How do you stop performing in your marriage? Somatic Healing in Intimate Relationships with Natalie Vartanian & Glenn Nielsen

Notes from the Edge

Relationship and intimacy coaches Natalie Vartanian and Glenn Nielsen join Lisa Lacy to discuss the transition from performing inherited rol

Key takeaways

• Natalie Vartaniu identified that she was performing the role of the 'accommodating good wife' due to childhood conditioning.
• Glenn Nielsen experienced significant identity disorientation following the collapse of his 38-year electrical contracting business in 2022.

Main topics

• Somatic healing
• Relationship design

Notable quotes

The body is the barometer.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an empowering guide for couples seeking to move

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Ghosted after the first date? We make the call you're afraid to make. The Second Date Update Binge Podcast. He Speaker 4 (0:07) kept yelling out, dude, yes, Speaker 2 (0:11) dude. Bad dates, big reveals, awkward phone calls. The Second Date Update Binge Podcast. Speaker 4 (0:19) Maybe I'm just being too picky, it was weird. Speaker 2 (0:22) Subscribe and binge today. If you dare. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:33) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Man to the Edge. Speaker 4 (1:03) Hey, my friends, welcome back to an episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having the entire time. Guess what? You ain't talking about it, so we're gonna. And today we have Natalie Vartanian and Glenn Nielsen, and they are relationship and intimacy coaches. who work alongside each other. And I love that to help couples understand not only the stories, we talk about stories a lot in here, guys, they matter. What are you telling yourself that are shaping your relationship, but what is also happening inside your individual nervous systems? So Natalie and Glenn have weathered business collapse, financial strain, family loss, major life transitions, and seasons where they genuinely did question whether their marriage was the problem. So guys, they're not coming at you saying, hey, we had it figured out the whole time. And that's what we love too. They're being real in here. But what they discovered was that underneath the conflict, they were performing roles they had inherited without consciously choosing. So Natalie was performing the accommodating good wife. We've talked about that a lot. Shaped by the years of being the good daughter, while Glenn was carrying the pressure of being the good husband and the provider until it almost nearly broke him. So today we're exploring what happens when two people stop performing at the same time and work on their shit. Natalie and Glenn, welcome in. Speaker 4 (2:45) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, my friends. I'm so excited to have you guys here because I think you guys have the capacity to help so many people out there struggling. How are you guys both doing today? Speaker 3 (2:57) Doing great. Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:59) Good. Speaker 4 (3:00) Well, we always kind of start with the pivotal moment. What was the moment when you both realized, wait a minute, we're replaying like some unconscious patterns here. Did one of you realize it first and share it with the other and it was well-received or not well-received? How did that kind of roll out for you? Speaker 3 (3:23) You want to take this? I think you were the one that woke up to it first. Speaker 1 (3:27) Yeah, that's true. That's true. Gosh, I know that's such a, because I think the thing I realized, Lisa, is like, it just creeps up. It just, it's like a building thing, right? Like little by little by little. And you don't notice that it's happening. Like little moments, but it was just like. and Glenn talks about this a lot with the body being the barometer, I also think our emotions are our like guiding lights, right? And I just found myself feeling irritated a lot or feeling resentful or feeling heavy and just like to the point where in the moment it kind of woke up for me where I was just like, oh my god, I don't feel like myself and I feel like I'm like disappearing in Speaker 3 (4:11) a way. Speaker 1 (4:13) hearing in our relationship disappearing, like with my own visions and dreams, like I felt like a muted version of myself and I'm a pretty big boisterous, like energetic person, you know? So I was just like, what the F is happening? And so that kind of took me down to like, okay, what is happening? You know? And instead of like blaming our situation or blaming this or blaming Glenn or blaming our marriage, you know? Cause I was just like, Something else has to be the problem here, you know, instead of like, oh, shit, like I've kind of let myself lose myself. Speaker 4 (4:50) Yeah. In Speaker 1 (4:51) our marriage. And so that started the seeking Speaker 4 (4:54) that started the seeking. You felt like I am not myself. This is not me. So what I love about that, Natalie, is you took a hard look going. I'm not digging this. Speaker 3 (5:06) I'm Speaker 4 (5:07) not going to play the blame game because there's no healing in the blame game. There's no healing in the blame game. So I love that. So when did you start? When did you both start recognizing? Wait a minute. We've been trying to perform roles that aren't ours. They were conditioned. probably to us just handed to us in in childhood and we're just replaying it over and over and over in our own relationship when did when did that epiphany come for you well Speaker 3 (5:37) i think what was it you know kind of piggybacking what natalie was saying you know because Coming into the relationship together, we came into it pretty awake, pretty, you know, we had done a lot of work on ourselves over the years. You know, I'd studied as a therapist for the last 30 years while I was a contractor and trauma therapist and somatic therapist doing all these things. We came into it with designing the relationship up front. We knew what we wanted and we were coming into it eyes wide open. Wow. Speaker 1 (6:06) part of that and later in life right later in life through multiple relationships before we got here yeah and so we really Speaker 3 (6:12) we had an eight-year friendship together before we ever turned it into a romance we really knew each other well that's Speaker 4 (6:19) a solid foundation yeah it's Speaker 3 (6:21) a really solid foundation which we're really grateful for and going into it we're like okay i know who you are you know who i am you know i accept who you are and we also had the thing we wanted it all we be careful what you ask for. Speaker 4 (6:39) Yeah. I just asked the universe to teach me what love was. Well, it's right. We want it