From Chaos to Clarity: 40 Years of Marriage Insights: Larry Bilotta

Summary

In this enlightening episode of The Chris Project, host Christian Brim sits down with Larry Bilotta to explore the transformative "Chaos to Purpose Scale." Discover how personal values shape our lives, relationships, and self-awareness. Larry shares his journey of self-discovery and the profound impact of understanding one's upbringing on personal growth. Tune in to learn how to navigate the scale from chaos to purpose and embrace a life of love and fulfillment. Don't miss this insightful conversation that could change the way you view your own values and relationships.

Takeaways

• Understanding the Chaos to Purpose Scale and its impact on personal values. 
• The importance of self-discovery in overcoming relationship challenges.
• Commitment and learning as pillars of a lasting marriage. 
• Building a supportive community and fostering open communication. 
• Shifting from fear to love to transform personal and relational dynamics.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.772)
Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining us is, I started to say your last name first, Larry Belota. And I didn't ask if that's how you pronounce it, so I hope I did it correct. Belota, sorry, my apologies, Larry. Larry, welcome.

Larry Bilotta (00:18.058)
So it's ballada. Yeah, it's ballada. That's okay. Thank you.

Christian Brim (00:27.062)
So you have a business, I don't know if it's called, You Can Save Your Marriage, or if there's some other name, but tell us a little bit about that and how it got started.

Larry Bilotta (00:44.022)
So people ask me, are you a psychologist? And I say, no, no, no. My training is being married to the roughest, toughest woman of the world for 40 years. And so what does the roughest, toughest woman for 40 years qualify me for? It qualifies me for learning about everything when you're in pain. So when you have two opposite people, a person who shuts down because they're literally brought up that way, and a person who fights.

Christian Brim (01:05.038)
Mm.

Larry Bilotta (01:12.831)
person who's brought up that way, you've got the makings of a really bad relationship. Now what kept us together, everybody asked. They asked that question because they think that when you're in pain, you should run away. That's what they all believe in. And so they asked that question. And so the answer is we were programmed from the very beginning to stay married and miserable by both sets of parents. Stay married and miserable, okay? So that's what they agreed on. What they didn't agree on is everything else because

Christian Brim (01:24.686)
Hmm.

Larry Bilotta (01:42.472)
my parents and her parents never even met. They never even asked about each other. So they had no interest in each other. So that's a sign that something is going to go wrong. Okay, so now that we've got this brewing story of she's trained to fight and I'm trained to shut down, what did she always do? She always fought. What did I always do? I always shut down. So what I saw was shutting down, what she saw was fighting. So since that's the

Christian Brim (01:46.253)
Interesting.

Christian Brim (01:53.891)
Yes.

Christian Brim (02:04.354)
Yes.

Yes.

Larry Bilotta (02:12.437)
the beginning. So I say the story is I had 27 years of a marriage made in hell, but in the 28th year I fell in love with my wife. But what I really don't say is I fell in love with myself. And that's really what happened to me. I fell in love with myself because I didn't like myself very much, right? So I have this scale that I talk about all the time called the chaos to purpose scale. So it goes from 10 to zero. 10 is purpose, zero is chaos.

Christian Brim (02:25.998)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (02:31.864)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (02:41.942)
So what goes is 10, 9, 8 is where purpose is. That's where your parents actually raise you for purpose and give you great values. 7, 6, 5 is they don't really raise you. That's the twilight zone. That's in the middle. And then in the end, 5 to 0, that's the chaos world. And that's where you had abandonment, abuse, and neglect. So if you have any form of that, that takes you lower and lower down to 0. So with that scale, for 15 years, I've been interviewing people about that scale.

And the reason I've been doing it is because I've been wanting to know, who am I talking to? Who's this person? Like, I can't just think you're in a marriage, quote unquote, because I have no idea what a marriage is. But when I put them on the scale, now I know. So now, if I'm talking to a guy, and he's raised at a 10, and now he's got great values, and he's married to a girl who's a two on the scale, now I know something. I know that his values are up here, and her values are down here. And so,

Christian Brim (03:09.442)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (03:31.789)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (03:38.42)
When I talk about values, what I'm really talking about is when you're raised at a 10, a 9 or an 8, you get values like commitment, loyalty. You know what those are. They're built in. You have confidence. You have humility. You have acceptance. You have all these great things. But when you're raised in the bottom, 2, 3, 1, 0, you're reasonably raised in values like selfishness and demands and gossip and lying and survival.

