Overcome - A Mental Health Podcast

Healing a Loveless Marriage: Larry Bilotta’s 40-Year Journey to Self-Love

• Episode 24

Share episode

In this powerful episode of Overcome - a Mental Health Podcast, host Travis White sits down with marriage expert and author Larry Bilotta.  Larry shares his personal journey through a loveless marriage and the profound impact of childhood experiences on adult relationships. He emphasizes the importance of understanding one's upbringing and how it shapes marriage dynamics. The discussion covers themes of self-love, the influence of family, and the necessity of overcoming fear to foster healthier relationships. Bilotta introduces concepts like the Chaos to Purpose Scale and the significance of self-reflection and writing in personal growth. He also addresses the stigma surrounding mental health and the need for awareness in navigating relationships.

Listeners will learn:

  • How childhood programming shapes adult relationships
  • The chaos-to-purpose scale and how it affects marriages
  • The difference between hard-natured and soft-hearted partners
  • Why self-love is the gateway to relational healing
  • Practical tools to shift from fear to love—like the powerful “25 Words” exercise

Whether you're in a struggling relationship, healing from past trauma, or seeking to understand yourself and your partner more deeply, this episode is a must-listen.

Listen and share, let's take a step forward and end the stigma.

Download Larry’s FREE guide: 7 Ways You’re Pushing Your Spouse Away Without Knowing It — a must-read for anyone wanting to save their relationship.
larrybilotta.com/7ways

Explore Larry’s full marriage-saving resources at:
youcansavethismarriage.com

Grab Larry’s book:
"This Is Not the Woman I Married" — a must-read for men struggling to make sense of their partner’s emotional withdrawal or transformation.
📖 Available now on Amazon

Watch powerful relationship videos on his YouTube channel:
youtube.com/larrybilotta

Follow Larry on social media:
• Facebook: facebook.com/MrLarryBilotta
• Twitter: twitter.com/LarryBilotta

Shop Merch:

https://overcomepod.com/shop

Follow Overcome - a Mental Health Podcast

Listen to us

Want to have a real conversation about your mental health? Fill out this form!

Travis White (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Overcome a mental health podcast, a place where you can freely share your mental health stories. I am very excited for tonight's guest. We are speaking with Larry Bellotta. He is the author of This Is Not the Woman I Married, which is out now on Amazon. Larry, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

Larry Bilotta (00:22)
Thanks, Travis.

Travis White (00:24)
And I just want to get right into business here and have you start us off by sharing your story on kind of just living through a loveless marriage and what that looked like.

Larry Bilotta (00:41)
So the Loveless Marriage starts when Larry and Marcia get married in 1974. That's the year they impeached Richard Nixon. so the start of 1974, Larry and Marcia don't know anything about where they came from, why they are the way they are. And they start fighting like right away.

And the reason they start fighting right away is because Marsha is raised to fight. She was literally raised by a mother and father who got angry. I was raised by a mother and father who shut down. And that's my programming. My little subconscious is all built for shutting down in trouble. Hers is built for fighting in trouble. So you bring those two people together, what's going to happen? One's going to shut down, the other's going to fight. And so that's going to be a problem. And starting in 1974,

That was a problem and it kept on going. And so what did I have to overcome? What I had to overcome is I had to overcome my fear. And my fear was a big thing that governed my life because, so my parents didn't talk about emotional things. They didn't talk about why they did what they did. That's not something I had, I could learn from them. They weren't gonna teach it to me. So.

What started to happen in 1974 was we started to fight, but at the same time, it became real easy to see that I couldn't leave her and she couldn't leave me. Now, why couldn't you leave? Because our parents both gave us the instruction that you stay married and miserable. Now, her parents were outwardly miserable. That's what the fought fighting was. My parents were inwardly miserable. That was the shutting down. And so I had this...

at the time I couldn't know that. And the reason I couldn't know that is because I think the most important idea that I can share with the people who listen to this Overcome podcast is that childhood makes marriage. Childhood makes marriage. like, well, what? And I'll tell people that, I'll talk to people on the phone. I'll say, did you ever hear that childhood makes marriage? They go, no, I get that answer.

No, I never, never heard that. I've heard people say, I kind of heard it, but I didn't really know what it meant. Right? And that's because it's not explained. Childhood makes marriage, needs an explanation. Well, what does it need? It needs an explanation that when you have a childhood that has turmoil in it, that you're going to grow up and that turmoil, which is containing your subconscious, is going to pick up, go all through your years.

And when you get to be about 35 years old, 40 years old, the chaos is going to come for you. And how is it going to come? What's going to come with the way you were given that the childhood messages? And so when you get in a difficult marriage, like I was in a marriage with a woman who was literally raised to fight, I was raised to shut down and not fight. And so there's like, look at that basic difference there. So if somebody would have come and

started to talk to Larry and Marcia at the time and ask, why are you two getting married? You're programmed to fight and he's programmed to shut down. Why are you doing this? Because that's what you're going to do. Well, that wasn't all we going to do. What I was going to do is I was soft-hearted. She was hard natured. And that's another thing we didn't know. I was soft-hearted. She was hard natured. Well, what does that mean? Hard natured goes with the fight program. Hard natured goes with the in your face. I'm going to

tell you what's wrong with you. I'm gonna criticize you. I'm gonna blame you. I'm gonna do things outwardly to let you know that you're wrong. And so what do I have? I have the lying and the sneaking and the hiding program. So why am I lying, sneaking, hiding? Because my parents did that. So I remember something like when I was about five, six, seven years old, I would hear my father tell me privately, you know, if...

we'd have more money if your mother didn't drink so much, because my mother was an alcoholic. And then privately, my mother would take me aside later, and she'd say, you know, we'd have more money if your father didn't, didn't bat on the horses so much, gamble so much. So they were telling to their kid, they were telling things that they really couldn't talk about to themselves. They couldn't talk about it. So they hid things, they lied, and they kept things inside. And so that was my message.

My message is don't confront anybody, go behind their back and do everything behind their back. Well, in the confrontational world of Marcia, that's a horrible sin. Hiding and lying, woohoo, that's killable by death. So I had to do something, I had to learn what was I doing? Why was I doing this? Because she's accusing me of lying. I'm not a liar. Well, you are when you're soft-hearted. When you're a soft-hearted man, you have no ability to confront.

You have no ability to tell things that you're convicted about, things you're certain of, things that you say, like, I'm going to tell you this, and you might be upset with this, but it doesn't matter. I just want to tell you what I believe in. That's what a strong, soft-hearted man can do now. But at the time, I was a soft-hearted man, and I wasn't strong, because I was raised by these two soft-hearted people who are hiding everything.

