Relationships on Mounjaro: When One of You Changes (with Jonathan Van Viegen)

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Today on This Is My Journey, we're talking about the person standing next to you while all of this happens. So in 2023, there were 102.5 thousand divorces in England and Wales. And the marriages that ended had lasted around about average of 12.7 years. So these aren't whirlwind mistakes. These are long marriages with... mortgages, with children and shared history that came apart anyway.

And here is what nobody has measured. So the one person in a couple changes dramatically using a GLP-1, their body, their confidence, the way strangers look at them, the way they walk into a room, what happens to the other one? So what happens to the two of you? There's no study for that. There's no leaflet that comes with it. There is

Only what actually happens in the therapy room week after week when two people who love each other find that the ground has moved underneath them. So my guest today has spent more than a decade in the room and he's written a book all about it. So I'm super excited about this one because it's a conversation we don't normally have. So let's roll the intro and get into it. When I started, I was on my own. Two years ago, I began GLP-1 medications for chronic obesity with no real idea of what was coming.

Not the good parts, not the hard parts, and definitely not the parts nobody warned you about. So I went looking for answers and what I found was just noise, opinions, judgment, people selling something and everyone had a take and nobody had the truth. 126 pounds down, I'm still on this road, still learning, still working out what maintenance actually means, because losing the weight, it turns out, was only half the story for me. I'm Marc, and this is This Is My Journey. Every week I sit down with the people I couldn't reach back then. Leading doctors, obesity specialists, psychologists, dieticians, fitness experts, surgeons, and the people who actually understand what this medication does to your body and your mind and who'll tell you straight.

working professionals and people walking the exact same road as you because their answers, they matter just as much. Just honest conversations about what this really takes, the science, the setbacks and the stuff you won't hear anywhere else. If you're on GLP1s, or you're thinking about starting them, or you're just trying to make sense of it all, this podcast is for you because nobody should have to do this alone, not anymore. Welcome back everyone and today I am joined by a Canadian couples therapist and relationship coach. A registered psychotherapist in Ontario with a master's in marriage and family therapy and more than a decade of clinical work behind him. Jonathan Van Viegen has built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people online with jargon free relationship advice built on a principle I absolutely love and that is connection beats chemistry every time.

So he describes himself as the therapist your therapist follows and his stated mission is to help save a million marriages. His first book, Choosing Us Stories and Strategies to Strengthen Your Marriage from Inside the Therapy Room is published on the 3rd of November and it takes readers inside the sessions of three real couples working through conflict, broken trust and betrayal. And I think that forms a great basis for today's conversation. So Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me.

And that introduction was way more than I deserved. So I appreciate that. No, it definitely wasn't. I think you have so much experience behind your belt with all of this stuff. And I think you do a really good job of communicating that online. So I suppose really just for anyone who hasn't yet come across your work.

a community that really is listening to every word that you say. So tell us a little bit more about yourself, maybe a fact that nobody would know, and what maybe made you decide to take what happens in the therapy room and put it out on a platform in such a public way that you have. Yeah, that's a great question. I would say a little known fact about me is that I'm really a broken man. And, you know, when I go back to my childhood and what I went through, there was severe emotional abuse, physical abuse. There was a point when I was eight years old, my father got remarried and we moved in with my stepmom.

It was the first experience of living with a stepparent. And this is very topical because we're talking about food. She used to make cream cheese and jam sandwiches for our lunches. And I could not stomach it. I hated cream cheese and that combination, the cheese and the sweet from the jam.

So I wouldn't eat it. And it was about middle of September and I'd come home and at the bottom of my bag, my school bag was all her sandwiches. And they'd built up over a period of about two weeks so that there was a ton of like... broken sandwiches down at the bottom of my bag. Well, my father discovered it one day and he said, you're not eating your lunches? Well, you're not eating.

And so then he didn't feed me for three days. And I was eight years old. And I remember waking up on the third night at 11 o'clock and dry heaving at the toilet. And at that point, I think he kind of, a switch flipped in his mind and he brought me down and made me a bowl of oatmeal. And that was my childhood. And so

with a healthy muscle for anger. And I could easily trigger cortisol. The adrenaline would just flow through my body. And so I'd gotten that relatively under control. But then I met my wife. And then it's really scary when you marry someone because you don't want to lose them.

