Saving Your Marriage: Larry Bilotta’s Guide to Understanding Dynamics

Brad Minus: [00:00:00] And welcome back to another episode of life changing challengers. As always, I am Brad Minus, your host. And today we are so lucky to have Larry Wlada on life changing challengers today. He is a relationship expert, author and speaker. He specializes in midlife crisis, and he is a creator of a series of successful programs designed to help couples and he's gonna tell us a little bit about his story and give us some, information on how maybe we can help with the state of marriages that we have today in America.

So, Larry, how are you today? 

Larry Bilotta: I'm at the top of my game. 

Brad Minus: Oh, that's what I like to hear. So Larry, can you tell us a little bit about your childhood, like where you grew up, what was the compliment of your family and what was it like to be Larry?

As a kid. 

Larry Bilotta: So that is the big question actually started my whole path down this, childhood [00:01:00] story. Because that's the big thing that I talk about in what I'm doing and helping people is, the childhood decides everything. And the reason it decides everything is because everything gets poured in, in those first 10 years.

And, the idea of ideas coming into the subconscious, into the mind. Is an idea that we can't handle. We can't like, well, what's that ideas come into the mind. So, what I have for parents is I have an alcoholic mother and a gambling father. Now that's not what their star role was.

That happened to be what affected me the most, right? They, the gambling father and the alcoholic mother don't have a lot of time to pay attention to you because they're actually pursuing their pursuits. So they're both very talented people. Very artistic, very creative, very talented people, very soft hearted people.

They weren't hard, weren't tough, right? So I kind of grew up in this Chicago environment where everything was about them leaving, going somewhere, to be with people, [00:02:00] to entertain and do the things they love to do. So my father played 13 instruments and my mother was a singer, and so all that stuff was a part of this, little Larry growing up in this environment of, Like, when is mom coming home?

We don't know. We don't know when mom's coming home. Because she may not come home. You may be asleep, you know, like, or go to sleep and that's how she's gonna, she's gonna arrive. Right. So like Santa Claus. So growing up with an alcoholic and a gambler, What it does is it, it causes the, the subconscious of the heart of my mind to be taking in ideas, which are, you're not important 

but they have interests. Their interests are outside of you, away from you, and so that's, where the beginning of abandonment and abuse and neglect, the three pillars of a chaos childhood are. And so that's really what was happening to me. I was actually growing up in chaos. And so I was getting the ideas of chaos, the ideas of [00:03:00] being abandoned, the ideas of being neglected, the ideas of being abused.

And so now that stuff is forming me. And so I'm soft hearted though. So as a soft hearted person, I really care about who likes who and who likes me and who's, you know, nice to me. So what I ended up doing when I got into my twenties and I started to be looking for strength and I was looking for strength, not obviously, I wasn't constantly even saying that, But I was feeling it.

I was feeling a longing for strength because my parents were not strong people. They were really soft hearted people. So I was soft hearted. They were soft hearted and there was no plan in my life at all. No plan to do anything, to become anything. So I'm drifting in my early twenties and I start calling out really privately in my mind.

I'm calling out for strength and who I attract is a strong woman. And she's really strong, right? I talked [00:04:00] about her being the strongest woman I've ever met. So what does she grow up in? She grows up in a childhood where she was born to fight because that's what her parents were.

They were, you know, when they wanted to get your attention, they threw something at you, you know, so that there was a yelling and there was a meanness to that. And so that's what I marry into. And so when I marry, when I take my soft hearted culture of mine and put it into this hard natured culture of her childhood.

Now we're combined into this. Soft and hard world. She's soft. I'm soft hearted. She's hard natured. I don't find this until lots of years later, but that's what happens. And so she's now ready to be a kamikaze on her last mission. She's ready to just destroy whatever Needs to be destroyed to make her point to be right to do whatever she's got to do.

Well, I don't have that kind of determination. I don't have that kind of fight. It's not built into my mind. So since I don't have that I have to find some way because we're [00:05:00] married now, by the way, we're talking about 1974 And that's the year they impeach nixon, right? That's the year we get started.

And so we get married And what should be very curious to me is that her parents had no interest in asking about my parents. My parents had no interest in asking about her parents. In fact, they never brought each other up ever. And so that's a complete absolute energy disconnection right there.

And I should have said like, how come my parents and your parents don't ever want to talk to each other? Never asked that question. I just, well, you know, like when you're really young, you just, you don't think these kinds of thoughts, right? Because you think none of that stuff matters. Just like I thought childhood didn't matter.

But it came years and years later, and to find out that childhood doesn't just matter, childhood literally is everything. Because the messages are down there and when they come up, let's think about the mind is a big vat. It's divided. And it's the [00:06:00] lower part and the upper part. And so the lower part is filled with really a lot of, turmoil thoughts because abandonment, abuse, and black are actually turmoil, thoughts that throw turmoil ideas.

And when they come up, they come up and they grab your personality and they make you want to do something that you don't normally do. And so that's really what I call the chaos kid. The chaos kid is the person raised in chaos. And so I have to start with my scale 10 down to zero because I was raised in chaos.

So what was the Rick, the chaos, the chaos was mom and dad didn't want to come home. Mom and dad didn't want to pay attention to me. Mom and dad didn't want to make me important, right? So that's the that's the environment I grow up in that's what my mind is built around So what happens to me is i'm like a a kid kind of on the streets, you know Because at that time it was called latchkey, right?

Yeah, it's a kind name but what it was is You're free to roam around And so like people in the baby boomers, they talk about [00:07:00] we're free to go wherever we want to do whatever we want, right? And so I was one of those kids ready to do whatever. And so, with me roaming around, what am I roaming around to do?

