24. Calm the heck down with Dan Purcell
Dan Purcell: https://getyourmarriageon.com
James Christensen: https://jamesmchristensen.com
About Dan Purcell:
Dan and his wife Emily Purcell are the founders of Get Your Marriage On! They are on a mission to help millions of couples overcome obstacles to significantly improve sex and intimacy in their marriages by making lovemaking incredibly fun and deeply connecting.
Dan is a sex and intimacy coach.. He is the host of the popular Get Your Marriage On! podcast with over 1.6 million listens. He has directly helped thousands of couples enjoy a great sex life and deeper intimacy through his coaching programs, romantic couples retreats, and workshops. He is also the creator of the popular Intimately Us and Just Between Us apps that are used by half a million couples around the world to strengthen their marriage intimately.
Dan and Emily met in middle school and have been married for over 21 years and have 6 kids. Dan loves cracking dad jokes, running marathons, planning the next creative date night with his sweetheart, and enjoys the magnificent outdoors around their St George home.
Website: getyourmarriageon.com
Instagram: @getyourmarriageon
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@getyourmarriageon
Podcast: Get Your Marriage On
Apple App Store / Google Play Store: Intimately Us, Just Between Us
Transcript:
James: Have you ever seen a pattern in a couple where one person is highly critical and the other one is very irresponsible?
Dan: Yes, in my own life.
James: Tell me. You would probably not be the irresponsible one, if I know you at all.
Dan: I don't know if it's irresponsible or not, but before I knew any better, my wife and I had a lot of conflict over sex in our marriage. I had a lot of desire and she didn't, and I would push and she would withdraw. I would be really sweet to her. I knew how to be a great, nice guy and do all the things. I'd write her these elaborate love letters, but looking back, I cringe reading what I wrote her because they're actually subtle attempts at control and manipulation. My thinking at the time was, if only she would just get ahold of her sexuality, embrace her own sexuality, then this area of conflict in our marriage would just go away. Then we'd just have the most perfect, ideal marriage, because we fight about nothing else. That's the only thing we struggle about. Everything else would be great if only she would just do this one thing.
I got this fantastic book. I loved it, loved the author. I think I did the audio first, and I loved it so much I bought the physical book. And I thought, "Emily needs to read this book." It's about embracing your sexuality. She just needs it. So I'd highlight the parts, I'd doggy-ear the corners. I'd put post-its in certain pages and write in the margins, "Emily, read this part, do this part." And I'd set it on her nightstand. It didn't move.
James: But the bigger picture is, was your energetic influence moving her towards or away from where you wanted her to go? Were you making it easier for her to do what you wanted, or harder?
Dan: At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was pushing her away even further.
James: Yeah, that's the thing that I wanted to talk to you about today. How when we're trying to get our partner to do option A, we're actually nudging them towards option B. This happens all the time. It is totally inadvertent and we don't even realize we're doing it, but it happens. A lot of the time when a couple's sitting here on this couch and partner A is complaining of partner B, if partner B would only do this thing, my influence on partner B is that I'm actually nudging them away from the thing I want them to change. It happens so often.
Dan: So I moved the book to the pillow. I double-downed.
James: Because she hadn't noticed it, I'm sure. I'm sure she had no idea what you were up to.
Dan: And then it's back on the nightstand. Anyway, it came to a head. We had a discussion, and I said, "Emily, I really think if you read this book and did the things in there, it would just make things so much better in our marriage." And she looks at me and says, "How in the world do you expect me to sit and read a book? I have young kids. I homeschool. I can barely have a shower to myself every day. I can't even use the bathroom with any privacy, let alone you want me to sit and read a book." For her, it was so low on her priority list. She was like, "Why do you want me to do this? I can't do this right now." So I said, "Fine, I get it. Let's see if we can work this out." We came up with an agreement. It was my idea that I would take over meals for two weeks—all the meal cooking, cleanup, everything, because that's a role she would usually take on. In exchange, it would free up more time in her day, and she would take that time to read the book.
To give this a little more context, we did have disagreements over mealtime because when we have dinner really late, like 7:30 or 8:00, after cleanup and the kids go to bed, it's late. It's 9:00 or 10:00 by then, and we don't have any couple time anymore. So I always wanted meals done sooner. But for those two weeks, guess what? I had dinner done by 5:00 or 5:30 every single day while working full time. And I let her know it, like, "Hey, I can work full time and I can get dinner done on time. And they're good meals. What gives?" I didn't say it like that, but that was the energy behind it, too.