And you're thinking, till death do us part. And so any little hiccup that presented itself triggered that anger to the point where I wasn't a great man to be with. And my wife looked at me and said, who did I marry? And fast forward about six years, I did a lot of therapy myself and luckily had the wherewithal to say I'm going to work on it. And then it was about the time that I had a one-year-old.

And my wife at that point, I've still had my anger issues, but they've been toned down a good 80%. But she said to me, I don't think you're funny enough. And that was another giant trigger because it was an identity level wound that I talk about all the time in my content. That prompted me to say, I've got to do something. And so I sought out a graduate degree. My best friend at the time, he was talking about marriage and family therapy.

And that's how I found that degree. And then fast forward to today. And I think what I take with all that is I know a lot of men, particularly men, women as well, obviously, but men who struggle with anger, who struggle to be a different man, a better man, to really kind of ascend to that mature masculine that all of us can be. Yeah. My message to them is anyone can do it. You can do it and you're not a prisoner to your childhood wounds.

And you don't need to carry that trauma into your relationship if you want to stay married. I like to use the analogy of a fire break. You know, when there's a forest fire, they'll cut down the trees and form a break so that the fire can't jump over and burn the other part of the forest. And so I like to think that us as men... when we choose to embark on that journey of transformation, we can become that generational trauma firebreak. So that's a little bit about my why, I guess, is probably the best way to put it.

Yeah, no, I think men in general anyway, obviously I can say this because I'm a man too, but like not really in touch with ourselves either. Like I think just the man's attitude is to almost stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist or isn't happening or anything like that. So Yeah, I think this is a super important conversation to have. And obviously, yes, we have women as well that listen to the podcast, but I think there's room for everybody to gain something from this conversation, I think so. So really, I suppose to start off with, so let's start with your line.

So it is one of the best things I have read. on this all year. Connection beats chemistry every time is what you say. So what do you mean by that? And why does that matter so much? Well, we all love manifesting.

It's been a hot topic for, you know, the last 10 years. And I think there's one thing about praying or speaking to the universe or your higher power, asking for what you want. But what they often don't tack on to that is this idea of taking aligned action. So it's one thing to have hopes, dreams, goals, and desires, but we all understand that we need to take action. And there's, when I say connection over chemistry, attractions just lives in the mind.

It's something, it's a feeling. It's something that we can't see, touch, taste, feel, or smell. And definitely in my practice and definitely with those couples, you know, the ones that you're talking about, you know, that are ending their marriages after 12, 13 years, I can promise you that 99% of them are walking away from their marriage based on a feeling. And if I get into, you know, a conversation with them and start poking the bear and start asking about their feelings. Pretty soon feelings start having their own feelings, emotions have their own emotions.

And we live so much in our heads that we forget to take action to build the same connection that made our partner say I do to us in the first place. And one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever heard was I was working with a couple. They were in their 50s. They'd been married over 20 years on the verge of divorce and I think it was about the third session in. I work really quickly with the couples I work with.

We don't need a lot of time because I don't let them live in their feelings. We got to take action. And so I just asked a simple question. I said, you know, what was going on back in the early days that made you fall in love with each other and be happy back then? And... We lived in a small town and she said, well, he used to get off work about 30 minutes before I did and he would drive by my office and leave a little note under the windshield wiper of my car so that when she came out of work and get to her car, she would see that note and he'd be like, miss you all day.

Can't wait to see you at home tonight. Dinner's ready, whatever. And it stretched a smile across her face. And so in my view, that's taking enormous aligned action to produce the result of connection as opposed to wait around for, did I marry the right person? And my wife is guilty of that. Like she said, is my husband funny enough?

That was just a feeling, a thought that she had rather than her turning inward. And part of it is that my wife needed to detach from her own father emotionally and from his approval. And she didn't want to do that. She was reluctant to basically go all in with me for fear of falling out of her father's favor. And so she didn't take action. She didn't take action to build sameness with me that I talk about, to be on my side, to defend me in the eyes of her dad and her family and whatnot.