I was roaming around to get sugar. Right. That was my heroin and heroin was sugar to me. And so what I did is I started to eat a lot of sugar, and so when you eat that as a kid, I started to get ear infections. And what happened is I woke up in pain and then I woke up my mother and father.

Who went to bed really late because they were out entertaining and doing all these things, right? So I woke them up and that became a big thing to get their attention. So, when I was waking them up at night, they were starting to say, well, we got to pay attention to health. We got to pay attention to what he's eating, right?

And so they started to think about, what are you eating anything I want, mom and dad, and my choice is sugar. That's my heroin. So with me being this sugar [00:08:00] addict that I had become, because I, I'm really looking for love is what I'm looking for. And because I'm looking for love and not finding it, I'm going to sugar as my, my gang.

And then they start getting health oriented. And so as typical extreme people do, they became extremely health oriented. And so one of the things they did is they, they got involved in a magazine back in the fifties called prevention magazine, right? So prevention magazine was J I Rodale. And I heard that over and over and over again.

And so I heard them preaching to me. About the evils of, you know, all these things they, they had listed. And so when I married Marsha, the strongest woman in the world, I don't know that she's raised on meanness. She's raised on, on a hardness that, that demands that you be crushed to stop your, your, whatever your, your problem is.

And so I have a completely different value system. And she has a completely different value system. So my value system is foundation [00:09:00] is shutting down. When I get upset, when I get worried, I shut down. I stopped talking. I close up, I leave the room, right? That's my version, right? Her version is when you shut down, I come and get you and I come and make you pay attention.

So that was our little combination, right? Which is like a painful combination. So what did all this pain do? The pain made it possible for me to say, I'm going to go insane here because I realized much later that I was programmed by my parents and she was programmed by her parents with one message, stay married, stay miserable.

That was the message. Stay married, stay miserable. It was so strong. We couldn't fight it at all. We couldn't resist it. We couldn't even argue with it. Stay married, stay miserable. So no matter how ugly things got, it was like, is there an exit here? Nope. No exit. There's no door out. This is the place you have to be.

Well, now that I know that there's no exit, I can't get outta this place. [00:10:00] I have to decide what am I gonna do? And now I get to this life changing challengers idea, Brad, right? What is my life changing challenge? My life changing challenges. I've gotta decide what this means. What does this chaotic childhood mean?

What does this marriage mean with this really hard woman? And I'm so soft because I don't have the strength to fight this girl. So I'm not going to compete with her on the strength of fighting because that was her star strength. The only way I could deal with getting through this is for me to become the learner.

Because she was not a learner. She learned in her own unseen format, her own unseen school. You can't actually tell her anything. You can't teach her anything. She won't let anything in. So there's nothing there to cause her to learn, except her own discoveries, which she did privately. So, what I had to realize is, I'm going to be the learner.

I got to learn what's happening to me, and why do I do what I [00:11:00] do, why does she do what she does. And so I started to ask all kinds of why questions. That I never would have done if I didn't have that pain. So, I've trapped lots of pain. I'm very motivated. And so what the challenge was is become a learner.

Become a student of this. And so what I started to do is I started to write, ideas out on legal pads. On yellow paper and I started to write it out, pages and pages and pages of notes. And also remember, this is what I call the 27 years of a Marriage Made in Hell, right? Why do I call it that?

Because it was 27 years. So I entered it when they elected, when they, impeachment. And I, I got out of the 27 years when they elected the second Bush. So that's how long it was in the US timeframe. So living in that 27 years, that's a long time and very messy, very sloppy. This discovery process is not neat and clean at all.

It's very messy. It's very chaotic. [00:12:00] So, all of these events happen with me being soft and her being hard. Me being shutting down and her being confrontational. So that is the essence of what I later discovered, is there's a whole bunch of couples who get married in the world today who are soft hearted and hard natured.

And so what I found out is there's a pattern of strong women attracting soft hearted men. There's lots of them, thousands and thousands of them, so, somewhere in this, I wrote a book called Soft Hearted Woman, Hard World, and it was completely off target. The reason is soft hearted women don't want a book.

But what I should have written is hard natured woman, soft hearted man because it turns out that when these hard women, when their marriage starts falling apart, because they're soft hearted man starts doing what I did. He starts shutting down and running away.

That's what soft hearted men do. But hard natured women, they don't do it, deal with it very well. They don't handle it in a [00:13:00] way that's going to be constructive. And so what they'll do is turn up their strength on their soft hearted man. And what their soft hearted man will do is he will not have this program that says, stay married or stay married.

He doesn't have that guard, right? What he has is Well, mom left, I'll leave, right? That's what he has, right? And she doesn't know that he was built in those first 10 years by a leaving mother or a leaving father. And if that's what he's built on, that's what he's going to go to. That means he has a license to leave.

And so if she keeps on this hard natured way, He's going to just exit and he's going to exit with some kind of girlfriend. So do they, at what point do you think that they realize this? 

It's not about realizing. 'cause the soft-hearted man I'm talking about is a chaos kid.

Okay? Right. That means on my scale he's down between five and zero mm-Hmm. some version of abandonment, [00:14:00] abuse, and neglect. That's what's in him. And so now he's gotta do the things. Of the abandonment music like world, the chaotic world, because the scale goes 1098. That's purpose. And that's where you're raised with values like, like, service and compassion and loyalty and commitment.

You see those kinds of things that becomes normal for you. It's kind of like your childhood, right? You're actually built with that, that kind of software inside. So, these hard women, yeah. They don't necessarily have that if they were raised in a really good childhood. Then it becomes a matter of, I believe in marriage.

