Pod Insights The Dr. John Delony Show I’m Afraid I’m Going to Cheat on My Husband About this episode On today’s episode, we hear about:
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A military wife struggling with her husband’s lack of parenting skills
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Speaker 00 I've been married a little over a year and I am finding myself attracted to someone who goes to the gym that I'm at. I'm really scared. What if I do something stupid? What if I respond to it?
0:18 Dr. John Delony? What makes you so untrusting of yourself? Have you done this before? Have you cheated before?
0:29 Dr. John Delony? Hey, this is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. I'm so glad that you're with us. Talking about your relationships and your mental and emotional health. Everything you've got going on in your life. I'm glad that you're here. For two decades, I've been sitting with hurting people when the wheels have fallen off their life. And pull up a seat and we'll figure out what's the next right move. If you want to be on this show, go to johndeloney.com/ask. And it'll go to Kelly 1.0. She'll convert it to hieroglyphics, which is her original language that she used thousands of years ago. And she'll get back to you. And thank God for AI, because then it will translate it back to your native language. All right, let's go out to Seattle, Washington, home of Pearl Jam, and talk to Krista. What's up, Krista?
1:14 Speaker 00 Hey, thanks so much. Nice to talk with you.
1:18 Dr. John Delony? It's nice to talk with you.
1:20 Speaker 00 So I am struggling. I've been married a little over a year and I am finding myself attracted to someone who goes to the gym that I'm at. And I, I just didn't think it would be like that, being newly married and I have a new baby. And just trying to figure out, how do I deal with this? How do I, um, how do I change that? How do I not be that person? I'm scared of cheating.
1:48 Dr. John Delony? Okay, so there's a big, there's a lot of leaps in here. So.
1:57 Dr. John Delony? Um, geez, let me back all the way out. Tell me about your marriage right now.
2:02 Speaker 00 Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's generally, it's really good. We're adjusting to having, um, you know, another, another little person in our lives. Um, it's, it's generally like textbook great. It's just, I'm just struggling with, uh, figuring out, you know, what, what marriage really looks like as, as we move forward.
2:28 Dr. John Delony? Tell me about that.
2:30 Speaker 00 Um, so I, I was used to traveling a lot and being kind of a jet setter. The baby was a surprise and, um.
2:42 Dr. John Delony? Is the baby why y'all got married?
2:44 Speaker 00 No, no, it was a honeymoon baby. Um, she's super cute.
2:48 Dr. John Delony? Ayo.
2:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm surprised. Um, which, you know, I'm so grateful for that, but it just.
2:55 Dr. John Delony? Okay, let me stop you there. Can I tell you, you can be super grateful and be holding a baby that's the like, this suddenly is the reason you're alive, right? All that stuff. And also you can grieve the fact that it wasn't in your plans for it to come like this.
3:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:15 Dr. John Delony? It doesn't make you a bad mom for you to go, good God, I wish this had happened four years from now.
3:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:21 Dr. John Delony? And it doesn't make you a bad wife and him a bad husband if y'all are both scrambling now? Cause this is not the picture y'all drew up.
3:32 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, I, I didn't think I would, I would feel this way having a baby either. And I, you know, I thought.
3:40 Dr. John Delony? Okay, listen to me. Listen, there's no bad feelings.
3:44 Dr. John Delony? Okay?
3:47 Speaker 00 Okay.
3:48 Dr. John Delony? There's no bad feelings. You're allowed to be frustrated. You're allowed to be annoyed. You're, they pop into your mind. And I think most of our pathology these days is because when the thoughts hit, we are so uncomfortable with them. We want to blame somebody else for them, or we want to beat ourselves up for them.
4:08 Speaker 00 Hmm.
4:09 Dr. John Delony? And then we feel dead in our own skin because we have to numb ourselves out. And then somebody walks by us in the gym and they say, hey, I think you're beautiful. And all of a sudden we're like, oh, that makes me feel alive again.
4:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
4:23 Dr. John Delony? You get what I'm saying?
4:24 Speaker 00 I don't feel like myself most of the time.
4:27 Dr. John Delony? Yes.
4:27 Speaker 00 And I, yeah, I actually.
4:29 Dr. John Delony? You don't feel like the, the, the version 3.0 of yourself and now you're at version 5.0?
4:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I am, I just don't, I don't know, like, I feel like my identity is just completely flipped and I don't, I don't know how to deal with that, I guess. And
4:52 Speaker 00 yeah, having these feelings really scares me because I, I do love my baby and I love my husband and I, I want that to work. I'm just so terrified, like, what if I, what if I do something stupid? What if I respond to it? Um, generally, I just, like, keep my distance from that person, but I'm, I'm really scared.
5:16 Dr. John Delony? Have you done this before? Have you cheated before?
5:18 Speaker 00 No.
5:19 Dr. John Delony? So, wh- wh- what makes you so untrusting of yourself?
5:25 Speaker 00 Um, in the past, I had really poor taste in men, I would say.
5:31 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
5:32 Speaker 00 And so I don't trust that I won't fall for something that's stupid. I, I guess I don't trust that I'm gonna always make the wisest of choices.
5:45 Dr. John Delony? Okay. So, let me clear the deck on a couple of things. Number one,
5:52 Dr. John Delony? um, there would be something wrong with you, psychol- uh, there would be something wrong with you, all of you, if you suddenly stopped finding attractive people attractive.
6:02 Dr. John Delony? Okay?
6:03 Speaker 00 Okay.
6:04 Dr. John Delony? There would also be something innately wrong if, um, there weren't lightning bolts of, like, like, electric desire.
6:17 Dr. John Delony? Okay? That just means you're human.
6:20 Speaker 00 Okay.
6:21 Dr. John Delony? What you, what you can control is whether you choose to meditate on that and fantasize about that and let it consume part of you.
6:35 Speaker 00 Okay.
6:35 Dr. John Delony? Like, the whole room should be lifted up when a beautiful woman walks in the room. Period. End of story. There should be a spirit that lifts in the room. Right? There should be a spirit that lifts in a room when a fireman walks in. Right? Or like a good-looking guy in the gym. Just walk like...
6:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:55 Dr. John Delony? Everyone should go, "Ah!" Right?
6:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:59 Dr. John Delony? And then it's, the switch flips is, "I wonder if..." Or, "I'm gonna turn on the flirt a little bit." Or, "I'm gonna receive his flirt a little bit." And, "Man, my husband doesn't, and that'd be so cool if..." And that reminds me of when. And that's when we get ourselves in trouble.
7:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:23 Dr. John Delony? And so if you honestly think, in your guts, and what I can't parse here in 15 minutes is, are you wrestling with, "I'm a new version of myself, and my husband and I have found ourselves, you've heard me say this, like, six inches apart on the couch, but 6,000 miles away from each other?" Then what we need to do is go out for a half-day and completely wipe the deck and say, "Hey, we got a brand-new relationship."
7:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
7:52 Dr. John Delony? We have a brand-new partnership, we have a brand-new marriage, because now we have, we've never been together, we've never been romantically involved and had a human to take care of.
8:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:01 Dr. John Delony? And we've never been in love and trying to do life together and build something together, and I was the wild, fun, jet-setting, jump-up-on-the-table girl, and now I'm covered in throw-up and changing diapers and breastfeeding and also watching you be disappointed that I'm not, right? Like, all of that has happened all at the same time.
8:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:24 Dr. John Delony? And so the question is, who are we gonna be?
8:28 Speaker 00 Hmm.
8:28 Dr. John Delony? Like, so, that's, that's part one. Part two is, everywhere you go, there's gonna be attractive people, and there's gonna be hilarious people, and there's gonna be poets, and there's gonna be people with jobs that your spouse doesn't have. And you wonder what that would be like. That makes you human. Great. Appreciate it and move on with your life.
8:49 Speaker 00 Okay.
8:50 Dr. John Delony? If you think, "I am at risk of blowing up my marriage and becoming somebody I don't wanna be," then quit the gym. Go to a new gym. It's that simple. There is no pulley machine that's worth your marriage.
9:05 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:05 Dr. John Delony? Right? But almost always
9:11 Dr. John Delony? that
9:13 Dr. John Delony? my goodness, that guy's good looking, but more than, more than that, what's, what's attractive about him is that you see him noticing you.
9:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:24 Dr. John Delony? And that feels good?
9:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:26 Dr. John Delony? And is it happening at the same time that your husband's got his head down trying to figure out how to be a husband and a dad too?
9:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:33 Dr. John Delony? Okay, that's the conversation that needs to happen.
9:37 Speaker 00 That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
9:39 Dr. John Delony? And it's not, I need you, I want you to use these words, I want you
9:45 Dr. John Delony? to be intentional about noticing me.
9:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, and it feels like right now if we get one on one time, the TV's on and it's not, that's just not, and I fall asleep and he's working on, on starting his new job and
10:02 Dr. John Delony? There you go.
10:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:04 Dr. John Delony? And just because it's winter doesn't mean summer's broken.
10:12 Dr. John Delony? And so it might be a season of winter right now. He's got a new job, you have completely, your identity that you knew, everything about you that you knew is gone now. And so it might be that we need two or three months, or five months, or six months of snuggling up on the couch under a blanket.
10:31 Dr. John Delony? And there's not fireworks and it's not July 4th, and we're not running around in tank tops and swim trunks, but the roots of what our relationship is growing deep.
10:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:48 Dr. John Delony? But I want to ask you, like, what can you control about feeling alive again in this new season?
10:55 Dr. John Delony? What about old you are you missing?
11:00 Speaker 00 I, I feel like I used to be driven and fun and adventurous and I, I don't feel like, I, I don't feel any of it anymore.
11:20 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
11:23 Speaker 00 I, um, I don't feel anything.
11:27 Dr. John Delony? Okay. Tell me about that.
11:31 Speaker 00 Um, I just don't think, yeah, I, it's like I, the only time I feel like a piece of me is there, you know, like I'll have moments with my son, but just every day I just look in the mirror and I don't recognize myself and I don't, um, yeah, I just feel really, really empty.
11:59 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
12:02 Dr. John Delony? Will you exhale on that? Hold on, grieve that.
12:06 Speaker 00 Sorry?
12:07 Dr. John Delony? Grieve that for a second with me.
12:12 Dr. John Delony? Like the woman that you were so proud of and the woman that you spent years curating and creating,
12:19 Dr. John Delony? she has a baby now. She's a wife now.
12:25 Dr. John Delony? Right? Listen to that sound. It's one of my favorite sounds in the world.
12:30 Dr. John Delony? Right?
12:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:34 Dr. John Delony? And I'm glad I don't have that sound in my house anymore, right? Both are true. Both are true.
12:43 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:45 Dr. John Delony? So my question is, that emptiness, that who am I? That what is my purpose now? Cause my purpose was being so hot and sexy and my purpose was adventure and my purpose was passionate, driven and all that. And all of that, by the way, she's still there and she'll return. She's just gonna look different. It's a different kind of awesome now.
13:06 Dr. John Delony? She was rad dude, and now you're entering into a different kind of rad. The question is, are we gonna remain empty and let somebody else from the outside come try to fill that for us? Because I'm telling you, that's a bottomless pit. Or, am I gonna be intentional about asking, who am I going to be now? And looking at my husband and saying, who are we gonna be now? And then I'm gonna reverse engineer that with, we don't turn the TV on at night. We have to have, even if it's, if it's six-minute survival sex, and I've got spit-up on my shirt, and by the way, I'm not taking my shirt off yet, but like, we're turning the lights off and we're getting this done. Right? Like, like, what does it look like? And hey, I know you're trying to start a new business, you can take five minutes, and by
13:51 Dr. John Delony? the way, it's not even gonna take you five minutes, but close the laptop, we're doing this. Or, I need you to close the laptop and keep the kid, because I'm gonna go do something silly with my girlfriends right now.
14:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:04 Dr. John Delony? What came so easy, now has to become intentional, and just because it's intentional doesn't mean it's less than, and doesn't mean it's not valuable. In fact, I think the more intentional it is, the more valuable and precious it becomes.
14:19 Speaker 00 I guess, yeah, that does make sense.
14:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, everything, everything is a half hour and a, and a list to get out the door now.
14:30 Dr. John Delony? Yes, yes, yes, and yes, and yes. So, the reality has changed. Trying to pretend reality has not changed is not, is not real. It's just dumb, right? It has.
14:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:40 Dr. John Delony? And so, what does it look like to put sex on the calendar? What does it look like to put adventure on the calendar? What does it look like to put exercise on the calendar?
14:54 Dr. John Delony? It's different, it's different.
14:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, definitely different.
14:59 Dr. John Delony? It's just a different kind of awesome.
15:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:03 Dr. John Delony? Let me promise you, having sat with people on this very issue.
15:09 Dr. John Delony? If and when you, I won't say when, if you sleep with the hot guy at the gym,
15:15 Dr. John Delony? I can't imagine a scenario where you don't wish that you had that back.
15:22 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:23 Dr. John Delony? But to me, it's less about that guy who just noticed you, and more it is a signal for where we need to lean in inside our home, you and your husband.
15:35 Dr. John Delony? What is that revealing? What is that feeling of, oh my gosh, there's, he recognizes me as old me. What is, what is that signal that we can head towards in our own house? And put on the table.
15:48 Dr. John Delony? This is a moment of honesty. We're a year in and I've got a toddler, and I have to be honest with your husband, like, a guy's noticing me at the gym and it feels so good.
16:01 Dr. John Delony? It feels so good. I'm not gonna do anything with it, but it's making me realize, I don't notice you anymore, I feel empty inside. I feel so empty that some stranger at the gym, with big abs, makes me feel seen again.
16:18 Dr. John Delony? And I want you to begin to see me again. And here's what that looks like. What if we didn't have phones up? What if we had our laptops down? What if we, what if we, what if we, what if we?
16:27 Dr. John Delony? Let's just co-create that thing together. You'll have a brand-new marriage, so clear the deck. The tower's fallen of your old marriage. Clear it and let's rebuild it.
16:38 Dr. John Delony? And to reiterate, you're not a bad, if you're not a bad human, if you think somebody else is attractive, if you think they're super good-looking. You're not a bad person if somebody handsome or beautiful walks in the room and you feel alive. Great, that's wonderful, that's life, that's what beauty does.
16:58 Dr. John Delony? Where you begin to cross over is you begin to imagine, what would it be like if?
17:03 Dr. John Delony? And those thoughts and feelings we can control. And if you don't feel like I can control those, then you've got to remove yourself from the situation. Thanks for the call, sister. I don't think there's something wrong with you. I think there's alarm bells going off and I think there are big spotlights pointing you in the direction you got to head. It's just going to be uncomfortable. It's just going to be different. But adventurous, fun, driven, purpose-filled Krista, she's still there. Just her purpose and her adventures and her drive are going to be pointed in different directions now, and that's incredible. Thank you for the call, sister. Call anytime. Call anytime. When we come back, a woman asks how she can tell her husband that he needs to just suck it up. I can't wait for this. We'll be right back.
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20:36 Dr. John Delony? All right, we're back. Hey, take two seconds to like or subscribe to the show. And it just, it helps the algorithm. It helps your neighbors. It helps everybody, helps us, it helps everybody. Take two seconds, log in and hit the subscribe or like button. So we went to San Diego, California and talked to Miranda. What's up, Miranda?
20:55 Speaker 00 Hi, how are you doing?
20:56 Dr. John Delony? I'm doing great. How about you?
20:59 Speaker 00 Good, except for I feel terribly guilty that I'm about to ask you a question about my husband right now.
21:04 Dr. John Delony? Oh geez, all right, bring it on.
21:06 Speaker 00 Okay, so just to give a little backstory. A few years ago, I got out of the Navy to work at church part-time and stay home with the kids. And my husband's still in, he's been gone most of the last three years. And this summer, while he was on deployment, I was pregnant with our fourth child. We don't have any family, but we have a bunch of kids, obviously goats, chickens, dogs. So I was by myself taking care of all that. Then I had a C-section.
21:34 Dr. John Delony? Cause why not, right?
21:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. Exactly, yeah. A million chickens. And then I had a C-section and came home and had to recover from that and have it take care of the new baby and take care of everything else I was doing and just wait for him to come home, which was another two months. So I just felt like I was looking at the end of the tunnel. There was a light and then when he got home, I would be able to rest, but that just has not happened at all. I mean, he's got three months off of work now and he just has no patience for anything. His temper is so short and I just feel like I can't ask him for help because his patience is so bad. When I leave for my meetings for church or to go grocery shopping, he's always rushing
22:18 Speaker 00 me and implies that I'm just wasting time, basically. He said he wants, he even said he wants to plan a backpacking trip for himself while we're here on leave. And I was like, maybe I'd like to go on that. And he's like, well, we'll watch the kids. And I just felt so discouraged by that. I feel so burnt out and like I've had to be strong for so long and I just wish that I could just rest and someone would be strong for me or sacrifice for me so that I can just breathe for a little bit, cause it's so hard to watch him be so impatient when for years I've been doing this and he's made me feel like it was easy.
22:56 Dr. John Delony? Yeah.
22:56 Speaker 00 And that I should feel guilty if I'm stressed out about being a mom. So I'm just like, do I just tell him to suck it up because that's what I've been doing for all this time or is that too mean or what?
23:07 Dr. John Delony? Um, no, I mean, it's, cause he's gonna say the same thing to you.
23:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:13 Dr. John Delony? And, and so it, it, that's not the issue.
23:17 Dr. John Delony? The issue is underneath this thing. Two-fold. I hear two-fold things. One is the men and women I've sat with after deployment number two and deployment number three are, are fried at the cellular level.
23:33 Speaker 00 Yes, that's so true.