And so with a lack of action, she was stuck with this feeling of questioning the chemistry. Well, when she finally started taking action and we started connecting and she would be on my side and support me and that lowered my nervous system. And I felt like I wasn't always being judged whether I was funny enough or not. And I could relax and just pour back into her. That's when the connection strengthened. Right.

So I like that. connection because it forces us all to take aligned action. And the only other thing I would say is that when we talk about feelings, feelings are usually a binary option. I feel this or I don't feel this. Whereas chemistry typically lives on a spectrum in our mind. It's how connected are you?

Right. It's not are you connected? It's usually we ask how connected. And so if we live on a spectrum, then we can move up and down that spectrum based on the action that we take. But if I just have to say, is he funny enough or not? That's a binary option.

And in the world of repairing your relationship, you don't want yes or no. You don't want binary. You want optionality. You want to move up and down a spectrum. Right. So.

I suppose really the reason I really wanted you specifically was to talk about this and when one person in a couple changes dramatically and, you know, they're using weight loss medication, their body, their confidence, how the world treats them, what happens? is it that is actually happening between those two people? You know, what do you see walk into that therapy room whenever you're having that conversations? Well, I would say the thing that's happening to them is the absence of the conversation that should be happening. And what I mean by that is that let's just take weight issues as the issue for an individual in a relationship and they want to address that. It's

When we get married or when we decide to build that long-term relationship, what I'm saying is that I'm all in with you. And I have strong faith. So I go to Mark 10, verse 8, where two become one flesh. But you don't need to have faith in anything to understand that we're all searching for sameness with our partner. We're all searching to be on the same team. That's all we want.

We want to know that they have our back and we have their back. Well, if your weight issues are having a profound impact on your life, I'm not going to be an observer. I want to play an active role and join you in your, in your challenge, in your journey, in your pushing back against your weight problem. And so the conversation that isn't happening or, you know, the questions that aren't being asked are those, which I call the WH questions that I love. It's, how can I support you?

How can we get through this together? What could I be doing that would let you know that I've got your back and I'm always here for you? When did you feel like, you know, you were completely supported by me in your journey? What more could I say? What more could I do? And so...

People often ask me, do you want more insight into the problem or do you want action and do you want tools and strategies? And if there was anything that I could ever tell any of your listeners to do, if they find themselves in an acrimonious situation with their spouse or the relationship is not where they want it to be, commit to developing the strongest sense of curiosity for your partner that you could possibly achieve. have. And the way you do that is with those WH questions. Now, the one question that you promised me you'll never ask is why. And why we don't ask why is because it's unknowable.

And more importantly, it's only going to connect them by default to their pain. Why don't you feel supported to me? And they're going to give you a list of examples of when they didn't feel supported. So stay away from the why question and just keep it to the other WH questions. And that's going to I have your back.

And that's really what people, when they say they want to feel seen, heard, understood. You ask a bunch of WH questions and they're going to feel all those things. So. It's all, it's a trigger. Almost like a trigger. Yeah.

I just, you were saying that and I'm just thinking back to any relationship or conversations, even with friends or anything, but it is sometimes that can rub people up the wrong way. So I suppose that was really, really interesting there, what you were saying. I definitely think there's a lot of people will take away from what you've just said there. So I suppose there is insecurities on both sides of that, isn't there? So there is the one person who's changed and then there's the one who didn't and almost may feel left behind. So...

Can you take us through both? Because I think the partner who stayed the same is the person nobody ever asks about. It's always the person who's changed. Well, I love that you asked that question because in the lead up to our conversation today, I've been thinking a lot about that and how I was going to respond to you when, when. Because I knew this, this question was going to come up. To me...

We're all on a different journey in our lives, whether that's career, whether that's health. Regardless, it doesn't matter what the subject of the journey is. But to me, it all comes back to likability. And I would say that that partner is feeling left behind. If we look at where they are in their life, and maybe they have their own weight issues that they need to tackle, or maybe they have their own journey, whether it's alcohol that they have a struggle with, whatever it is. No one changes without feeling good about themselves.