Christian Brim (04:03.278)
you

Larry Bilotta (04:08.445)
And all of those values become your values, right? So now we have those values. In the case of Marcia and I, Marcia was raised at the lower parts of the scale, but she had a kind of like a stable foundation of parents who stayed married, right? But they stayed married to stay married miserable. I had the same thing, stay married to stay miserable. So now that we had this message inside, we couldn't leave. We had to stay. I had to continue to shut down.

Christian Brim (04:23.17)
Right?

Larry Bilotta (04:37.886)
She had a continued fight. So what did I do? I had to decide what I was going to do. What was I going to do? I was going to become the learner. The learner stays and learns. typically, if you're married to a leaver, a leaver leaves because they saw the parents leave. And so just like you said with the Chris project, right? What did he say? He saw what he saw in the beginning. So that beginning story is everything for everyone.

Christian Brim (04:53.164)
Right.

Christian Brim (04:58.669)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (05:06.217)
So everybody, I always ask about the beginning because everybody tells me stories and when they tell the story they don't even know that this is the story of why you're going to live this way. You're going to live the way you were shown. That's all this very simple idea. Is you're going to live the way you were shown. And so people don't know that that's what they do. They just, they don't have a conscious awareness. That's why I do these podcasts because I'm trying to spread the word that your childhood decides what you're going to be in life. And so...

Christian Brim (05:18.786)
Yes?

Larry Bilotta (05:35.904)
You know, we have the beginning, we have the middle, and we have the end. And so the beginning is the first 10 years. And that's when we get what we get. And then we have our teen years, which are testing years. Then we have our 20s, which is the indestructible years, where I think we're going to live forever. And then since we're going to live forever, we don't learn much. And so I have a program where I teach people called the Environment Changer. And the Environment Changer is about changing the environment of your mind. Well, I've got nobody in their 20s. Nobody in their 20s wants to learn this stuff.

Why? Because you're going to live forever. Why would you need to learn this, right? But in their 30s and 40s, that's the place where the midlife crisis comes. That's where they want to hear this. And why do they want to hear it? Because now all the stuff of childhood is coming. And so when it comes, now that's where the midlife crisis is. And what is the midlife crisis? That's where your childhood's abandonment or your abuse or your neglect is going to show up in your life. And so what happens is if a woman's married to a man,

Christian Brim (06:05.368)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (06:34.496)
and the man's marriage is at the bottom of the scale, the midlife crisis comes to him. If the man is married to a woman and she's at the bottom of the scale, the midlife crisis comes to her. And this is what nobody knows. They don't know because this is such a long-term lifetime thing. but why does this come for me? Why is this happening? So who do I talk to? I talk to stayers, people who stay in the marriage. I do not talk to leavers because the leavers do not want to talk to me.

Christian Brim (06:58.284)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (07:04.632)
Right?

Larry Bilotta (07:04.637)
Why? Because they're busy leaving. And so the stayer stays and tells me the story of the lever. That's where I've heard it for 15 years. They said, what kinds of stories I've heard? Well, these are scientists, these are politicians, these are teachers, these are construction workers, these are analysts, these are all kinds of people that have lived these very productive lives. And so what's happening in these productive lives that looks so good?

And the spouse who I'm talking to, the sayer, they're going, I can't believe it. can't believe it. Right? Why can't they believe it? Because this person lives a life where they've been shutting down inside the messages of childhood. And so it's a three-step process. number one, no, I'm not doing that. That's what happens. No, I'm not doing that. Step number two, I'm going to do this instead. Step number three, I'm going to act it out. Those are the three steps. One, two, three, and it could happen over days, weeks.

months, years, over and over and over again, 30 years, 20 years, 15 years. What's happening? That person I'm talking to is married to a bucker, a bucker like the bucking bronco. The bucking bronco bucks off the rider. And that's really what these people are. They're from chaos childhoods, but they're bucking and fighting it over and over and over again. What they're doing is they're fighting their mind. They can't fight their mind. They're going to lose. Why? Because the mind can outlast

Christian Brim (08:16.46)
Right?

Christian Brim (08:31.608)
Right?

Larry Bilotta (08:33.418)
their willpower. Willpower can't last with the mind. So since this is the way it works, and I've been listening to this over and over and over again for 15 years. So since people don't know this, what is the simple idea? The simple idea is if you're raised at the bottom of the chaos of purpose scale, you're going to be carrying pain. Sometimes a lot of pain. I've heard some horrendous stories of what people carry with no therapy, no help, no intervention of any kind. Right?

