Our Three Biggest Fights as a Couple

Jason Lange: All right, and welcome back. I'm Jason from Evolutionary Men, and this is.

Violet Lange: I'm Violet Lang, and I'm the host of the Pleasure Path podcast, and I'm a women's coach.

Violet Lange: What.

Jason Lange: When she says the wall and the grenade, that's what we call our relationship dance of dysregulation, in a sense, which is something we cover in our program of. Sometimes my wallness, which just means not revealing a whole lot of my insides, including my feelings towards her, would leave her hanging, and then she would need to poke me bigger and bigger and bigger till she got a reaction. And although it wasn't very skillful, you know, when I'm screaming I love you over the phone, there's. That's a reaction, right? That did get me to move towards her in a way. And that was the first time that really got illuminated. I wish I could say it was the last time we did that dance, but it was where it was like, wow, this is a thing, right? You don't feel me enough, so you escalate.

Violet Lange: And.

Jason Lange: And then I. I kind of come forward with anger, though, which then makes you feel unsafe. And then we're both like, this fucking sucks. Like, neither of us are feeling connected or together right now.

Violet Lange: Like, boom, this is like three inches he's showing.

Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah, so just slam. Which made a big hole in the wall and immediately stopped the whole conversation. And because of her family of origin history, like, you know, she. She felt very unsafe in what, you know, doubled this down even more to go back to some of what I was talking about earlier. And then deeper aspects of shadow, something that does absolutely come up in relationship is, you know, she pulls away, and she's like, how could I ever have kids with you? How could I trust that you wouldn't hit me or hit the kids? And I immediately went to. I would never hit you or hit the kids. And the second. The second I said it, I knew it was a lie. And I knew she knew it was a lie. I was like, what are you talking about? You just literally slammed the wall by my face. That is something inside of you. And that began a deep piece of work for me where I had to get in touch with part of my lineage that actually was physically abusive, in that this is part of me. I could do this. I actually could do it. My nervous system could get overwhelmed, that I could hurt her or my child. And what's dangerous is pretending like that can't happen versus, wow, this is inside of me. And I really need to learn to work with my anger and how to set boundaries at a much earlier state. And that kicked off a whole nother deep dive, really into therapy again. Thankfully, we had our therapist on the bat dial and you know, we had some tools, but it took some time to re establish any kind of connection. It was, you know, on and off in some big ways, but that it really surfaced, you know, me having to come to terms with my anger. And paradoxically, you know, things we started to uncover was that for me, I had to become okay with my anger and that if I let it out in a healthy way to not assume it was really bad and then that would have me hold it back. And to realize her nervous system was allowed to have an experience. But as long as I'm not projecting it on her, that's okay. Like, I'm allowed to have that experience. And that was a huge learning. Along with that was the wake up call I needed to. Okay, you know what? My current life strategy is not working. It's true. I would not be able to take care of a family like this. And you know, it sounds like I made that realization right after the moment, but this is like a three month aftershocks of all of this really kind of coming together where then I had to step forward and get some stable work, which I still have to this day. Even though, yeah, my coaching business is growing and thriving, it allows a certain type of stability that allows me to be present in a different way.

