Malcolm Stern: 0:47

Well, welcome to my podcast Slay your Dragons, and it's a great delight today to have Matthew Pruen with me. I've known Matthew for three or so years but our relationship has become a very deep connection and you'll see during the podcast there'll be lots of places where our kindred thinking comes into play. Matthew is a relationship coach, although I think this underplays what he is. I asked him to call him a relationship expert, but he was too humble to do that. So he's a relationship coach and he's also a supervising facilitator at the Hoffman Institute UK. So, Matthew, welcome to the podcast Slay your Dragons. And today we'll be looking at your life what's made you who you are and what have you had to take on and challenge in the process?

Matthew Pruen: 1:46

Thank you so much, malcolm. It's a complete treat. I feel I'm really chuffed to be doing this and, exactly as you say, in the relatively short time we've known each other, I really feel like I've met a kindred spirit. So I'm really intrigued what sort of alchemy and connection might yet bring. It's already brought a lot.

Malcolm Stern: 2:10

So can you tell us a little bit about your background and what's brought you to where you are and who you are?

Matthew Pruen: 2:17

Yeah, sure, I'm a mixture, which I think is important to who I am. My father was English and my mother was Lebanese-Palestinian. So I was born and brought up in Beirut, in Lebanon, and I lived there until the early years of the Civil War when I was about 16. So within me are a big dose of the Arab world, and not just the Arab world, but the Levantine Arab world, which is the sort of Mediterranean bit of it, and also the English world as well, which comes with my education, english boarding schools and that sort of thing. If there's a kind of path that that set me on, it's about reconciling difference and it's about East and West and it's about building bridges. And I think I've had to do that as part of my own survival, my own way of managing the difference within me and in the two environments in which I've lived and also in my work life, particularly with couples, reconciling difference and building bridges between my clients.

Malcolm Stern: 3:48

I think, when we look at reconciling differences and building bridges, I think we're looking really aren't we? At the whole world. What we need in order to survive is to recognize, and I remember seeing a beautiful video of Carl Sagan, who did this series, Cosmos. I don't know if you've come across him.

Matthew Pruen: 4:05

I remember it yeah.

Malcolm Stern: 4:06

Yes, and he did something called Pale Blue Dot, which is about a five minute piece, and he showed that this little pale blue dot in space. Everything all of our history is on this little dot. And what really struck me in that is he said and we go to war over these things that we see ourselves as so different when in fact we're so alike. And I think that we have to learn to live together and we have to learn how to, more than tolerate each other, we have to learn to love each other as fellow human beings, as I see it, as fellow pilgrims on his earth.

Matthew Pruen: 4:43

And love, I think, very particularly defined by accepting each other as we are rather than as we would want each other to be. Yes, yes, yeah, absolutely yeah. There's a song, isn't there, called From a Distance, or something like that. That was beautiful yeah. The heart-rending song, because I think it's written through God's eyes and the song proposes that from that distance it becomes very easy to love us all, because you can't see the mess.

Malcolm Stern: 5:19

It's true and it's so strange. When we think about how we get into conflict through our own thinking, we think something about another. They ought to be a different way. They're not responding to us in the way we want them to, and we've been on a group together which we're exploring those differences and people have learned, are learning over an extended period of time to love each other and even though sometimes we're gonna irritate each other, there's still the sense that we are fellow human beings on a journey, on a human journey and this temporary body we inhabit. So tell me a little bit about your work with couples, because I think that is again. That's a work that I've been involved in in the past as well, and to a small degree now, but there's something that you've really taken on in terms of working with couples.