So what was I going to do? I was going to do what I was raised to do. She was going to do what she was raised to do. And so that's really a graphic illustration because the backdrop of that is both of our mothers and fathers each gave us the message, stay married and miserable. Don't ever divorce. Stay married and miserable. Don't leave. Stay married and miserable. So when I say childhood makes marriage, what I'm saying is whatever happened in your childhood is going to be what's going to happen in your adult life.

So when you marry, when you couple up with somebody, that's coming with you. And so childhood makes marriage. So what's marriage? Marriage is not something children do. Children don't do marriage. Childhood makes marriage. Nothing else makes marriage, childhood does. And so when I'm talking about childhood, I'm talking about the first messages, the messages of the first 10 years. And so I have people who talk to me and they want to talk to me about their current life, their adult life.

the things that they're doing right now. And they're telling me, my father became a lot more mild and easygoing when he became older, right? And none of that matters. All that matters is what happened in the first 10 years. The first 10 years are still with you. And so we want to find out what happened in the first 10 years, because that's 55,000 hours of time. That's 16 hours a day for 10 years. You're awake, getting all those messages, right? All that time.

And so as you go through all that time, you can't keep an inventory of what was said to you. You can't remember it all, right? So what can happen to people during those 10 years? Just a thousand things can happen. Like you can't possibly know what happened other than the things you remember. And what do you remember? The most emotional things. The things that were really staring to you, bothered you, frustrated you, upset you. And so what we have is we have really kind of two kinds of people.

We have people that are very strong and we have people that are very soft. So hard natured and soft natured. And these two kinds of people, they process life very, very differently. And so Marcia was very hard natured and everything about her was very strong. And she was also very private and I was very public and I was very soft. I want, so what's the nature of soft hearted man? Soft hearted man cares what people think.

He cares what people believe. He cares who likes who, who's mad at who, who's in a bad mood. That's what he cares about. What does a woman care about? Who's hard-natured? She cares what's right, what's wrong, who's on, who's off, who's in, who's out. It's very final. The hard-natured person is always thinking about what's on, what's right, what's broken. So we start this 1974 marriage and we're...

24 and 22 or something like that. And when you're 24 and 24, 24 and 22, it's like being in your teenage years, Because 30 is a new 20, right? And so you really don't know anything. You don't know anything at all. And so what I had to do is I had to stay and learn. And what did I have to overcome? Well, in the beginning, it looked like I had to overcome a person named Marcia. But I didn't have to overcome a person named Marcia. I had to overcome myself.

And what was myself? Myself was this guy who's living a fearful life, who's feeling insecure, who's feeling doubtful, who's worried, who's, you know, like, oh, who's mad at me? Who doesn't like me? Right? I'm concerned about all of the same, right? Because I'm soft-hearted, right? But she didn't have any of that. She didn't struggle with any of that. There's nothing to her, right? Because if she really didn't like you, she'd bat you away real fast, because that's what the hard nature people do, right? So...

I had to learn all of that over the next 40 years. But the first part of the story was the 27 years, the 27 years of marriage made now. And then the 28th year, I fell in love with myself and I fell in love with my wife. And why could I do that? As I started to love myself finally, I remember 27 years is a long time. I finally started to love who I am. I've started to love my soft nature. I'm starting to love that.

that I'm not a bad person, I'm not a condemnable person. And so as I start to love myself, I start to feel a more certain orientation to how I live my life, how I think my thoughts and how I feel about what I'm thinking. So as I'm starting to live that way, she starts changing. And the reason she starts changing is because she's a reactor. And so when we started, I was a reactor and she was a reactor.

And she reacted to whatever I did and said, I reacted to whatever she did and said. And those reactions were, they are never good. So that's the way we start. And as the years go on, I started to learn that I need to turn into somebody I call a creator. Because what a creator does is they create with their mind. They create in the way they think, in the way they're thinking, a new way of what's the world call it? They call it a paradigm.

I always thought there was a weird word, paradigm. But what it is, it's a system that you operate on, like an operating system. And so when you have a paradigm shift, you change the operating system. And so that's really what I was doing. I was changing how I thought about myself. By changing how I thought about myself, the more I started to love myself, the more my confidence grew, and the more my enthusiasm for life grew.

And so that's really what the overcoming was. The overcoming was I was overcoming what I was raised in. Because now it's time to give you my chaos to purpose scale, because now I'm talking about chaos kids. And so the reason I made this scale is because I was talking to people and as I did, I didn't understand where they were. And I I developed a scale so I could understand where are they? Right? Well, they're somewhere at the top or somewhere at the bottom.

And so what I did is I defined the numbers this way. 10, nine, eight is purpose. You're raised on a purpose to chaos scale. Purpose is the top. And purpose is where you're given great values. You're giving values like commitment and loyalty and service and humility and kindness and sharing. All that stuff comes in when great parents raise you, right? Because you're seven, six, five, four, you're a kid, you're ready to let everything in. And so these are the values that you let in. Great parents give you great values, right?

So now you're a nine or now you're a 10. And so down at the bottom of the scale, chaos starts at five. It goes five, four, three, two, one, zero. And that's where the chaos neighborhood is. And where you are on that scale depends on how much abandonment, how much abuse, and how much neglect you got. And so abandonment, abuse, and neglect is what happened to you. What happened to you is I was abandoned, I was abused, I was neglected. Well, the more you get of that, the lower you go on the scale.

So if you marry somebody and they has have these troubles abandoned abuse neglect, you're marrying a cast kid So you might be a ten But now you're to marry a two or a one or a zero, right? And some of these families because that's really what you're marrying, you know, childhood makes marriage Why does chair hold make marriage because you don't marry a person you marry a family And you always got to remember you're marrying a family So a man if you get a girl

You're not just getting that girl. You're getting the whole family. You're not just getting the girl. Right. And so the guy who's in love and naive, he doesn't know any of that. He doesn't know he's marrying a family. He just think, well, that's her mother. That's her father. And and so when you marry a family, you're getting a whole family system. So what if you get a family that's based on meanness, a family that's based on alcohol?

family that's based on parties, a family that's based on a super social life, a family that's based on criticism, right? There's all kinds of family systems that you can marry into, right? And when you're naive and you're young, you don't know any of that. Like, I'm marrying a family? Gosh, do I really want to marry a family? So that's the big thing you're struggling with when you're a kid. And when I say you're a kid, when you're 20, you're a kid. When you're 25, you're a kid.