I believe in my vows. I'm strong, right? So that becomes their stance. Their stance is to be strong and fight and bolt somebody over. But that's not the way the soft hearted men can handle anything. They don't handle anything that way. And so what the whole way of the hard nature of woman has to, what she has to turn her ship is she has to turn her ship to a softer side.

She has to go to the softer side of this [00:15:00] whole hard soft world and if she moves to her softer side She starts to back off with her demands with her requirements with her In her inquisitions of like where were you and why did you do this? Right, right She stops all of that and when she stops all that and I see this in my program I call it the environment changer And the reason it's called environment change is because you change the environment of your mind.

That's the environment you're changing. And so if a hard natured woman is married to a soft hearted man, she has to change the environment of her mind. That means her mind's got to move to the softer side. That doesn't mean like, releasing him from all responsibility, that means she's got to literally take back in her delivery.

A kind of softer kindness, a love orientation, of a forgiveness, a releasing of her pressure. And I've seen this like, and I've talked about hundreds and hundreds of women I've talked to over the [00:16:00] years in fact, I'll even say it this way. I've got a men's course and a women's course.

Who's in my women's course. They're all hard natured women. They're all strong and they're all married to soft hearted men 

Brad Minus: Yeah. So I got a couple of questions for you. Just to kind of make a picture. First of all, did you, you have any brothers or sisters 

Larry Bilotta: I had one brother, one sister, and both of them died in poverty.

My father, my brother died of overweight. He was a very, very heavy, a very chaotic life. My sister, she latched on to an extreme, Christianity and she, died and so the reason I know this, I know her only son.

Who's my nephew? And so, what happened to him? He became an alcoholic, right? And then he entered AA and AA saved him, literally saved him and gave him a life where he actually had a normal life. Right. But, but my sister was full of chaotic ideas. And so I have me, my brother and sister, and we're coming out of this chaotic family where my [00:17:00] gambling father and my alcoholic mother really couldn't give them, the ideas for a normal life.

They just couldn't give it to him. 

Brad Minus: So I'm assuming that all three of you are considered soft hearted. 

Larry Bilotta: Yeah. Yes. Well, yeah, I think we're, yeah, we're all soft hearted. That's right. 

Brad Minus: All right. So all three of you're soft hearted. And are, were you.

In the same age range, 

you grew up 

together. 

Larry Bilotta: It to me as a little kid, I'm the youngest, they were really old, but they were only like two years older. 

Brad Minus: Oh, okay. So as far as, sibling bonding, they didn't have that either. 

Larry Bilotta: No there was no bonding, as you brought that up, there was no bonding.

And so because there was no bonding. At that young age, my brother was a rebel. My sister was very dependent. And I was like exploring like, what, what am I supposed to end up in? I ended up in this 40 year marriage to Marsha and that's what was my school. That's where I really learned everything that I, I could learn and I learned it under [00:18:00] pain and pressure and because without pain and pressure, you don't have a school.

So what happens when you go to college, you go to college, you're supposed to learn in an environment where it's kind of pressure. And so they kind of create a pressure environment with study, right? But when you have a person who's your teacher, and that person is very, very opposite from you, you're under a lot of pain.

And you're struggling to like, I want to run away, but I can't. And so now I have to stay and learn, but staying and learning was the greatest challenge that I could do. What was I really diving into? I was diving into the realm of ideas because this is not about body parts.

This is not about behaviors, what you say with your mouth and what you do with your body. This is about the mind. The whole thing in that 40 years was about the mind. And so what we're talking about in the mind, we're talking about the whole negative side of the mind and we're talking about the whole positive side of the mind.

And so what I was trying to do, it was, I was trying to, you know, why was I writing and studying and going to the [00:19:00] seminars and all these things I was trying to find, I was trying to find ideas, ideas, save me ideas, did that. And so when we look at, in the United States, What's on every corner?

Well, there's a bar. What's on every corner of every town? There's a church, right? A church and a bar, right? What does it represent? That represent a longing for goodness and longing for, for happiness, dependency. Yeah. All those things are represented by a bar. So, you remember how, prohibition happened?

Prohibition was a terrible failure and what actually made prohibition what it was, it was made by women. But women said, this is really, and by the way, Carrie Nations, that's a historical figure. She was a real hard natured woman and a hard natured woman thought, Hey, here's what we have to do. Stomp this out.

Right? Well, that's how hard natured women do it. They stomp out what they don't like. So prohibition was a [00:20:00] terrible failure for all kinds of reasons. And then when we step into this world of, I'm in this hard marriage to a hard woman. And I have to learn something. So one of the first things I learned is I learned about the four personalities and I ended up calling them fun, control, perfect, and peace, right?

And this comes from Hippocrates who taught about this thousands of years ago, but fun, control, perfect, and peace. So fun women are very social women. They're very lively and very entertaining and they have a big circle of friends, and so then we have, that's a soft nature, by the way, fun is a soft nature.

Then peace is the other one, that's also a soft nature. And so what's a peace nature? A peace most likely is To shut down when there's any conflict. Peace people don't like conflict. They can't live in conflict. So they shut down and they're very quiet and very key to themselves and they don't have a big circle of friends and they don't Have a big social life, right?

So that's the second world. So fun and peace and those are two soft [00:21:00] natures. And then the other two natures are hard natures. Control and perfect. Control nature is a nature that wants to control the environment of the world out there and the perfect nature wants to make the world get fixed and changed in Be what they want it to be and they have ideals and they have things that they should be and ought to be and they have this whole meticulous, analysis of what's wrong and how do we fix that?

And so really, people in education and religion, they're really big, perfect people, right? So the two natures that are hard are control and perfect. And when you put them together, cause you have a first and a second, and if you are a control person and your second nature is perfect, you're a control perfect person.