They're living this way in marriages that seem to be functional. They seem to be, you know, they've got the white picket fence and everything. They've got the kids in the mortgage and cutting the lawn. But that pain is down there. And because that pain is down there, it's going to come out between 30s and 40s. It's going to come out. Some people, they're late people. Some people, it's very early. But the bulk of the people between 35 and 45, that's really what it helps.

Christian Brim (09:05.75)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (09:31.51)
The idea that I'm talking about is called changing the environment of your mind. And when you change the environment of your mind, what you're doing is you're leaving the place of fear and you're moving to the place of love. And that's the basic core idea. I leave the world of fear and I go to the world of love. So what is the world of fear? The world of fear is about a thousand words that we have in the English language and they're all horrible. Horrible words like anxiety, fear.

doubt, worry, frustration, hate, all those words, there's a thousand of them, okay? That's the world of fear. The world that we know, we all know that world, and it feels bad to us, we don't like it, but we keep visiting often. Then we have the world of love. The world of love is also very different, a thousand words that we have in the English language, we can look them up, it's like joy, kindness, thankfulness, gratitude, loyalty, beauty, right? All the words, thousand of them.

Okay? So a thousand love words, which is the language of the world of love, and the world of love is a very great place to be. We love it. We want to be there. But why are we struggling so much? Well, it's because we're bouncing between the world of fear and the world of love. World of fear, love. Fear, love. Fear, love. Fear, love. We don't stay anywhere very long. We keep on moving. And why do our lives look so chaotic? Because we're bouncing between fear and love all the time.

And we can't stop. We can't turn it off. We don't even know we're doing it. We don't know we're leaving fear and going to love. We don't know we're leaving love and going to fear. We don't know it. And because we don't know it, we don't know what to do. And so that's really why I teach the Environment Changer course, because the Environment Changer course is a course on changing where you live. Are you going to live in the world of fear and keep on visiting it back and forth and back and forth, or are you going to finally make a commitment that I'm going to live in the world of love?

this is the way I'm going to live. So, and by the way, I'll practice what I preach. There's my list right there. Right? There's my two list. 25 words and 25 words. And so that's what I'm teaching. I'm teaching the idea that when you finally get 25 words of fear, you get them from the thousand. And how do you do that? You go on the internet and look them up. You look up like all of the word, the struggling negative words from that list.

Larry Bilotta (11:58.25)
hand pick each word. So I have words like fail, rotten, scared. I have all the words that have visited me in my lifetime and I can relate to, right? So that's what's on that list. On the love list, I have words that I like and I admire and I want and I've experienced words like creative and inspiration and belief and divine and friends and hug, right? All those kinds of words.

Christian Brim (12:08.546)
Right.

Christian Brim (12:24.844)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (12:25.951)
So I've got 25 on the left and 25 on the right. And so what I do is I take the list and every once in a while, every day, I will glance between the list on the left and the list on the right. And what happens every time? Like, I don't want this list down here. I want to be here. I don't want this here. I want this there. What does that force say? It's forcing you to make a choice in your mind about how you're to live. Right? Just a little simple glance back and forth and suddenly I'm making a choice. Right?

So now when you make that choice, you don't transform. What you do is you're starting to move where you really want to live. And by living in this new place, in this list, because 25 words represents a thousand words, and now you realize that 25 represents a thousand, I think I really want to be in this love list. I want to be it. I like it. I feel good about it. It feels good to me. I like it. It captures my imagination. I think I want to be here.

And so you don't have to talk that through, you just have to glance left and right, left and right, left and right, left and right. And so now that you have it, now it's a place where you want to move. And when you want to move, you're probably going to go.

Christian Brim (13:38.264)
So there's a lot to unpack in what you just said and I agree with what you said. I think the interesting point for me is the point where I realized, and it was with the help of my executive coach, my business coach, and it's strange that it took me, you know,

50 some years to understand this, but that in the end, you can't change another person. You can only change yourself. Like this idea that if I could fix this about my wife, things would be better, right? Yes, right. And I think part of it was

Larry Bilotta (14:29.705)
That's our first thought.

Christian Brim (14:36.968)
As an entrepreneur, we see problems and we fix them. That's what our job is. And we can see the problem, you know, and it's clear, like, if you would just do this, recognize this, understand this, you know, it would all be different. But the reality is that not only was it the only person that I could affect was myself.