So all of that is part of what I had to learn. I had to learn because in that 27 years, I finally got to this place where I finally really loved who I was. And when I loved who I was, then my wife could feel, Marcia could feel that something had happened. She didn't know what happened, and she was suspicious of what happened, but she started to really change the way she treated me. Why she changed the way she treated me? Because she's a reactor.

What do reactors do? They react to everything that's out in the world, right? So I like to talk about what are people reacting to. People reacting to the seven energies that are coming out of you. Seven energies are coming out all the time. So the first three are easy to know. My mood, my attitude, my feelings. Those are really easy to know. My mood, my attitude, my feelings. And once you have those three, you can start to say, wow, I think I need to change them. Why are you not aware enough to change them?

You're not aware enough of your mood. You're not aware of enough of your attitude. You don't need to know what your feelings are. Just say you don't know. Right? So those are coming out of you. Along with those three are another three, which is my energy. My energy is coming out of me. Well, what is my energy? Well, I don't know that either because I don't have one of my five senses to tell me about it. Right? Another one is my sensitivity. My sensitivity is something I'm not. mean, like, am I sensitive? Right? You can't even monitor that.

You can't even measure it in any way, right? But sensitivity is coming out of you. Then another one is called your frequency. Your frequencies, now we're getting really into energy. Because when you talk about your frequencies, there's nothing you have that can measure your frequency, right? You go into a room and you can't monitor the frequency you're giving off, right? But the last one, the seventh one, is called your vibration. And your vibration is what people latch onto. Like, I'm thinking about...

giving off bad vibes. They know that. They know that term, giving off bad vibes. And so what are these seven energies? The seven energies are what you have to give out. And what you don't know is things can attach to the energies and go out. So the energy of a mood, okay, that's one of the energies. What attaches to the mood? Anxiety, fear, doubt, worry, struggling, failure.

Poor self-image, right? All those things attached to the mood, right? Or to a sensitivity. What attaches to a sensitivity? All kinds of things could take anger, resentment, criticism, blame, right? You can keep all that inside, but it doesn't matter because the energies are carrying it out. And it's going out and everybody can feel it. Like, there's something about that guy I don't like, right? That's the kind of things people say. There's something about that guy I don't like that, right?

Travis White (17:11)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (17:16)
Well, what people are doing is they're picking up your energies and they're making decisions. Now, they don't tell you about their decisions, but they're making decisions internally, privately, secretly, and they think they're making them, right? But what you don't know is that they're making those decisions based on what they're getting from you. And that's what people don't know. And so when we talk about childhood makes marriage, what happened in childhood? What the heck happened there? Right? Did you have an angry father?

Because if you did, that anger is in you today. You're an adult now, but the anger is still there. Maybe you had an alcoholic in your family, and when you have an alcoholic, that's a very unpredictable thing. Because we have all kinds of alcoholics, all kinds of, like we have a very sober alcoholic, a comic alcoholic, a mean alcoholic, a sorry alcoholic. We have all kinds of people in all states they get in.

Well, when that's happening to you, that's all story in your subconscious. It's all going down there. Well, if it's all down there, what's going to happen when you go and you grow up and you become 30 years old, 40 years old? What happens? That's still there. The same messages. Those child is going to make your marriage. And if you think, you know, because I'm talking to people when they call me, the reason they call me is because their marriage is falling apart. That's why they call me like.

People that are happy, that are both raised at the top of the scale, two 10s, or a 10 married to a nine, right? They have a little difficulty, a little disagreement or something. They work it out. They go to a marriage seminar and they work it out. they're happy again. So it's kind of like unfair. Like, why did you both get good homes and I didn't get a good home? Why'd you get that, Because childhood makes marriage, right?

So I'm trying to spread the idea that childhood makes marriage because I want generations of people, because every 20 years we get another generation, right? I want the generations to get the idea that childhood makes marriage. It makes it, right? And if you want to have a marriage that you can be happy in, you've got to do something about what happened to you in the first 10 years. And so that becomes the question, what do you do about what happened to you in the first 10 years? And so my method was messy and sloppy.

Travis White (19:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (19:30)
and very convoluted. It was the whole idea that, and I learned this much, later, I had to leave the world of fear and I had to move to the world of love. And what is the world of fear? The world of fear is a thousand words, a thousand words that we all know what they are and we don't like any of them. Anxiety, fear, doubt, worry, blame, right? It goes on and on, a thousand, right? That's the world of fear.

And all those words represent the world of fear. When you go into the world of fear, nothing's going to be right for you. Nothing. Everything's going to be convoluted and strange. Then we have the world of love. And what is the world of love? Well, that's easy. That's thousand words in the English language that we know. And we happen to love all those words. Kindness, love, gentleness, self-control, forgiveness, beauty, love, right? All those words of love we love. And we want to be around them, right? So...

We don't know right now how do we get out of the world of fear and move to the world of love. We don't know how to do it because we go to religion for that reason. That's why people go to church and join all these different religions because they don't know how do I move from fear to love because when I talk to people they all tell me that they're living in fear. When I tell them about fear to love they know they're living in fear and they don't even know what the fear is. They don't even know how to

Well, can tell you what my fear is, they can't really do that very well. Because when you're in fear, everything's convoluted, everything's strange. But you don't want to stay there, you need to get out. And so when I'm talking about the idea of getting out of fear and getting in the love, it's really not somebody that, it's not something the person you marry fixes. The person you marry can't fix that you're going to leave fear and move to love.

person you marry can't solve that. The person you marry doesn't even want to deal with that. The person you marry would like to love you and be loved. That's what they want. You know, I came up with this little four box picture. It's called real dad, real mom, real wife, real husband. All right. So I use these because I'm trying to simplify everything.

And I'll give you the real dad definition. The real dad definition is I'm consistently tough but fair. I show a genuine interest in my children's challenges, opportunities, and joys in each of my unique children. That's a real dad. Why? Because each child's unique and they know it. In fact, great coaches know this. Each player is unique. Well, a great parent says, a great father says, each child's unique.

And so the challenges, the opportunities and the joys, I really tune into those because every opportunity that's coming up every day is an opportunity to tune in to my, what am I showing a genuine interest in? I'm showing a genuine interest in an opportunity my kid comes up with. Coming up with something like, I want to do this, but I'm afraid, right? I want to try this, but right? And so they're dealing with stuff that's like that, that's that a real dad should tune into.