Or if we go to a perfect control person. That's a very hard nature. Two hard natures combined in one. So my wife, Marcia, was control perfect. What was I? I was fun peace. So we have this [00:22:00] split now. This is Hippocrates now who taught us this. And this is my simplification. Here I was split and I realized, Oh, I'm on the soft side.

She's on the hard side. So I started to realize, Oh, that's what she's supposed to do. She's supposed to be hard. I'm supposed to be soft. This is my way. This is her way. And so I started to realize there's things about her that I need to understand. There's things about myself. I need to accept. And things I need to like about myself because, you know, when you come out of a chaos childhood, you don't really like yourself very much and and in extreme cases, you really don't love yourself and can't love yourself because you don't think highly of yourself because when your parents attention is away from you and there's all kinds of versions of doing that, but it's not on you.

And because it's not on you, you start to think, well, what's wrong with me? Well, that builds into a story of what's wrong with [00:23:00] me. That's a story of like, I'm not enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not right enough. I'm not desirable enough. So all of that starts to build in the life you end up living as an adult.

And so when we're born, we've got those first 10 years. That's the time when the parents pour in all the stuff of these ideas, because remember ideas are what we're working with. And so after the first 10 years you enter your teens and you know how parents talk about teens, right? And so what's happening there?

That's the testing time. All this stuff they gave me in the first 10, I'm going to test it in the second 10. So during the teenage years, I'm going to find out if this is right and I'm going to push and I'm going to shove and I'm going to, demand and I'm going to do all those things.

So that's what the teen years are about. The teen years are about trying to figure out what is this all about? What is it for? And so when you go through the testing years, you get through and you come out into the indestructible years. That's the twenties. The twenties are when you're going to live forever.

And you're never [00:24:00] gonna die. And you've got all kinds of energy and you've got all kinds of beauty. And what does, the culture do? They take the twenties and they hold them up as icons of what's valuable. And they say the youth is the twenties is, man, you are hot, you're cool, and they come up with all these words, right?

Yeah. And so that's your indestructible time. But then after your indestructible time you enter your thirties. And when you enter your 30s, now you're going like, Oh, wait a minute, I thought that this was true. I thought this worked this way. I thought, I thought.

And now you're getting things corrected on you. Right? Because that's the time when you start to realize, Wait a minute, this isn't working the way I thought it was going to work. And so you go through your 30s. And then you enter your 40s and so your 30s and 40s That's the place where the midlife crisis actually occurs between 35 and 45.

And what is the midlife crisis? The midlife crisis is abandonment abuse and neglect those ideas from childhood They come in the 30s and 40s [00:25:00] and they come like a bull in a china shop And I get to see these people I get to meet them and talk to them Right. I get to see how bad is it right when, because who's calling me, who's calling me is what I call the stair.

Right. And I don't get to talk to the believer. I get to talk to the stair. And so all my perspective about chaos kids comes from stairs who are talking to me about their chaos kids. And they're saying, you know, He did this and he did this and it said all these terrible things, right? And so I ended up talking about the values of a ten and the values of a zero.

And so, what's the values of a ten? The values of a ten are things like commitment and loyalty and competence and service and kindness and sharing and accepting, right? What are the values of a zero? So the values of a zero become it becomes survival, gossip, defensiveness, worry, frustration, fear, right?

That's all the values, and literally, it's values. It's how you literally process what's happening to you. [00:26:00] So, what happens is these people who are stayers, Usually raise high on the scale. Call me about their levers. Raise low on the scale, right? So the high on the scale calls me about a low on the scale, and they say they did these 2,300 things I want to tell you all about.

And so I think, well, you don't have to tell me all about 'em. Right? You're married to a two, you're at, you're a 10, married to a two, or you're a 10, married to a zero, or you're an eight, married to a one. Right, whatever the combination is, it's a high person on the scale raised, in a great home to a person who's raised in a troubled home.

And so what are we talking about now? We're talking about parenting. Parenting is what this is all about. And so what we, when we look at, so we're in, we're in 2024, but I could be talking to you in 2001. I could have been talking to you in 1978, right? But there, of course, there were no podcasts at the time, right?

Great. [00:27:00] But, but whatever time frame you're in, We still have this same thing. Parenting has to make a kid. It has to make a kid who becomes a citizen, right? And so, I, I spent, some time with prisoners in, you know, in a minimum security prison. And I, and I interviewed them. And I said, I told them about the scale.

10 to zero, right? And they all told me, I'm a zero. I'm a one. I'm a two, right? They all, they all identified as where they came from on the scale. So what do we do with prisons? We're building prisons to put these citizens who would have been citizens, but now they can't be citizens. Why? Because they're chaos kids and they're chaos kids who just didn't make the right decisions at the right times.

So when we come in and start asking, this is all about parents. Well, what happens with parents? Well, we have caring parents who literally [00:28:00] they might have had chaos Childhoods, but they're very determined to be higher on the scale They're very determined to borrow values that actually become really good And so these people are and you see them in the media.

You see them. They really had troubled homes But they grab something in the world of ideas, and they hold on to them. So, you know, you told me about some of your challengers, right? And what are they all doing? They are all bucking a trend of whatever they're given in childhood, and they're snapping out of it in a really big way.

They're living the childhood that they were given, and choosing a big one every day. And that's what happens to people who are trying to get up to the top of the scale, and saying, I'm not going to leave the way I was raised. And by the way, these people, I call them buckers, like a bucking bronco. They're bucking Bronco because they go through three steps literally every minute of every day They number one they say stop not doing [00:29:00] that and what they're doing is the idea came up from below and they said stop I'm not doing that the second step.