23:35 Dr. John Delony? And was he in combat deployment? What was he doing?
23:38 Speaker 00 No, he was, he's in the Navy. He was just, they really didn't have a mission. They were kind of just being present around the waters and in different areas, so.
23:46 Dr. John Delony? Okay. And so.
23:51 Dr. John Delony? This is just my experience and you both have been in, so you have a different perspective than I do. This is just the outside when people come sit with me, okay?
24:03 Dr. John Delony? There's like a hierarchy of, "I saw combat, so I get to be X, Y, I get to feel a certain way, or I get to like have these responses." "I was deployed, but I didn't see combat, so I only get to, I only have permission to feel this level of frustrated, scared, lonely, left out, whatever." "I've been in the service for 20 years, but I never went to combat, and so none of my feelings count. None of the things I saw, watched, etc., none of that counts."
24:35 Dr. John Delony? And it's easy, here's the challenge, both of y'all have picked up a scorecard,
24:43 Dr. John Delony? and you're walking around keeping score, and that's a recipe for a marriage that ends in ash.
24:50 Dr. John Delony? And you sitting down and saying, "Hey, tell me about, like, even deeper than that, you don't look like you're happy to be here, you don't look well, are you okay? I miss you."
25:03 Dr. John Delony? "I miss my husband."
25:08 Dr. John Delony? And it's less about,
25:12 Dr. John Delony? "He's not seeing, he's not knowing me," and it's more about, "How can I see and how can I know him? How can I celebrate him?" And that sounds crazy, but that's the only path to you being finally seen and known and celebrated too. Somebody has to go first.
25:25 Speaker 00 I totally agree with you. I mean, I've actually been following that advice that you've given, and like every day I try to tell him and be encouraging to him, like, "I've noticed that you're doing these things really well, or when we get into bed at night, I will make a point to say, 'You're doing a really great job with this or that, and thank you for everything that you're doing here and these changes that you have made.'" Because he's not all bad, obviously.
25:46 Dr. John Delony? Of course.
25:47 Speaker 00 He's made a lot of good changes.
25:48 Dr. John Delony? Yeah, of course.
25:48 Speaker 00 And, and so I acknowledge all of those things.
25:52 Dr. John Delony? But are you at a position now where you can clear the deck and say, "Hey, we've got a brand-new marriage, I want to build a new marriage, because the one we had doesn't exist anymore?"
26:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:01 Dr. John Delony? The one we had was two kids, no chickens, one deployment, and I had a steady paycheck too. We have a new life now. What do we want this thing to look like?
26:14 Dr. John Delony? And for somebody who just came off deployment number three, there might be so much chaos with four kids,
26:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:19 Dr. John Delony? a wife working part-time, plus all these chickens, plus all these whatever, plus the financial stress of living in San Diego, all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it. And it might just be that he's electrified and the only thing his body knows to do is get out of here. And, or let me put it this way. I remember exactly the moment when I realized, falsely by the way, the greatest gift I could give my family was to just not be in the house.
26:48 Dr. John Delony? Because I couldn't do anything right. I didn't know the rhythms and routines of this house. I was working 24/7, 365 in hospitals and sitting with hurting people and as a, and then doing my college job during the day. Like, I just knew, I make this thing worse, I'm gonna be out of here. I'll go make money, I'll go on hunting trip, I'll just leave, because that'll be the best gift I can give my wife and my kids.
27:13 Speaker 00 Okay.
27:13 Dr. John Delony? And you get what I'm saying? So like, what I thought was the greatest thing actually made everything worse. It put gasoline on the already existing fire of my marriage.
27:23 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
27:26 Speaker 00 So, it sounds like what you're saying, how I'm taking this, is that I need to suck it up, kind of?
27:32 Dr. John Delony? Nope.
27:32 Speaker 00 Because now I feel like...
27:34 Dr. John Delony? And both of y'all need to stop sucking it up.
27:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:38 Dr. John Delony? Here's the thing, you're, you're, there's no amount of sleep or rest that's gonna solve the chaos that is your life right now.
27:45 Speaker 00 That's true.
27:46 Dr. John Delony? You're, you have a, you have a, you're just like, hey, when do I get to go run my marathon? The problem is, your marathon will not have a finish line.
27:55 Speaker 00 So what do you recommend for that, like, burnt-out feeling? What do I do about that? I just feel like I can't even enjoy being around my children anymore because I'm so tired, like, not physically, but just, like you said, on a cellular level, I'm just...
28:10 Dr. John Delony? Yes, it's existential because you're running a race that has no finish line. People can do insanely hard things when there's a finish line.
28:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, that's true. Like, just like how I said, I felt like there was a finish line, like a light at the end of the tunnel, but now I'm realizing that's not true.
28:27 Dr. John Delony? Exactly. Because you had a picture of what it was gonna look like when he got home, and he had a picture of what it was gonna look like when he got home.
28:34 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
28:35 Dr. John Delony? And he walked in the door and you're like, "Ah, I'm off."
28:38 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
28:39 Dr. John Delony? Your turn.
28:39 Speaker 00 That's definitely how I felt.
28:40 Dr. John Delony? And he walked home and said, "This home is more chaotic than the boat I just got off of."
28:48 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm. That's definitely true. I mean, in my defense, he did tell me that when he got home, he was gonna...
28:54 Dr. John Delony? Of course.
28:55 Speaker 00 It would be that way.
28:56 Dr. John Delony? Of course.
28:56 Speaker 00 But he probably didn't anticipate how it would really work.
28:58 Dr. John Delony? And you probably sent him some flirty pictures too, and said, "I can't wait till you get home. I'm gonna rock your world. We're gonna make kids number nine, 10, 11, or however many y'all have." And you both got home and...
29:06 Speaker 00 I was pregnant.
29:06 Dr. John Delony? I'm playing, I'm playing. But like, but like, but like, you both had pictures of what this is gonna look like, and y'all both had good intentions of what we were gonna do and how we were gonna be.
29:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
29:17 Dr. John Delony? But you keep saying, "I just need to rest." That's not true.