James: The message got through.
Dan: So if she's in the bedroom supposedly reading this book, is she in the room fawning, like, "Oh, my husband, he's so wonderful. He's doing all these things for me. He's making my life better." No, in fact.
James: What you're talking about is zooming out and looking at the system as a whole, instead of just saying, "Well, I took action A, which should have had consequence B," based on a very narrow and oversimplified idea of how people work. Why didn't Emily do what you wanted? How would you summarize what was driving her actions? What was she fighting for?
Dan: She was fighting for herself because the way I had framed the problem is "I have it figured out and you don't. If you would just do this, it would fix my problem." The moment I put myself on that pedestal, we created a hierarchy in our marriage. I am above her, she's below, and I engage with her with that energy. It is not motivating for the person who's being condescended to. They'll fight for their own freedom, their own individuality, every single time, I think.
James: The way I would phrase it is that she was fighting for her freedom or her sovereignty. I see it as a very central drive to how we are as human beings. We long to be free and we long to be in charge of our lives and our decisions. And if someone tries to take that away from me, I will instinctively fight back. I really don't know anyone who yields to that over the long run. People might yield for a limited time, but in the long run, in a marriage especially, I don't know anyone who actually yields to that kind of pressure.
Dan: Right. We don't want to be controlled or dictated by another person. That's not fun. You can't have an intimate relationship with someone that you feel controlled by, or that's trying to control you, or you don't feel free in it. It might be a functional marriage, but if you want a passionate marriage, there's got to be freedom in it.
James: I have this theory that effective ways of having influence on my wife live in the right brain and ineffective ways live in the left brain. The left brain is obsessed with this oversimplified control manipulation that doesn't work on people. It works on objects, but it doesn't work on people. The right brain is capable of seeing people as people. And just understanding this, if I try to influence you, Dan, as soon as I start pressuring your personal sovereignty, your sense of self, you're going to push back because that's what people do.
Dan: I like the phrase, "calm the heck down." That's my mantra. I had to calm the heck down about why I was pushing her so much for this certain outcome that I wanted. Not that it wasn't important to me, it's that part of it is anxiety-driven. I really want this, it matters a lot to me, so I'm going to keep pushing hard to get it. Part of it too is I have an entrepreneurial background. In business life and goals, I'm a high achiever. Everything I've set my mind to, if I push hard enough and work hard enough, I get it. And I think that principle doesn't always translate to relationships or what you want out of other people in relationships. It's not just me, I see this with other people too. That probably goes back to that left-brain, right-brain concept you just mentioned.
James: I have this idea, and sometimes I tell couples, that you each have 80% of the power in your relationship if you use it appropriately. The way I see relationships is most of what I do in my marriage is responding to my wife, and she's also mostly responding to me. We're mostly responding to each other, which means that when I take a proactive step and make a real change, then I can have a lot of power and influence the way the relationship goes. But it has to be me doing something different than what I was doing before. People always say, "Well, I already did that." And I say, "No. What you already did got you where you are." If you have 80% of the power, then you are responsible for setting up the system that you have right now. You're playing a role in it. It's a very common idea for people to imagine they have no power in their relationship: "My wife has all the power, she gets to make all the decisions. I'm just poor little me and I have no power." But realistically, either person can go first in doing the very difficult thing of changing the underlying structure of the relationship. But I agree with "calming the heck down." That's the first step—slowing down and calming enough to see things clearly.
Dan: Right. Because if I'm engaging with my wife out of all emotional functioning, not using my brain, it's very reactive. So calming the heck down allows me—it's not that my feelings don't matter, it's not that emotions don't matter—but it's calming down enough not to make every decision based on emotional reactivity. I can actually think through things a little bit more, a little bit slower. And oftentimes, if I'm slowed down enough, I come up with better ideas of how to approach situations that aren't just knee-jerk reactions to how I'm feeling in the moment.
James: Yeah. Sometimes my first idea is usually a bad idea. Not always, but if I'm feeling regressed, if I'm not doing very well, if I'm upset at my wife, then my first idea is usually a bad one. I can come up with something better, but I have to let that first idea sail on past and wait for the next one to come.