They say I'm doing this instead and what are they doing there? They're choosing a value from the top of the scale Somewhere in the top of the scale. I'm going to do this instead. So they have enough awareness to go, I'm doing a better value, right? Well, I'm going with honesty. I'm going with integrity. I'm going with commitment, right?

I'm doing some of these good values, right? And, why'd they do that? Because in the first step they bucked the value of, that they were given. And then they do the second step, choosing the better value. And then the third step, they live out the value in spite of a lot of obstacles and a lot of frustration from personal life and the community and social world, they still do it.

And so they're buckers. But the weird thing about buckers is they end up snapping, and the reason they do is because they're literally using willpower to crush down the values that were given. And so when I [00:30:00] was talking about the values that were given, selfishness, lying, gossip, defensiveness, worry, whatever.

Those are the values of a troubled person. A troubled person has those values. They cling on to those things as a troubled person does. So what does a bucker do? They say, stop, I'm not doing that. I'm doing this instead. And then they go live it out. Step one, two, three, over and over again for years.

They end up snapping and they end up snapping because they can't say stop anymore. And so when they can't say stop anymore What happens that flood of what's coming from down there? You know from that like that lower place in the mind It comes up and it comes up so fiercely that it literally can change their personality So a person who was religious is now an atheist a person who used to smoke is now smoking like a fiend.

A person who denied that, alcohol was a good thing, is now clutching the bottle, right? Whatever they're doing, they [00:31:00] literally get flooded with, and that's a really traumatic childhood, literally coming for them. And so to imagine being the spouse of a person who's raised low on the scale. And all of a sudden this all comes, you know, so what did the culture do?

The culture made the midlife crisis, kind of a joke. They said, well that's a man who gets a sports car, and, and like, a red sports car, that's what they did, they made a joke of it. But I'm in the trenches with midlife crisis. I'm talking to the people. I'm seeing what happens to their lives and I see how painful it is.

And so that, that caused me to write a book that's coming up, this next year called this is not the woman I married. And it's a book for men. This is not the woman I married. Well I actually took all of the ideas that I really believe in and I packed it into this book, 

and who are they? They're men who marry women. Who are raised at a two or a one or a three or a zero, right? That's who they are. And so that's who I talk to every day. I talk to people who are marrying [00:32:00] these chaos kids. Yes, I do know. But here's what I don't know.

I don't know who's going to become the life changing challenger. I don't know that because something in the heart creates the spark that actually makes the life changing challenger who does something from down here. I'm a 98 pound weakling, right? And I'm going to snap and I'm going to become this person in 18 months who becomes a professional.

A big change. Why? What does that? Something in the heart is there. Something lights a fire in them that lights them up and makes them say, I'm going to get through this. I'm going to do what was not done before. And they do that over and over and over again. And they succeed. Because you got the evidence.

You've seen it. Because you're there. You're working with them. So, all of that to say that where am I going in my whole education process? I'm learning through pain and that's the best place to be when you're in pain, when you're hurting, when you're losing, when things are falling, when things are [00:33:00] failing, when all that's collapsing on you, that's the best time to learn everything because you can't learn when you're happy.

You can't learn at Disneyland. Nobody learns anything at Disneyland. They're too happy. So when you're really happy, you're not going to learn anything. But when you're in pain, you're going to learn a lot. And why do you learn in pain? You learn in pain because you're hurting and you're so hurting that you really are like now focused on your attention.

Oh, why is this? I remember me with the yellow legal pads. Like why was I writing and writing and writing? What was driving it is I was really hurting. Because when I was going to get up and stand up and go back out to my life with Marsha, I was going to have to face my real situation.

I was going to have to deal with that in some kind of productive way. And so my productive choice was, I'm going to start to change the meaning of what happens to my events. Because what does it mean? Like when she's mean to me, what does it mean? Does it mean I'm a loser? That I, these terrible things [00:34:00] she said I was, is that what it means?

Or am I changing the meaning of it? No, it doesn't mean that. It means this, right? And so when I come up for this, what is that this? This is, I have value. I have talents. I've got abilities. I've got things, right? I'm not going to look at my string of mistakes. I'm going to say that string of mistakes is my learning path, right?

That's why I say it was sloppy and messy, right? Why did I say it was sloppy and messy? Because if we look in terms of time, 1974 was the beginning of my learning process, right? So somewhere during that learning process, I think like maybe three years, four years into it, we separated, and we separated for a year, and then, during that separation, she came back and stormed the house I was living in, and then there was a thing where the police came to the house, because she kicked the door down, right, so the police dragged us down to the station, right, and so they found that this was just [00:35:00] an arguing couple, they said, we're policemen, we don't know anything, Deal with this.

Like, you two can just walk home. Right? Right. So, so they drove us down to the squad car, but they didn't let us get a ride back. So, so we're walking back and, and so I remember, 'cause like I'm in my twenties, I don't know anything. All I know is I'm afraid, I'm frustrated, I'm angry. I, I wanna, I wanna talk about what I, I'm afraid of.

And so I'm walking with her. And we're walking under a streetlight and I stop and I say,

if you make me stay with you, I'm going to die.

You know what she said? She said, okay, then die then. 

Brad Minus: Wow. 

Larry Bilotta: That's the kind of stuff that is happening when you're living in chaos, because we were both chaos kids. And so we were both at the bottom of the scale and we're both having to find some way [00:36:00] To make a productive life, right? So she pulled up a productive life out of this chaos.

And so we had kids and we kept on doing the things, you know, taking them into school and so there was an incident with my first daughter was like, seven years old. And she came home and told Marsha, this kid punched me. And you know what she did she said, where is he?