And so that's what real dad reads like. Tough affair, right? But when we come to real husband, I'm protective but compassionate. I do everything in my power so my wife can feel emotionally safe, number one, financially secure, number two, and free to be herself. That is what women want. They want that. They want emotionally safe, financially secure, and free to be herself. And that's what women complain about all the time.

because they have a husband who's living in fear and the husband can't support free to be herself when he's living in fear. So I grow each day and by understanding her needs because they are my first priority. So that's what this sounds like, real husband, real wife, right? So there's a real mom and a real wife definition on there as well. So I give this to people because once you have it, it's a very simple idea that you can

Remember, I want to be a real dad. When you start to say I want to be a real dad, you start to well, what does that mean? Oh, this is what it means. I want to be that guy. So I learned all this by being married to a very, very hard, impossible to understand woman. And without her, I couldn't have overcome this. I couldn't learn these things. And the reason why is because a painful person, a painful teacher is a really good teacher.

Travis White (23:40)
Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (24:00)
Because what they're doing is they're pushing you to your limits. And then you're going to your limit and then you're finding like, I think I can do this. Then they push you again and they push you to a limit. And then you think I can do this. So that's really what I actually made it through 40 years with her before she died in 2019. And she was a great teacher. And I could never replace what she did.

Travis White (24:09)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (24:24)
Because she made all this kind of learning possible for me.

Travis White (24:28)
And what did your relationship at the very end like with her look like?

Larry Bilotta (24:32)
⁓

What it was, it was kind of a... It was almost like a memory lane kind of thing. Like, when we were this way, I was feeling this way. And so, she didn't have a lot of words to explain things, because she wasn't really a chatty person. But she talked in very short sentences.

and she said, you know, I was crazy about you until you got crazy. That would be her way to say it. I was crazy about you until you got crazy. Why did I get crazy? Because I was so fearful. You know, a fearful person really gets kind of crazy. ⁓

Travis White (25:08)
yeah, yeah, can

vouch for that. I have, I struggle with anxiety, so I know what it's like to be fearful. ⁓ But you mentioned a lot of like self-love, like what did your journey look like for to kind of start loving yourself?

Larry Bilotta (25:14)
Uh-huh.

So what I was looking for was how can I finally feel good right now? How can I feel good myself? And so when I'm looking, I'm looking through all kinds of spiritual things, Christianity and Buddhism and the Maharishi and all these thought systems. And what I was looking for all the time

even going to marriage seminars myself or different kinds of church events if they were church events or self-help kinds of events, you know, where they get all the kinds of people in the room, right? And when you go through those things, you learn something in everything you go to. And they all affect you in some way. They all kind of turn some idea into Because really, that's all we have. We have ideas.

We don't have anything else. We don't have dogs and cars and spaceships. We have ideas. And so everything is an idea. And because everything is an idea, when you go to a seminar, you go to have some improvement thing, you're going to get ideas. You're going to get a way to think about yourself. And, you know, I almost I almost title my book, Screwed from Youth. I always title it screwed from youth.

Travis White (26:43)
you

Larry Bilotta (26:46)
But that would have been a very good title because it was very negative.

Travis White (26:49)
you

So when somebody's like on the brink of losing their marriage, what are the first steps for them getting back in line to work that marriage out?

Larry Bilotta (27:04)
So it looks like it takes two to tango. It looks like you got to give 50-50. That's what it looks like. The world says that. But it's not that. It's you've got to become a happy person yourself. You've got to... Actually a phrase that the world's got. You got to work on yourself. And they say that a lot. You got to work on yourself. I'm working on myself. That doesn't mean anything. It has no meaning.

has no meaning I work on myself. But what does mean something is I'm finding ways to like who I am. I'm finding ways to like what I think. I'm finding ways to accept what I believe and start to think about the kinds of things that make me what do I believe in? Why do I believe it? What do I believe in? Why do I believe it? That's a really good thing to work on yourself. What do I believe in? do I believe it?

You really can't get very far if you just think all by yourself in your head. But as you put things down on paper, when you write things down over and over again, you start learning things like, why did I write that yesterday? When you start to do that, you start to learn from what you wrote, because the thoughts stay still. The ideas stay still. And because they stay still, you can now think about what you just wrote down. So what do you believe, and why do you believe it?

Travis White (28:13)
Thanks for

It's like you have to take a deep dive into things and actually think them out instead of, cause like sometimes to me, a thought is just a thought and that thought's most likely just gonna pass if I don't, like you said, write it down.

Larry Bilotta (28:30)
That's right. If you don't write it down, it won't hold still. That's why the world, say, if it's not written, it's not real. That's why the whole legal business, the whole legal thing, it's got to be in a document. It's got to be on paper. Because if it's not on paper, it's moving around. It's moving all over the place. Because that's all we have is ideas.

Travis White (28:42)
Yeah, it's gotta be there.

Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (28:51)
So these 40 years was a school for me to get me to become what colleges try to teach. Colleges try to teach in some kind of structured way with credits. They try to teach people to become psychologists. And people ask me, are you a psychologist? I said, no. I was trained by the toughest, roughest woman in the world. Right? No college teaches that.

Travis White (29:21)
No, that's for sure

Larry Bilotta (29:25)
So the job of learning is the job of being in pain because nobody learns when they're happy. You really don't learn. You go to the happiest place on Earth, Disneyland, you don't learn anything there. There's nothing there that you can learn. But when you go into a very difficult relationship, that's the greatest place to learn. A tough relationship that you don't understand and you're frustrated by and you're

You're hoping for something happy and you're not getting it and you're not getting it and you don't know why. So when you're there, you've got to find a way to start to feel good about yourself. What do I feel good about? What do I actually like? And so if you write down, I know in those years, I had yellow legal pads. So yellow paper on legal pads, right? And I had those legal pads and I think I had maybe like a hundred of them. And I would write,

on that page after page after page. What was I writing? I was writing about what is this? Why is this happening to me? If this is happening and that's happening, what does it have in common with this and this and this? Well, now I'm starting to learn. I'm starting to learn because I'm writing it down and I'm making it stand still. And that really did a lot. That did a lot to help me discover who am I and what do I believe about myself? Why do I believe that? That's not easy to answer.

What do I believe and why do I believe it? That's not easy to answer at all. Right?

Travis White (30:49)
Yeah, it's my friend was asking me, you know questions about like religious stuff and he was this was all through text and he was like, well, he asked that exact question Why do you believe that? And in that moment, it was really hard to sit down and think you know, why do I really believe this and I found myself like searching like

scriptures and stuff that were available to me and totally thinking it out before I wrote back to him to explain why I believe what I believe.

Larry Bilotta (31:26)
Okay,

so you know, when you when you're using text to have a deep religious conversation, it was really hard to do.

