#81 - Helping Men on the Brink of Divorce | Geoffrey Setiawan
No relationship is perfect. There will come a time wherein couples go through a rough patch and it's normal. As they say, it's not always a walk-in-the-park experience. Oftentimes, these challenges are also necessary for a couple to make improvements and adjustments to save the relationship. However, failing to recognize the most obvious signs and the root of the problem may put the couple in a situation where they need to decide whether to break out of it or stay together. But regardless of the hardships, remember that if you and your partner are willing to work things out, you will be able to surpass whatever struggle comes your way.
In Episode 81, we invited a self-made man who helps men who are on the brink of divorce to salvage their marriage. Geoffrey Setiawan is a Youtuber who creates videos to pursue his passion that led to an actual online course for everyone.
He’ll be sharing with us how he pivoted from data science to being someone who helps not just men but also women and how they can save their relationships and how they can learn to manage their emotions. He courageously stepped out of his comfort zone to pursue his passion and built his confidence to continue paving his path to help other people as well.
We’ll discuss further the following:
Common reasons for Divorce
Pillars of the Relationship
The Identity Shifting
The Paradox of Change
Conflicts as a part of life
Different terminologies
If you are someone who is trying to change to save your relationship, this episode is just for you. Use the knowledge and be inspired on how you can rebuild a love better than ever.
Join us, and together let us dive deeper to learn more and reflect on the lessons from this episode!
The term “Stonewalling”
The fundamental attribution error
Why it’s good to have differences in a relationship
Anger and emotion management
Attachment styles
Two parts of self-esteem
Meditation as a tool
Successful vs failed couples
The program “Connection equals freedom”
Connect with Geoffrey:
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life, and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hyper-sexualized times and to win at this game we call life. Now, guys, I'm really excited because we have a guest that I had hunted. I heard him on a podcast that I've been listening to for years. It's about entrepreneurship, and it's something that I love. I was really impressed and inspired by his story, so I went to his YouTube channel. And then I was just blown away. He's just self-made, he helps men who are on the brink of divorce to salvage their marriage, he has created a ton of YouTube videos. But that has led to an online course. That's what he does now. He used to have just a normal job in computers, but now he just helps men save their marriages for a living. And he makes a very good living. More importantly, he's doing the thing that he loves, and he's passionate about, and it's of service to this world. So please take notes. He's got a lot of great ideas, but he's not a doctor. He's not a psychiatrist, and it's nothing like that. He's just passionate about this. He did the work to figure out how he can actually add value to people's lives, help them overcome difficulties, very specific pain point, which is feeling helpless in their marriage. And he's found a way to really get good at solving that problem. We should all be doing these guys, we should all be doing this. So please, a round of applause, digital virtual applause.
Welcome, Geoffrey Setiawan. So guys, as I said, we have this really cool guy here that I have briefly stalked online and have invited to our podcast. And that's the cool thing that we can do with the internet. When you're doing something cool, you can identify other people that are doing something cool. And then you can collaborate and just help create this cascade effect of healing. And so, Geoffrey, I've just been super impressed by you straight out of the gate. I want you to know that you have a fan here because there's academic knowledge and then there's practical real-life fixing real-life problems, knowledge. It seems like you've doubled down on that and an area of the world. That's super important because there are so many people going through divorces and you're dealing with this area. So first of all, I want to welcome you to the podcast. This is called the Love, Life, and Legacy podcast. Welcome.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here as well.
Andrew Love
Are you in Texas?
Geoffrey Setiawan
We are in Houston, Texas. I think we're gonna call this home.
Andrew Love
Really? There's this massive influx there. What's so great about Texas, tell me?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Well, I've always been in Texas. So I moved to the US ten years ago. I was in San Antonio first, then went to college there, but I lived in Austin. That was where I met my partner, and then we are now living in Houston. So I've always been in Texas. I don't know what it's like to live in other places. But I do like it here. So yeah, I'm not going to fix what's not broken, I guess.
Andrew Love
And where were you before that?
Geoffrey Setiawan
So I lived in Singapore for about ten years. And before that, which is where I was born, was Indonesia.
Andrew Love
Wow, I just spent the entirety of last year in Bali. When the pandemic broke, we were there. We were basically stuck on the island for a year.
Geoffrey Setiawan
If you go to Bali, I wouldn't say you got a good taste of Indonesia because it's such a different place than... but it's a nice place for sure.
Andrew Love
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we flew to Jakarta, we were a little bit shocked by what we saw just landing at the airport. And it was pretty intense. So, do you think America is really your place?
Geoffrey Setiawan
I think so. I think it has a fine balance of feminine energy where you can enjoy yourself and let loose, but it has the entrepreneurship spirit. We also love to get inspiration from both sides. Yeah, it's a great culture, for sure.
Andrew Love
Amazing. And from what I heard, you went to school, and your background has something to do with computers or something like that.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah. So I studied finance and marketing. I was a Math geek growing up. And when I got out into the work field, I realized that I was gravitating towards data. And so I eventually went into data science, and then when I switched to working with people in relationships, it was a shock for a lot of people.
Andrew Love
I'd like to talk about that because a lot of people have this desire, especially when they start experiencing healing. They want to spread that around, they want to offer it to other people, but they say I'm not qualified. I'm not a therapist, I didn't blah, blah, blah, blah, and to your excuse here. So how did you permit yourself from numbers, a very impersonal, data-driven person, to getting into people helping people? There's some mental functionality that allows you to access the chance that hey, maybe I could do this, and what was that transition from things to people? How did you make that transition?