Dan: I am working with another couple. This is a hypothetical situation where he's the higher-desire spouse in his marriage, and she's the lower-desire spouse. For years, he wants her to step up in initiating. He's tired of being the only one making overtures for sex. He wants to be wanted by her. He wants her to step up the initiating. One Saturday, things came to a head. They'd been out of town for two weeks on vacation, visiting family, so intimate time was very limited. Now they're back. He is so ready to go and she is just not in the mood. He says, "Fine, then I give up initiating. I'm sick and tired of feeling rejected, the chronic rejection. From now on, you do the initiating, and whenever you're ready, I'll be here for you to say yes." He just stopped initiating.
So that's the setup. The logic for him is, if I stop initiating, we'll create a void in the marriage relationship, and then she'll step up and do the initiating because I was doing it all the time. She'll realize it's not happening, and then she'll step up and do it. But what's happening in this relationship is all of that pressure for her to now initiate is actually making it even more difficult for her to want to initiate. He's getting more and more frustrated because he's counting the days, "Wait, I said it's your turn to initiate. It's been a week, it's been two weeks, a month, two months. You're supposed to be doing this now." If she had any desire before, now it's almost zero because of the obligation that she has to step in. It goes back to what we're talking about with having our own autonomy. If she initiates, it's like she's giving in, she's capitulating to what he wants. So to assert herself, she thinks it's better off if she doesn't initiate. So they're at this standstill, really gridlocked over this issue.
James: I think there is a way he could do that cleanly. He could say, "Hey, I'm going to take a pause from initiating." But it's the more subtle, nuanced part of it. You hit the nail on the head. The thing that makes it harder for her is that he has set things up in a way where, when she does what he wants, she loses. He has taken a stance of, "I'm the one in control here, and I'm the one who calls the shots, and the shot I'm calling is for you to do this." So he's making it hard, not impossible, but hard for her to do what he wants and hold on to her integrity.
In this case, he's probably pressuring her past the amount of solid self that she has. So what he needs to do is calm the heck down, like you said, and say, "This is what I want, but I'm not going to use my emotionality to try to get it. I'm not going to punish you. I'm not going to nag you. I'm going to treat you really well." That's really the core. It's pretty easy to just ask yourself, "How well am I treating my partner as I go through this process?" I can say, "Hey, I'm not going to initiate for the next month and I'm going to treat you really well." That's a big difference from, "I'm not going to initiate for the next month and I'm going to treat you like crap," and then, "Why didn't you do what I wanted?"
The question is, is the energy I'm putting into the relationship making it easier for my partner to be who I want them to be, or is it making it harder? Honestly, most of the time in most relationships, it's the second one, where we naturally tend to make it harder. I see that as a left-brain problem because the left brain falls into that trap really easily.
Dan: Yes, I like that. "Am I making it easier for my spouse to do what I want or is it making it harder?" Another part of it is, where is my focal point? In that scenario, his point of focus is on her. It's not within himself. In his mind, the only path to success is if she does something. It's very external-focused. If it was, instead, "I am going to stop initiating because it's not good for me. I need to find something else that's better for our marriage than the current setup. I need a break," you see how that's going to be a different energy? It's going to be more self-focused. I think that plays a big role in how couples escape patterns like this.
James: Yeah, and the escape is often, "I'm going to be okay regardless of what choices you make," right? I sometimes talk about how one of our earliest instincts is to use dysregulation to get taken care of. When I'm a baby, I get taken care of by getting dysregulated. As an adult, I also try to do that, and it doesn't work, but we still do it all the time. In the example you're giving, there was some of that there—this idea that "I'm not going to be okay unless you change." He might not be thinking about it that way, but he's definitely doing that. You can make the exact same move accompanied with, "Oh, and by the way, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to treat you really well." And now it's a whole different move. "I'm not going to initiate sex for the next month, and I'm going to have a really good life and be totally okay. I'm not putting my well-being on you as your responsibility. I'm actually taking care of myself, and I'm also making it clear what I want you to do." There's a very different vibe between those two. But to do the second one, I have to give up the fantasy of being able to control my partner.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. And it isn't the answer people want to hear. It's so much harder because it means you have to do the work. He's thinking, "What? She's the one not initiating. I'm the one doing it." And then you have to tell him that.
James: It really is difficult. It's changing brain patterns that have been there for a long time. The brain is designed to work the way it works, and I know certain problem-solving skills, certain patterns, certain ways of resolving conflict, certain ways to try to get what I want. And obviously, none of those have worked, because if they had worked, I wouldn't be here. So it really takes building new pathways in the brain to be able to behave differently. One way I like to think about it is that we don't really get rid of the old pathways. We just add new parallel pathways. And so the way my brain used to work, that option is still there. But now I have another option as well. And if the other option works better than I have a tendency to choose the new option over and over, but I have to build that new pathway before I can use it.