Travis White (31:33)
Yeah, yes, it's

very hard to do. So it was, I mean, it all turned out well in the end and it's basically him just asking questions, but it was very hard to do, to have a deep religious conversation through text.

Larry Bilotta (31:38)
you

You did that.

Travis White (31:52)
Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (31:54)
You know, I talk to couples, well not couples, because I work with one half of a couple. I work with the stayer. I don't work with the lever. The lever leaves, the stayer stays, and the stayer wants answers. So that's what I'm talking to. So everything I know about levers is from stayers. They're the ones telling me all about it, And so the stayers, they tell me that they get very fearful.

Travis White (32:13)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (32:18)
when the person they marry is doing terrible things. And by the way, when I'm talking to stayers, they're usually raised at the high place in the scale. They're married to a person at a low place on the scale, like a nine married to a two, or a 10 married to a zero. And so when you have those people of completely different values, you know, I'm calling them values, they don't like me calling them values because...

So I'm saying lying, cheating, stealing, fighting, I call those values. They don't call them values. At the top of the scale, they don't call them values. They call them problems, but they don't call them values. But the reason the chaos kids value those things so much is because that's the only thing they gave. They were given. They were given like, if you want to fight for yourself, you need to stand up and push the other person away.

You need to lie to other person. You need to make the other person look bad. It's a real competitive bottom of the scale. It's really a tough, tough place to be. But if you think about it, our prisons are full of people at the bottom of the scale.

Right? What's in prison? People who have failed in all parts of life. Over and over again. Right? And so what has to happen? The courts and the police have to get involved and put them in a prison. Right? Why? To keep the rest of us safe.

So what they do is they mark prisoners with a thing called a felony. And when you find out what a felony does to you, wow, you can't even function in society if you got a felony, right? But that's really what we're doing. We're really scarring prisoners forever because we're telling them, you you can't get better and you're a felon. Like, that's like, wow, what a horrible place that is to be.

And I wouldn't even go into my experiences with prisoners, but.

Travis White (34:12)
So I want to go back to like when your merch first started and the fights were fighting was starting and you were finally know starting to kind of butt heads and Figuring each other out. What's what's going through your mind at that time? Like what? Are you? Like what struggles are you dealing with like mentally or?

Larry Bilotta (34:38)
So all I have at the time is I have shut down. That means don't say anything, don't confront anything, don't, don't, don't, a lot of don'ts. That's what I had. And I'm trying to have a conversation with her, but she's got an idea of what she wants. And she's trying to force me to believe her idea.

and it's too forceful. I can't accept it because it's given to me in a style I can't handle. And the kinds of ideas that I had in my head were chaotic and erratic and I'm just trying to find happiness and I'm thinking you're the problem, you're the reason I'm not happy. If you made me happy, if you did the things I wanted you to do and you start to praise me and like me and

and admire me and give me all these things I want then I would be happy. My happiness comes from out here. My happiness doesn't come from in here. There's nothing in here. It's all out there. That's what I believe. I believe it was all a belief in the world. That's why you got married. You got married because somebody out there would make you feel good in here. Well there's nothing more wrong about that idea. You know could pick all kinds of things. It's just wrong. Somebody outside you cannot make you

feel better about yourself. Right? The reason you feel bad about yourself is because of something inside. And because we don't understand what inside is, we don't know what that is. But it's in your mind and we don't know what a mind is. Because has anybody drawn a picture of a mind? No. We don't know what it is. But the mind, we have the word and that's all we have. So we have a mind and all we do is we think it's a brain but it's not a brain.

The mind is where ideas are. And so when you start to think and write down your thoughts and you start to slow things down, that's really another thing that writing does. Writing slows ideas down so you can examine them and start to come back and look at them again. And when you see something that starts to stir you, you start to feel good about. Like I think I did an exercise is what did I feel good about in grade school?

Right? Okay, so I'm in my adult life. I'm like 24 years old and I'm writing what did I feel good about in grade school? And so I'm writing whatever I thought was a success in grade school and I didn't have a lot of successes in grade school, right? But what I'm doing is I'm writing things that I think could make me feel good. This could make me feel if I write this down, this will feel good. Right? And so you think, well, that can't do anything, but it can.

Why because you're feeling good about something in yourself That's the most important thing and what am I trying to do? I'm trying to get out away from this world where the world decides how I feel That's what i'm trying to leave. I'm trying to leave the place where the world out there decides what I feel in here And so when you think about that idea, I feel like travis you think about the things you struggle with when you think about the world out there It's going to make me feel good in here You know how wrong that idea is

Travis White (37:45)
it's totally wrong. And we're raised to think that so true. Over the past year, I've been in therapy and had to overcome a lot of internal struggles for mental health and some physical struggles I was dealing with. I have a seizure disorder on top of my depression and anxiety.

Larry Bilotta (37:46)
I... I do.

⁓ huh.

Okay.

Uh-huh.

yeah.

Travis White (38:08)
And I've really taken a step to learn to love myself. And so when you say like, yeah, the world out there makes you feel a certain way. It's very true. And it's like, no, you need to learn how to love yourself and bring it back to you.

Larry Bilotta (38:25)
So that's where we get back to what do I believe and why. When you ask what do I believe and why, do I believe that the people outside can make me feel something inside? Do I believe that? And if I believe it, why do I believe it? Well, because this is the way my mother did it. This is the way my father did it. My father got mad at the neighbor and it made him feel so mad and frustrated he punched a hole in the wall, let's say. That was an example of...

The world outside makes you feel bad inside, right? Or then there was a time that all these people got together and gave me a congratulations for something I didn't even realize I did, right? They made me feel good, right? So that's, I'm starting to get all these things to sell me. Wow, I believe it because I saw it. But that wasn't what was really happening. What was really happening is they were mirroring back to me what was coming from me.

Travis White (38:55)
for a second.

Larry Bilotta (39:23)
And the better I felt about myself, the better they out there felt about me. And so it was a reverse of what I thought. So the world out there, like my wife didn't treat me badly because she was bad. My wife treated me badly because I felt bad about myself. And I gave out the energy that she picked up and started to go, I'm making a decision. I'm going to treat you rotten. That's actually the story of bullying. How does bullying work exactly?

Well, what happens is the child comes along feeling uncertain, feeling like they're feeling hurt, feeling like they're feeling damaged, feeling like they're feeling criticized at home. And then they go to school and they're giving off the energy of punch me because I'm a punching bag, right? They're giving off the feeling that I need to be punished. And so who picks that up? People who have the ambition.

to do something mean to people. They pick that energy up. And so when the child says, I was bullied a lot in school. Why? Because I felt bad about myself a lot in school. Because the kids who didn't feel bad about themselves didn't get picked up. Why? Because they gave out the energy of, I feel good about myself. And they didn't get picked up. And so that's really a great story of bullying and how bullying works. You literally send out

Travis White (40:44)
Yeah, very true.