29:23 Dr. John Delony? What you need is some sort of... Let me rephrase that. You do need rest. But your rest is not gonna be found in just unhooking from everything.
29:36 Speaker 00 Right.
29:37 Dr. John Delony? Because you're also a problem solver. And that machine will kick up wildly.
29:43 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
29:44 Dr. John Delony? What you need is some support and some help, and you need a partner and a unified vision for what our home is gonna feel like and look like moving forward. And you don't have that.
29:54 Speaker 00 Right. Yeah, you're right.
29:55 Dr. John Delony? And so you're adding more chaos with more chickens, and more dogs, and more ponies, and more whatever. There's this ever... Let me put it this way for you.
30:06 Dr. John Delony? You have some sort of internal gap.
30:11 Dr. John Delony? Internal space that you're trying to get other people and other things to fill.
30:20 Dr. John Delony? And so what is that gap?
30:26 Speaker 00 I don't know. How do you know?
30:31 Dr. John Delony? I mean, usually it takes some introspection.
30:35 Speaker 00 I don't really do that. I'm too distracted to think, actually, get to know myself. I probably avoid it.
30:42 Dr. John Delony? Yeah, probably.
30:43 Speaker 00 But I think you're right. When you said that, it sounded right to me. I just don't know what the answer is, what that gap is for me.
30:52 Dr. John Delony? Okay, and there's not just like a, "Oh, it's this."
30:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:55 Dr. John Delony? It's usually a whole bunch of shenanigans.
31:00 Speaker 00 Okay.
31:01 Dr. John Delony? And it's just, it's worth exploring.
31:06 Dr. John Delony? What you're seeking here
31:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think I just feel really
31:08 Dr. John Delony? is peace.
31:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:12 Dr. John Delony? Right? It's not being off the clock, although that might be a part of peace. It's not him doing the dishes, although that might really help. Those are all tactics. Those are all hacks.
31:24 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
31:25 Dr. John Delony? They're all things that have to get done. But you're talking about something in your bones, man.
31:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're right.
31:32 Dr. John Delony? I did my service. I became a mom. I tried to be a wife. I held it all together. I had another kid and another kid and another kid. And then I had this, I watched a lot of YouTube while I was pregnant, so then I wanted to have the chickens and the farm and the whatever. All of these things are supposed to solve that gap inside your chest, and they're not.
31:51 Speaker 00 You're right, and I just keep adding more things and
31:54 Dr. John Delony? And then you blame the rest of the world for your lack of peace.
31:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's true.
31:59 Dr. John Delony? Now, I'm not, I'm not letting him off the hook. He does need to have some suck it up. He does need to, like, he needs to have the same, if not more, vigor about the mission that is his home
32:11 Dr. John Delony? that he just got off the boat. He's carried out on the boat.
32:16 Dr. John Delony? The problem is, is they didn't send that boat out there without some sort of mission, some sort of operation strategy.
32:27 Dr. John Delony? Your home doesn't have one right now.
32:29 Speaker 00 Alright.
32:30 Dr. John Delony? And so that's what I mean by y'all clearing the deck. It's not about either of you sucking it up at this point.
32:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
32:37 Dr. John Delony? Y'all chose to make four humans. So there's gonna be just a level of chaos, it just is. There's gonna be a level of fatigue and a level of what happened to my body. There's just gonna be that. Y'all just have to, y'all have that responsibility. Y'all put that weight on the bar. So it is what it is. But it's about clearing the deck and saying, hey, I miss you and I love you. And we have a brand new marriage now. We have never been married after deployment three, after I quit my job, after we have four kids. What do we want this thing to look like and feel like? And then we get to develop the strategy to get us there.
33:10 Speaker 00 Definitely.
33:11 Dr. John Delony? If you sat down across the table and said, I miss you and I love you and I wanna build a new marriage and I realized that while you were gone, this house became an electrified, chaotic zoo, literally.
33:25 Dr. John Delony? And I wanna know how we can co-create a new marriage and I wanna know how I can love you in this new season?
33:34 Dr. John Delony? What would he say to that?
33:37 Speaker 00 I think he would be all for it. He's a very dedicated person to me and to our family, he is. I think that he's, like you said before and made me realize, he's going through his own struggles too. And we probably just need to, like you said, start new, hear from each other what is going on and try and serve each other and support each other and be a team instead of trying to fight each other all the time.
34:03 Dr. John Delony? It sounds gross the way I say it. What you just said is perfect, but it can also, the way you said it can also be a lot of cliches, right? A lot of things you just ditch onto a pillow.
34:13 Speaker 00 Right.
34:13 Dr. John Delony? There is a point when this gets gross and I wish it wasn't this, you couldn't distill it down to this level of transaction, but Terry Real, the great therapist and author, says, "At some level, it is how can I give you what you want and what you need so that you are anchored enough to give me what I want and what I need?"
34:36 Dr. John Delony? And the challenge is someone has to go first.
34:40 Speaker 00 Yes.
34:42 Dr. John Delony? Otherwise, it's just about take, take, take, give me, give me, give me, I need, I need, I need. And that turns into, well, you don't, you never, and then it turns into, I've got this scorecard and I'm winning.
34:55 Speaker 00 Exactly. I just need to wipe it clean, stop resenting him for how I feel, because it's not his fault, it's just our life.
35:01 Dr. John Delony? It's our life, that's right. In like any, you've been through these trainings before in your years of service. At some point, the battlefield will happen to you. Or we're going to come up with an operation and with a strategy and a plan, and then we're going to happen to this battlefield.
35:21 Dr. John Delony? And so it's just recognizing, after we woke up at six years later and the world had just happened to us.
35:29 Dr. John Delony? And now we're going to take our autonomy back and we're going to take control of this thing and we're going to lock arms and do the same together, unified together.
35:42 Dr. John Delony? And if you haven't asked, if you haven't gone past, man, you didn't even do anything, you all just drove around in the ocean on a boat for a while. And docked and went and partied and got back on the boat.