Violet Lange: Yes. And I had a lot of guilt and shame over, you know, attacking Jason, throwing the grenade, having such big needs, being in my masculine, being closed down to him, and then like causing him suffering, you know, making him do some work that he doesn't maybe love as much as some of the other work he does. And so me getting comfortable with my own needs and then also me getting comfortable with my self righteousness. You know, in one of our therapy sessions, Jason kind of like used his fist to hit the table was just kind of like, you know, very briefly, just kind of pounded it on the table. And I startled, you know, and I went into my whole, like, see, like he's angry and he's aggressive and I would never do that. I remember saying to the therapist, like, I, I would never do that. Like, I don't do that with my anger. Not realizing that what I do with my anger was just as bad. It was threatening the relationship. I was attacking him verbally, you know, I was, I was using my anger in very unskillful ways. And again, she was like, okay, tell me about that. Because that seems unreasonable and self righteous to just be like, no one can ever express anger in physical ways. You know, it has to just be through their words. And then I had some work to do on my lineage and me creating safety in my body and me re establishing trust within myself and within Jason. And also knowing that like, if for whatever reason he ever became physically abusive to me or our children, I would leave. You know, one of my shadow sides in my lineage is that there was a lot of trauma that happened when I was young and my mom never left, you know, and she had her own reasons, financial and otherwise, when. But I think some of my controlling, self righteous, attacking behavior was testing him and provoking him. Not only because I needed to feel him more, I needed to feel safe in him, but because I was recreating the past and I had not yet decided I will leave if I feel actually unsafe in that way. And that was huge for me because, you know, I had a long dating journey. I had a sexless marriage in my 20s. Like the last thing I wanted to do is leave a relationship. Especially now that I've just spent three years with this person and I'm really ready to have kids. But I had to be willing to let that dream go in service of prioritizing my lineage healing, which looks like being willing to leave if someone is not accountable to our agreements. And so one of our agreements is that we're not going to use physical violence. And our therapist helped us see that I was being in quotations, violent with my words, the way that I would threaten the relationship. So saying, you know, I don't know if we're going to last or work or, you know, I can't do this anymore or I want to have a baby, but I don't know if it's with you. Like these are ways that I was threatening the relationship.

Jason Lange: And I think that kind of rolls right along into fight number three.

Violet Lange: So, yes, I mean, we're telling you like the big, big ruptures. Obviously we have smaller ruptures along the way, like every couple does. But the biggest fight then was actually not till quite a bit later. That next kind of huge fight was in December of 2023. So pretty recently, again, related to fertility stuff. And you might notice a theme also related to when we have had distance from each other, which is common in a lot of couples, right? There's travel, there's long distance relationships, there's times when you just can't connect as often. And for me, part of what was percolating with this was a few things, one of which is that I had a miscarriage in August of 2023. And it was a missed miscarriage, which means that you don't realize that you're not pregnant anymore until you go in for a scan. And they say the baby stopped developing. And it's fairly common. But it was my first experience of that type of loss. I had had other types of pregnancy loss and I was, as my therapist said, as our therapist said, you know, mad with grief, crazy with grief. But it didn' it at the time. So I did some good self care. You know, I really grieved in many ways. I went on a pilgrimage to the UK to Glastonbury, which was very healing. But I wouldn't say that I was doing relational healing. You know, I was working with myself. But there were still old kind of ghosts and issues haunting me from myself and my own mindset. Questions about would I be a mom again, Questions about challenges in our dynamic related to fertility, which, you know, unfortunately is a struggle for a lot of people, parenting or fertility or pregnancy loss. And then I had letter retreat in early November and I think my nervous system just, it just got fried. I had the pregnancy loss and I went on my own retreat. We're still parenting, you know, at that time. A three year old, which can be very challenging age. I had just led my retreat and then we had tried a fertility treatment and IUI that didn't work. And I think all of those things combined, the separation or the, you know, the travel, the distance from Jason and the unwillingness to maybe go to the depths of my grief that I needed to go to, just all kind of piled up and slight improvement to things in the past that I like told him we need a session with our therapist because I have so much on my heart. So I didn't just unload it on him. That's like one, one small step in the right direction. But once it got in the session, it got Pretty nasty. So, yeah, I basically was like, I'm not gonna do this relationship just for the sake of. Of Ruby or just for the sake of appearances again, maybe this is me kind of trying to assert myself compared to my lineage. Like, again, in my family, you stay together no matter what, no matter how toxic. Toxic it is or who's getting abused or what the cost is. And there was also a lot of appearances, like, oh, well, our family is perfect from the outside and on the inside, you know, there's incest and there's physical abuse and there's narcissism and there's these other things happening. So I think my pendulum swinging in the totally opposite direction is like, I'm not going to be in this for appearances. I'm just going to be in this for the kids. You know, Like, I was so full of vitriol from the time we had wasted in quotations with our fertility journey and all the losses along the way. And I was punishing him. Yeah, I was punishing him with my words and my emotions. And I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud of kind of like putting Ruby in the mix. I. I said some mean things about Jason's relationship with Ruby that aren't exactly true. You know, I basically was like, well, she doesn't even like you. But the truth is I was feeling lots of contempt and rage towards Jason and she was picking up on that. Once we worked through this cycle of healing, that was a much shorter cycle, but still, like, maybe, you know, two or three weeks in December of 2023, Ruby started bonding with Jason more. You know, like, we have a deep impact on our children and how we feel about our partner translates. You know, Jason has had the experience of his mom being upset at his dad, and Jason's feeling that feminine rage in his body, even if his mom isn't saying anything to his dad at that point. So anyway, I'll stop talking and let Jason chime in.

