Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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How do I navigate a life-changing diagnosis when my partner has an invisible disease? And I guess the other part is how do I grieve the unknown?
What's the diagnosis?
Trigeminal neuralgia. Oh, man. So you look it up and it's, you know, number one most painful diagnosis that someone can get.
What up, what up, what up? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show coming to you live from Nashville, Tennessee, taking your calls on your mental health, your emotional health, your marriage, whatever you got going on in your life. All of us are trying to figure out what to do in a world that's lost its freak in mind. That's why I'm here.
Pull up a seat and we'll figure out what's the next right move for you, your marriage, your kids, whatever you got going on. Let's go out to New York City, New York, and talk to Lee. What's up, Lee? Hey, Dr. John.
What's up, homie? Oh, not much, brother.
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Chapter 2: How do I navigate a life-changing diagnosis when my partner has an invisible disease?
I'm in it right now.
Let's hear it, man. What's going on?
Yeah, I guess, you know, I've listened to you for a long time. Really, really love all the wisdom you give, and thank you so much to you guys on the team. But my question, you know, how do I navigate a life-changing diagnosis when my partner has an invisible disability? disease. And I guess the other part is how do I grieve the unknown?
Oh man. What happened? What's the diagnosis?
Uh, trigeminal neuralgia. Oh man. So you look it up and it's, it's suicide disease. Um, you know, number one, most painful diagnosis that someone can get. Um, you know, she was diagnosed a few weeks ago. Um, I work in healthcare in, in New York and kind of seeing the other side of the system and, and,
how, you know, for context, for everyone, it's a severe, shocking pain to one side of the face that is debilitating, puts people on disability. And, you know, navigating people thinking it's stress and thinking it's a period and thinking it's everything else except for the diagnosis. And so we have a diagnosis, you know, but the short term, she's going on short-term medical leave.
So kind of mourning the next month, but not knowing if this is something that's going to respond quickly to therapy or if we're looking at years. And this is somebody incredibly healthy, no medical problems, works two jobs, stepmom to my two beautiful kids, best woman I've ever met in my life. And we're kind of having to deal with the hand grenade dropped a little bit.
Yeah.
Man, she's lucky to have you.
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Chapter 3: What are effective ways to communicate about emotional needs in a marriage?
Seven minutes. There's that game we played when we were kids called Seven Minutes in Heaven where you go French kiss in the closet, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I want you to play Seven Minutes in Hell once a week. Okay. Where you read your list and she reads hers. And I want you to intentionally put some ridiculous things in there. Yeah. But here's what I want you to do. Y'all are going to have to do something hard, which is celebrate life recklessly and grieve at the same time. And the third thing that's even more scary is fear the unknown.
Yeah.
Right. And so when you put all these fears down, when y'all have this time of seven minutes in hell together once a week.
Yeah.
My hope is it's a time of high honesty and high dark humor. Yeah. And that y'all will take a pen and mark off the things that you cannot control. You're not going to make these things go away. But what you're going to do by being intentional about putting a time limit on it, by writing it down and by going through these together and saying, can we control that? We control that.
What you're going to do to your nervous system is remind it, I'm driving. Yeah. And I can't see that far ahead of me. So we're going to slow down, but I'm driving and we are going to turn up the eighties like hair metals and sing our guts out until otherwise. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you bind it and seven, that's a total arbitrary thing. It can be 15 minutes. It can be 30 minutes.
There might be days when she needs less doom castle and more just, I need to, I need you to hold me. Yeah. And so where I'd love you to spend the rest of your energy is how can I love you this week? Yeah. And you are going to get a ringside seat into how true change in marriage happens. Yeah. It doesn't happen with these huge declarations. It happens minute by minute.
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Chapter 4: How can I support my spouse through chronic pain and health challenges?
Part of reconnecting here is you saying, here's what I would love. I would love to do all this stuff. I'm putting it on the table because I love you and I'm honest.
Yeah.
And I'm also surrendering to, this is your body, this is your pain. Yeah. And I will be ride or die, however you want to navigate this.
Every day, man. I take this from her 100 times out of 100. It's tough to not. I know, I know. it's tough to not be able to, you know, I see stories of people not touching their wife's face for a decade on one side. Right. And like, I want to think everything's going to be great when X, Y, and Z happens.
And I feel like the dam is going to break when the summer comes and it's not better in the winter or. Okay. But here's the thing.
I don't feel so tough. Yeah.
There's a famous Amos Tversky quote. He's a famous psychologist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can help improve communication in a strained relationship?
Yeah. I need to look at you in the eye and say five things I love about you. Yeah. And because y'all are, y'all are funny people like me and my wife. I'm going to tell you four things. You're really driving me crazy lately.
Yeah.