Dan: That's funny. Maybe a metaphor for that: This summer we went to Scotland as a family on vacation. There are seven of us in my family, and we got a rental car that was like a miniature bus. The roads are narrow there, and they drive on the left side of the road. This was my first time driving on the left side. You know where I'm going with this. We ran into some trouble because of that. I won't go into the details, but by the end of the week, I finally got a little more comfortable with the reverse driving in this big car. It takes some practice, it takes a lot of stumbling, but it's that process.
James: It's a really good metaphor. It's like learning to drive in Scotland in a huge van. It's just like that. It's incredibly uncomfortable. It feels impossible. The first time you do it is really hard. The next time is a little bit easier, and then after you've done it for a week, you're like, "Oh, yeah, I know how to do this." That's a really good metaphor. I like that. I'm going to steal that.
Dan: I hit a big pothole and got two flat tires. We hit it hard because we were coming around a corner, a car was coming at us, and I had a knee-jerk reaction, overcorrected, went off the road, and hit a big hole. That was a wake-up call. I had to take this a little more slowly. You're going to hit potholes, and it's just a reminder to take things a little more slowly and stick to the process. You'll figure it out.
James: I really like this metaphor of having to drive on the other side of the road. That's a really good one. I remember driving in England in a rental car, and we were going down this tiny country lane with 12-foot hedgerows on both sides, and I'm doing 40 miles an hour. It's like the car is six feet wide and the road is eight feet wide, and it's a two-lane road. And this huge, full-sized semi-truck just comes the other way. And they're just like this happens every day. I just have to back up. That's just the way it is there. And I'm just like, "Oh my gosh." Meanwhile, the road in my neighborhood is like four times wider than this road that semi-trucks are driving on. It was crazy.
Dan: I think conflict in marriage is a wake-up call that something needs to be addressed in the relationship. Not all conflict is necessarily bad. How you deal with the conflict matters, but the conflict alone, I think, is a stepping stone for your marriage if you let it be.
In our home, we have a guest bedroom, and we had some guests stay overnight. I was cleaning up in there and I stepped over by the foot of the bed and noticed the carpet was wet. I figured maybe our guests spilled a drink or something. A week later, I was in there taking care of something else, and the carpet was still wet. I thought, "This isn't good," but I didn't want to do anything about it. A month went by, and guess what? I reluctantly stepped on that carpet, and it was still wet. I didn't want to do anything about this. I was busy. This was the last thing I wanted to do. Another week goes by, and I thought, "Okay, it's still wet. I think I need to do something about this." It turns out there was a water pipe that runs in the wall. It had a leak, and it caused thousands of dollars of water damage. I had to rip out the carpet and do it all.
I think a lot of marriages are like that. We have a struggle, but we don't want to deal with it right now because it's so inconvenient. It goes unaddressed, and eventually, it turns into a big enough crisis where you have to address it. Or you can be a little more disciplined as a couple and create a ritual, a regular system or process in your marriage to address things. Some of the couples I know that do this really well have created a habit of making time together regularly just to talk and work through things. Couples that do it really well can address issues as they arise while they're still rather small, rather than waiting for things to build up. Then things become a crisis, and it's a bigger job to address. It's that "ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" concept. When couples do that and do that well, I think they're happier. They learn how to overcome issues better. It's so much easier to drive on the left side of the road for a short distance rather than a multi-day journey where you're struggling the whole time.
James: Sometimes I call that more conflict, not less. You need to have more conflict but handle it better. Because what you're talking about with the wet spot is avoiding conflict, which, honestly, I think is the biggest problem in most relationships. Now, when conflict comes, we also don't handle it well, but we avoid the conflict. We don't talk about things, and we don't try to make things better.
Dan: There was a couple that came to my marriage retreat, and they shared this story about the main struggle in their marriage. Things came to a head when she caught him sending text messages, basically sexting someone else extramaritally. It was devastating for her, and he was absolutely embarrassed. When he looks back, for him, it started as a small, innocent thing, and then things got very friendly, very fast with this friend. But he could justify it because she was really closed down sexually in their marriage at the time. He really wanted an outlet, and it just felt so good and so validating that someone else saw him as attractive because he wasn't getting it from his wife. So he could justify it that way.