all. And we also Speaker 3 (6:44) with the idea too, that we wanted each other to be fully expressed inside a committed relationship. And what does that look like? What to be fully expressed inside a committed relationship. Oh, Speaker 4 (6:55) I love that. I had a dream Speaker 3 (6:57) of owning a retreat center. I found this retreat center by divine intervention. And. Natalie was this huge support of it, like so supportive. And it was like, oh, my God. And she she could see it even before I did. She was like, oh, my God, when I see it, I see us working together. And and I bought the place and we get up here. And the the awakening for me was probably I would say about a year in your year and a half in when I noticed Natalie beginning to lose herself. Speaker 2 (7:28) Like Speaker 3 (7:29) and I'm like, what's going on? Speaker 4 (7:32) Yeah. Speaker 3 (7:32) You know, I started to take a personal, which is one of the part of our ground rules. Nothing's personal. And so I'm trying to keep that in my, okay, what's going on here? Because the reactions and the responses we're getting, like all of a sudden it's like, oh my God, is this not working for you? You know, like, and then the provider in me, like, oh my God, babe, I bought this for us. Like, this is for us. You know, we're on 30 acres. We're in the, we're in the forest. we're doing healing work here we're doing why aren't you Speaker 4 (8:00) happy why aren't you Speaker 3 (8:02) happy like what's the deal you know and so that was the awakening point for me to start going okay i gotta i gotta listen i gotta lean in we gotta dig Speaker 4 (8:11) deeper we Speaker 3 (8:13) gotta gotta we gotta take this deeper there's something else going on here you know well Speaker 1 (8:17) because glenn was also going through his reckoning around money and finances and business and you know starting over in a whole new industry and you know just there was just so much that he was also kind of thrashing around with like we were both personally thrashing around with these things but then kind of weirdly like projecting it onto the other person or getting defensive like when we saw them in their state and just not understanding like i honestly would say it was just like it just didn't make sense up here that was the thing it just is like we don't what's going on and that's when i was like okay there's other stuff happening trauma stuff like you know we're in survival mode like it just there was so much more like beneath the surface Speaker 4 (9:03) natalie and glenn i don't want to gloss over that Because we can have it up here all day long. We can have it intellectualized all day long. When I did DBT, $25,000 program, 18 month long program, I had both those books memorized, Marshall in hand. I still find her to be quite a genius, but not one of those skills was being applied. Not one. And I had it memorized, but it was not the mode for me. It just wasn't the modality for me. It didn't fit me. So I wasn't going to be able to apply it in my life. So I'm a... big proponent of you got to find what works and who works for you and always have a mentor, always, always, always. And Speaker 1 (9:41) I'm a Speaker 4 (9:42) big proponent of transformational coaches because that was what finally got me over the hump was a transformational coach. That's why I became one. That's why I'm such an advocate for them. So you and Natalie, I love the fact that you guys talk about being the good wife and the good husband, because I think no matter where we're in, in, in the States. in in this culture no matter we have an idea of what the good wife and the good husband is is no no matter religious background whatever we have an idea of what that is and the minute we try to cram ourselves into that box it just creates pressure so talk to me about your epiphanies around the pressure that that was actually creating for you Speaker 3 (10:29) Well, for me, it was around the financial stuff. It was around the provider. I was born and raised Mormon, and I'm no longer Mormon, obviously. But in that culture, I mean, literally, the teaching was if you're not making enough money to support your family so your wife can be at home and raise the kids, get a second job. Get another job. I was fortunate enough. I was an electrical contractor for 38, very successful contractor, multimillion dollar business, things like that. And so I felt I'm being the man I'm doing. I got raised four girls, put them through college marriages, you know, you name it, all that kind of stuff. And then in 2022, my business collapsed after 38 years. Speaker 2 (11:15) Wow. That's Speaker 3 (11:16) a Speaker 2 (11:16) long time. Speaker 3 (11:17) Yeah. And it was incredibly disorienting. because things were happening that were unexplainable. Well, Speaker 4 (11:24) and everything was disorienting at that time, not to mention just, yeah, yeah, everything was disorienting. Yeah, Speaker 1 (11:29) everything around us. Everything Speaker 3 (11:31) was very disorienting. Just, I could not, I mean, I'm like, wow, I'm not new at this. I've been doing this for 38 years. What is going on? I've since come to realize, and let's get a little woo here, that it was kind of the divine hand in moving, because this was where I needed to be. And the story of how I came across this thing was just unbelievable. And like, okay. We Speaker 4 (11:51) always know, Glenn. We always, it's just that, that hindsight may come a year from now. It may come five years from now, but I promise you friends out there, it's going to make sense one day. It's going to make sense why it went away. Speaker 3 (12:06) It didn't make sense at the time because it was like, I had this game plan and here it is. And all of a sudden just the rug gets pulled out, you know? So I spent that. year after we moved up here full time. in a pretty disoriented state, you know, trying to figure out what the heck happened and grieving and having time to grieve and try and also starting a new business, running a retreat center at the same time, you know, doing that. And so that's important Speaker 4 (12:36) to let people know, guys, we grieve not just the loss of a human. We grieve the loss of a job, a business, moving a car, even, I mean, you know, everything. End of a business partnership. Speaker 3 (12:50) End of a business partnership of, you know, business partner that I've known since I was 17. Speaker 4 (12:55) Wow. You Speaker 3 (12:57) know, things like that, that still infiltrates my dreams. I mean, it's, it was one of those things that it was a real reckoning to go through. I leaned on Natalie pretty hard in that first year because my assumption was she's part of, she, she's a big supporter of this. You know, she. and her business skills and all the things