Do you how do you want to lay this out? You want to just like go through? Let's just go

one.

Let's just go by one, one by one.

They they certainly connect.

And again, four pillars.

I envision it as like four pillars.

stone columns with a big stone slab on top of it, right? We need all four.

Well, I feel like that leads into the next pillar of ownership, that if you are taking a pause and you're the one calling for that pause... then you're the one that owns coming back.

Scott, what did you experience today?

When Leela set that first boundary, like she said, defensive, angry, upset, a lot of putting it back on her.

When are things getting back to normal? But I can't remember how I came across the book, if it was a recommendation from her or I came across it, but it was, I started reading out of the doghouse and that kicked my butt.

I didn't even finish the book.

I got two thirds of the way through.

We were, we were going on a vacation to Florida.

I listened to a lot of the audio book while we were driving.

was hard.

Yeah.

Scott, were you going to say something? I did some air quotes because we learned a lot of good techniques and couple relationship skills and one of the things that I think at the time if If I had been willing to go deeper and to try to understand, hey, why am I acting out? What is this doing for me in my life? It could have been really, really helpful, but it wasn't and I didn't.

So we learned a lot of really good techniques and we learned how to communicate and we learned how to pass emotional boulders back and forth.

And I would hold her boulder for a while and then she would hold mine for a while.

But I never understood why I had those boulders or how I could hold that boulder for myself and break it apart and understand it.

And so in the end, it went back to coping mechanisms of hiding and lying and doing what I had to, to keep Lila healthy and happy.

I was scared to death of what would happen with her, with her medication going wrong and this and that.

Maybe could you, do you have anything you want to say there where you started to involve other people?

What does my partner think about? What do they care about? How does this impact them? How does it affect them?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and I think when I first started feeling this, you used a great term, which was icky, and that's exactly how it made me feel.

It felt selfish.

It felt like absolute moral failure.

I felt like a failure.

Okay.

So Scott, I'll get more into it here in a second, but what do people wanna know about you, or tell us what people might wanna know about you.

Oh, sure.

Well, um, you know, my story is I'm a fellow traveler.

Took a really long time, and I hear this title, I hear Making Sense of His Behavior, and I think there's two phases of this.

And I think the first phase is the making sense of the problematic sexual behaviors, whatever it is in the relationship, whether it was affairs or pornography or whatever it might have been.

And then there's the other part of the behavior.

So we have to make sense of that, and then we also have to make sense of this second phase where all of a sudden he's appearing as somebody that's defensive, avoidant, maybe anger, maybe rage that never really existed before.

You wanna grab that one, Scott?