Matthew Pruen: 6:11

Yeah, I've been married twice and at the end of my first marriage did a lot of couples therapy. On the receiving end I was a consumer, as it were, of couples therapy. And so my surprise, because my first 20 years in working life, adult life, was in business. I ran restaurants and bars and live music venues and that sort of thing. But when I did eventually become a couple's coach, I had the same slightly flat feeling that I sometimes had as a consumer of couples therapy, which was in the short one hour sessions that we would do Perhaps the most that might be achieved, which wasn't nothing, but it was like a little bubble of safety and within that, perhaps a little freedom to be more fully myself with the other than I had felt before. But that lacked traction and lacked momentum and didn't translate a great deal into action, and often by the next week I would feel like we were starting where we'd left off. So as a practitioner, I followed my nose and did what others do, which is to do one hour sessions, and pretty soon felt the same slightly dispiriting feeling that this wasn't really cat catalyzing meaningful change. It was at best creating that little bubble of safety. So I took a bold step, which was to create a one day program, which I had no idea whether the world would want, because it seemed like a lot. And I borrowed heavily from various wisdom traditions and, slowly, I suppose if I offered anything original myself, it was in the choreography of it, the sequencing of certain processes, because I knew I didn't want to sit around and talk about it for a whole day with people. It wasn't to be a talking therapy, it was to be a cause, and that started to go pretty well, but it still felt like it had an additional step.

Matthew Pruen: 8:27

So two and then three themes became really fundamental. One was saying what needs to be said and hearing what needs to be said, so communication, day one. The next was letting go of grievances and ultimately compassion and forgiveness. So that became the theme of day two. And then day three would be the what next bit, which would be ultimately envisioning a positive future. And what I came to see was that those three things were necessary, whether people wanted to stay together or whether they wanted to part. So a good goodbye is worth an awful lot and we all know what a bad goodbye or an incomplete goodbye looks like. So what I came to see was that the first two days set the condition to the third. You could go straight in with the what next bit. But without an open heart and without peace in your heart and without compassion for each other, it's unlikely to be very effective. In fact, it can often be very sticky. So two thirds of the process is about setting the conditions for what we do about it.

Malcolm Stern: 9:51

That's very good, because actually what I'm hearing is that this is like the Ai Qing, which is the Chinese Oracle which Confucius said he starts to grasp the rudimentary zone in his 70s. It says that when the family is in order, then the whole world is in order. When the father is truly the father and the mother is truly the mother and the child is truly the child, then the whole world is in order. What I'm hearing here is that if you can get the couple into order rather than to try and to magic up some trick where they walk out of your consulting rooms feeling like they're not happier towards each other, but then that doesn't have the longevity that it needs to make real change. So I can see that these and I often look at this when I'm working in the corporate world is that actually you need to get to the core before you try and find your way forward. You've got to try that what's not working. So if you just go straight to forgiveness, for example, then you're missing out on something, aren't you?

Matthew Pruen: 10:55

Yeah, forgiveness, when we rush to it tends to be forgiveness as a virtue rather than as a blessing. And forgiveness as a virtue I certainly am not interested in. At best it's a rather patronising I make myself big and I make you small process. If someone comes to me and says you know, matthew, that dreadful thing you did, well, I in my large ass, I forgive you for it. I don't feel very nourished, I don't feel very blessed by that sort of thing. I can't imagine they would if I did that too. But you know, I mean, this has been said to the point of cliche. So I know it's not my original thought.

Matthew Pruen: 11:44

But Mandela, you know, when he got out of jail, was asked what do you feel about your prison guards, who, after all, have been torturing him, I think, for 27 years in Robin Island? And he said, well, I'm going to try, which I thought was an interesting word. He didn't say I will, he said I'm going to try and forgive them. And the interviewer said to him well, they don't deserve it. And he said no, make no mistake, they certainly don't, but I do.

Malcolm Stern: 12:12

Oh, that's beautiful. I haven't heard that before. It's beautiful.

