And your body is saying, get out of this. Cause you're gonna die.

But what you start to do is you start to separate how you feel from what you think about how you feel. Wow. Yeah. So you're able to be the observer of your experience, not just your experience. So language wise, because language is really important.

Instead of saying, I am angry, you would start to use language like, a part of me feels angry. That way, you're recognizing through language, you're creating space for more parts of you. So a part of me feels anxious right now. A part of me also feels excited. Okay.

And so you can start to play with that. That gives more space to hold more feelings. Yeah. Also looking at your relationships and being like, am I in relationship with people who are actually able to have hard conversations? You know?

And that's why working with a therapist, a coach, what they're doing is starting to teach you if you've never experienced it, like, this conversation is for sure experiencing that co regulation where our nervous systems are communicating on another level that we're not even aware of, you know, we're not. If we got into disagreement about a point, maybe we'd get a bit activated, but we. We have the skill set to be able to ask questions, probably not create judgments about one another. Maybe if we do, we examine them. So for people to actually do an inventory of their relationships, are they safe to be themselves?

Are they safe to express? Are they safe? Yeah. You know, and those, that's just a way to begin to touch it. So important, too, in adult friendships.

Mari Llewelyn
I think that's a tough spot for a lot of people because it's difficult to understand what an adult friendship looks like versus a high school or college friendship. I spoke about this with my therapist, but my belief system around friendship is referenced from college, where I would be inseparable with my friends. Like, we would hang out while we were showering, we would get ready together, like, we were constantly together. And now understanding that people have marriages and families, and maybe you communicate a bit less, maybe you see each other once a week like that. That concept was difficult for me because I was like, oh, well, if we're not together all the time, then we're not even friends, right?

You know? Yeah, I do. And that when relationships change, what we desire changes. All of that is asking us to actually acknowledge that. You know, we were talking earlier about one of the most important aspects of change is really getting to know, like, if you don't know what you want and what you need.

Mark Groves
Right. You start to do this point of inquiry, like, who am I? Yeah. And if you want to create an amazing life, just figure out what are your four top values, which you'll know by when they're violated. What are your four top values?

And then make an inventory of every relationship in your life. Are they in alignment with my values? No. What would it take to get them in alignment with my values? You can look at all the choices you make, all your relationships to substances, your relationships to food, your relationships to exercise, and you start to look like, are these in alignment?

Are they not? And if you start to eliminate all the things that are not and start to actually invite the things that aren't to change, if that's possible, your life will be amazing. Like, you won't need substances to change your state, because your state will be so delicious. You know, and I, we were talking off camera a bit about, like, how important to be regulated is also having access to resources. So, like, community.

Having access to, like, being able to, you know, we were talking earlier about choice and relationship, having access to money. Yeah. Having access to stuff like that. Starting a homestead, getting chickens. Yeah, I feel like that's the answer.

Mari Llewelyn
I think chickens are the answer. I feel like manual labor, or whatever you want to call it, like, doing something physical is just, like, so healing, you know, like, getting outside. I have a horse that I take care of. Do you have a horse? I do, yeah.

No, I'm a full animal crazy person. I've heard that my mother in law has a horse, and I'm allergic to horses, but I bump into my allergy because I like being around the horse a lot. There's something about them. I love dogs. You know, for me, dogs.

Mark Groves
But I think it's crazy that we present science, that forest bathing is good for us. Like, we need science to tell us that a tree makes us happier. Like, all you gotta do is sit and look at the ocean or sit and look at another human. Like, whenever I do workshops and people, I gaze.

I'm blown away by the amount of people brought to tears because they haven't allowed themselves to be seen or seen somebody truly with no words just to be witnessed. Wow. Yeah. And I think we're craving farms. I think we're craving homesteads.

Mari Llewelyn
I think that's so evident in what I'm seeing from everyone. And have you, speaking of co regulation, have you heard the fact that horses can sense your heart rate and will kind of match? Or when they're in a pack, when they're running in the wild, they all co regulate so that they have the same heart rate. Wow. Isn't that insane?

Mark Groves
Yeah. And it doesn't surprise me. They're just magic creatures. It's like how our kids, and we kids learn from us, from mirror neurons, and, like, we learn from each other. Like, like, you learn empathy through watching people empathize.

And so I think a lot about the impact of technology when, like, a parent is looking at a phone instead of engaging with the child or their partner, let's say. And I remember listening to a psychologist give a presentation saying that not only does social media present the potentiality of creating a lot of narcissism, but so does the fact that we're not learning empathy. Yeah. I also remember reading that empathy is experienced through the ability to mimic. So if you say you're sad, I mimic your sadness and with a facial expression, so you see that I feel your sadness.

But if I get Botox, I won't be able to do the exact thing. So I won't have access to the emotion because the emotion follows the change in my face. Oh, my gosh. Which I thought was really interesting. Again, not a judgment on people getting that.

I just was like, oh, that's fascinating. I wonder how that kind of stuff impacts our ability to be empathic. That's true. I know so many layers. I could ask you a million questions.

Mari Llewelyn
We're going to have to do a part two. I know you have a new book. Tell us about it. So, our new book is called Liberated Love. I wrote it with my wife, and it is about how to heal codependent patterns.

Mark Groves
So very apropos to our conversation, obviously, we're really proud of this book. Like, what I know to be true about this book is if you want to change your relationships and change your life, it walks you through the process, the how to. We tell our story, we tell clients stories, because humans learn through narrative. And there's lots of stuff in there, but especially what's in there is the tools. So, like, okay, it's great.

Nice to hear all these things, but, like, I want to actually change my relationship. How do I do that? I want to actually learn regulation of my nervous system. How do I do that in relationship and with myself? So we walk people through that and we're excited.

We're excited about it. Incredible. Congratulations. Thank you, Mark. Where can everyone find you online?

Mari Llewelyn
Where can they buy the book? So you can find me on my podcast, Mark Rose podcast. I also have a YouTube channel. The book is at liberated dash love.com. or you can get it wherever books are sold.

Mark Groves
The audiobook. I'm a big audiobook guy. Is it you reading it? Yeah, my wife and I swapping it. Oh, nice.

At the end of each chapter, we have an unscripted conversation between us where we talk about stuff from the chapter. I wanted to do something fun because I'm like, I consume so many audiobooks that for me it was like, okay, let's make something really special with that. So if that's something people prefer, there's definitely. And also if you buy the book@bookshop.org in the US and the UK, it supports small bookstores. Incredible.

Mari Llewelyn
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. To support this show, please rate and review and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player.

You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favourites at mari llewellyn.com. it will be linked in the show notes. This is a wellness out loud production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona Attucks and Kelly Kyle. This show is is edited by Mike Fry and our video is recorded by Luis Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Mari Fitness.

Love you pal girls and pal boys. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.