If you can't look in the mirror and see yourself in a positive light, no one is ever going to feel good. Whether that's good enough that they will embark on their own journey or support you in your journey, they won't be able to show up. People just do not move when they feel insecure about themselves or not feeling great about themselves. And the bigger issue with that is that it then opens the door to two very important questions that all of us will answer consciously a yes to. But I call bullshit on that because I think most people actually underneath can't answer yes to these questions. And those two questions are

Am I capable of building the relationship that I want? And do I deserve the relationship I want? And again, people will consciously say, oh, yeah, I can build it. I deserve it. But then on and that's going to be on the subconscious level. But why does their stomach hurt or what prevents them from taking action?

And people don't take action in their lives when they truly don't think they'll be successful. Because if you can't build the relationship that you want after you've tried, well, you're going to have to look in the mirror and tell yourself that you failed because you weren't good enough to do it. And so there's a big fear of taking action. Now, what I would say to that person who is feeling like they're failing, I would say there is no failure here. All you're doing is you're learning what not to do, and then you can pick up.

And as long as you stay, as long as your horse is still in the race and you're fighting for that better relationship and you're fighting for that connection, you are by definition a success in my mind, even though you haven't achieved it yet. So I would say for that partner who's feeling left behind, or even the partner that's made that change, the first place that you guys want to go back to as a couple is that ability for each other. I think there's that feeling that the other person has that they are getting potentially left behind. And I think I've experienced a lot of it, I suppose, in friendship relationships. And I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine recently, and it was, Like my friends have all changed how they perceive me because I was always known as the fat friend.

And now I am not. And I don't want to say skinny, but I've lost the weight and I'm more in a healthy range and all that. But because my friends have all known me as a different size, they're almost. attitudes are changing towards me and stuff. I think it's really, really interesting, like space. And obviously, yes, specifically we're talking about, you know, couples and that kind of relationship.

But I think it stems wider than that, I think, in terms of the insecurities and stuff, I think. Well, on that point, the only thing I would add to that is, you know, when your friends say that they know you from a different size, I go back to the point I made earlier. Where is the curiosity for you today? Right. And so if they got to know you today, what gets you out of bed every day, where your passion is? Obviously, we know where your passion is, but even in friendships, we need that curiosity just as much in our relationship.

Right. So I suppose in talking about that insecurity and things, you know, there's insecurity on both sides. So chosen and cherished is the phrase at the heart of all the work that you do. Break that down for us. What does being chosen actually look like as a behavior on a random Tuesday, you know, in a normal, I suppose, marriage, if you want to call it that. Well, it's great because I separate the two.

Like I see them kind of as a yin and a yang where one leans more masculine and one leans more feminine. And so if I ask 100 women, 99 of them are going to tell me that they want to be the prize in their husband's eyes. Right. And they want to know that that they above everyone in his orbit, she occupies the most real estate at all times in his mind. Whether he brings in a daughter from a previous marriage, his new wife will still want to know that she's number one, even though that. There's no competition, but in her mind, she may feel like there is.

And so to me, that idea of making a woman feel like the prize is essentially saying of every woman on the planet, everyone on the planet, I choose you. To be honest, we could talk about this for the longest, longest time because there's so many different areas and points for it. a lot of people that are listening and I would really encourage them to go and follow you and listen to what you've got, especially if they're going through these situations themselves. Because I think there is a lot of people within this community specifically that are going through these changes in relationships and their marriages. And I think it's really good that we can highlight how they can navigate that you don't really see a lot of people talking about it obviously i will drop all your links to everything into the caption of the podcast i suppose the big one that's coming up is you know pre-ordering uh choosing us um before it lands in november i have

had the privilege of having a little look at the book before it does come out a book should always provide value to somebody and they should be able to take whatever they're learning from it and be able to implement that themselves and i think that's one thing that your book does really really well so i would yeah really encourage everybody to go and pre-order their copies and but all that's left for me to say is thank you so much jonathan for joining me today on the podcast it's been the luck with the new book. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me.