Matthew Pruen: 12:17

It's. I think it probably takes 27 years of being tortured to kind of find that sublime spiritual truth in yourself. But what he knew was that he'd suffered enough and he knew that bitterness was a choice, and he knew that bitterness was going to create more suffering for him. So he knew that forgiveness was self-interested. It's for me that I might forgive Now, if I can artfully and skillfully make that clear to couples, and particularly couples who have been at it a while. You know, I mean, there is no relationship good or bad or indifferent that doesn't have power struggle in it. So if people have been around that rather predictable and very tiresome vicious cycle a few times, it's not that difficult to say hey look, wouldn't you like to be office? Yeah, you know. Then you got the buy in and then, yes, absolutely as you say, you've got two days of not fixing any, two days of just setting the conditions, where the fixing work comes rather naturally because, as you say, you've got to the core of it.

Malcolm Stern: 13:30

Yes, now that sounds really good, because I've done a lot of couple of work in the past and always done it in that sort of therapy hour. So I was feeling sometimes like, oh that's great, you know, they've really shifted, and then they'll come back the next time. It's a bit like osteopathy, where you get all your bones twisted and you're in a terrible state and suddenly you're okay, and then you walk out and a little bit later your bones snap back because they haven't actually fixed the core of what needs to be fixed. And what I'm hearing is that you have, you've ascertained a way of getting to the core, which, of course, is spacious, and that's what we often don't give ourselves. We have this extraordinary structure of the marriage or a deep couples relationship, and we expect to crack it in a therapy hour. In fact, if you're going to invest in these things, they're going to involve an awful lot of soul searching, aren't they?

Matthew Pruen: 14:20

I think the one hour thing can be, you know, a very useful intervention. And I look back on the therapist I used to have and others, and within an hour you're no exception. There's no doubt that I have real affection and respect for the facilitation that's been afforded me in those settings. And the other thing that I think shouldn't be forgotten is that it's not just the process or what I have to offer, but the level of commitment that's required to sign up for three days. You know, nine till four o'clock or four thirty for three days is.

Matthew Pruen: 15:05

It asks a lot of you and I do a pre-call to interview ultimately the couples to see if I want to work with them. And in that pre-call what I'm doing is I'm saying you have to be willing. I ask a lot of you. I'm not just doing this to you. You're going to be doing the work. I ask a lot of you, but one of the things you have to be willing to do is to see yourself through your partner's eyes for a little while. You have to be willing to do something different for two months, because it is coaching, it's not therapy. I'm actually not a psychotherapist. So there's a two month period afterwards during which there are practical things that people sign up to commitments to change. They ask each other, they make requests, they come up with ideas that they want to do differently, and then we have a two month review, two months later. So you have to mean business, and that level of commitment is, of course, I mean almost whatever the quality of the work is going to bring out more from it, isn't it?

Malcolm Stern: 16:11

So that feels like a healthy way of approaching couples and I know that in the early 2000s I did this process called the Hoffman process, which was an eight day training. I don't know if it's still an eight day training, but it was seven day training.

Malcolm Stern: 16:26

Okay, it's shrunk, but I found that very powerful because I had to go in. It was a very intense period and you've been a Hoffman trainer for many years and also you're a supervising facilitator, so you've been helping people get through extraordinary shifts that they need to make. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Matthew Pruen: 16:48

Yeah, and I think I have to say that the Hoffman process has been so fundamentally informing of the work I do with couples, so it gave me an awful lot of flying hours basically being a Hoffman facilitator. But I should start by saying that long before I had any aspiration to work as a coach, I found my way through the doors of the Hoffman process as a participant, as a student, and I was just telling 40 and every possible fisher in my corny midlife crisis was cracking away like a good one. So my children were in their teens, both my parents and my wife's remaining living parent had just died in the year before and my working life was a bit of a disaster, so it was a hot mess. I was about as wobbly as I could possibly be and I then jumped on this roller coaster which the Hoffman process is.

Matthew Pruen: 18:00

Is that actually, if you break it down to a series of about 130 or so emotionally intentional experiences spread out over now over seven days?