Geoffrey Setiawan
I'm not gonna tell you that it wasn't a smooth journey. It wasn't like I started with a very strong conviction of what I wanted to do. I actually felt a lot of the same fear and doubt and just turmoil internally for a good four years. So at that point in time, I had enough money saved up to where I know, okay, I had a decent runway. When I say decent, it was about a six to eight months runway. And when I looked at my job in data science, I liked it, but it wasn't something I wanted to do every single day. So there was a period of two months where I was talking with my partner, and we're talking about what we can do. What would light up my fire? And we talked about the history of our relationship, and it just clicked in us to say, why don't we help people do this? Just teach people what we went through, push through all the myths that we went through, and so on. The hard part, though, was, I'm Asian. I guess you guys can see me, but I look like I'm still in college. The first real doubt that I had is, who would listen to me if I go to his marriage niche? These are guys who are going to be four years older, 45 years old, or married, have kids much more life than I had ever experienced. Why would they listen to me? But fueled by that thought of, if I die, I want to make sure that I've tried something. I don't want to regret not trying at the very least. So I tried it. And I tried it for a good two years. And I tried writing books first and getting my authority set up that way, the thinking was that once people understood what I was talking about, and what I said, and how I went against a lot of the common knowledge that people have about relationships that are quite toxic, I think that people will start to see it. So I was trying to write a book, I was trying to write a blog, I was trying to do Facebook advertising. I mean, I tried so many different methods over the last two years. And then I finally said, look on YouTube. And even when I found YouTube, it was still a rocky road where the first six months I had nothing, I had no traction, and it took six months to probably get 50 subscribers.
Whenever I publish a video, it will get 13 views... And so that was six months. And then after six months, I kept doing it and started to gain traction on that. I was actually quite surprised. It was very surreal because a lot of these guys that were the initial followers, they're very burly men type. You could tell it kind of the biker types, and for them to listen to my videos. And sometimes I would have a chat with them, and they would have my posters on their wall. It was just a real thing. That fueled that confidence, so it was a slow build of confidence. So it wasn't a smooth transition to I have this conviction. And no matter what, I double down on it. There were a lot of doubts. There were a lot of moments when I spent time on the floor, just weeping and crying because I felt that my dream wasn't coming true. It was messy.
Andrew Love
I like to get into you talking about common wisdom that's not so wise. And it's quite toxic, as you mentioned. So, what did you identify as a cultural norm that was not congruent with healthy relationships? What did you want to dispel?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah, there's a lot here. But the biggest one that I want to dispel is that most of us have heard of Gottman's theory of the Four Horsemen, which is that stonewalling and gaslighting are the killers of a relationship. In our experience, it is a bit of a different interpretation of that because whenever we hear people who are stonewalling or shutting down or gaslighting...
Andrew Love
Can you explain those terms a little bit? Others might not know about it.
Geoffrey Setiawan
So stonewalling is a term for when people avoid conversations, avoid confrontations, avoid conflicts, avoid conversations that they don't either agree with or they're not comfortable with, and just shut down. A lot of people in relationships hear, oh, communication is key. So they take that home, and they go, oh, Hubby, we need to communicate. I'm going to back off. And a lot of men and women whenever they back off like that they get labeled as stonewalling. And when you get labeled as stonewalling, it's going to sign to almost like a narcissistic tendency. I think that's damaging. Because I'm sure in our lives, we have stonewalled people before.
A lot of times in our lives where either the problem is way too complex or maybe the person has made it very difficult for us to express something to that person. And so maybe our boss comes in and says, how come you didn't tell me about this when I asked you? Internally, well, if I did tell you it would have wreaked havoc. And you would be so pissed at me, I would just be buried. And that's the reason why I don't want to share with you or sometimes when the problems become so complex. People ask us, what's the issue? Can you tell me more about the issue? We just go, it's nothing. We're not trying to stonewall out of narcissism, but we just have a self-preservation issue there. But the problem is, we're too quick to blame character. And scientists call this the fundamental attribution error. When we tend to blame the character for issues, we start to not only be angry internally, but we start to actually perpetuate the same problems over and over again. So let's say that if someone stonewalling or gaslighting out of a self-preservation issue, and you call them a narcissist, when they stonewall or gaslight, well, then you're going to stop reserve, even more, don't work on that. And so it puts people in this vicious cycle, and most people are not even aware of it. Their relationship has a lot of potential. And their partner has a lot of potential, but they never get to find out what their potential is because they've already set upon this vicious cycle. That's one of the big myths that I'm trying to dispel right now at least.
Andrew Love
Got it. So in some ways, it's the label that's not helping people because then they say I am this or you are this.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah. And really, it's also about relationships or managing your emotions. It's about how you interpret your world. If you interpret stonewalling as narcissistic abuse, then there's no way you can lead the conversation to a calm place and have a conversation in a place of understanding. But if you simply switch that interpretation, in the same event into maybe it's a self-preservation problem, maybe they're feeling the lack of safety, the lack of trust, the lack of ability to express themselves instantly. By just that change of interpretation, we get a very different emotion inside of us. And it allows us to lead the conversation better to a healthier place.
Andrew Love
Because you're a little bit more empathetic to where they're coming from?
Geoffrey Setiawan
That's right.