35:54 Dr. John Delony? Right? Which is the easy story to throw out.
35:59 Dr. John Delony? Asking him, hey, what was it? Tell me about it.
36:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's not really fair to him to say that. It's only how I saw it.
36:08 Dr. John Delony? And what I will guarantee you, and you know this, the number of men who I've sat with over the years who say, hey, by the way, I'm going to tell you what happened. You cannot tell my wife.
36:19 Dr. John Delony? That this thing blew up, that we were under, under watch for, we were, I'm trying to think, say not nerdy military terms, so the listeners don't. Like, that we were, thought we were going to get shot and killed twice a week, or three times a week, or every week.
36:35 Dr. John Delony? Or we got geared up and, and got all the boats out of the middle, put them out, and then we had to put them all back, we kept having to do that over and like. Who knows?
36:47 Dr. John Delony? But he was probably trained, you keep your mouth shut about what happened, you suck it up and you go home.
36:52 Speaker 00 Right.
36:58 Dr. John Delony? And if you become a safe place for him to exhale and talk to,
37:04 Dr. John Delony? and you give him a map on how he can love you, now you're talking about game change. Will there be times when both of you all have to suck up? 100% yes, that's just life, that's being a parent, that's being a spouse. Are y'all gonna have to do things that you don't feel like doing? 1 million percent, that's life.
37:21 Dr. John Delony? But right now, solving that at the
37:26 Dr. John Delony? tactical level isn't a good use of your time or energy. It's just gonna lead to more burnout. It is exhaling and saying, how do we want to feel when we both walk in the door every day?
37:36 Dr. John Delony? I miss you and I love you. Let's build something completely new from the scratch up. We get to decide, we get to decide what it looks like.
37:42 Dr. John Delony? I'm all in, are you in?
37:45 Dr. John Delony? And if he wants to call, I'd love to talk to him. I'd love to talk to him.
37:52 Dr. John Delony? But it's awesome that he loves you and it's awesome that you love him.
37:56 Dr. John Delony? It's built something amazing.
37:58 Dr. John Delony? We come back, a woman asks how to face shame about using weight loss medication.
38:05 Dr. John Delony? If you've seen me speaking onstage at live events, in the local comedy club, or anywhere on social media or the internets, you have seen me wearing Poncho shirts. Why? Cause I love them. I'm always wearing Poncho shirts. And now that it's cold outside, it's perfect for wearing my favorite Poncho shirts, the denims and the flannels. Their denim has that soft, broken in feel in a little stretch. It's like you've worn it a million times, but it still looks incredible. And Poncho flannels come in original or western styles. And I'm telling you, they're gonna be the softest shirts you've ever owned. And somehow these soft shirts are tough and comfortable. I love Poncho shirts.
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39:20 Dr. John Delony? All right, Sacramento, California. Let's talk to AMY. What's up, Amy?
39:25 Speaker 02 Hi, Dr. John. How are you?
39:26 Dr. John Delony? I'm great. How are you?
39:28 Speaker 02 I'm doing well.
39:29 Dr. John Delony? Excellent. What's up?
39:32 Speaker 02 So, here's the deal. After many months of tests, experiments, and discussions with, between me and my doctor, we finally decided that the right next step for me and my health was to go on GLP-1 weight loss medication.
39:48 Dr. John Delony? Outstanding. Awesome.
39:51 Speaker 02 Thank you. So, for context, my starting BMI is about 30.
39:56 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
39:56 Speaker 02 Um, I'm comfortable with this decision, but I realize that I have only told two people about it. One is my husband, and the other one is a good friend who is also on the same journey. So, we're bouncing off of ideas off of each other.
40:14 Dr. John Delony? How, how long have you, um, and by the way, BMI at the population level is a helpful metric. At the individual level, doesn't tell me a whole lot. Um, are you overweight? Are you, have you been struggling with your weight? Tell me where you are.
40:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I'm overweight. Um, I'm not, I don't consider myself obese.
40:36 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
40:37 Speaker 02 Um, I'm about 30 to 40 pounds heavier than I want to be.
40:42 Dr. John Delony? Okay. And is your desire, is that based in reality, or is that based in some sort of distorted view of yourself?
40:49 Speaker 02 No, it's pretty real.
40:50 Dr. John Delony? Okay, all right. Your doctor agrees you could, you could use to lose 40 pounds?
40:55 Speaker 02 Correct.
40:56 Dr. John Delony? Okay.
40:56 Speaker 02 And, and the weight gain has caused some real medical issues as well.
41:00 Dr. John Delony? Perfect, okay.
41:01 Speaker 02 It's not just the, okay.
41:02 Dr. John Delony? How long have you been taking, uh, what, what are you taking?
41:06 Speaker 02 Uh, I'm, I'm on Zepbound.
41:08 Dr. John Delony? Okay, great. So, how long have you been on it?
41:11 Speaker 02 Just a couple of weeks.
41:12 Dr. John Delony? What have you seen, what have you experienced?
41:18 Speaker 02 Um, it's pretty magical, to be honest with you.
41:20 Dr. John Delony? Yep.
41:21 Speaker 02 Um, the way that it just turns off all the food noise.
41:26 Dr. John Delony? Yeah.
41:26 Speaker 02 People keep talking about it, but it just, once you've experienced it, it's, it's hard to believe.
41:33 Dr. John Delony? And I'm asking this for the audience as much as, as, as anything else. Um, what have you noticed about other positive side effects?
41:45 Speaker 02 Um, I can't say much yet. I think it's too early to talk.
41:52 Dr. John Delony? What, what I, what I've heard from, so I've had some of them on this show before and these have become some of my close, personal friends. Um, but there are fitness experts across the globe and not influencer dorks, but like actual trainers and actual scientists. Um, many of whom, when these things came out, when GLP-1s came out, they took them not because in any shape or form or fashion, they needed them, but they wanted to be able to speak from insider knowledge, right?