But it was the only path through. Like at the end of the day, there wasn't anything that I could do besides leave than to work on myself. And I think that's a sticking point for a lot of people because looking inside of you and saying, you know, I don't want to be the way that I am.

or saying things like, don't like the person that I am, that's a hard thing to do. It's easier to project your feelings on someone else.

Larry Bilotta (15:46.71)
That's exactly right. That's what happens. That's why leavers leave. Leavers leave because of that same conclusion. Your problem, I'm going to go where there is a problem. That's what a leaver does. What does a stayer do? A stayer says, I've got to learn something from this. That's why a stayer stays. A stayer also stays because they have a value system of commitment. They have a value system of loyalty. Now, do they understand it? They theoretically understand it, but they don't really understand that they're staying because they're programmed to

That's what they got in the original time, right? The first 10 years is all the styles in the mind and now it's here and now I'm living on it. Because I'm living on it, I don't know why I really have it, right? So it's difficult to learn when you're happy. So what I'm talking about is I'm talking about what happens to stayers. This is their time to learn. And so when they get in the learning place, they have a person who's a leaving person who creates pain. And so they don't just leave.

Christian Brim (16:31.16)
Yeah

Larry Bilotta (16:47.658)
They leave and they cause trouble while they're leaving. And because leavers leave by making trouble, they create that peanuts character who creates all the dust. So, pig pen. Pig pen makes a lot of messes. Well, that's how leavers leave. They make a lot of it. They make financial messes, they make emotional messes, they make children messes, they make all these messes. But that's where your environment of learning is. When you have a person who's creating that much pain,

Christian Brim (16:59.778)
Yes. Pig pen.

Larry Bilotta (17:17.545)
you're going to learn. But now the question is, while you're learning, you need a support system. so that's really what I built. I built a community of people, a separate course for men, a separate course for women. And so the men go into the men's course and they've got men to support them, women have women support them. So in that environment of being supported by positive people, that's a great place to learn. Because that's a place where you can actually get people caring for you instead of just lamenting over your losses.

Right? And so.

Christian Brim (17:48.11)
Yeah, and you're right. You don't learn anything unless there's friction. And I think for our marriage, we had three children right after we got married. mean, we were done having children by 30, and we were very busy. And so there wasn't time for reflection. We were engaged 100%.

But then when the kids leave, then the problems come back. And I think that's a recurring thing too, is that when there's that emptiness syndrome, you know, that these problems that you didn't deal with show back up. And a lot of people at that point decide that it's, you know, let's just move on and go find someplace else.

To your point, the only place you can learn is when, I hate to say it this way, but when there is pain. Like you don't learn anything from comfort. And we are programmed, like you said, to avoid pain. Like that's the way our brain, you know, it's a very reasonable thing to avoid pain. Are you familiar with the book Secure Love?

I don't remember the author's name. Okay. She's a psychologist, but it was a book that I read about a year ago and I found it very insightful because she used a completely different paradigm to describe what you're talking about. But the way she described it is as emotional detachment and those people that

Larry Bilotta (19:17.822)
No.

Christian Brim (19:44.238)
either are anxious about it and want to engage the other person and resolve it, or the people that avoid it, which it sounds like you are, so you shut down and you don't, and how your behaviors actually exasperate the problem of the other person, right? Like, so I'm the anxious one, my wife's the avoider.

And so when we would have a conflict, I would want to get it resolved. And I literally would follow her from room to room to try and resolve this. yeah, and she's like avoiding it. And so like I'm chasing her and she's trying to get away. And you can imagine that that is not, and that's not conducive to constructive conversation.

Larry Bilotta (20:17.075)
I could picture that.

Christian Brim (20:34.386)
And the whole book is about identifying that and understanding it, but then creating these secure places to have the communication. It was interesting. There's an exercise in there where it was like 10 questions and it was in order for, not questions, they were statements.

In order for me to feel secure. I need to know that right and then there was something after that and Like I need to feel valued. I need to feel heard, you know, you know those types of things and My wife and I sat down and I remember this very vividly because it was one of the most intimate conversations we've ever had and We didn't get through the list. I think we got through like four or five but it was

Each of us saying that to each other But what was what was interesting is? her reaction when she read like in order for Me to feel secure. I need to know that I am valued right, okay? when she said that She immediately was thinking of it in terms of me

Because her response was, well, yeah, I think I value you. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the statement. The statement is you say it about yourself, right? And that's what resonates with me about what you're saying is that it is marriage work, but it's really self-work. In working on yourself,

Larry Bilotta (22:25.13)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:28.3)
Yeah, there might be some things that you need to work on in the marriage, but you have to work on yourself first.