Matthew Pruen: 18:13

First of all, a deep immersion into childhood. So we make a movement from looking back as adults, with all the wisdom and compassion that adulthood can bring, to look at childhood from a distance, and instead we re-immers ourselves into childhood and we re-experience the feelings, the subjective experience of us as children, without whitewashing, without re-appraising, without re-evaluating or rationalising it away, but just to really intensely feel that experience of childhood and then to work our way through a cathartic process. And then the sequencing is so important. I think I learned a lot from Hoffman because of the sequencing. So the first step is awareness, embodied awareness of childhood. The second is expression, so you really really dig deep and you pull out of yourself all that old grief. And that, in the same way as when you do that with couples at an individual level, what that does is create an incredible sweet spot. The sweet spot means that we can find compassion for the children that our parents once were. So we know our past.

Malcolm Stern: 19:41

Find compassion for ourselves, the children we once were. We're going an extra step.

Matthew Pruen: 19:45

The two things happen together if we make peace with ourselves by grieving our own past, the thought God, it didn't begin with mum and dad, they too were once children that suddenly drops down from our head into our heart.

Matthew Pruen: 20:01

We have a compassionate understanding that our parents were once children too, and something becomes possible that would not be possible without that kind of cathartic process beforehand. And then the new behavior, the fourth step, the new behavior, which is what we've all signed up for and why we've come. I want to be different, I want to act differently, I want to do things differently in my life, and that becomes really much more natural. So you could probably go to the smart thinking section of Waterstones and find a good self-help book, but what you would be lacking is the processing beforehand that prepares you for making that change in a more natural way. So I've been doing that for about 14 or 15 years, and it's a strange job, you'll know, because you've been on the receiving end of it, I think. And so facilitating that, as I said earlier, gave me an awful lot of flying hours, and I think it kind of trained me.

Malcolm Stern: 21:06

Yes, I think that's the thing we get trained in the process of training. So I'm seeing what I see with my main work now is with ongoing therapy groups, and what I can see is that it's all about practice. You can get the insight. You can do like a one-off session. You can get the insight and sometimes I'll do an amazing week somewhere and people come away full of love and then, bit by bit, it dribbles away and then we've got to find ways of keeping the continuity of change and I think that without awareness that won't happen. You may get a free ride for a while, but without awareness you're not going to get to the core of who you are.

Matthew Pruen: 21:48

Absolutely. I think the thing that changed me most was not so much the Huffman process itself, but then training to be a facilitator, and that was an ignominious experience in the sense that it was a feedback-based training. So what I signed up for was to build a robustness in myself, to hear how other people experienced me and of course that brought me face to face with my ego, because an awful lot of it was very, very hard to hear and I heard it copiously and I heard it from all directions Patterns of arrogance, patterns of entitlement, patterns that my own privileged background had filled me up with and I'm not saying I've got, I've shaken them all off, sadly. But what I can say is that it gave me an accelerated period of growth, ultimately spiritual growth, and so to become more robust about some of that stuff has been incredibly healing to me and I suppose, if that's given me anything in my practice, it's been able to hold space for others in their distress or in their discomfort or their vulnerability.

Malcolm Stern: 23:12

Yeah, that's probably what you're looking at. There is, the root of compassion is to allow the other to be distressed, to not judge them and put them in a box that they are this or they are, that we are all as human beings. We're all suffering and we go through life and there is suffering, but we are also, hopefully, in the process of learning. There's a lovely line in a Lennar Cohen song Anthem. The well-known line is that there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. But the less well-known line in that is that every heart to love shall come. But like a refugee and I really see that it's almost like we get brought kicking and screaming to consciousness, which we look at it from a period of when will it happen? In a year or two years? But actually what we're looking at normally when we're looking at consciousness is lifetimes. If we believe in that structure, gradually, bit by bit, we evolve into what we can become.