Andrew Love
Yeah. I can see that. It's less adversarial and more on we're on the same team. We just function differently here, better at left-wing stuff. I mean, Canadians, so I'm talking about hockey here. But that makes a lot of sense, just a little bit more practically, you were in a relationship that you deemed to be healthy. And then was it because you were consciously creating that relationship with your partner that gave you the confidence to explain it to other people? Because a lot of people might have something good in their life, but they might have no idea how they got that thing. Or if they might not be able to express how other people can have the same results that they did.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Just taking you back to my own background as well. I grew up in a very traditional home. My parents never said I love you once to each other. They didn't even sleep in the same bed, and we don't have dinners as a family. So love and romance weren't something that we prioritized. I didn't see that, I didn't have any example of that growing up even in the early stages of this relationship. We've been together six years now, and it was a terrible relationship. We were fighting every time we had a conflict. We couldn't resolve it, we were feeling more and more closed off having to sweep things under the rug more and more that it eventually goes up. And I think this is the experience of a lot of people as well. It's like a slow death by 1000 cuts experienced over time. When we first started to rebuild a relationship, we read a lot of the same books, we went to therapy, and we learned things like the Four Horsemen. We learn things like the five love languages, the attachment styles, and none of those actually helped us. In fact, they made it even worse not. And I can expand more on how that makes things worse, for us.
So it was when we started to really discuss things and think about the first principles of everything that we were talking about, and learning and discussing were when we started to come up with our own answers. We were bold enough to actually object and counter a lot of those common pieces of advice. And that's when we started to get more clarity and wrote a lot more as well. The conviction that we have about what we say works not only have we experienced it ourselves, but we have consumed every possible resource out there. We have seen other people who are building relationships consume the same resources, and we saw them crumbling, struggling. We had this small group of people where it was me, my partner, and another couple where we were on our own journey of discovery. And we were the ones thriving. And so, it's almost as if you had to learn the English language from the start, from scratch, you would be a better teacher because you know exactly how to go from 0 to 100. But I think a lot of people who have good relationships from the beginning, it's really hard to articulate what exactly led them there because we went from 0 to 100, we can articulate the exact steps we took. Does that make sense?
Andrew Love
Absolutely. Yeah. This is what I understand on why YouTube is such a great forum for you. This is because, it's this natural thing that we used to get in tribes, from elders and from people who've been around to help expedite certain processes so that we don't make the same stupid mistakes that they made a generation prior where you've evolved. Now, you're helping people evolve quicker because how long you said this journey was? six years? You could probably shave off, I don't know, five and a half years from somebody's journey if they just follow the advice. So that's really this collective evolution that's taking place, which is really cool because as far as I know, are you credentialed? Are you a doctor? Do you have a lot of fancy titles?
Geoffrey Setiawan
No, I'm surprised at how little people actually care about that. Yeah.
Andrew Love
It's an amazing thing because, a lot of times, academic knowledge doesn't help in practical, real-life situations. There is somebody who's been through it and can say, this is what I did. That is why I did it. So cool. Yes, it's just almost so practical to me that it eludes us because we're used to going to somebody like a sage to tell us how we should live our lives rather than finding out somebody living the life that we want and figure out how they did that.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah, and what's interesting too, Andrew is at the beginning, we were seeing that the program was the last resort. People would consider Gottman, first, Sue Johnson, Esther Perel, whatever it is the big names in the industry before they consider us. What's funny is now, we're having more and more people who have spent close to $50,000 on other programs, and they come to our program, and they would say, I wish I found this sooner. And in fact, we have a lot of therapists who practice the Gottman method and so on. They come to our program because once their clients start to go into our program, this one does start to see massive change. So, I knew I wanted to disprove the fact that academic theory was always best, very early on, but it just happened more organically for me where now, I don't have to say it outright. But people realize it themselves, I guess.
Andrew Love
He just stands right next to your results and says, huh?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah, exactly, almost like that.
Andrew Love
And honestly, we're in a society where there's a lot of emphasis still on accumulating knowledge going to school and all this stuff, very little education on how to be a human being, on how to have successful relationships. And so the result is that, I don't know what statistic is this nationally, I hear everybody has quotes that divorce rate is 50%, whatever, let's just use that as a generalized metric. But what's a common reason for this? Why are people finding themselves, you start out in love, and then you end up in divorce? Why is this happening in droves? First of all, why is this happening? We can get into some solutions later. But why is this happening?
Geoffrey Setiawan
To us, it's very simple. If you look at nature, the national artifact of two people being together, it's two people with different thoughts, beliefs, decision points, and everything. The myth that we always hear is you have to find someone very similar to you if you have a shared interest, whatever is great. But what people don't realize is that it's not the similarities you have that determine whether you're successful or not. It's the differences you have, and also your ability to go through and talk about those differences.
Andrew Love
So why is it good to have differences?
Geoffrey Setiawan
The differences are not bad. Let me give you an example of this. And this is how the feedback loop and the cycle go downhill for a lot of people. So let's say you start with a simple argument, like wanting different temperatures in the bedroom which is a common thing. And you have a difference here, but because you don't have the internal ability to be able to stay calm and poise through that conflict, you're not understanding how to use the right frameworks or the right ways of talking to find a win-win a deep understanding and a win-win on that until that small conflict becomes something bigger. And whenever you're not able to resolve that one difference, it creates a multi-dimensional difference, and now you're upset, not about the bad thing that temperature is, but now you're upset because you can't even talk about it.
So it's another layer here that creates another problem. But the other problem creates, whenever the other problem comes in, you don't have the skill to be able to turn that from negative to positive. And so it creates four problems, then eight, then 16, as these problems come up, you're starting to feel less and less safe in the relationship. You feel more repressed, more bitterness. And again, it's like the death by 1000 cuts where it starts with this one small difference, but the chasm just grows and grows over time. And five years later when people are on their last legs in the relationship, they don't see the millions of things that happened in five years that led to the downfall. So they misattributed it by saying, oh, we're just not a good fit. Oh, we're just not this. We're just four horsemen, whatever it is, but I don't see that the real cause of it is because you're not able to take those key differences you have that create a culture where you can express it, you can get an understanding of it, and find a win-win in it as well. Does that make sense?