Larry Bilotta (22:36.672)
Yeah, so that's what happened to me. I didn't know I was making a mature conclusion, but it was a mature conclusion to actually know that the problem is in myself. And so I did not ever say the statement, you know, the problem is I don't love myself. I never said that. I never concluded that. I just, what I would have is I would have her explosions and I would have my pain.

And between her explosions and my pain, in the middle was my learning. And so what I would do is I would get yellow pads of paper and sit by myself and I'd start writing out what's happening. And started to start writing out what I was feeling. And I was starting to write out what I thought she was feeling.

Christian Brim (23:10.029)
Yes.

Larry Bilotta (23:24.069)
So as I started to talk about my feelings and her feelings and what was happening in terms of behavior, I was starting to learn all kinds of things, drawing all kinds of brand new conclusions. And so that's really what I was doing. was studying myself in the context of a relationship.

Christian Brim (23:40.6)
Well, you know, that doesn't seem to be a normal response. Okay. I'm just going to be, I'm just going be honest with you. mean, most people when they're in their emotions, don't gravitate to a cognitive exercise like that. Right. So why, why is it that you did that? What allowed you to be able to do that?

Larry Bilotta (24:04.949)
It was the combination of the trapped phenomena. I was trapped between the programming I had and the programming she had, stay married, stay miserable. And that's a very powerful thing. We don't even understand how powerful the message of in our mind is, but it controls everything. And so now that I'm being held, literally held in place, I couldn't escape. So what am I going to do now that I have this can't escape place?

I have to decide what I'm going to do. I've to do something about it, right? Because I was an entrepreneur. What do entrepreneurs do? They fix things. Well, what am I going to fix? I can't fix horror.

There's no reaching her. She was literally programmed to fight. I can't fix her, so I've got to do something about finding out about myself. And so in working through the ideas of myself, I started to make conclusions and draw conclusions about who I am, why do I think this way? And I started to go back and look at my childhood and start to realize I have beliefs of my parents.

Christian Brim (25:10.872)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (25:11.061)
And I started to slowly, slowly realize that. And so oddly enough, Marsha, in all her anger, in between those angers, she would have revelations. And one of the things she invented was a thing I call the invisible lifestyle. It was called the invisible lifestyle because lifestyle is a word you look up and it says a way of life, a style of living that reflects the values of a person or group. So that's lifestyle.

Lifestyle is the values of your parents. So she started to say the invisible lifestyle. It's an invisible thing. You can't see the lifestyle of your parents and you don't like it. You don't like the lifestyle of your parents, but yet there it is. It's there and that's why it was invisible. So she would she would teach me things like that in between her rages. So as a shutter downer, I really hated living in the environment of an angry woman. Really hard, right?

Christian Brim (26:07.224)
Right?

Larry Bilotta (26:09.043)
So I couldn't even think straight. So I had to escape to a shut-off room to start to write out all these ideas. Why was I writing on these legal paths? Because I was writing and writing because I was exploring thought is what I was doing. I was exploring thought. Well, nobody explores thought. You only explore thought if you're in pain. Pain drives the need to explore thought. But if you don't do it, you won't find anything because you won't explore.

Christian Brim (26:36.61)
Yeah, I almost as you were describing that I almost envisioned someone in prison, like, you know, like you can't physically do anything about your circumstances. And so what do you do? You have to go inward because there's nowhere else to go. But I kind of want to dig in there. So you perceived that there was no option that you were trapped.

Larry Bilotta (26:42.036)
Yes.

Larry Bilotta (26:47.285)
That's right.

Larry Bilotta (27:04.052)
you

Christian Brim (27:06.558)
but a lot of people choose other avenues rather than thought and self-reflection such as, succumbing to depression, you know, addiction. how did you avoid that?

Larry Bilotta (27:29.045)
So this revolves around the idea of discovering the rat on the ship. Okay, so the analogy is you're a ship and as a ship you don't know it but you have a rat. Now a rat on a cruise ship is very bad for business so you don't ever want to discover the rat. So when you realize that you have a rat, now you go and find the rat to get it off the ship. And so that's what I was doing. I was finding that I had a rat and that I was a ship.