Matthew Pruen: 24:15

Yeah, well, that's beautiful and what a wonderful place in the world Lennar Cohen has occupied. One of the things I've seen in my work is that, and also my own processing, is that there is an aspect of me which is unneurotic, and most traditions have referred to that as the spirit, and I'm happy to go with that, so I'll call it my spiritual self. So there's an aspect of me that is unneurotic, and we might as well call that my spirit, and I don't have the kind of access to that part of me that I would like. I have an ego the size of a bus that obscures that access. However, hoffman and other experiences like it have given me a kind of methodology, a little toolkit to.

Matthew Pruen: 25:21

If I have the presence of mind and if I have the goodwill, I can access it when I need it.

Matthew Pruen: 25:30

It's far easier I just want to be clear to access it in my work to support others than it is in my own marriage, as my wife will attest. Nevertheless, it's really good to know it's there, and knowing it's there in me means I know it's in there and it's in others too. So if I have a facilitation role in helping others access that part of them, then I'm on to something good. I've heard people who are with the medical training, with a brain science training, talk about the mid prefrontal cortex and talk about trauma in ways that I'm not trained to really talk about. But it makes sense to me at that level that compassion, rationality, fineness, warm good humor, goodwill, all those things are the properties or the quantities of that spiritual self and that reactivity, fight and flight, but in short hand are the qualities of people under stress or in trauma. So the role of the facilitator is to create safety so that we can access that higher part of ourselves.

Malcolm Stern: 27:03

And you're right, there is. I remember someone once saying to me that when you run a workshop it's almost as though you become guru for a day. It is very easy to actually find that in relation to others, but it's finding it in yourself and finding it. And does it come by grace that actually it descends upon us? Or does it come by practice that we meditate regularly or we make a practice of how we are in relationship? But I did.

Malcolm Stern: 27:30

I remember there was a I won't name this person, but there was a person who was talking about relationships and a large audience that we had at Alternatives and St James's and I asked her about her own relationship and I saw her struggle to give an honest and yet also a sort of like a wise answer and she said and she ended up saying what was the best thing she could have said given the circumstances. But I didn't think that she was in a profound relationship and she said I do the best, I try the best I can, but my sense with you, as you've been with your current, your current wife, your second wife, for 20 odd years, is that right, something in the other way? Yeah, and that actually you have a good working relationship. And I think there's something about at one level, we teach what we need to learn and I think that you know I'm not as brilliant as I might appear when I'm running a workshop. There are parts of me that aren't as integrated as I will show when I'm not deliberately hiding anything, but it's. They'll show that.

Malcolm Stern: 28:35

But there's something about being a relationship coach and actually having gone through quite a lot yourself so that you are actually an embodiment of that. That feels quite profound. So can you tell me a little bit about your relationship? Obviously without all this sort of necessary all the bits and pieces, but just, is it good? What did you have to come through to make it good? What are you learning in that place?

Matthew Pruen: 29:00

So it is good. It is definitely a good relationship and it's a really good and timely question that you've just asked, because last Friday actually last Friday was the night before our wedding anniversary, but because I was off to London to work with you and your sangha and our sangha in London on our wedding anniversary. We had our dinner the night before and the love flowed well between us. There was a quality which the two of us can co-create easily, which is a slight sense of ritual, where we celebrate the value that we both place on the relationship, the preciousness of the relationship. We tend to do so with food, so we went out to dinner and we had what I would call a really good quality connection, and one of the things that my wife said to me afterwards was that was really lovely and I really miss you when you're not present.

Malcolm Stern: 30:09

Wow.

Matthew Pruen: 30:12

So one of my patents and I know where I learned it was at boarding school. I was eight and I don't want to speak about boarding school in general or other people's experience, but I can tell you that mine was one of total overwhelm and that it was a traumatic experience To be a little fundamentally Arab boy, transplanted 3,000 miles to a British a third rate British public school at a time when Britain hadn't yet accepted that it didn't really have an empire anymore. So the function of the school was still carrying on as if we did. And in that space I know that I shut down and one of the little tricks I learned in order to sue what was an overwhelming experience of rupture in my primary relationship with my mum especially, was to space out. So I used to look out the window and probably drool while I fantasized about being at home again in London, and that little drug has been a readily available resource of self soothing ever since and it plays out in my marriage, it plays out in all my relationships and it plays out in my parenting.