Andrew Love
Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, you alluded to some core skills of handling this, do you have pillars that you recommend people to develop? or some pillar internal core muscle groups that they can develop?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yeah. So in terms of the pillars of how it manifests in the relationship, we have, basically the five pillars, and the base of this pillar is, again, that emotional and psychological safety. The essence here is that if you have safety, for you to express your thoughts properly, your feelings properly and your partner to express their thoughts properly, then conflicts no longer become an issue, and in fact, have become opportunities now. But then in terms of how you go about climbing those pillars and building safety, there are three key ingredients that we often tell people. Number one is, you have to understand the frameworks or these are the ways of talking and the ways of maneuvering yourself around the conversation so that you can get to a deeper understanding.
The next layer behind that is what we call them mindsets. And there are two parts to the mindset that really matter for us. One is about our ability to shift our interpretations of events of actions in a healthier way so that we can stay calm and poised enough to play out the right conversations. So for example, my partner drives a sports car, and she backed out her sports car in this garage on time, to the side of the garage. There's gonna be an expensive fix, and it's going to be around $10,000, or whatever. If let's say in a moment, my interpretation of that was, why are you so careless? There would be no chance for me to be calm, there'd be no chance for me to be curious enough, compassionate enough to dig deeper, to understand where she's coming from. But if I shifted that interpretation to be, hmm, I wonder what's going on in her life to make her a bit perilous at that particular moment. Instantly, with a shift of interpretation, I can become a lot more understanding, calm, compassionate, and can play out the frameworks to discover deeper about what's going on in her life. I can turn that from a negative experience into a positive experience where that's now a memory we look back on and say, wow, that was a great conversation we had.
Andrew Love
So framing it in the context of getting the most out of the situation, rather than attacking somebody.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Exactly. A lot of people, when they think about anger management, for example, or emotional management, think about tactics like meditation, journaling, taking walks in a park. But we believe in this first principle that emotions simply arise via the way we interpret life. If we want to change our emotions, we simply have to program and change the way we interpret our world. Change the lens through which we see our world. A lot of people spend a lot of time meditating or journaling, but it doesn't really change the interpretations so, at the moment, it doesn't really work. At the moment when things are heated or when things are on, it doesn't really work. But if you can change your interpretations then at the moment reflexively, you're going to change the stories you tell yourself, and it's going to be easier for you to stay calm and poised without using your willpower or clenching your fists to stay calm in a way.
Andrew Love
Is that premeditated? Because a lot of the people listening to this, they're overcoming some pretty self-destructive habits just on their own. But pornography is denigrating their sense of value, and they can cognitively understand why they're doing it in hindsight or in foresight. But in the heat of the moment, it's not always clear to them how to do the thing that's aligned with who they want to be. In order to tell yourself a certain story, is it more of a mental game? Or are you using the nervous system through breath work or something like that?
Geoffrey Setiawan
We're going to get a bit deep here. We have 60 plus hours of material in our program to explain this stuff so I hope I'm not going over people's heads, but I'm trying to be as detailed as possible. So the second thing about the mindset that we often explore is exploring the cognitive biases that we have, and how it affects our thinking, how it affects the way we define ourselves, how we understand the society in general. This is a really, really hard one for me to explain, but the best way is, do you mind if we play a very short mathematical game just to show you how to do it?
This is what I do with my students all the time. I'm going to start by giving you three numbers, Andrew. The three numbers are two, four, and eight. Now, I'm thinking of a rule that governs the two numbers I just gave you. So a rule could be, for example, is even numbers or it could be multiplied by two, two, four, and eight. Your job is to get three chances to guess the rule that I'm thinking about, the mathematical rule. But the way you guess it is by proposing a unique set of three numbers that you think fits the rule. Once you get the three numbers, I will tell you whether the three numbers you gave fit my rule or not, and you guess it that way. It's almost 20 questions, does that make sense?
Andrew Love
Yes, sure.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Okay, let's try. Again, the first numbers are two, four, and eight. Give me another set of three numbers to try to guess the rule that I'm thinking about.
Andrew Love
I'll give you three numbers?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yes.
Andrew Love
Let's say 16, 32, 48.
Geoffrey Setiawan
16, 32, 48, that fits my rule. What do you think it is?
Andrew Love
I suck at Math. I see the metaphor, I suck at math though so this is embarrassing. I would say they're all numbers that you hate because of your cognitive bias. You hate...
Geoffrey Setiawan
No, it's not. Just to be really quick, for people who want to play this game the rule is basically numbers in increasing order for me. But what a lot of people do is, they think that the rule is even numbers, they will continue to pump out even numbers to say 10, 12, 14. I'll say yes. Is it 20, 22, 24? Yes. And it would feel a lot more confident each time. But actually, they're not getting to that answer, any closer to the answer. The only way they would get closer is if they went, instead of what we call hypothetic, they start with a hypothesis leading with that, the questions. If you were antithetic, if you tried to disprove me or yourself. So you said, for example, Jeff what about 10, 8, 6? I would have said, no, that doesn't fit my rule. And you would have gone to a much better idea really fast on what that rule is, which is just numbers in increasing order.
The reason why I play this game with you is, in relationships a lot of people go through is they ask questions, they think they're saying the right things, they think they're understanding their partner, but really they're not. They're not getting closer to it. But just how you were in the game it's like, I don't know the answer. I think I know but I don't know. It seems like I don't know. And they get really frustrated and really confused when they thought they listened but their partner says, you haven't really, and they get lost. It's because of the subconscious way that we think. All the biases that affect how we think to prevent us from actually understanding our relationship, our partner, and ourselves as well.