The end result of that was kind of like a "nuke and pave" of their marriage. It was like, "Okay, we're going to take everything down to the studs and build it back up again." And the conversations they had were about everything we've talked about on this call. It was, "What is it in our relationship? What are our patterns? What are our cycles? How is it that I am reacting to you?" For him, it would've been, "Why is it that I crave this external validation about sex so much that I give up my values to get it?" And for her, it was, "Why do I have such a difficult time with sexuality? What is it about my upbringing, my thought patterns, that make it so that I automatically shut that part of me down? And how is that not only unhealthy for me, but what's the impact it has on my marriage too?" It was those kinds of deep questions that they both wrestled through very patiently together and were able to rebuild. Now they have a very happy marriage where they've overcome that.
James: So it's the willingness to deal with it head-on and the skills to do so. One thing is that it's hard to imagine what "better" looks like. If I was exposed to a certain kind of marriage when I was young, and then I've had a certain kind of marriage, and all my friends have a certain kind of marriage, it's really hard to imagine what caring about someone a lot more looks like. Or what does being a lot more honest and having a lot more healthy conflict look like? What does even healthy conflict look like? If all I've ever known is avoid, avoid, avoid, explode, then what does it look like to actually bring something up in a collaborative way?
Dan: Yeah, that's great. I think some education and help on actual tools is needed. I have on my website a 10-step, step-by-step outline on how to have hard conversations. Step one is "calm the heck down."
James: I knew you were going to say that. I was like, I bet I know what step one is. My number one is "slow down." It's more or less the same.
Dan: I like that. In fact, I say that phrase so much, a friend bought me a sign as a gift that says "Calm the Heck Down." It's a reminder. You can't engage in a conflict when you're emotionally overstimulated. Part of your brain goes offline when your reactive part of your brain—freeze, fight, flight, whatever you want to call it—when that has hijacked the brain, it doesn't work. So self-soothing is a skill. I think that's where some people find a lot of solace in practices like yoga, meditation, prayer, running—things that involve calming that part of the brain down regularly. It's a skill; it's a muscle you can develop.
James: I have a favorite, what I call tactical calming. I think of tactical versus strategic. I was a military guy. Strategic is big picture, when I have time to think, and tactical is in the moment, what do I do? So tactical calming is what can I do right now without disengaging from the conversation? I could go take a 10-minute break and calm myself down, but sometimes I need to deal with something right now.
One way that I do that is I look for three things I can feel outside my body and three things I can feel inside my body. Right now, I can feel the air on my skin, the texture of the couch, and the floor against my feet. Those are three outside. Inside, I can feel a slight pain in my back, a tingling in my face, and that I'm hungry. Three things outside, three things inside. We have this phrase, "come to my senses." What I just did is I just came to my senses in that I'm leaving the land of imagination and fantasy and ideas, and I'm coming into the land of physical reality, which is much safer than the land of ideas. Especially if I'm in a difficult marriage, the ideas I have about my marriage don't make me feel safe. I feel really threatened. But if I come back to physical reality, like I'm sitting on a couch in Northern California, I'm fine. I'm not in a war zone. No one's going to hit me. I'm fine. I need to come into physical reality to feel okay. So that's just one way that I calm the heck down—by coming into my senses, coming into physical reality. Sometimes you can use all five senses, too. You can say, "What do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I feel?" and just go through them like that. But I really like to focus more on what I feel, because I can feel outside the body and inside.
When I first learned I was anxious about 10 years ago, I didn't know I was anxious. I thought I was just good at pretending to be calm, and I kind of convinced myself. I learned I was anxious when I was deployed in the Middle East a long time ago. That's when I started Googling and I found things like meditation and breathing exercises. That was the first time I learned that I could breathe to calm down. It really helps.
There. Should we leave it there?
Dan: That's great.
James: Why don't you tell people where to find you?
Dan: My website is GetYourMarriageOn.com. It has tons of resources. I have a few great resources. One is a mobile app called Intimately Us. It's designed for married couples that want to take intimacy in their marriage to the next level. I also have an Instagram with a lot of fun content. About half of our content is, I guess you could say, adult sex ed. We talk a lot about topics in the context of a marriage and how to just make it more fun. And then the other half is more of this coaching content. How do you develop a solid relationship? How do you overcome conflicts so that the overall climate in your marriage is one where intimacy can thrive?
James: All right. Well thanks for coming on the show, Dan, and I'll talk to you again soon.
Dan: Thank you.
James: All right, bye.