42:23 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
42:24 Dr. John Delony? And to a person, a hundred percent of them have come back in personal conversations to me and said, "I stopped drinking. I stopped worrying all the time." These things, like, basically that weight loss is a downstream benefit of a whole host of other powerful benefits. And so-
42:47 Speaker 02 I'm looking forward to that.
42:48 Dr. John Delony? Yeah, you're like, "Oh, sweet, sign me up for that, too." Um, so let me get to the root question here.
42:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:54 Dr. John Delony? Where in the world does your shame come from that you happen to live in a sliver of history and we have some amazing medications that can, that are pretty transformative?
43:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm trying to figure it out myself, to be honest. Um, again, I'm comfortable that this is the right choice, but I realize that, um, I don't want to tell people. So the expectation is it's going to be visible, right? People are going to start noticing. And if people start commenting about it, my initial reaction is that I don't want to talk about this at all. But I'm not a liar, so I don't know what to do.
43:32 Dr. John Delony? The question beneath it, why do you feel like you need to tell anybody? Why can't you just say, "Thank you so much"? "What have you been doing? Been working hard?" Ta-da.
43:41 Speaker 02 But, but is that true? Like-
43:47 Speaker 02 Yes, I have been working hard, right? But I have been working hard for a very long time and it hasn't been working for me.
43:55 Dr. John Delony? Okay, so you just found, you found different ways that, that it didn't work. And now you found one that did.
44:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think of the, of the core of it is that I feel like I should have been able to handle this myself.
44:08 Dr. John Delony? Where does that should come from? Because that should is a lie. You got dropped into a world ecosystem that your body was not designed to live in. Period.
44:21 Speaker 02 What do you mean by that?
44:23 Dr. John Delony? The human body, from the cellular level to the neurological level, to the physical level, was designed for environments of scarcity.
44:33 Dr. John Delony? All of our brain chemistry is designed to go, "Oh, God, there's apples."
44:39 Dr. John Delony? Once, um, once a year.
44:44 Dr. John Delony? Or let me put it another way. My great-grandmother got a sack of oranges for one Christmas.
44:51 Dr. John Delony? And the thought of having oranges in December was madness.
44:56 Dr. John Delony? It was worthy of a Christmas gift. The Christmas gift they got that year. And now we go to the store and we have oranges stacked in a pile as tall as we are, 24/7/365.
45:11 Speaker 02 True.
45:13 Dr. John Delony? Not to mention Uber Eats and gas stations and, and hyper-palatable foods and hyper-processed, like, we just aren't supposed to live in this environment.
45:26 Dr. John Delony? And I want to applaud you for scratching and clawing and trying so many different paths for so long. What that tells me is you're committed to trying to find ways to be a good steward of your body. That's awesome.
45:43 Dr. John Delony? And now you found one that works. Hooray! Awesome! And nobody else gets a vote.
45:55 Speaker 02 How would you respond? How would you respond to the question of what have you been doing? And I feel angry that people are actually entitled to ask that question of people about people's bodies?
46:06 Dr. John Delony? Yeah, but hold on, hold on, hold on.
46:07 Speaker 02 But how do you respond to that?
46:08 Dr. John Delony? You can choose anger if you want to, or you can choose deep compassion, because you've been there too.
46:14 Speaker 02 True.
46:15 Dr. John Delony? You've had somebody in your life that lost a bunch of weight, and you had to know, because they must have the secret elixir. What's the secret path? The super workout? The atomic diet? Like, what is it?
46:27 Dr. John Delony? And so if somebody asks, take that as a sign that you are a light in a dark place for them.
46:38 Dr. John Delony? And you can just say, "It's a whole bunch of stuff. I'm still working on it, so I don't want to talk about it too much, but it's been a lot of hard work."
46:48 Dr. John Delony? Or just say, "I met with my doctor, and these GLP-1s are magical." And then go on about your day.
46:56 Speaker 02 That's a good way to look at it. I think at the end of the day, I'm generally like a pretty high-achieving person. So I try to excel at everything that I do.
47:05 Dr. John Delony? Do you use the internet?
47:06 Speaker 02 This is one thing.
47:10 Dr. John Delony? Do you?
47:12 Speaker 02 What's that?
47:13 Dr. John Delony? Do you use the internet?
47:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
47:15 Dr. John Delony? Cheater. Do you use a laptop?
47:20 Speaker 02 Correct.
47:20 Dr. John Delony? Cheater. Do you have a smartphone?
47:24 Speaker 02 Yep.
47:25 Dr. John Delony? My granddad was an engineer, and he used a protractor. Cheater.
47:30 Dr. John Delony? Do you drive a car?
47:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:33 Dr. John Delony? Yeah, my great-grandfather had to get around on a horse. Cheater.
47:38 Dr. John Delony? It takes the tools that we have, and every tool we have comes with trade-offs.
47:47 Dr. John Delony? My great-grandparents walked a lot, and so they were thinner and healthier. We drive a lot. We can get places a lot faster. Both of us would say we should trade. Great, cool.
47:59 Dr. John Delony? If you take GLP-1s, you have to have to exercise. You have to work out.
48:05 Speaker 02 I do.
48:06 Dr. John Delony? Okay, you have to lift weights. Great. You have to be intentional about protein and fiber. Great.
48:14 Dr. John Delony? But we just live in a sliver of history where we have this both, this amazing abundance. And if you read the data on global starvation, it has fallen off a cliff in the, in recent decades. Amazing. There's still hungry people, make no mistake. But awesome. We figured out abundance in this little snapshot of history. Cool. We're burning out the soil and all that, but fine. We've, we solved abundance for a while. Great. And that comes at a cost, which is we have light switches in our minds that are not designed to have food everywhere, all the time, 24/7. Especially food engineered by scientists who are trying to flip switches in our mind that make it almost impossible to stop eating. Cool.
48:56 Dr. John Delony? Or as Jon Stewart says, "Science has become amazing solving problems caused by science." Cool. Right?
49:04 Speaker 02 That's true. It's just hard to turn off the noise, right? The noise of like, oh, if you just go keto for two months, it's gonna be fine. Or if you just lift heavier, then you're gonna be fine. If you, and then you try all of those things and it just doesn't work.