Andrew Love
I was just going to say that from my vantage point, you've created a set of rules based on what you think is right, and I have no real shot of fitting into that fantasy that you have that I'm going to magically figure out exactly your rules that you've set up. So it screws both parties over, in a sense, because I'm making assumptions about you. You've created a framework that I could never fit into, and so we're all losing in this game.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Right. Exactly, exactly. It is almost like how interactions happen often in relationships too where the rules of the game, the confines of the box in a way, just put us in very different ideas of what each other are trying to express. But we can never get out of the bubble because of the way we think. We cannot be empathetic, we cannot just admit that we don't know something. That's an example of how people are trying to overcome their addiction, it requires a lot of understanding about who they are, about the effects of their environment, of their past and so on, or on that behavior on why it's so hard to resist. If we are not thinking in the right ways, we can often lead to wrong conclusions. And the wrong conclusions can often lead us to the wrong diagnosis, and the worst part is, we won't even know that it was a wrong diagnosis.
Andrew Love
Could somebody theoretically or have you ever seen it do that game that you just played with themselves? Can you set up a framework that you can't even win because of many assumptions that you've made in your life and like, I need to be this, I need to be this. You've created rules that you can't even win at that game.
Geoffrey Setiawan
It happens a lot. This manifests in conversations because once we make an assumption about something, we no longer feel the need to even ask. It's a very subconscious thing. And if we don't ask, if we don't ask the right questions then we can't even find out the right answers. This happens with our partner, with ourselves, and it's just how people get the wrong diagnosis, get wrong treatments, and get the wrong path without them even knowing it for the rest of their lives.
Andrew Love
Yes, diagnosis. I've heard so many nightmares and some horrific statistics about how misdiagnosis is such a massive contributor to the destabilization of our society because even the pharmaceutical industry, just has these broad answers to very specific problems that people don't fit into it. I get it when you're dealing with a ton of people with a lot of nuanced problems, it's a lot easier just to be and say, take this pill and shut up and leave me alone, instead of really getting to know somebody. But when you look at our situation as a society from a macro perspective, in terms of divorce rates, in terms of this, the complexities are becoming exponential because we, as a society, don't know how to talk. We as individuals don't know how to talk, and you stack all these things together. You'll have a ton of anxiety, you'll have a ton of isolation and you're seeing the results unfold now. So it seems like the scaling back of getting to know yourself is really the answer to all these problems at the end of the day.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Just to mention that divorce stats feels like it's 50% or more now but even the people who are on divorce, it's not just to say they're happy. Probably it's bigger than 50%, but to me, the reason why a lot of people I think struggle into quitting a good culture in a relationship is because they have a lot of these paradigms and teachings that they have been exposed to. That is what I call is true but useless. Let's say we go back to this four horsemen thing, and you read this philosophy by John Godwin, and you are finally able to say, my partner is a narcissist. He's a stonewalling, he's a gaslighter, and he's abusive. Now, it feels good to know that. The certainty feels good in our bodies, but if you think about it, what can you do with that information besides leaving? So it's a true fact but it's useless.
Andrew Love
Because it doesn't add to resolution, it doesn't create resolution. It seems like it makes it easier to identify the problem and to say you're the problem actually than to create a resolution.
Geoffrey Setiawan
It's what we call a program that TV use as the true of useless. Another one is also the attachment styles, people love attachment styles. If you look at the videos of attachment styles, and on YouTube, they get multiple millions of views. People love diagnosing themselves: Oh, I have the avoidant, anxious. But again, it's okay, it's true. But if you ask a lot of professionals about this, what do we do? They will tell you to go on a journal and meditate and just be more positive. That's like saying to someone with a really serious illness to say, go home and eat healthier and drink water.
Again, it's a true fact. It's fun to find out, but it's not useful. The way we think about it in our program is whatever attachment style you have is really determined by this self-esteem that you have. The self-esteem for us is two parts. One part is self-efficacy, this is about your confidence in your ability to accomplish something, to get through a problem. So for example, if you are at work and you have very high self-efficacy in your work, you know the protocols, you know what to do, you're not going to be shy of facing problems because you know how to tackle it. The other part of self-esteem is what we call self-worth. This is about your belief in your own self-value, basically. This is about your ability to manage your mind.
If you look at the attachment styles, you look at avoidant, that's just someone with low self-esteem either because you have low self-efficacy to tackle the problem, low self-worth to tackle the problem or both. But if we understand that the attachment style is a self-efficacy or a self-esteem problem, that is not a true but useless fact. We can actually grow, we can actually do something to grow self-esteem. But rather than fully focusing all your time on attachment styles, focus on your self-esteem. Because if you do that, you're not going to be so anxious, you're not going to be so avoidant, you're going to be quite secure. So that's how we bring things down to the first principle. Go against what we think is right, what we think we should do, and just get to the root core of something to actually give you something to do.
Andrew Love
Yes, foundations are building some momentum. Yes, very practical.What are some common benefits to working with you like an aha moment that people experienced? Because they're inundated with a lot of information, but you synthesize it into this really powerful elixir of information, so then when you see people get it, what's a common thing that they seem to get?