Matthew Pruen: 31:40

So that guru for a day thing is to borrow a phrase I used the other day when we were working is I get away with a lot because I can summon up a high level of presence in my facilitation work. When I work with groups and in the far more challenging space of my personal life, the ease with which I can check out is still very natural to me and it's a source of challenge in the relationship. So when I say our relationship is good, what I mean by that is it's incredibly precious to both of us and that the love is extremely natural between us and that the power struggles that we have, like anyone and everyone, are things that we both engage with good hearts to get through that much more quickly than we might if we were in a bad relationship and ultimately are the resource the difficulties are the resource which provides the growth and the deeply of our intimacy. So we trust each other more because of putting our failings right well, with humility, than we would if we hadn't offended against each other in the first place.

Malcolm Stern: 33:17

I think people often confuse. You often hear the sort of surprise that couple seems so wonderful and it was amazing that they split up. But actually I think if you don't find the places of conflict and resolution within the relationship and you'll know more about this than I do then you'll put sticking plaster over things, but you won't. I think the relationship as a tool for growth is a very important concept, that actually before the 1970s we never relationships weren't thought of as places where growth would take place, but that I see them as extraordinary places now where we are forced to become ourselves. You know like you're gonna be forced to show up and be present within your relationship, otherwise you'll be challenged or worse, you'll be ignored.

Matthew Pruen: 34:02

Yeah, and the romantic mythology has a lot to answer for, doesn't it? Because every image, every song, every poem, every play, every painting we've ever seen about love has reinforced this idea that love, that is to say successful love, can be defined by a rather painless, etheric sequence of blissful experiences, one following the other, and the first sign of any difficulty that we're with, as we might say, the wrong person. And the truth is so fundamentally different, isn't it? It's in the vulnerability and distress and discomfort of a crisis in a relationship that the nutrients for growth can be found, not in the stuff anyone can do the kind of nicey, nicey bit.

Malcolm Stern: 34:59

Yes, and sex will carry you a certain distance, but it won't carry you the whole way. True, yes, but I think what we're looking at is also the if we take that back, to strip this back to it sort of smallest, sort of common denominator us as individuals, our challenges and this is very much what inspired my book Slay your Dragons With Compassion is how do we deal with adversity, and can we let adversity grow us rather than see it as a punishment from a vengeful God?

Matthew Pruen: 35:34

Yeah, it's such a good question. I really enjoyed your book and it was the chapter on Sangha that inspired my continuation and my work with you and my journey with you. We can ask us what is a good relationship and we can list perhaps I don't know 20, 30 really beautiful qualities that can be found in a good relationship. You know humor, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, passion, love, joy, playfulness, etc. Trust, honesty, etc, etc, etc. We could easily populate a long list of qualities and then if we asked us what a bad relationship was, we could put in all kinds of things very easily. That would be the characteristics of a bad relationship. You know distrust, cruelty, blame, judgment, abandonment, smothering, controlling, etc, etc.

Matthew Pruen: 36:38

And where we go wrong, I think, is to say here's the good list, that's a good relationship. And it's only a good relationship if it's just that stuff and if the other stuff even bleeds into it a tiny bit, it's like wrong and with the wrong person I made a mistake. I mean, silly me, why did I ever? You know, if we see the other list instead of being evidence that a relationship has failed and seen it instead as the catalyst for growth, of course that stuff is horrible, of course that stuff is painful and of course we must be discerning.

Matthew Pruen: 37:28

If it was all that stuff and only that stuff, get the hell out of there, of course. But if we then said, actually we need not only is it okay to have some of that in it, but we actually need some of that, we'll keep it to a minimum, but we need some of that to catalyze the growth and deepen the intimacy and deepen the love, then we can see relationships ultimately as an initiation. You know, the group that I've been in with you feels like an initiation, particularly as we come to the end of it. It's made me into something different than when I walked in 10 months ago a relationship how much more so over 20, 30, 40 years.