She went down to the school. She said she found the kid she grabbed him by the shoulders and she said if you ever look badly at her If you ever get near her if you ever intend anything, I will come and find you right then And terrified the kid, right?

The kid's seven years old, right? But that's her way You That was right. That's it. That's what, that's what strong women do. Right. So I'm just, I'm just singling out that little incident to illustrate what hard natured, women do. So, there is a hard [00:37:00] natured men. And they attract soft hearted women and so that that flip flop just the same kind of thing hard and soft come together and Soft nature women are really soft They're really like really tender and nurturing and and feeling and they cry at movies and they want close friends and they're right so When you learn about soft and hard you start opening up a whole world That actually entered the, the, the four, the four, the two soft natures and the two hard natures I was talking about.

Right. It kind of brings you into that world and you start to realize, Oh, I'm talking to soft hearted people here. I'm talking to a hard natured person here. Right. And we just start to learn who they are and what they're like and, and what they want to choose. You start feeling wiser and you start making less mistakes.

Right. So my, my path was 27 years of a marriage made in hell. And, and so when we got to the end of that 27 [00:38:00] years, how did we get to the end of that? We got to the end of it because I was, internalizing ideas. And what I internalized was ideas about meaning. And because I call it the big, the, the most important idea is the meaning and the movie.

The meaning you make and the movie you see. The meaning you make in the movie you see. So what is the meaning when you have an event happen? What does the event mean? That's a great question to ask. What does this event mean? Does it mean all the negative things on the chaos side? Or does it mean all the positive things on the purpose side of the scale?

Does it have purpose in it? Is there purpose in this? What is it for? Or is it chaotic and I'm no good and all that stuff? So what I'm doing is I'm living a life of moving ideas to where we want to move. And what is that? That's all about meaning. Because when you start to move towards meaning, you start to calm down.

You start to slow down. Because, you know, [00:39:00] when I talk to people, they're in a really chaotic state. Because their whole life turned upside down with this, this person becoming this, this new personality. And so I, I have to say, they say, what should I do? I said, what you should do, you should do in your mind.

And what you should do in your mind is keep one word. Because that's about all you can handle. One word, and that word is calm. And when you have the word calm, you will slow down your mind because the word calm is the energy of calm. And all the words that are synonyms to the word calm, those are all supportive of the word calm.

And so, easy, casual, light, friendly, Calm, slow down, you know, ease yourself into a new meaning that I can get through this. I can believe in ideas, and ideas change my world. Because that's what happens to me. I change my world with ideas. So, what happened is, in [00:40:00] 27 years of the marriage made in hell, is I started to love myself more.

I started to feel better about myself. And as I started to feel better about myself, Marsha became, less intense. Because soft is chaos to her, because she's hard. Soft is, you know, the more soft I am, the more squishy, the more unpredictable I am, the more that threatens her. And so I started to feel more confident about myself, and not confident in a pushy kind of way.

But confident in that I can do this, I can get through this web of ideas and I can start to grab on to ideas that mean something to me that actually I like and so I started to become a person who liked myself, love myself, started to respect myself and so she started to do that and she started to follow me and when she started to follow me, our life got better and so that's the 27 years.

Now remember, I'm married 40 years. And at the [00:41:00] 40th year, that's when she dies. And I think in the whole, ethereal scheme of life, I think she died because I didn't need her anymore. I didn't need to be this with this learning person, this teacher, who was my teacher. And I really owe her a great debt of gratitude for teaching me, all the stuff that I've learned in the world of ideas. Interesting. So it became years and Larry gets to love himself. And then finally she comes to the end of her life, in the 40 year story. So that brings me to, after she dies, after she dies, I'm three years alone and three years alone without my teacher, without my pressure.

And so I had no pressure and I started to, like, gee, well, what am I supposed to, what am I doing here? Right. And so, I had a therapist and she said, you're too young, you need a relationship. And so I said, well, so what do I do?

She said, well, start writing a story [00:42:00] of who you're looking for. And so I wrote a story of who I was looking for. And I wrote the story in great detail, talked about her family, talked about her friends, talked about her work environment. And I literally described this whole picture of this woman.

Right. And so, what happened in, 2023. I go on a hike and I meet a woman who is looking for real love. And so I meet her that day and I knew something was really different because energetically she was really in line with me.

And so we ended up getting married. So we meet and we marry one year later. So, so that's what happens. And so what I have now is I have a different brand of teacher. This brand of teacher is a woman who teaches me, out of wisdom, out of strength. Out of kindness, out of, insight, all kinds of things that are very different than my, my 40 years with Marsha.

So it's, it's like a life that, I call her my [00:43:00] kaleidoscope. She's my kaleidoscope. And the reason she's my kaleidoscope is because she's always changing the, you know, how you look through the kaleidoscope and all the colors keep changing. What she is, she's changing her energies and I'm responding to her energy.

So it's a really valuable place for me to be because it's another new place for me to learn. So that's what I have now. I have a second marriage.

Brad Minus: That's amazing. So let, so I'm going to work backwards a little bit, but, all right. So you said there was the, of the four types, just, the, the soft targeted and the long and the, and the, and the strong targeted.

And strong natured. I'm sorry. Hard natured. Hard natured. 

Fun, control. 

Larry Bilotta: So the two soft natures are fun and peace. Fun and peace. The two hard natures are perfect in control. 

Brad Minus: Perfectly controlled, fun and peace. So would you say that your new wife is controlled and fun or is she, is she peace and perfect?

Larry Bilotta: She is, fun and [00:44:00] perfect. So she's on both sides. Nice. 

Brad Minus: Cause the way you talked about it, I was like, Oh, she's got a little bit of each. Oh, see, I'm already learning something. So, I do have a question. I want to, step back just a little bit. Cause I want to put some context around this, a little visual about it.