Geoffrey Setiawan
I think the biggest epiphany for people, and there's a lot of assumptions that have been made here, a lot of premises that you have to accept as well. But the final epiphany, I guess that people realize is it doesn't take two to tango. A lot of people, they're in a bad relationship and they're dealing with a partner that doesn't want to work on the relationship, and we hear this saying of "It takes two to tango" and we take it a bit too far. And we say that if my partner is not going to want to work on it, no point. But we enroll 500 to 700 people a year, and virtually every single one of them starts out in this position where they come to me because their partner doesn't want to help, doesn't want to work on the relationship. But when you start to understand how to have the right frameworks, mindsets, and also what we call the identity shifting inside it as well, that's when you realize that your partner was stonewalling, gaslighting, doing all her crazy behaviors because she wasn't happy with a relationship. Because of the lack of safety, lack of trust that once you understand those three levels of change, you're able to change the culture, change yourself and show these changes in a massive way. You'll be very shocked at how much that changes your partner's behavior as well.
Andrew Love
Basically, when you create some semblance of harmony within yourself, it projects outwards and impacts your environment to some degree.
Geoffrey Setiawan
To some degree, yes. We focus on internal shifts first. Once you make the internal shift that will manifest automatically, externally so it influences the way you talk, the way you come across, the way you guide conversations, the way you understand, and so on. And once you have this both as internal and external shift, you'll be shocked at how many of our clients for example, once they start to change the way they talk, the way they think, not only do their partners come back, but they also change the way they think and speak to be more similar to them. They emulate it very subconsciously. And this would have been unheard of in the beginning when they have all these myths about that my partner's just a bad person or she's a stone wall or she tries to avoid problems. Again, it's true but useless information that we'll get too.
Andrew Love
That's really interesting because I've been studying this one guy. He focuses more on neuroscience, more about meditation, but a little bit different than what you're talking about. But it's about brain-heart coherence. That's basically that most of our lives are spent in discord. But the moment that you create coherence within yourself, you start to tune into that coherence with the things around you, and you're creating the song. When there's a couple that's in incoherence or discord, they themselves are individually like that, and then there's this systematic breakdown. But if one can get in tune like an instrument in tune, then the other can tune off of that person and you can start creating a melody that works.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yes, so two points on that. I'm not against meditation, I do it every single day, but I think we need to understand that meditation is a tool. A tool is to observe our minds better. But what often happens to a lot of people is that when they're observing their minds, they're observing their minds in the same paradigm. Instead of meditation being a calming effect, it ended up being the worst effect where you're observing ugly thoughts. The thing about one person tuning the other one is what a lot of people don't realize is that this feedback loop between you and your partner is happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whether you know it or not. For a lot of couples who are struggling, that feedback is going in a negative direction.
So for example, your partner comes home, she comes home a bit pissed, but short. Are there being pissed or short makes you pissed and short? And you being pissed and short makes her more pissed and short. That's already happening. It's just happening in a negative direction. All we're trying to do in the program is to make you recognize that this feedback between you and your partner is happening every time, for you to observe it, catch it, and be able to turn it from negative to positive. Once you understand that, you realize that what you do actually affects what your partner does. And now it's affecting in a negative way, which we just need to understand how to affect it in a positive way.
Andrew Love
Yes, we're in a relationship with every single thing around us. It's usually unconscious. That's wonderful. And so in terms of all the single people who are not yet in a relationship, but they're prepping, what are some good things that they can be investing into right now to really be in a good relationship with themselves, and to create some fundamental skills that will pay off later?
Geoffrey Setiawan
I'm not sure if there's a good way to answer this because we get to be asked a lot, and this is something that I never was able to answer. They'll ask me for example: Geoff, I can't afford your program, would you recommend me some books or some podcasts or other resources? And I would say no, because this is the reason why I built this program to talk over a lot of common knowledge, to go against a lot of books. Besides just joining the program, I don't know how to answer that really, because a lot of our clients take in all the programs imaginable, and this is the one that really sticks with them. And that happens for a reason, I guess.
Andrew Love
Yes, it makes sense. You've created your own methodology. Okay, I can live with that, and I like it. I'm just trying to give an action step because there are quite a few listeners who are in the early phase of a relationship. Some of them are in the courting phase, and getting to know somebody with intentionality because that's one thing that we really double, triple down on is to live with intentionality in every aspect of your life and figure out how you want to relate to stuff and orient yourself in that way. So is there any bone that you can throw at them that would help them at least not step on their own toes or on other people's stones?
Geoffrey Setiawan
The one big myth that I like to debunk as well is this notion or understanding that we have this dream relationship where we don't have conflicts. I don't think that's what differentiates successful couples versus failures. We often imagine that people who are successful, couples who are successful, have just less conflict and less arguments and less fights. The couples who are failing, they're the ones who are very different or who have a lot of conflicts. That's not true.
Again, it really boils down to how you can take that negative conflict into a positive, because physical couples are the ones who can succeed despite the same problems, and the couples who are failing are the ones who fail because of the same problems. Don't have this idea that a relationship is supposed to be no conflicts, no fights because life is just entropy just everywhere. But instead, learn the skill to be able to take the complex of negative stuff and turn it into positive and enjoy. The implications of this are quite massive actually because a lot of the reasons why I think men are not able to become good leaders in the relationship also is because whenever conflict happens, or whenever their partner needs to tell them the truth about something, they see that as a threat. I shouldn't be having this because if I have this, it means that my relationship sucks.
So they become avoidant, they retreat from that, they stonewall, which means their partner is even more pissed. And destroyed by the safety and trust, because now they're part of things that I don't want to express stuff to my partner anymore because if I do, it will wreak havoc. This is all the bread with the paradigm that I'm not supposed to have conflicts. But if we learn to basically look at conflicts as a part of life, as an opportunity to actually experience something better, then we can lean into it. That makes it easier for us to create safety that trust, so then the next time a problem occurs, there's no hesitation for my partner to actually express her thoughts to me. Because she knows that I'm going to lean into it, I'm going to deal with it well.