The ship is good, the rat is not. We have to get rid of the rat. So then I realized that she has a ship. She also has a rat. So I had two cruise ships and two rats. And so then I realized the rats can communicate. They can communicate an energy called against energy that goes back and forth between the ships. And it's so fierce, so strong, that the ships separate. Now, when you don't know when you're the ship and you don't know why you're separating, you don't know that you have a rat. And so...

So that my analogy of the cruise ship is separating a cruise ship is good, a rat is not good. So what we have to do is get rid of the rat. But now how do you get rid of a rat that doesn't want to leave? How do you do that? So that's what I teach in the course. I teach about the idea of what the rat is, that it actually exists, that it thinks, that it can do all kinds of things. It knows you and all those things. Once you realize there is a rat, you've got to understand what it is and how to do the work of getting rid of it.

And so that's a part of the course, getting rid of your rats.

Christian Brim (28:59.224)
So you were able to understand that there was a separate element from, separate from you and separate from your wife and even separate from the marriage in a way that was the actual problem, not the symptom.

Larry Bilotta (29:09.683)
Yes.

Larry Bilotta (29:19.753)
Yes, that's right. The rat was the problem. So when I realized that the rat was the problem, then it became a job of finding the rat internally and removing it. Because what the rat does is generate a thing called against energy and what against energy is, is I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. That's just being against. Against everything. I don't like this thing, I don't like that thing, and there's of things in the world that you pick and there's thousands of things in the world to pick. And when you apply against energy,

to the things in the world that you're mad at. You're really now in the world of fear and you can't get out. And because you're so firmly in the world of fear, you can't see the world of love because it's invisible to you. And that's what happened to me. I couldn't see there was a world of love and I couldn't be like, how do I get to love myself? Well, I've got to see that there's a world of love. I've got to see that there's a possibility that I can even get there. but by the way, I got to get out of this rat world of fear.

Christian Brim (29:54.882)
Yes.

Larry Bilotta (30:17.247)
And so that's what I found out. I found out I had a rat and that the rat lives in the world of fear, makes the world of fear, and actually creates a ship full of fear. And so that's what I was. I was a cruise ship full of fear. So that's what I had to find out. So what was the story was, I lived 27 years of a marriage made in hell. So what is 27 years? Well, when they impeached Richard Nixon, that was the beginning of my life in hell with a rat.

Christian Brim (30:45.902)
So it was, your marriage was never good from the beginning? mean, like...

Larry Bilotta (30:49.95)
No, no, not from the very first day. Because we brought the two fight and shut down systems with us. And that's what started immediately.

Christian Brim (30:56.14)
Right, right. What brought you together?

Larry Bilotta (31:01.173)
The need for strength. See, the need for strength brought me together with her. Her need to control something brought her to me. So she can control me. I'm soft-hearted. She's hard-natured. It was a combination that initially drew us together. So looks, personality, conversation, none of that mattered. All that mattered was the driving forces of, I can control him.

Christian Brim (31:03.342)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (31:10.127)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (31:30.623)
her drive and my need for strength. So my parents were not strong. That's why I needed strength.

Christian Brim (31:36.214)
And at what point would you say in the marriage did you guys have that understanding of that dynamic, both of you together?

Larry Bilotta (31:47.03)
There was no both of us together. It was a very slow, because remember we're talking about 27 years in a 40-year marriage. That 27 years was a very slow, sloppy discovery of idea after idea after idea. Now remember it's happening to me. Now I don't know what's happening to her internally. I know what's happening to me internally. So that's a slow, sloppy process. And because it was so slow and sloppy, I can't really pick days when anything started to...

Christian Brim (31:55.427)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (32:16.255)
to gel. But I know that in 27 years when I finally realized I do love who I am, she started to lose her fight. She started to take her edge off because her edge was like always on guard, always defensive, always attacking. It's always a setup that she had to live under. Because she had to live that way, she had to live that way because she considered me a threat. And so now when I stop becoming a threat, because the more I live in the world of love,

the less threatening I become. But the more I live in fear, I don't.