Can you give me like a normal day during the time you were married to your first wife before the 27 year change? So what was a typical day? You come home and what would happen? 

Larry Bilotta: So, if there was a typical day and I like to think there was no typical day because of what was happening is her strength.

Was always making something happen. So there was trees to trim. There was, leaves to rake. There were, cats to go find. There was, a rescue, right? So there's always something happening because the strong woman is always making something happen. [00:45:00] And so what I had to do is I had to say.

Okay, so this is my job to step into this world of activity and not hate it. Not like, Oh, I'm so exhausted. When are you going to just stop? Right? Not, not do that. Just say, Okay, I can accept that this is her way. This is the way she wants to live. And so what can I do to live in this world? This world of activity and action, this world of decision making, this world of debate, like debate.

I don't like debate. Right. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. No, cause you don't like conflict. 

Larry Bilotta: Right. So, so we had, we had two kids and, you know, if we talk in their childhood years, we did a lot of things. to keep them have a, to have them have a stable home. But at times she couldn't control her temper. And so they got to see that, right?

And so they got to see how mad she could get, right? [00:46:00] And how did she determine that something should be fixed and all those kinds of things. So there was no common typical day because if I got up in the morning and like, oh, what's going to happen today? Well, I couldn't predict that because she was always like a roulette wheel.

It's always going to be an unpredictable. So that was the unpredictableness of my world was the way the world was. But I had to live with the unpredictableness and roll with the punches. Right. 

Brad Minus: So during this time, what were you doing for work? So I was in advertising. I was a creative guy. So writing and graphic design and, all the things, the visual stuff in, in advertising.

Did she work or was she a homemaker? 

Larry Bilotta: She did not work. And she did not work because her mother did not work ever. And because her mother never worked, she never worked. This is back in the seventies.

And so we got into a really tough spot back in the [00:47:00] seventies because I couldn't find the job. And so you have to go to job service and she came with me to job service And she was wearing her full length rabbit coat And she had hair down to her kneecaps, right? So she was a sight to see like who is this woman just like a spectacular thing, right?

And so the the the person working at the job service said, well, well So what are you going to do for a living? And she says, I don't work As a hard natured woman I don't work And what she was saying is my mother didn't work. 

Why should I work right? 

Brad Minus: We'd call that entitled 

Larry Bilotta: But I had to work because I had to find a way to support this family Right.

So I always was pushing to find a way to support the family and, and so, you know, as you evolved over 10, 20, 30, 40 years, you go through a lot of discoveries. Yes. And a lot of things that that happen to you make the. Oh, that didn't work last time. I got to do [00:48:00] this different this time because, nothing is going to be predictable and, it's like there's a beauty in not being predictable.

Right. But in your mind, as you calm your mind down, as you start to slow your mind down, this is not about things in the world. This is about ideas in the mind. And so what kind of ideas in the mind do I want to have? Do I want to have like, what is my value? My value in my ideas in my mind is commitment.

And so in the later part of the 40 years, I was committed. I was not staying this because I was married, stay married and stay miserable. I was not staying there. I was now in living in a stay committed because commitment is the right thing to do. Right. So that was a different idea that was keeping me alive.

Keeping me going, right? Because The more you look at what you don't want the more you get what you don't want the more you look at what you do Want the more you get what you do want and that seems simple [00:49:00] Can that really be true? Right? When you think about what you do want i've asked a lot of people tell me what you want and they give me 40 word 50 word essays because they don't know what they want they're exploring all kinds of things because they don't know what they want but when you think about what you want, it's almost like you have to do what I did.

Grab a yellow legal pad and slow down and start to ask, what do I believe? Why do I believe it? Now that, that two question system, what do I believe in? What do I believe is really great as a teacher because you start to ask, what do I believe? And then you start saying things that you were taught. You start repeating your parents.

You start repeating what they believe. And then you start digging a little deeper What do I really believe and why do I really believe it the deeper you dig? The more you slow down and start to ask harder and harder questions And it keeps you moving towards a place where you're thinking straight You're thinking about [00:50:00] what you really do believe and why you really do believe it.

And then you find out, Oh, that's what I really believe in. I believe in what my father believed in and I still believe it. I believe in what my mother believed in and I still believe it. And so there, there's where I am. What do I believe in? Why I believe I believe a mom did. 

Brad Minus: It was a long time before I started to deviate from my father from what he believed. I still, core beliefs are still pretty much aligned, but there are some other beliefs that as I gained some world experience, I was able to deviate from. We have separate issue. We have separate thoughts on abortion.

We both have separate thoughts on the environment. But as far as a lot of the other things go, we're pretty much aligned. I can literally tell you the experiences that made me. Really think about, what I believed and why I believed it. I could tell you the exact experience of how it happened when it [00:51:00] happened and I could tell you exactly what happened there.

Interesting is, let's just make this a little bit, less serious at the moment, but interesting enough is where in Chicago. Did you spend most of your time 

Larry Bilotta: West side of Chicago, 

Brad Minus: the West side?

Larry Bilotta: Yeah. Right. Before the suburbs began, the city of Chicago stopped a line. There's the suburbs. That's, that's where I was. 

Brad Minus: It was like river day, Riverside 

Larry Bilotta: sister on Oak Park. 

Brad Minus: Okay. Yeah. So obviously I know that because I'm from the area too. But I'm from the, I'm from Northwest suburbs.

So, but spend, you know, I also, you know, Worked and lived in, in downtown as well. So yeah, as when he said that Westside, I was like, okay, yeah, it's somewhere. I actually grew up thinking that I was going to, I was going to live in an Oak Park. I wanted to live in Oak Park. I had this big thing and then I moved out of state.