Violet Lange: Yeah. And I think there were things I just learned that I didn't know were having such a big impact. You know, Jason shared in that session that he. If I, like, startled in the middle of the night because I have a pretty big startle response, ironically, less so now that we've moved. But that came up a lot in our old house. I didn't quite feel as safe there, just based on the neighborhood and, you know, kid throwing a rock through the window and other things. And that when I had a startle response, he was taking that on like, oh, I'm bad, I've done something wrong, like, I've hurt Violet. Even though I have a startle response because of my childhood trauma, some of which happened, you know, when. When it was dark and because this place we're living that I don't necessarily feel this super safe in our physical home. So I felt a New awareness of how responsible I needed to be for my nervous system. And I've seen like memes on the Internet or this kind of concept. I just want to reiterate that's we are responsible for the energy we put into our relationship, even if we're not verbalizing it, even if we're not doing something wrong in quotations like, oh, what would it be like to actually be responsible for Jason's nervous system in a healthy way with the way that I'm showing up with my nervous system. So I completely agree with you that we had more tools going in. We actually did the fight in front of our therapist, which is probably healthier than we had ever done it before. Even though is. Is more, you know, extreme, like verbally and there was more at stake than ever before. And, and we kind of went to that very scary place of like, do we want to be together? Which we hadn't really vocalized in our previous. It catalyzed me to take a little more responsibility for my nervous system. I got a fertility specific therapist so I could work through some of my grief. I started doing sessions with our couples therapists one on one. I had been working with like herbology stuff and I just kind of took that to another level, making sure I had the right structure and rituals in my day to day routine so I could show up a little more self regulated. And then, yeah, letting go of that hurt. I think I had a tendency in the past to maybe hold on to that because it's what kept me connected to Jason, false, falsely connected, you know, just through my rage or, or whatever. But the rage in some ways felt better than resentment or better than contempt or better than disgust. And as I was able to move through that more quickly then I was able to feel the love that Jason had for Jason and, or Jason had for Ruby and Ruby had for Jason. And kind of our family unit began to heal in a way that we, we just hadn't the year prior because we were either doing fertility treatments or we had pregnancy loss or we were traveling or working. And yeah, I think that year we probably had the least amount of physical connection than, than any other year. And that is, that is a tool for regulating. It can be overused. You know, we don't want to just trauma, trauma bang our partner and just be like bonding as a way to sexually as a way to regulate our own nervous systems. That's, that's not great. But, but true connected intimacy where your hearts are open and you're enjoying physical pleasure, you know, that can Be like a healing balm for your relationship.