Malcolm Stern: 38:15

Yes, I can see it's almost like an alchemical process, both in relationship and in terms of the group that I run.

Malcolm Stern: 38:23

I don't quite understand how it works, but what I know is that by continuing the practices and by removing our armoring, removing the places where we're hiding from each other, then there's a depth and there's a trust that gets built.

Malcolm Stern: 38:38

So we take that back to the denominator of relationships and of course that's it as well. We can present with the sort of like you know, I was looking at a photograph of my and my friends flat the other day where I was staying and I was running the group, and there was a picture of the set of Gone with the Wind and there was a picture of Clark Gable looking utterly cool, utterly sort of self contained, and he thought he's managed to cover every single area of vulnerability and remove it from his posture in that place. And there's a picture of Vivian Lee. At the same picture there's Vivian Lee who looks like a little girl who's trying really hard to do what she needs to do. And I think that that willingness to show up in relationships, to show ourselves what's in all and but also our willingness to be in environments where we accept each other for all those things is what makes for success. What's made of the group success this year?

Matthew Pruen: 39:35

Outland is a really good word Because it means, I think, that lots and lots of subtle things are happening all at once and maybe we can never really know or master what's really going on. But we can facilitate it and in that group setting and in the relational setting, the mythology ultimately the lie of the cult of the individual, the cult of the strong hero who fixes it on their own and with no help from anyone else, that lie gets dissolved. And we've been bombarded with that Clark Gable mythology all our lives.

Matthew Pruen: 40:25

And in one way, women in another, and it's been a way. It's like a kind of a rebirth. We're merging out of that bullshit to discover the relational, the communal, the spiritual, because it's not just the cult of the individual, it's the cult of the intellect as well. Nothing wrong with the intellect, but it's not the only tool in the box. And we discovered that there's these other resources within us spiritual and emotional, communal, relational qualities that can be developed.

Malcolm Stern: 41:06

Yes, but that involves finding our vulnerability and allowing that to be a part of relationship, and I think that's terrifying for a lot of people. I can't imagine Clark Gable showing up as vulnerable. It's like it wasn't in his toolbox. He knew how to do cool and he's not my ultimate Just. That picture was just so, it was 100% assured and cool. And of course, we're not those things. We are also timid, worried, frightened, and I think if we show that too early in a relationship then the relationship is probably doomed. Because there's a great another great Lena Cohen line is a man never got a woman back by crawling on his bended knees, and there's something about finding our strength but also allowing our vulnerability to partner it.

Matthew Pruen: 41:56

Yeah, that's great that line. And also Brony Brown talks in her first famous book on vulnerability and I think it's called Daring Greatly I can't remember, but the first book and she talks about a man coming to her after a lecture she gave on vulnerability and saying I just want you to know that the women in my life my wife, my daughters, my sisters, my mother are not a tool signed up for me getting off my big white horse and she said, gosh, she hadn't seen it until that point.

Matthew Pruen: 42:37

It was a lovely, humble moment in her extraordinary career. In writing, where she goes yes, it's all very well on me saying but we've been conditioned. We've been conditioned so, so thoroughly, and not just men, but we've been conditioned to be invulnerable. So it's, it's a painful process. I think about my relationship with the pattern of jealousy and the evolution of my. I mean, there are many patterns that I feel like I've kind of moved on from them, many, just as many more maybe that I haven't, but jealousy is definitely one I've kind of healed myself.

Matthew Pruen: 43:19

And how did that happen? How did that? How did I go from being someone who was consumed with jealousy, particularly romantic relationships Not that feedback was so ashamed of it that I denied it and then made it like a dark, shameful secret? And then what happened for me was in a workshop setting, I heard someone another man, say that they were very jealous in relationships. And this little voice in me came up and said how can you say that with no shame, Aren't you? I mean, how can?