49:19 Dr. John Delony? That's right. Correct. The hardest thing is just mostly doing the right thing over and over again for a long, long time. It's hard. It's hard. I'm Exhibit A. It's hard. And so you found something incredible. Great. I don't think you're a cheater. I think you're doing the next right thing for you and your body, and you're not doing it on a whim, and you didn't watch a YouTube clip and be like, oh, yeah, I'm good. Like you went and sat with a doctor, and I don't think other people will get a vote in your life. And I would
49:59 Dr. John Delony? not have one second, this is me personally, of shame about telling somebody that I was on a GLP-1 if I was taking one. And also, I can't control what stories other people choose to take with that information and make up about me. So I'm not gonna try. But I'm not gonna cash in my integrity. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna be a person who just suddenly stops telling the truth or telling my story. But I'm gonna be a guy that can't, I can't decide, I can't make you not make up stories about me. Great. Cool. I'm gonna move on with my life.
50:38 Dr. John Delony? But I guess, hear me say, Amy, I'm proud of you. As a guy who sat at my kitchen table and wept when I first took anxiety medication. I thought I'd failed my son, I thought I'd failed my wife, I thought I'd failed my everything. I wept. And those medications for a short season turned down the noise enough that let me go sit with a counselor and get back into the gym and, and, and, and, and, and, and. I've been there, I get it. And there's also a place just to be of insanely deep gratitude that me and we live in a time with all this abundance and we live in a time when our brains have been hacked and we live in a time when somebody studied, what, is it Gila monster poison or something?
51:20 Dr. John Delony? And came up with these GLP-1s and so far with the right intentionality about what we eat and how much protein we get, how much we lift in weight, whatever. They can be magic for a large swath of a hurting population. Incredible. So I applaud you, sister. I applaud you. Call me back in a few weeks and let me know how you're doing. I would love to keep up with your journey here. I'm proud of you, it's awesome. Hold your head high. We'll be right back. All right, it's the new year and everybody's talking about getting more organized with less clutter, less stress and more peace. Here's one area of organization I want you to focus on this year.
52:05 Dr. John Delony? Your digital footprint. To do this, I recommend Delete Me. Every time you fill out a quick form, grab a discount online, or sign up for some kind of free thing on the internets, your personal information, things like your name, your email, your phone number, your address, all of that stuff gets collected and sold and shared by data brokers behind your back. And over time, all of this turns into a fire hose of spam calls and weird texts and scam emails. Delete Me's team of privacy experts finds your personal information on data broker sites that are selling your data and it gets all of that information taken down. And then Delete Me keeps checking on your Information to make sure it's always gone.
52:50 Dr. John Delony? It's like setting healthy boundaries for your digital life. Because protecting your privacy is part of protecting your peace. It's about organizing everything in your life. So this year, start fresh with fewer distractions and more peace. Go to joindelete.me/deloney for 20% off an annual plan. That's J O I N. Joindelete.me/deloney and start organizing and protecting your peace this year.
53:20 Dr. John Delony? All right, we're back. I've got a money in marriage question. These are anonymous questions that people leave at the Money Marriage Retreats that me and Rachel Cruz put on a few times a year here in Nashville. Here's the question. We've been married 10-plus years and we have two little kids. We live in a rural area and don't really have friends we can call or that we hang out with. Lots of people we know, but no real adult friends for either of us. How the heck do we do adults make friends in small rural areas? As a guy who grew up in suburbs, I moved out to a rural area when I was here in Nashville. Out in the woods, like banjos playing everywhere. And I had to get used to two things.
54:04 Dr. John Delony? Number one, the people around me
54:08 Dr. John Delony? had different lived experiences than I did. And I had to get over something that I didn't even know was inside my chest, which is I thought that I knew more about the world and that I was a little more educated. And I was, I mean, I hate to say it, but I'm probably a little bit better. And that was 1,000% wrong and correct. And so, two things that my wife and I did. Number one, we were uber intentional about generosity.
54:37 Dr. John Delony? That means we were always taking food and stuff to our neighbors. And some of our neighbors are in their 70s. And we've become great neighbor friends with them. We talk about their illnesses. We talk about their dreams. We talk about the cost of land. We talk about the engine that my neighbor's putting in his new truck, his old truck and in his 70s, he's just awesome. We talk about our kids. We talk about everything. But it started with us taking over some homemade sourdough bread. It started with us taking over, like when I get a deer during hunting season, I'll take one over and just give, donate the whole thing to them. It started with, hey, come up to my front porch, let's have coffee.
55:15 Dr. John Delony? With my 60-year-old neighbor who's dying of cancer. And he showed up and it was amazing. It was a blast. And so, number one, we went first and we led with generosity. Number two,
55:28 Dr. John Delony? we started having my kids' friends' parents over all the time. And we are very different and they've turned into dear radical new friends of ours that we love and we care about because we started realizing they've got different lived experiences. They lived in different towns. We all had different jobs, but we all care about mostly the same things.
55:49 Dr. John Delony? We want some peace in our life. We want our kids to do well. We want our marriages to be good and we want to laugh hilarious and tell funny jokes. And we have different values and different beliefs and yada, yada. And it has been awesome. But again, that took us inviting people into our house. And it's been transformative. And so, I can distill it down in two sentences or two little quippy phrases. Go first and be weird. Go first and lead with generosity. Go first and do the invites and be weird. Just be willing to do things that you're uncomfortable with, that you've never done before and have conversations with people you've never talked about before. And open your eyes and realize I'm no better. I'm just different and I want to learn about their world.
56:35 Dr. John Delony? And I'll tell you what, in our life, in my rural community out in the woods, it has changed everything in my life for me, my wife and my kids. Love you guys. Bye.
56:45 Dr. John Delony? All right, let's talk about your marriage. Right now, we have February and October weekends on sale for the Money in Marriage Getaway. It's the best marriage retreat on the planet. Tickets start at $749 a couple. Get yours at ramsysolutions.com/getaway.
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