Larry Bilotta (40:46)
you send out a message, punch me, make fun of me, criticize me, blame me, do all that to me because I feel that bad about myself.

Travis White (40:54)
And to me that kind of goes back to what you were saying about vibrations. You send off good or negative vibes to people and people pick up on them.

Larry Bilotta (41:06)
Which brings us to words. Words are ideas. And so when we're talking about a person being bullied, why are you being bullied? Well, you don't really know why you're being bullied because you don't know how you feel about yourself. You don't like, what do I believe about myself and why do I believe it? Wow, that's kind of a deep question. I never thought about that. What do I believe about myself and why do I believe it?

And you start realizing, you start writing down, what do you believe about yourself? And you start realizing, oh, that's terrible. I really believe bad things about myself. Then when you get to the part about why do I believe it, like I believe it because of the way my dad treated me. I believe it because of the way my mom treated me, the way they talked to me, the way they criticized me, the way they blamed me. That's why I feel this way, right? So now I'm doing, actually, what's the foundation of the world out there makes me feel bad in here.

It starts with mom and dad, biological mom and dad. The strange thing I found over dealing with years of dealing with adopted people is adopted people never take on the traits of the adopted mother and the adopted father. It's almost like, wow, it's like you weren't even here. What they got, they got the biological DNA.

Travis White (42:23)
Yeah, that's it.

Larry Bilotta (42:29)
of the adoptive parents and they're long gone. But that's really what their ways are. Their ways are the ways of their biological parents. So much so that the adoptive parents can't make a dent. Not a dent. It's like grandma and grandpa. They can't make much of a dent either.

Travis White (42:46)
That's really interesting to know that. I mean, it makes sense, but I think if somebody like spent so much time with adoptive parents, so it's like biologically embedded in you.

Larry Bilotta (42:58)
Yes it is. Yes it is. Which goes to the idea of a child who makes marriage again.

Travis White (43:05)
So looking back to the old Larry who's struggling with fear and marriage issues, what do you say to that person?

Larry Bilotta (43:18)
So if I go back to 1974, Larry.

The first thing I got to tell him is he's got a long road ahead of him, but he never wants to give up because he married his teacher.

And she's not a pleasant teacher, but she's a really great teacher because that's how you're to learn. You're going to learn. I remember one day we got pulled in, taken down to the police station in a police car, the two of us, for fighting. And so the police don't know what to do with fighting people, especially married couples.

And so they had us in the station kind of going back and forth. And they said, listen, we can't do anything for you. You guys just need to walk home.

So we're walking home and I remember stopping in a streetlight. And this is really like one of those unforgettable moments. And the unforgettable moment was I stopped Marcia and I made her look at me. I say, if you make me stay with you, you're gonna kill me. You know what she said? Then you need to die then.

And that was the attitude that we had at the time. You need to die then. You're going to kill me.

Travis White (44:35)
She's just throwing

out what it was going to be.

Larry Bilotta (44:42)
Yeah But because what is it that dies What what what actually dies when when people grow and when people mature when people start to change What's happening is their ego is dying Because the ego it's been written about for thousands of years, but it's never been good not ever And so when the ego dies Use getting freer yourself Because if you can separate from your ego

That's a really great thing. And everybody, they're on all kinds of paths to do that, where the ego has to leave and the person has to stay. And so that's really what was happening to me. The ego was leaving and I was staying. The ego was dying and I was living. So I tell kind of a story of that when I give the cruise ship analogy. And the cruise ship analogy is that you are a cruise ship and you have a ship and on your ship is a wreck.

but you don't know about the rat. You just don't know it's there. So it's there privately. And then you get another ship, and that's the person you married, and that person's the ship, and they have a rat also that they don't know is there. So these two rats have radios, and they send a message back and forth called against energy. And so this against energy is so severe that the ships are separating. And the reason they're separating is because these rats are doing the work. So what you do is you find out that you might have a rat too because you go to a seminar.

you find out that the rat might be there. So you go through all the trouble to find it and get it off the ship. Now we have two ships, but this time we have only one rat. The rat that's on the person you married's ship is pushing as hard as ever, but it doesn't really help because it takes two rats to push two ships. One rat alone can't do it. Okay, so that's really what I'm talking about. Actually, I'm talking about getting rid of your ego.

Because that's what the rat is. The rat is all the messages of childhood in the form of the ego. And so when the ego's gone off your ship and you're married to this other ship, that person has a rat. Not going to get rid of it. They're going to stay a reactor all the time. Well, that turns out to be a good thing because what can you do? You can be the person who changes your mind. You change the way you think. You change the way you believe. You change the way you see the world.

And because you're doing those changes yourself, that changes what the reactor, the other ship, is going to do, how that ship is going to react. Because that's what you can depend on. When you get rid of your rat, you're now going to be freer to be able to change what's really happening to you. And so that's really kind of like a bigger story of what happened to me, really. Losing my ego was a big part of my success.

overcoming. Because, you know, what do people do when they overcome? They overcome their ego. That's what they do. We can't see the ego, we can't monitor the ego, we can't find the ego, right? But it's there.

Travis White (47:38)
Pretty true. No.

Very true.

So couples that are in crisis, what's one daily habit or like mindset shift that you can recommend for them?

Larry Bilotta (47:58)
But you get the idea that when you get rid of your rat, the two ships only have one rat. One rat can't push two ships. Doesn't have enough strength to push two ships. Because when you are the ship without the rat, you are free to make whatever you want to make. Whatever kind of thing you want. You want to start serving margaritas on your ship, you can serve margaritas on your You can do anything you want on your ship. Because you don't have a rat.

And so when you do that, as you change your energy, the other person is going to react, because that's what you want. You don't have to change the other person. You don't have to tell the other person they have to do anything. They don't have to do anything. All they have to do is keep on reacting the way they do. And so as you start to get more more free of your rent, more free to be able to think and do as you want to do, and you start to feel really happy in yourself, you're going to change the relationship.

Why? Because you have one creator and one reactor. That makes sense even when you say it. One creator and one reactor. I think that would work. One creates, the reactor reacts. And what happens is a reactor wants to follow you. And that's really what you do when you start to feel good about yourself. You lead and the reactor follows.

Travis White (49:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, totally makes sense. So someone that's listening that feels completely hopeless in their relationship, what do you tell that person?