Matthew Pruen: 43:57

I was full of admiration and also horrified and a bit repelled that he would admit to such a terrible, dirty secret, and I started to experiment with it and probably initially in a kind of a rather kind of timid way, there's going to be some kind of a bit of a difference anyway, moving on, and then eventually it would be well. Yeah, actually I, when I'm really objective, I've got a sort of track record of intense jealousy in relationships. And then, gosh, it's liberating to get that out. And, as they say, shame dies on exposure, doesn't it? It thrives in the dark, and so that there's a healing in that. And then, coming from that, comes to in the and this is the action point that you talk about it's not enough to just waft around in some sort of hippie workshop game, isn't it lovely? You have to bring it into our lives and to actually say to my partner, as I did a few years ago, many years ago, gosh, I felt jealous. You know, in that moment it was jealousy that I felt.

Malcolm Stern: 45:03

It's funny because I think we've got to find ways of doing it that aren't about controlling the other to stop you feeling jealous. So a friend of mine rang me the other day and was saying you know like his partner gets really jealous if he goes somewhere where there are other women, even though he's 100% reliable? I know he is. And he said I don't want to have to, I'm willing to reassure her around her, around her jealousy, but I don't want to have to modify my behavior so that she doesn't have to get jealous. She's got to find her way of working through it. I thought that was quite a wise response actually.

Matthew Pruen: 45:35

Yeah, I mean. It's beautiful, it's extremely trustworthy and, ultimately, very sensible policy card. The danger with romantic love is that we attribute to our lovers the power to make me feel good about ourselves. So all of us, of course, are wounded in childhood. We develop shame beliefs, we fall in love and gosh. Your acceptance of me heals that old wound. So you become this sort of superhuman, incredibly powerful person and ultimately you become a drug, because I now need you to feel good about myself.

Matthew Pruen: 46:24

Next, we begin a long-term relationship and may do something as reckless as to marry or have children, and God knows what kind of a storm that creates. So then you betray me. Damn you, because not only have you the power to feel good, make me feel good about myself, but you withhold it and betray me and you actually use it against me. Damn you. So the healing is to go. It's not you who is doing that to me. Someone said something to me once about MDMA. It's a very sweet thing to say. I don't want to rely on this, but I really love knowing that that's something I have in me, that I could feel that way. Yes, and wouldn't it be great to access it, just naturally.

Malcolm Stern: 47:18

And that probably comes with, you know, a real sense of commitment, practice and evolution of ourselves. So we've become wise enough to find our way through the sort of labyrinths of relationships as well. So we're coming towards the close of our time together, matthew. I just wonder if there's something that you would like to sort of like to encapsulate what it is you've been exploring today.

Matthew Pruen: 47:46

Yeah, there's a definition of commitment that I once had. I think it's attributed to the German Psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, the founding figure of constellation work, and he's defined commitment as I take you, as you are. And that, for me, is the challenge, because so attractive to me is I take you on the condition that you make me feel good about myself, that I lose intimacy that way. Yeah, now we're definitely. I am definitely a teacher who teaches what he needs to learn. I'm under no delusions about being a guru who lives what they teach, but in as much as I can take a little bit of that into my life, you know it's worthwhile, isn't it?

Malcolm Stern: 48:47

I think that's the thing I think you know. Yes, we can make a practice of walking out all, but not to set ourselves in post targets of showing up as an awakened being. In fact, we are in the process of becoming something. We're in an evolutionary process together you, me and the rest of the world in becoming what we can become, which hopefully is better than we've got at the moment out there. Thank you so much, matthew, for coming on my show. I really appreciate it and it's been really lovely to have this dialogue and I really get the depth of the work you're doing, especially around relationships and around the Hoffman process.

Matthew Pruen: 49:26

Yeah now I'm completely honoured to be on your show and super grateful. Thank you very, very much, Thank you.