Hey, everybody, come on and take a seat on the virtual couch.

Hey everybody, welcome to episode 309 of the virtual couch.

I am your host, Tony Overbay.

I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, a certified mindful habit coach, writer, speaker, husband, father of four,

ultra marathon runner, and creator of the Path Back, a pornography recovery program that is helping

people reclaim their lives

from turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms like pornography, but the same can be said for anything,

whether it's video games, whether it's food, whether it's your phone, whenever we really don't

feel like we are connected or being our authentic self, or if we don't feel like we're in alignment

with our values, how easy is it to just turn to some coping mechanism? There are so many coping mechanisms as I have noticed lately, whether it is turning to my phone for games or, my goodness, I just watched a tremendous amount of TikTok this morning. And that was the last thing that I wanted to do. And I got to own that. I got to take responsibility of that. But as soon as I noticed that I was doing that, I would love to say that then I noticed it. I forgave myself and I got right back to the present moment. But no, I told myself I'd give myself another three or four minutes and I don't even know how many minutes. That's a lie. It was another 10 minutes. But here I am and we're going to record this podcast. And I've had a couple of people over the last

probably two to three weeks who I haven't seen in a while. And there are former clients that still have access to my scheduling portal. And they've come in to see me. And it's been so great to see some of these people. But it's been a long time. And as a therapist, you really do evolve and you're continually just on a day-to-day basis. You're in the lab. You're having people come in. And if I even just look at the last couple of years, as I've learned more about the concepts of differentiation or external validation, becoming interdependent versus codependent, or all these other buzzwords that I promise you that I will make sense of. I had someone, one of these people,

what do you think the biggest problem is that you see in a couple's relationship? And I'm, well, I probably, I will probably touch on my four pillars at some point. But I just said, hey, you got a few minutes. And they were the last client I had in the day. And so I said, let me just lay out something. I would love for you to just comment as I go along. And it just really made me think, I don't think I really have some episode where I can just point somebody and say, here's a little bit of background that I would love for you to know before we meet, or this is a foundational principle of the things that I'm working from. So today, I thought I would just

try to, I don't know, riff, vibe, improv, whatever that looks like. And just if I was asked to

just talk through where I feel relationships go south or what that looks like and why we have

such a difficult time often in relationships

that I just thought I would just try to lay it out from the very beginning.

And again, we're going all the way back to birth, to the womb.

And before I get to that, I will just do the little bit of business real quick.

If you are interested in my magnetic

marriage course with my buddy, my friend, fellow podcaster, Preston Pugmire, then please go to

Tonyoverbay.com, go to the contact form and shoot me a note because we're going to be announcing

when the next round of the magnetic marriage course will be soon,

...