Larry Bilotta (49:30)
So we're talking about hope. Hope is not a plan. Having hope is really like having a wish. And so when you lose hope, you're losing the potential, the possibility that something can get better. And you don't want to be living on hope because hope doesn't give you a plan to do something. And so when we're thinking about a plan, we like to think of the body doing things, the hands and the head and the mouth doing things.

But the head, the head, the hands, and the mouth are not the issue. The issue is you've got to change what you're thinking. You've got to change how you're feeling, because that's at the center of what you really are. You are a person who feels things, a person who thinks things. That's how you want to live. You want to start thinking, like, what do I believe? What do I like about myself? What can I hold onto that I actually like about myself? Because now when we get to an idea of, like, this person who's being mean to me and

a lot of marriages, people feel like victims. And what's the problem with feeling like a victim? When you feel like a victim, you're saying, I am being treated really rotten out there. And when out there is treating me bad, I feel bad in here. Well, now you're a victim. You're a victim because this person unfairly did this to you. And that's why the kingpin idea is the idea that I'm leaving the life of fear.

Because that's where victim is. Victim lives in fear. I'm moving to love because I don't know how to move to love, but I'm deciding I'm going to leave fear and I'm going to move to love. That's what I'm going to do. And now how do I do it? Well, there's a... Your higher self lives within your mind and your higher self can bring you ideas. Because that's all we have, these ideas. And so...

How do I move from my fear, the world of fear I'm living about, as you talked about, how do I move into love? I want all those positive words. I want to live there. Well, when you do that, what you're doing is you're actually leaving this place that feels very, very bad into a place that feels very, good. And so one of the things I teach about how to do that is you...

go on the internet and enter the words, negative words, negative words on the internet. And when you enter negative words, you're gonna get lists like loss of them, right? And so the lists are kind of give you the, remember the thousand words of negative I'm talking about, right? You're gonna get those thousand words, but you really can't write down a thousand words. So what you do is you represent the thousand with 25. And what are the 25? There are 25 words.

Travis White (52:02)
⁓

Larry Bilotta (52:13)
that you can relate to. Things like resentment, things like anger, things like lying, things like fear, right? So all those words that you relate to, you're going to put them down a piece of paper and you're going to write 25 of them on the left side of the paper in your own hand. And when you write them down, they sit there and now you're going to do the second exercise on a different day. You're going to write positive words on the internet, positive words, right? What are you going to get?

You're going to get lists, lists of positive words. And there's lots of them, like a thousand, right? And so you can't go through them, but you've got to go through them looking for 25 that you can relate to. Like kindness and beauty and intelligence and faithfulness, right? All kinds of words like that. When you can find a word to relate to, you write it on your list of 25. And so now when you're done, you have a list of 25 words of fear and 25 words of love.

Now when you've got these two lists, you title the top one World of Fear and you title the right one World of Love. And now you've got an illustrator for you, the World of Fear and the World of Love, right? Because those words are particular to you. They mean something to you. Like I have a word crazy on my list. And the reason I have crazy on my list of fear words is because back in the 70s, I used to say crazy a lot. Like, that's crazy.

you're crazy. No, that's craziest thing I ever heard. Right. So I used to say a lot and people would call me out and think, why do you keep saying crazy all the time? So I put that word down on my list of fearful words. So that's how you find the words that you relate to. So once you've got the list of 25 and 25, you now put it down on your desk or you put it on a wall and you look at it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And what you start to realize is like

I don't want to be here. I want to be there. I don't want to be here. I want to be there. And that happens to you each time you scan the list. So I look 10 seconds. I spend back and forth, back and forth between fear and love, fear and love, fear and love. What do I keep doing? I don't want to be here. I want to be there. And once you've made that decision that you want to live in love, and remember, you don't know how, you don't know how, but you're going to your way, your

way of getting there is going to come to you. It's going to come to you. Why? Because you're really crying out in your mind. You're saying like some wisdom somewhere. Come and tell me how am going to do it? How am going to find a way to leave here and go there? But that's what the two lists do. The two lists convict you that I want don't want to be here anymore. I want to be there and you and it shows you a visual of what love looks like. What does love look like? It looks like the 25 words I handpicked.

That's what it looks like. And it feels good too. And the more you scan that day after day after day, the more you feel bad about fear. The more you start to become really aware. And so then a day comes when you have to make a decision. And it's a decision that's hard to make. And all of sudden you've got to make it. And what do you do? The two lists come. They show up. And all of a sudden you make the love choice, not the fear choice.

And when that happens to you, like, hey, how did I do that? You did it because you were literally dwelling in the two worlds. The two worlds. You weren't decided to live in fear. Because fear, the 25 list became exposure for the world of fear and said, I don't want to live here. I want to live here because now I have the 25 words of love right here. I have the 25 words of fear right here. And the contrast is so great. I don't want to stay in the other place.

And that's how you make the decision.

Travis White (56:05)
That's a cool exercise to do. actually going to go try it. Sometimes within the next two days I want to actually look through stuff and try it out.

Larry Bilotta (56:07)
Yeah.

Yes. But you know what people tell me when they do this? Like, boy, the fearless was easy, but the loveless was hard.

Travis White (56:21)
The...

I could see that being the case.

Larry Bilotta (56:24)
Yeah.

Travis White (56:27)
So I just have a few more questions here for you. Why do you think one of them being why do think so many people give up on their marriage before things change?

Larry Bilotta (56:36)
Well, it starts with the pattern you get in the first 10 years and the pattern you get is giving up. So what you see is what you're going to do. So if I saw my father give up on my mother, I had that imprint. And now I want to give up because he led the way. Right. If I see my mother give up on my father, now I see how to give up. This is how you do it. Like, she did it. I can do it. And so now

If you see parents who don't give up, now you're like, giving up, that's not an option. Quitting is not an option. It's not a choice. Right. So what's the problem of divorce? Divorce is an instruction. Divorce is not just an example. It's an instruction. This is how you do it when you're in a hard spot. This is what you do. You do what dad did. You do what mom did. And so I've had people tell me

I'm really against what my parents did. I think it's so wrong what they did. It hurt me so badly, I'm never going to put my children through that. And then after all that determination, here it comes, divorce time. And what's happening? Well, she or he married a chaos kid. What's a chaos kid? Who probably saw divorce. So now when you realize, childhood makes marriage.

so anything that was down there is going to be here? Anything down there is going to be up here. geez, that's really bad news. Right? So, you know, it almost feels like childhood makes marriage. It's like I'm not free. I can't choose anymore because childhood makes marriage. I have to do it. I have to do what they did. But you don't have to do what they did. You can learn how to do the opposite of what they did because you can start to feel good.

about who you are yourself. Because the less people think about what they are and where they're going and where they want to be and what they want to do, the less they're going to really, the more they're going to rely on what happened to them. But the more they think about what they want to do and what they want to be and what they want to become and what they value, the more they're going to leave what they were. But the houses they grew up in, that house, boom, big imprintor, really big.