Christian Brim (32:48.622)
So did she arrive at that same self understanding at 27 years or did it take her longer to

Larry Bilotta (32:54.55)
No, no, she did not. And this is not even something that she and I could talk about. We couldn't even talk about it. Because remember, part of her programming was we have no conversation. There is no talking in this marriage. So she grew up as a non-talking person in a non-talking home. And so there's no discovery. There's no... All there is is anger. And that's how you show everything. So because she had no ability to talk, we couldn't actually talk through anything.

Christian Brim (33:02.296)
Right.

Christian Brim (33:09.282)
Hmm.

Larry Bilotta (33:23.931)
everything was just self-discovery. Pain, self-discovery. Pain, self-discovery. That became the way of life. then it just naturally happened that she started to lose her fight, not because I said anything, not because I did anything with my body or said anything with my mouth. She started to lose her edge because she started living in a safer environment. And so I was creating that safer environment.

Christian Brim (33:51.342)
Has she come to that self understanding now?

Larry Bilotta (33:56.31)
Not, well she died in 2019. Yeah. Oh, okay. I forgot, that's why it was a 40 year marriage, right? So she died in 2019 and I don't actually know about her discovery, right? She took it to the grave with her, so I don't know. But I do know she was my teacher.

Christian Brim (34:02.116)
okay. I'm sorry. I I missed that part.

Christian Brim (34:15.373)
Okay.

Christian Brim (34:23.266)
Mm-hmm.

Larry Bilotta (34:23.465)
And so when you call the most painful thing your teacher, now you're ready to start learning something that starts to matter, something you can actually do something with, right?

Christian Brim (34:33.773)
Were you able to love her at the end?

Larry Bilotta (34:40.032)
So when you love yourself, you can love another person. When you don't love yourself, you can't love another person. And so that's a very simple idea that's so deep and so far reaching that we can't even comprehend any of it. When you love yourself, you love another person. look at how long it took me 27 years to love myself and start to feel so good about myself that I could love a person who is difficult. And took a long, time.

Christian Brim (34:43.661)
Yes?

Larry Bilotta (35:09.749)
Why did take so long? Because it was a slow, sloppy process.

Christian Brim (35:13.536)
And you personally never went to therapy? Interesting.

Larry Bilotta (35:16.403)
No. No, but I did seek out all kinds of therapy in terms of advice and books and reading and study of all kinds. So I did look for that. And so I was getting all kinds of outward input from teachers. Actually, when you think about the Amazon self-help book list, specifically the Amazon self-help book list, there may be like a thousand titles in there, nine titles, right?

Christian Brim (35:43.629)
Right.

Larry Bilotta (35:46.144)
Who's writing? Well, all the authors who want to teach themselves something, right? Or want to share what they learned with somebody, right? So all the great dead authors are there, all the great living authors are there, right? And so all these people, they know all these things, they teach all these things with all kinds of examples and illustrations. What a great learning resource that is, right? But you can't read all those books. So how do you get to those books? Well, somebody tells you,

Christian Brim (35:50.574)
Mm.

Right.

Christian Brim (35:58.53)
Right.

Christian Brim (36:10.478)
Sure.

Larry Bilotta (36:16.201)
This book helped me. That's the only way you can know. So I wrote a book because I wanted to take all these ideas about the people that I talked to, the stares, and I wrote a book called This Is Not the Woman I Married. And so, this is not the woman I married. Why is it titled that? Because that's what the people who come to me say. This is not the woman I married. This is not the man I married. So I have one book called This Is Not the Woman I Married.

Christian Brim (36:19.342)
Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (36:43.958)
I have to work on the second book, This Is Not the Man I Married, because we have to separate gender worlds for people because they need to actually see it's something that applies to them. So I put all these ideas that I have from this long 40-year discovery system, and I put it into the book and I feel good about it. I finally have something that I believe in, so this is what I believe in. So that's what's there.

Christian Brim (37:02.349)
Right.

Yeah.

Christian Brim (37:09.774)
Are you going to have to someone help you co-author it to get the female perspective?

Larry Bilotta (37:16.501)
So when I think about co-authoring, when I talk to women, specifically to women, women tell me their whole female perspective. And because I have their whole female perspective, I have their whole female perspective and I have it literally every week. Because every week I'm talking to the women I'm talking about, This is not the man I married. That's what they've said. So I learn from them and then I learn from men.

Christian Brim (37:27.916)
Yes.

Christian Brim (37:35.213)
Right?

Larry Bilotta (37:46.579)
And so I have this male female perspective and I've had it for 15, 20 years. So that's where I'm learning. I'm learning from this laboratory of real life.