Jason Lange: And again, just kind of what I took away from that was learning to differentiate my nervous system in that she's allowed to have her experience. And it's not that I'm closed to it, but I can also be safe in my own experience, which is different than hers. And you know, another place this sometimes used to show up would be she has very visceral dreams. And so sometimes we would wait, wake up, and she would be mad at me because of something that had happened in a dream. And I would take that on, right, like, oh my God, I gotta like fix this now. Or somehow prove that that would never happen. And I would actually get dysregulated from that versus now I have more capacity to. No, I'm okay. Like, oh, that's okay. It's just a dream, like, and it's okay. And she's going to be okay. She always ends up regulating herself long term in a sense in that. Instead, you know, the shift now is to just kind of approach that from a more curious place and, you know, not assume it's true or that I have to defend something because of that and again, just not collapse into my own dysregulation in the, in the relationship. And for us to just be much better at naming resentments and frustrations and to build more and more safety to bring these different parts of ourselves forward. And while we used an example here of, for us, we leaned a lot in these instances on our therapist. But we were each doing individual work with therapists and different programs and modalities at the same time. Because the other, I think, core component here of what's shifted over the course of these three fights is our individual capacity and our individual intimacy with ourselves and our patterns and our ability to take responsibility for, oh, this is, this is what's going on in my side. And that, that takes practice and training, right? That's something anyone can learn. We learned it. We're still learning it. It's not like you just master it one day, but it's just you get better and better at bringing things forward more and more real time in ways that lead to connection rather than conflict, in a sense of bringing forward vulnerabilities or hurts or things like that. Much more on, on the dime, so to speak, rather than they build up and then they kind of come out for me as, you know, more passive aggressive or hers, you know, more that grenade energy initially. And that's part of the inspiration for, you know, the program we've created is okay. How do you actually build these capacities as a couple without having to have the extreme situations? Like, what. What are the safe ways you can start to play with all of this different kind of stuff. Conflict, connection, sexuality, in ways that we can really get to know ourselves and our partners at a much deeper level.

Violet Lange: And I will also just add, you know, looking back at these three biggest fights, there was always a calling towards growth or an opportunity for growth on the other side of them that perhaps was in the field or was something that wanted to happen. I'm not saying the fight wanted to happen. That could have done a lot. We could have done that a lot more skillfully. But for instance, our fight in 2018, that I didn't realize I was pregnant at the time, and it did end in a blighted ovum, like an early miscarriage. We got. We worked through that, and then we got pregnant a few months later. And the. Sorry, that was fight number two that we talked about. And then the first fight that we talked about on the other side of that was actually growth for both of us in our businesses and in our personal development. We just maybe couldn't see or anticipate it at the time. And then the huge fight we had In December of 2023, you know, month and a half, two months later, we had bought our new house. We had gotten pregnant through some fertility treatments. And so if you are going through a hard time in your relationship or you look back on the hard times you've gone through on a spiritual level, maybe something is being worked through to support you foundationally for this next level of growth in your relationship. If we can take the hard medicine of taking responsibility, doing our work, getting resourced and supported, being surrounded by other role models and couples and. And knowing that we are committed to ourselves and to each other, that interdependence.

Jason Lange: And, you know, it's really two things that ended up playing together here to allow us to keep moving forward, which are part of, again, what we weave into the evolutionary couples and 12 epic gates experience, which are really both capacity and tools. So capacity is just the ability to stay present, right? And then to kind of consciously respond rather than react, as we were both doing earlier on, where we would just become the reactive emotion. Now we can, you know, at our best, take these more subtle pauses and come with a little more intention. Okay, I have the capacity to choose what I want to do here. And then where tools come online is, well, what do I want to do here? What do we actually have in the toolkit to deal with, with this resentment or deal with this physical disconnection or deal with this just kind of, I don't know, things are good, but we're kind of missing a little bit of the electricity here. What's, what's the tool we can reach for to kind of generate that again? And that's really what we're teaching in the program.

Violet Lange: And I'll say that this, these last, you know, eight months or so have probably been the healthiest months that we've had. We've noticed our pattern sooner. We haven't been without stress, you know, moving to a different state while pregnant, you know, while getting your four year old set up for a new school. You know, there's been all sorts of things that could have been stressors but I feel like we've both, to Jason's point, been developing our capacity, reaching for our tools and prioritizing our connection physically and emotionally even amidst all the stress. And it's probably the first time, at least in my perspective in our relationship where for a very solid amount of time we've had both physical and emotional connection online, that we've stayed connected even through the hard times. And I'm, I'm really proud of us for that.

Jason Lange: Well, I think we'll bring things to a close there. If you have any questions, you can contact us on the Evolutionary Couples website. And until next time you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men Apply.