A great example of this is, one time our car broke down, and we had a conflict. We're hungry, we're tired and a lot of people would see my partner being short like a threat. We would play out the negative cycle over and over again, but for me, I saw this as we have a problem, we have a conflict. A lot of people would say, I don't care about how miserable we are while we're fixing the car, we just need to get the car fixed and get to the destination fast. I don't care about how miserable this is. But for me, it's more of, we have this conflict but this is actually an opportunity for me to show my partner just how poise and calm I can be. How we can turn conflicts into actually a fun moment, of fun process. So now we got home but we had fun doing it at the same time. This all again bred from that paradigm of conflicts are not to be avoided, they're meant for you to turn from negative to positive. That's it.
Andrew Love
Yes, I like that. It's funny how your two instances so far were about cars because I wonder how many breakups were caused because of car incidents. But no, that's pretty awesome because it's almost gamifying the relationship. If you quit every time there's a bad guy in a video game, you'd quit all video games because that's the whole point. But that frames it. So again, that you're on the same team. That's a hard thing to really remember. I've been married for over nine years now, and we're at our worst when we're trying to prove ourselves to each other. We're at our best when we remember that we're the heads, we have three kids, and we're supposed to be on the same team here. But it's reframing that, that's adjusting yourself to reorient to frame it in that context.
Geoffrey Setiawan
You bring up a really good point. That's a massive struggle for a lot of my people in general. We call this the paradox of change. So the paradox was something like this. We work with a lot of people who have really destroyed their relationships. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, but the relationship has really gone at this point. When the relationship is gone like that, usually one or both partners has a confirmation bias and who the other person is. That's who you are, who you're not, or whatever it is. So when they try to change the way they talk, the way they behave, the way they think, and they start to ask them a question. Their partner will often say to them, why are you being a therapist? That's not how you sound. And that's actually a common thing that happens to all of life.
You asked anyone in life: do you want to become richer, do you want to become happier, have better sex, have better relationships? They want a different life, essentially, but to get a different life, they need to become someone different. They need to think differently, act differently, and so on. But the funny part is that, as soon as you try to become someone different, people will resist you. The same way when I tried to change the way I talk in my relationship, my partner was like, why are you being so vague? Or when I was trying to change my career to do this, people were saying, are you crazy? This is not you, you are not a dater guy. This is not you. You're not like the guys on Youtube, or writing books or whatever.
And so the paradox here is that people want to have a different life, but whenever they try, they get this very intense resistance. And this intense resistance starts externally, but then it becomes internal depth, and then they back down. A lot of people back down, a lot of people go. For example, a lot of people when they change the way they talk and their partner says, why do you sound like a therapist? They'll go: You're right, let me back down.
So they can never break through to the next level because they cannot fight this paradox and change that we call. But the difference between a lot of people who are successful and people who are struggling and stuck in this cycle of failure is, people who are failures and they stay stuck in there. And when I say failures, I don't mean just being broke. I mean it's like an internal state. They let other people define who they are. While the people who are successful, they're understanding how to source that identity of who they want to become from inside, from internal and they will stay steadfast despite people's resistance. What's interesting is if you go steadfast like right now, two years later or six years later in my relationship, my partner knows me is what I am today. In a short term, she was questioning everything I do, but now it's just my new identity. Now, people know me as the relationship guy, I'm no longer the dater guy. The people are so simple, they break through that person who changed because they sorted internally, and you have to do that.
Andrew Love
Is that a matter of persistence of having a clear reason why you want to change and just to attempt it? Because a few days ago, we released a program called connection equals freedom based on the premise that the opposite of addiction is connection. But my whole pitch to why this is worthy is that you get really good at identifying who you want to be, and then every day just practicing becoming that person. But within that paradigm, you're trying and sometimes you're going to fail. Sometimes it's a miss, because you're attempting to be somebody that you're not or not yet, and so you might veer off a little bit because it's trial and error. Is the real skill here persistence or just keep on trying until it feels right? Or how do you know you're there?
Geoffrey Setiawan
This is actually a massive, massive part of our program. This is what we call the identity-shifting part. This is the part that nobody talks about. To just give you a quick introduction to how I see this, imagine you're standing in front of two people. These two people are trying to quit smoking, so you give the first person a cigarette, and he says to you, no thanks, I'm trying to quit. That's fine. Second Person, you give the same cigarette and he says, no thanks, I'm not a smoker. They both want to quit but the second guy has that conviction. He's most likely to quit. But most people, when they try to become different, they try to change, they're the first person. They say, I'm not calm but I'm trying to be. I'm not innocent, but it's actually very, very damaging because you're trying to fundamentally become someone who you're not.
Andrew Love
So the language is identifying their lack of commitment to become that thing.
Geoffrey Setiawan
So we can take this further in our program, and imagine three nodes. On the right side, here you have the node that you can label as "having". Then move over to the left, another node is "doing" and then on the left side is "being". A lot of people work right to left, where they focus on what they want to have first. This is the outcome that they want to have. The outcome they want to have defines what they want to do. And they hope that when they do enough, it becomes a beam. But this can never work because whenever you are forcing or doing your identities from the having, you have to understand that before you get success, you're going to face a lot of depths, a lot of challenges.
If your motivation is tethered to that outcome, then when the outcome is bad, you're going to get demotivated. When the outcome is good, you're going to get motivated. Most people never get to sustain this higher level of motivation for very long because they're working right to left. They're forcing everything from the having, but what we try to do is to say, no focus on being first. Really clarify what that being is, some questions shift yourself to that new being when you can effortlessly be, you can effortlessly do. When you can effortlessly do, you'll effortlessly have. And when people do that, you become a lot more consistent, and do things and change with a lot more conviction because it's who they are. It's their identity now.