Christian Brim (37:59.214)
You were saying, you said something that I wanted to go back to. You said that you can't love others if you don't love yourself. And I'm thinking about the Old Testament and New Testament statements of loving others or loving your neighbor as yourself.

And I think how profound that is because we are limited in our capacity to love others based upon how much we love ourselves. And if you don't really like yourself and you're just holding everybody else to that same standard, it's...

you can feel righteous to say, I'm not treating them any worse than I would treat myself, but it still falls short.

Larry Bilotta (39:07.177)
Well, when you're talking about falling short and you're talking about the Bible, the Bible says, your neighbor as yourself, with that simple idea. But this now brings us to self-discovery. Do you love yourself? Well, what do the Greeks say? Know thyself. Well,

I don't know myself because I never really had to stop and know myself. So people who are, I've had people on three divorces. They have three divorces in their history. And with three divorces, they've left three times, right? Or they've been dumped three times, right? But they're not learning anything. And that's really the key. The key is I'm not learning anything. So I can't know if I love myself. I can't even know who myself is. Know thyself is the ancient wisdom.

Christian Brim (39:44.718)
All right.

Larry Bilotta (39:55.784)
But how am I going to know that I saw? So I go back to the Amazon book list. What's in the Amazon book list? All kinds of ancient and modern day knowledge. All kinds of, it's all there, right? Now it's just that it's so buried in such like thousands and thousands of pages, we consider it to be overwhelming.

Christian Brim (40:08.888)
Yes.

Christian Brim (40:16.973)
Yes.

Larry Bilotta (40:17.063)
So we have to start somewhere. So we have to start with very simple books. And one of the simple books is not The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That is not a simple book. But there's people who gravitate to that book because they're ready for it. And so now what you really got to ask is, where's my book? Where's the book I'm supposed to learn from? You don't really know. You don't know what book you're supposed to learn from, but the answers are there.

Because there's books by Marcus Aurelius in Amazon. So there's ancient wisdom, there's modern, so there's Freud and all that. So all is there, the question is where is your book? And so I talk about this in my course, that when you need something, you call out to the universe and say, where is my book? When you ask the question, where is my book? You're asking the universe to bring the book to you.

And so something will happen. Some person will say something. Something, a little scrap of an article will be read by you. Something will happen to find your book. And so that's how you find your book. And so what does that lead to? Well, that leads to the next book, right? So now you're on a path. You're on a path of learning. And why are you on a path of learning? Because you decided that you're going to learn. And once you decide that you're going to be the learner, the...

the things you need to learn are going to come to you. Because you ask the university, universe is going to tell you. The universe is guided by love. How do we know that? We know that by all the people who have died and come back. That's how we know. We know it because those people have had this out of world experience and they come back to say that the universe is literally governed by love. And that's what we know. And we know it from all kinds of authors.

Like Eben Alexander, the guy who wrote Proof of Heaven. So he noted... Dolores Cannon, who wrote all his books on interviewing people who died and had between lives memories. So we know it from all kinds of sources. So we know the universe is guided by love. And that's why you can say, just in the privacy of your own life, where is my book? You're now asking the universe.

Larry Bilotta (42:39.465)
Where is my book?

Christian Brim (42:41.034)
It reminds me of the Chinese proverb of when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Yeah.

Larry Bilotta (42:49.108)
Yes, that's exactly how it happens. When you say, is my book? The universe answers. And that's why you're ready. And so when you're ready for those things, they do show up. And that's how you sort through a book with thousand titles in it. How do you do that? Say, where's my book?

Christian Brim (43:06.604)
Right. Larry, I very much appreciate your time and your insight. How do people find your book and learn more about You Can Save This Marriage?

Larry Bilotta (43:16.937)
Okay, the book is, This is Not the Woman I Married. And so under that title, can use right now it's on Kindle, but it's going to be released in January on everything. So that is all the things I believe in, but also ways to get, you know, I have a lot of videos on my channel on YouTube. You can search Larry Blount on YouTube, you'll find the channel. And then you can go to the specific programs on

Christian Brim (43:27.822)
Nice.

Larry Bilotta (43:46.751)
YouCanSaveThisMarriage.com or LarryBallotta.com. And so that's gonna be a broad brush of all the stuff that I've done.

Christian Brim (43:57.442)
Perfect. Listeners, check it out if you want to learn more about Larry. If you like the program, please share the podcast, rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, and until then, know that you are not alone.