So, and then that never happened, but I always like, Oh, Park is, you know, Riverside, Oak Park. I'm like, yeah, that's cool, man. I like that area. I was never walking in Wilmette area. That was like too rich for me. And all I thought [00:52:00] about is, yeah, you can have one of those houses, but you got to clean it.

And I'm like, yeah, that's amazing where you live now. 

Larry Bilotta: So I end up through lots of, bouncing, in Wisconsin,

Brad Minus: in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Okay, cool. 

Larry Bilotta: So that's where I ended up. I ended up in a small town. Even though I didn't grow up in a small town, I ended up in a small town. 

Brad Minus: It seems to be, that seems to be where it goes, you know, I know a lot of people that started out in big city and now in small towns.

And I know a lot of people that were in small towns and are now in big cities. Or at least in a suburb or something that they have access to it. So that, that makes, it makes perfect changes. So I just want to mention that first of all, what you gave us today was absolutely incredible.

And I think the amount of information that you gave us a label to identify ourselves as either hard or soft hearted. And you know, one of the four types. So I think that's amazing. Is there a difference when you deal with clients that are, you know, [00:53:00] where the husband is hard, and the, and the wife is soft or vice versa. Do you, is there a difference of the way that you, that you coach them or, is it the same? 

Larry Bilotta: So when I know that a person is in a country like fun and peace, I know they're soft. And when they're in the hard side, I know they're hard. And so when I'm talking to a couple, I'm asking the hard guy or the hard woman, tell me if you understand him, her, as this nature that. Doesn't seem to be the way you do, right? So I'm really asking about are you willing to come over here and understand this? Are you really come and speak French when you go to France, you know, right?

Because some people, that they're not really at a place where they can really learn. And so they really are more committed to being upset and being demanding. And I got to find out, [00:54:00] are they really stuck in their way, or are they able to come up to the other side and start to say, well, what can I learn about you and the way you see?

Events, the way you see things, because when you hear an idea that's absolutely opposed to everything you believe in, it's very hard to process it because when you hear it, like, well, this is so not what I believe in. This is so not right. And then you see that with couples and not just politically, but energetically and energy that the hard nature is an energy force itself that processes everything through a really hard thing and as you get more severe in that hardness, you become less willing to listen, less willing to hear, less willing to compromise or cooperate or even ask about your point of view because it's too severe to listen.

So, we see that obviously politically, but we [00:55:00] can see it in religion. We can see that in education, there's, there's all kinds of ways to take a subject field and get really, really tight and narrow in its, in its extreme. And when you get tight and narrow and extreme, you can't really hear anymore.

You can't ask open ended questions because you're personally too threatened. And now your, your, your energy is all disturbed because you're, you're being threatened by that idea. And so my Marsha's hardness, for instance, was. When she was very extreme because when she when I was more of a threat to her She became more extreme down that extreme pipeline of control and perfect She became more controlling more perfect oriented.

So all the qualities of control and perfect people she increased them And they got tighter and tighter and tighter. And so she was a lot less willing to listen. Right. And so when I went to my soft side and I, I got extreme in my soft side. So we ended up in those two things. And this [00:56:00] happened over the years.

We would get tighter and tighter in our extremes and then we get looser and looser and looser. And that's actually how we, we raised kids. We got looser and looser. And we couldn't listen anymore and we couldn't hear it.

And that's, that was one of the things I learned. I learned that when you get really extreme, you can't hear anymore. And the more you become less extreme, the more you get to this, her hardness became less hard, my softness became less soft. And as we come into this, this, closer area of, of, of, I'm willing to ask questions and she's willing to ask questions.

And that became more, what, what they call reasonable, right? 

Brad Minus: So it sounds just right back to where we end up back to what everybody says, compromise, you know, a little bit softer becomes, the soft becomes a little bit harder. The hard becomes a little bit softer. And so we meet somewhere in the middle.

Larry Bilotta: That's right. Well, that, that's what the idea of reasonable is. Reasonable. Right? Well, you can't reason, if you're in an [00:57:00] extreme and when you're in an extreme reason is over, right? 

Brad Minus: Well, that is definitely a lot to think about and I think with America having a divorce rate of 50%, these are ideas that need to be shared.

And you are doing that now. You can. See some more resources and he's got some courses and stuff and he's at youcansavethismarriage. com and you've got to check this out because his website is, loaded with information, blog courses, reviews, all about this. And you can learn a little bit more about him.

You can book a strategy call and, you definitely need to check this out. And there's just so much information out there about Larry. about his courses and you really, really need to check that out. Again, that's, you can save this marriage. com. I'm going to go ahead and put that in the show notes.

I see that you are on some social media outlets. Which one would you say is your most active? 

Larry Bilotta: So the 

way to get [00:58:00] a lot of Larry blood ideas is through YouTube videos. If you go to YouTube and do Larry ballata. You go to the Larry Belotta channel and that's a place where, like all the ideas that I've been talking about are there. In some video form. 

Brad Minus: He's got, and this channel looks like it's really laid out really nicely. He's got some shorts and some Q and a's he's got stuff on midlife crisis. So definitely go and check that out. But Larry, I really appreciate you joining us today. I think what you put out here.

Is really different way of looking at finding ways to save our marriages, especially in an environment where half of our marriages are not being successful. So thank you so much. Really appreciate that. All right. So for the rest of you, check this out. I'll have all that stuff in the show notes.

If you check us out on YouTube, please go ahead and hit subscribe and like it and, hit the notification bell. So you'll know when the next episode comes out. [00:59:00] If you're listening to us on a podcast directory like Apple or Spotify, please go ahead and leave a review.

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