Andrew Love
Yes, I love it. I was just reading that the other day that we do have things, and it's so powerful. I love the way you describe it and it needs to jump off the paper because it is so contrary to how we're bred in this world, which dangles the thing in front of your face and wants happiness, you have to have this. Work your ass off to get this. Slave away until you can finally purchase happiness, and it doesn't work because you're still the same person with a nice jacket.
Yes, I love it. Thank you. Thank you for diving deep. I appreciate it. I know that with this content, you probably asked similar questions or different questions that cause you to answer a lot of the same stuff. I know sometimes it's like mental drudgery, so I appreciate you taking the time to dive deep into this stuff. Because we're figuring this thing out together, as a human race. I believe that when people spend the time to especially identify who it is that they want to be in the first place, then this stuff that's blocking them just really becomes so evident, and it becomes a lot easier to just to shift it out of the way. It's not as much of a struggle because it feels more like you're calling your destiny rather than some superficial desire which, like you said, it just fades away very quickly at the first stage of adversity. Maybe I shouldn't be the relationship guide, it's too hard.
Instead, you're crying on the floor with 30 subscribers after six months. That's where we need to go because I think our world is slowly breaking down in a good way. But it's giving us the opportunity to say, what do we want? If we can identify what's not working, which is most structures that men have created, then what's better? Starting with ourselves, and then next is our relationships with actual other people. You're doing really good. I love the fact that your depth of knowledge is so wide and deep. I know you're helping a lot of people, so who should be in your course? Please identify the demographic that would really get the most value out of your course.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Most of the people that we work with are driven and motivated by saving the relationship, basically. Going on the last legs of the relationship in a very dire situation, you need help immediately. But if we want to broaden our horizon of who we can work with, it's really anyone who is motivated and really pumped, totally cover parts of themselves, their inner self, the way they think, their identity shifting, and so on. And the way to talk differently, then you want to take it beyond what books can and beyond what your imagination currently can take you. We can help you with that. We're going to blow your minds. I can say that confidently because, without flinching, we hear it every single day. We have politicians, whoever it is now, we have therapists, and this is the lifelong obsession with programming. If you want that commitment to grow yourself and to grow yourself for the sake of having better relationships romantically or with work, or with your family, this stuff applies pretty universally.
Andrew Love
Awesome. Yes, because I know some people who are in a tough spot with the relationship. But I also know some people who may be their wife actually did leave them, and as far as the wife is concerned, that's the end of that. So this program would also work for them or help them sort through this.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Yes, it's a very wildly encompassing program that we talk about how to find your masculinity or femininity, how to lower your level of anxiety, lower your level of need where you're not showing toxic neediness or toxic indifference. A lot of people pretend to be indifferent to be powerful, but it's really not making you powerful. Teaching how to talk, it's very widely encompassing because we really want to make this a one-stop-shop for any relationship, and even the periphery of what it means to have a good relationship as well.
Andrew Love
Outstanding. And so where can people find you? Where's the best place to find Geoffrey online?
Geoffrey Setiawan
Just look up my name on YouTube.
Andrew Love
We'll have it in the show notes.
Geoffrey Setiawan
I'm pretty sure I'm the only one with that name. And if you want to explore what we talked about in the program a bit deeper, we do have a master class in about an hour and a half. We're going to go in-depth into the different processes that we have. All our clients, I'm using myself to rebuild that relationship from the ground up and how to get the internal changing as well.
Andrew Love
Outstanding. Thank you. Thank you, first of all, for joining me here now. But also, more importantly, just thank you for believing in yourself. That was more than just a little hop, skip, and jump. You overcame a lot to go from that one identity as a dater guy to the savant that you are, the relationship savant. I just want to say thank you, because the more that people actually do that, there are so many people that have all this stuff in them. They have the capability of doing this, but it just remains trapped in this former identity that locks this, so I just want to say thank you for doing that hard work.
I'm sure people thank you for the course, but I don't know if anybody thanked you just for doing your own work so that the course could come out of you. On behalf of humanity, thank you.
Geoffrey Setiawan
It's nice to be acknowledged. Thank you.
Andrew Love
Awesome. So, guys, we'll have all the links to everything below. If you know anybody who's experiencing difficulty in their marriage like your parents or anybody, please send them this way because a lot of people are going through this program experiencing so much healing on the other side. So send people, there should be a mass exodus towards Geoffrey. So let's make it happen. Thank you, Geoffrey. Thank you for showing up, bro.
Geoffrey Setiawan
Thank you, and I had a good time.
Andrew Love
Andrew Love here, and I wanted to plant a seed in your mind before you go. A lot of people when they start to consume our content, they listen to our podcast, they watch our videos, they read our blogs, they start to believe in the idea of freedom as a possibility for them and their lives, and it is. You can break free from porn, you can build amazing eternal relationships. But it requires you to make the jump, it requires you to commit to transformation, and that only happens when you invite other people into your journey. A lot of people think that because I got into porn by myself, I can get out of it by myself. That's the wrong way of thinking. It's not about simply removing a negative force from your life, it's about creating fulfillment and connection and intimacy with other people. So we really recommend, first and foremost, that you build a team of accountability partners, facilitators, group members, and we can do that. We have all of that waiting for you, but you need to first reach out to us. If you already have people in your life that you think can help you, we have online courses that will teach you both how to create a dynamic that works in terms of accountability. But if you don't have an accountability partner, we already have volunteers who are waiting for somebody to help. We have groups that are waiting for somebody like you, but your role and your job is to merely reach out to us and we can work together with you to create a powerhouse team so that you can build the life of your dreams. We look forward to hearing from you.