Right? And that keeps those simmering frustrations and resentments from taking over. Yeah. Because they'll burn from underneath the leaf pile and then all of a sudden it's an inferno and you didn't realize there was ash down there. And so I'm going to tell you I think you're kind of ridiculous for not, you just kind of just quit making dinner, right?
And y'all can both laugh about that as she's on an IV drip, whatever. And then she can be like, well, I actually think you're letting yourself go a little bit. I think y'all, and it becomes a, we're still one. We're still speaking our language, right? And that's not for every couple, by the way, right? But if that's who y'all are, then let's not lose our humanity.
Here's the best way I can pass it along. My oldest best friend on the planet, A guy I've known for 47 years got in a life altering car wreck the week after he graduated college. And he's been paralyzed ever since. A massive traumatic brain injury. And I remember me and one of our other best friends and his little brother, who's also a close friend.
We were in a, it was a Denny's or an IHOP or something like that in the middle of the night. And we actually had the conversation. hey, we all are ruthless on each other. We can't keep doing that. Yeah. And I'm confident it was his brother that said, no chance. We're not going to start treating him differently now. He's been one of our brothers. He'll always be one of our brothers.
Mm-hmm.
Right. Yeah. And so, but we had the humanity conversation.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How do I help my child develop healthy relationships when their father doesn't model them?
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Sorry, I'm a little nervous.
Oh, you're good. You're good. You're all good.
So I am dealing with some issues with my husband loving me and wanting to be married, but also like kind of not necessarily wanting the responsibility of being a husband.
Tell me more about that.
So the majority of the time, I would say our marriage is pretty good. What does that mean? What does pretty good mean? We have fun together. We do life side by side well together without like much arguments. I mean, of course, there's little tips here and there, but the majority of the time, it doesn't turn into anything big when there is like a small issue.
Okay.
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Chapter 7: What are the signs that my partner is emotionally unavailable?
But he feels like he needs to feel a certain way. And if he doesn't feel a certain way, then he's going to do X, Y, or Z. And instead of taking ownership of, of course I want to be with my wife. Of course I do. Of course I want to be with that woman right there. That's why I married her. And I made up a story in my head about what this was going to look like.
And more importantly, how I was going to feel. And I thought it was a frequency issue. Not that. Now I think it's a quality issue. Yeah. Not that. So now it's a, well, I just got to grieve it and make, and all of that is saying, I'm not willing to deal with my sense of not feeling alive in my own skin. I'm not willing to deal with what is it about me that shows up here that's not well and whole.
So that I can see this woman in front of me who loves me, know this woman in front of me and know she's going through health issues, stress issues, all these other things. And I'm seeing how hard she's working for me. Right.
And I'm going to celebrate the crap out of her, which has a strange reciprocal effect of you feeling like you've got more margin, more peace, which allows you to have more energy too. Right?
Right.
Less stress, less, like, it just gets in this really circular, weird dance.
Yeah.
Right? And so anytime somebody comes to me with, I'm going to give you like a tiered response here, okay? Okay. You've got some really big fears in your chest.
Those have to come out on the table because anything else is just going to be you playing whack-a-mole with feelings and with stories, and you're going to start looking at everything he does to backfill the story you've already made up, which is he's probably going to leave. Or maybe even worse, he's going to stay.
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Chapter 8: How can I create a supportive environment for my spouse during tough times?
Right, here's what I mean. Both of you are creating self-fulfilling prophecies in your house in real time. You have this sense that he's gonna leave based on stuff he said before and probably the things he said touched a real nerve with your life experience, fair? Maybe you got left as a kid. Maybe your folks left either physically or in spirit, emotionally.
Maybe a previous boyfriend left you, right? You've been down this road before, so your body knows what this feels like. And so the story you tell yourself is, I can only be okay if I know for certain he's not going to leave. But you have already convinced yourself you're worth leaving. Because you don't think you have enough sex. You don't think you do it right.
And so if he says, I'm not leaving, your body registers that as a lie. Because you don't believe it. And so then what do you do? You ask more. Are you sure you're not leaving? Are you sure you're not leaving? And he gets further and further away. And at the same time, he's convinced himself. She doesn't do this enough. She doesn't do this in the right way.
She doesn't make me feel dot, dot, dot, dot. Right? And that sense pushes you further away. Right. And so this is a classic case of somebody has to turn the music on and stop, like turn the music off and turn on the lights and just say, hey, let's stop this dance.
Yeah.
Because we're actually creating the thing that both of us are scared of.
Right.
Right. And this is where it gets very un-Hollywood very fast. but it's being as specific as possible.
Right. And I, I've tried to be in, um, I recently had a conversation with him about like, um, because he told me that, that he's burnt out with work and with, um, a relationship, I guess. Um, so I tried to, you know, tell him that like, I think you're putting an effort in areas in our marriage where, um, I appreciate it, but it doesn't help me to feel the love the way that I prefer to.
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