Episode 140 - "Your Marriage Didn't Start on Your Wedding Day" with Larry Bilotta

And so that brings us back to the whole idea of what brings you back to where you were, and that's what I'm teaching about childhood, uh, because childhood is what drives marriage and everything you do in it.

And when you look at your childhood, you're looking at experiences, and so I developed a scale from 10 to zero, and I've been using that scale for about 15 years.

What is that scale?

The scale is 10 is where purpose is, where you're raised in purpose by a mom and dad who love each other, and they love you.

So that's a 10.

Down at the end is zero.

Zero is where you're abandoned, you're abused, and you're neglected, so all three, and that puts you down at zero.

So the scale of purpose to chaos, uh, has been what I've been interviewing people with for 15 years.

I've done over, I think, 3,000 interviews and sort of keeping notes on all of that.

And so I see the stories that people are living through, and I ask about the father.

"Tell me what kind of relationship do you have with your dad?" I hear just a wide variety of what kind of fathers are out there.

3,000 interviews.

I got a lot of fathers, right? [laughs] And so as we look at all those fathers, w- if we go to the top of the scale, let me start with the tens.

"My dad was my rock." I hear that a lot, right? "My dad was the greatest guy in the world.

My dad loved me unbelievably.

I could never do anything without my dad." So that's the 10 stories.

When I come to the zero stories, what do I hear? "My dad was never there.

My dad was a creep.

My dad was rotten.

My dad was mean." [laughs] And then I switch to the mothers.

"Tell me about your mom, and w- what was she like?" So when we go to mothers, at the top of the scale I hear nurturing, tender, kind, sympathetic.

When I go to the bottom of the scale, I hear cold, nasty, witch, abandoned me, left me, walked out with another man.

All kinds of stories that are just distorted.

So this scale has been really helpful for me because if I don't have the scale, I really don't know what the story is.

The story is in the scale.