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Welcome to the Thrive Marriage Lab with Restory Counseling, where we help you explore the why behind the what. Because guess what? We believe that your marriage is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be explored and enjoyed. We believe that the more you explore and know your story, the deeper your marriage connection will be. This podcast is now the audio version of our new YouTube channel, Thrive Marriage Lab.

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where each week you can expect us to help you cultivate connection and belonging without the fixing and tips and common things you often hear in the marriage space. So find us on YouTube or listen in.

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At one point in your life, it was the best decision you could make to shut down your emotions. For whatever reason, it was the safest and most logical decision that you could make in order to stay safe in your environment and to just shut down how it felt to be there. Now, these are stories that happen most of the time in our earliest of experiences as kids.

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in our childhood homes, in our childhood experiences, something was unsafe for us to bring or feel our emotions. And at that time, it was the safest and best decision for us to shut off, to not feel those emotions because it was just too much or they would lead to some other kind of issue or danger or tragedy that would have come. So for you, if you are the person in your marriage where you're like, I just don't feel, I just don't.

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I just don't want to, I just don't show up. I have a hard time being present. Things are fine. You know, they're not bad, they're not good, they're not whatever. They're just kind of fine. If you find yourself in that just general plateaued space where you're not able to share emotional connection with your spouse, this video is for you. Welcome to the Thrive Marriage Lab. My name is Chris Bruno and I'm a licensed professional counselor and together with my wife, Beth, and a colleague, Tracy Johnson,

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We post videos to help you understand the why behind the what. Because we believe the more you explore and know your story, the deeper your connection will be. Every single one of us experiences some level of tragedy and trauma in our growing up years. I hear so many times like, oh, well, my parents were good parents. They did the best they could. I have nothing to complain about. I grew up with the best of families, like all that kind of stuff. The fact is that...

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that might have been good, and I do not want to discount how good it was, and it wasn't ever all that you needed growing up. It wasn't all that you needed in order to navigate the world as a human. And so when we come to understanding this idea of emotional unavailability, it's important for us to know that there are moments in our past stories, especially when we're growing up as kids, where as I just said, the best thing for you to do

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is to shut down those emotions, to not feel them. Because to feel them means that you are either too much or too little, that you are going to be unsafe with those emotions, no one's gonna hear you, no one's gonna care for you. And so it is far better for you to live in a place of unavailability, shut down, than to hope that someone is actually gonna come for you or see you or comfort you in the moment.

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That's a really tough place to be as a child because we all want comfort. We all want someone to know what we're feeling. We all want someone to come alongside of us when something hurts or something is scary or I'm anxious about something or I'm sad about something, I'm angry about something. We need an adult to come alongside of us as kids to be able to process and navigate those emotions. The fact is we cannot actually navigate all the tragic things that happen in our lives.

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by ourselves as kids, we need someone else. And so what I wanna say here is that we can't hold off all the tragic moments in our lives. They are going to happen. No matter how regimented we can be, however, you know, bubble life we live, we are going to experience some level of tragedy. What transforms it into trauma, however, is that it is in the moment of tragedy, we don't have the kind of kindness, the kind of presence

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that we need in order to figure that out, navigate that, digest the experience, have some sense of what this is and kind of make sense in our lives and our bodies and our brains and our hearts and emotions. If we don't have that kind of kindness in that moment, that external tragedy transforms into an internal trauma. Now with emotional unavailability, that internal trauma

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that to experience those emotions is too much or dangerous and it is better for us to shut down. So if you are that person who's experienced those kinds of things, or right now you're in a marriage where your spouse is saying, hey, you're emotionally unavailable, I think the invitation that I would have for you is to not focus on what's currently happening in your marriage, though that may be a good thing to still think about, but to really think about, hey, what are some of the stories of my life?

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felt like I needed to shut down, where I needed to become emotionally unavailable just to make it through the day, just to make it through the week, just to make it through the year. And go back to your childhood. Think through what are those moments where that began to happen, where you learned that the pathway of shutting down was the safest and best one for you to take. If you can have that kind of curiosity with yourself and you kind of put some things together, bring that to your spouse.

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start to talk about those things with your spouse. Here's what it was like for me. And I realized now as an adult, what I had to do as a child was to shut down and not feel to the degree that I actually felt back then. And maybe that's part of what's going on with us now. The fact is you probably need someone, some kind of counselor to help you navigate through those kinds of conversations to really start to find healing in that. But gosh, I can tell you how many people I have

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worked with that have just started with a level of curiosity for themselves. For themselves, not current in the present, but to look how the past is informing the present so that you can be in the space with your spouse now, we're going to have to go back and look at the spaces of your past. So if you can have that kind of curiosity and then bring some of those stories to start sharing some of those stories with your spouse, I think that

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maybe shifting, changing, opening up some new possibilities and what it would be like to be present to your spouse, to share with your spouse, to kind of crack open a little bit of that emotion that you have and begin to test out how is my spouse with my emotion. If I do make it available, what begins to happen? So those would be a couple of things that I would say to you, if you are the one who is struggling with being emotionally unavailable, take those couple of steps.

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and move on to the next video and we will see you there, but hopefully you begin to share some of those stories with your spouse as well, and they will be able to listen to some of those stories that you're sharing with a posture of curiosity rather than the anger of, why aren't you emotionally available now? So my hope is to take you to the why behind the what. Always, I will see you in the next video.

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If you like this, there's more where that came from. Go to Thrive Marriage Lab on YouTube to check out all of the marriage resources we have for you. We are so committed to helping you develop a deeper and more connected relationship that we have created 12 free curated date guides to walk you through one year of good.

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dates that we believe take you beyond your average date night to the kind of connection you really want. So head over to restory.life/thrive-dates or just look in the show notes to subscribe to get those for free in your inbox for one year. And if you're curious about us, you can find us over at restory.life where we look forward to hearing about how your marriage continues to grow. See you same time, same place.

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next week.