Travis White (58:53)
Yeah, for sure.

Larry Bilotta (58:55)
So if you're gonna leave the house you grew up in, you really have to follow the ideas that you wanna really believe in. But that means you have to know what they are. You have to know what the ideas are and why you believe in them and why they feel good to you. And that could be following like an author like Wayne Dyer, like, you know, or Stephen Covey, right? When you get really big authors who write really big books, right? You can follow those ideas.

Because that's what you believe in, that's what you like, and that's not what mom and dad did. That's what I want to attach my life to. I want to attach my seven energies to those kinds of ideas.

Travis White (59:34)
What do you think the key is to a successful merge?

Larry Bilotta (59:38)
The key to a successful marriage. So this is on the premise that nobody knows that childhood makes marriage. Like on the premise that nobody knows that. Nobody knows childhood makes marriage. The key to a successful marriage is learning that childhood does make marriage. And once you realize that childhood does make marriage, now you can start to think about it. What does that mean?

Travis White (59:44)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Larry Bilotta (59:59)
that childhood makes marriage. Well, one of the things that happens is people don't know to even ask. The person they marry, they don't even ask about their childhood. They don't even ask, what happened? What does it mean? What does it mean to you? How do you interpret it? They don't do that.

Travis White (1:00:15)
See, that's crazy to me because I don't think I would have been married if I didn't figure out what her childhood was like.

Larry Bilotta (1:00:16)
So.

But you have like an awareness, Travis, you have an awareness that the child makes marriage. And so because you had the awareness that it kind of does something, you may not be sure what it is. You knew enough to ask and keep on asking. Because, you know, I've seen couples when they start asking about why they're doing what they're doing, they're going back to their childhood memories. And what happens is they talk about what happens.

in their childhood memories. You know, when I was with Marcia and I was starting to really love myself, one of the things that started happening is we talked about our childhoods a lot more, a lot longer. And by talking about what happened back then, we started to learn, why do I do that now? because that happened then. because that's why, okay. You know, so...

My mother and father are gambler and alcoholic. They canceled each other out. My father canceled out my mother's drinking. My mother canceled out my father's gambling. Now I can't gamble or drink.

It's gone. They cancel each other out.

Travis White (1:01:37)
Well, that's you've answered everything I I Do have one thing that I ask everybody at the end of the show Just I love to see that here the different answers What do you feel is the biggest stigma when it comes to mental health?

Larry Bilotta (1:01:40)
Hahaha.

Mental health has a stigma because if you think about psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists as a group, and they have their own associations when they get together, different cities, Psychologists, psychologists, and therapists, right? What are they all doing? They're all talking about the mind, right?

I think we can agree that they don't agree. They can't come up with a unified theory of how the mind works. Because they can't create a unified theory of how the mind works, we're all left with a stigma. And then what the stigma is, is their disagreement. Their disagreement that they have when they get together. And by the way, they don't even cross over. Therapists, psychologists, and psychologists don't even mix. Right? So that separation...

creates a stigma for all of us in society and all we get is bits and pieces from the media who like to publish sensational articles and that creates a stigma for us and that stigma is like When you have mental health problems You could be crazy Well, I don't even think that we think that because they can't get together and tell us a concept of one whose mental health

Travis White (1:03:12)
I love it. Love all of it. You've brought a fresh perspective on things that I've never really thought about. This is why I really enjoy like, well, like doing this type of stuff. Last thing, can, I guess, not really the last thing, second to last thing, where can people find out more about you?

Larry Bilotta (1:03:34)
So, youcansavethismarriage.com. Youcansavethismarriage is the place where my programs are. And then they can go to larrybalada.com. They can go to the YouTube channel. YouTube has a lot of Larry Baladas on the Larry Balada channel, a lot of videos. And so there's really all my kinds of ideas that I distribute into the public.

But what I'm trying to do on podcasts is I'm trying to get the idea that childhood makes marriage. And someday, I think I'll make a dent.

Travis White (1:04:06)
You gotta start somewhere, right?

Larry Bilotta (1:04:08)
Yes,

yes, yes I do.

Travis White (1:04:11)
And this is the last thing, is there anything that we have not discussed that you would want to bring up?

Larry Bilotta (1:04:19)
Let's see. I think this is for men. This book here is, this is not the woman I married. This is a book for men. It's not a book for women. And so everything I know about chaos kids, everything I know about marriage and the needs of women, all that is in here. And so if you get that book, that's really a condensation.

of all the ideas that I teach and what I really believe in and why I believe it. So this is not the woman I married. The reason I got that headline is I got it from the guys I talked to because what they said is this is not the woman I married. Those were their words. This is not the woman I married because the woman is in a midlife crisis and she's not the woman that he originally met. And so I go through all the reasons why that happens. How does that happen?

And one of the things that's in the beginning of the book is a really important list called the 21 signs you're losing her heart. And this is a really big thing that I want to get out into the world. It's what are the signs you're losing her heart? What does it look like? What kinds of things happen when you're losing a woman's heart? And so this is, you know, when you pack 21 things together, it really kind of makes a statement about

could I have done these things? So that 21 signs is in that book. So that'd be the thing I'd add.

And that's how the Amazon.

So if you enter, is not the woman I buried on Amazon, you'll find it.

Travis White (1:05:46)
I'll put all these links in the show notes as well for people to find. Larry, thank you so much for your time and coming on and giving the show a fresh perspective on marriage and ⁓ child, especially overcoming. I loved the childhood perspective. I absolutely loved it.

Larry Bilotta (1:05:57)
especially overcoming.

Okay.

Travis White (1:06:07)
things now that make sense to me in a different way, you know, ways that I act or come across like, I'm like, oh, I probably got that from my dad. I probably got, mean, I've thought of it before, but not in the way that you have brought it up. So childhood makes marriage.

Larry Bilotta (1:06:17)
haha

Mm-hmm, yes.

That was an experience, that's it.

Travis White (1:06:29)
a concept that everyone should grasp onto. So thank you again for coming on and it's been a pleasure speaking with you. And thank you to all the listeners out there, thanks for listening. The best thing that you can do for us right now is follow our show, share it with other people and like everything that we have out there, spread the word and thanks again for listening. Until next time.