When Everything Is On The Line: Dr. Becky on Marriage, Crisis, and Courage

What is a crisis—really?

In this powerful and deeply personal conversation, we sit down with marriage crisis coach Dr. Becky Whetstone to explore what happens when life overwhelms our ability to cope—and how we begin to find our way forward.

Dr. Becky shares both her professional expertise and her own lived experience, including the devastating loss of her Marine son to friendly fire, and the lifelong grief that followed. Together, we unpack the ways crisis can show up quietly, the cost of avoiding the truth, and why naming what’s real is often the first step toward healing.

In this episode, we explore:

•  growing up in the segregated South and the experiences that shaped her voice 
•  the loss of her son and what it means to live forward through grief 
•  how crisis is defined—and why it doesn’t always look the way we expect 
•  why avoiding the truth often deepens the pain 
•  what it means to take the next right step when everything feels uncertain 

This conversation is a reminder that crisis doesn’t mean the end of the story—it may be the moment that invites us to tell the truth, seek support, and begin again.

🎧 Listen now and share with someone who might need it.

Transcript

Episode Opening And Guest Intro

Kellie 0:05

Some conversations challenge the way we think about relationships, and others challenge the way we think about life itself. Today's conversation does both.

Erin 0:14

Dr. Becky Whetstone, known as the Marriage Crisis Manager, has spent decades helping couples navigate the moments when everything feels like it's falling apart. But her work isn't built on theory alone. It's shaped by the very experiences she's lived herself.

Kellie 0:29

From marriages that taught her what she didn't yet know to rebuilding her life as a single mom to the unimaginable loss of her son Benjamin, a Marine killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, her story is one of truth, resilience, and hard-earned wisdom. In this conversation, we explore what it really takes to face what's not working, to stay present in the middle of pain, and to rebuild connection with others and within ourselves.

Erin 0:55

Because whether we're navigating relationship challenges, personal loss, or both at the same time, the work is the same. It starts with honesty and it requires courage. This is a conversation about crisis, but also about clarity, growth, and what becomes possible when we're willing to do the work.

Kellie 1:14

This is The P-I-G, where we unbox stories of life, love, loss, and legacy through real conversations and meaningful stories with purpose, intention, and gratitude. We're Kellie and Erin, sisters, best friends, sometimes polar opposites, but always deeply connected by the life and love of the woman who taught us that it's never too late to begin again. Our mother Marsha.

Erin 1:50

Today's guest is someone whose work goes straight to the heart of what we explore here. The courage it takes to tell the truth, to face what's not working, and to rebuild connection even in the hardest seasons of life. Dr. Becky Whetstone, the Marriage Crisis Manager, has lived the very stories she now helps others navigate. From early marriages that taught her what she didn't know yet, to raising two children as a single mom to the unimaginable loss of her son Benjamin, a Marine and her biggest fan, her path has been shaped by both heartbreak and extraordinary resilience. And instead of letting those experiences close her off, she used them to deepen her compassion, sharpen her wisdom, and build a practice that gives people real tools when their relationships are on the brink. Her work is direct, heart-led, and born from lived experience, not theory. Dr. Becky, we are so grateful that you are here. Welcome to The P-I-G.

Dr. Becky 2:51

Thank you so much, Kellie and Erin. This is so cool to be here. I could not be more excited to talk about whatever relationships, marriage, how much I hate divorce, whatever...

Erin 3:05

Well, we are absolutely thrilled to have you. We are so excited for this conversation. I know that it is going to be filled with probably so much laughter and tears and probably everything in between. I'm really excited to explore your work and your life and your journey. I know that this is going to be a really meaningful, impactful conversation, definitely for the three of us, but I know that it's going to be really extraordinary for all of our listeners. Thank you. Yes, you are welcome. So, with that, when you look back at everything you've lived, the relationships, the heartbreaks, the rebuilding, where does your story truly begin?

Childhood In Segregated Arkansas

Dr. Becky 3:50

You know, I'm one of those people that can remember a lot of my childhood. Lots. I grew up in El Dorado, Arkansas, in a town that was segregated. I remember walking to school and seeing the laundromat in the shopping center, and it had a sign in the window that said "Whites only," and I thought that meant you could only wash white clothes in there.

Kellie 4:13

Wow.

Marriages That Fell Apart

Dr. Becky 4:14

That's the mind of a child, you know. Right? So I grew up kind of during the civil rights times and saw a lot of changes going on there. And I think I was also very influenced by the culture of the town, which was definitely a town of haves and have nots. Like the Murphy Oil billionaires were there. That's where Murphy Oil was. And then there's the normal, regular middle class people, like my family. And then there was the rednecks. And I mean, seriously, it was like a caste system in our town. And then there were what they called back then the colored people. You know? And I remember driving out to where the black people were and seeing the unbelievable poverty. I just remember seeing it was like entering into the Twilight Zone, seriously. I was like, I just they didn't have streets, it was all muddy roads and shacks, and and it it just was the saddest thing in the world. So I think that I always had a heart for the underdogs and the people who weren't treated fairly. That this has to be innate because I noticed it so early on in my life. And my family would talk about these things, and they were definitely civil rights-minded. I had that heart, and it just so happened that my elementary school got one black child as they were first starting to integrate, and he was in my class. His name was Gregory Dykes, and interestingly enough, I have looked for years for Gregory Dykes because I wanted to contact him and ask him what that experience was like. Because he was an amazing young man. He was very sharp, you know, he wore beautiful little clothes and he had such a good personality. And yet some of the kids in the class were so cruel to him. And I remember I used to try to defend him and protect him, and I would tattletale on the bullies. And so I have literally looked for him every six months, maybe for the last 20 years. And finally, about a month ago, I was looking for him once again, and I found his obituary. Oh. And he lived in like Illinois, and it said that he had grown up in El Dorado, Arkansas. And I was like, and he's my age, you know, and I'm like, well, there he is. And there was a photograph of him, and I'm just so sick that I couldn't find him before. However, his obituary was basically like he didn't have a never married, didn't have children. You know, he really he loved his parents apparently a whole lot. And so, you know, I don't know, he didn't do anything that made him show up on the internet, I guess. So until he passed away. So, and then where my life really started heading in the direction where I am now was in my twenties, just living my life and dating and getting married ridiculously, having terrible relationships. And then my family was kind of driving me crazy. And I began to have this voice in my head that would say, like, are you crazy? Are they crazy? Or is everybody crazy?

Erin 7:33

We've asked all the same questions...

Dr. Becky 7:36

I really wanted to know the answer to that question. So I started reading self-help books and stuff. And when I was a teen, I used to love reading advice columns and I would love to write. So I had in my mind that I was going to become the next Ann Landers. That's what my goal was. So when I went off to college, I majored in journalism with that in mind. And so I got married to my second husband. And about six months into our marriage, and this would be my kid's dad, he had been the most loving, most adoring person, demonstrative, affectionate, everything for six months after our marriage. And then he just closed the door one day and never came back out again. And when he did that, I started having depression and panic attacks. And at that time we were, he was a orthopedic surgery. He had been a resident when I met him, but now he had graduated and we went to Australia and New Zealand for a period of time for him to do some fellowships down there in knee surgery because I guess there's a lot of football down there and soccer and stuff, and they had the most amount of knee surgery available down there. So he wanted to go down there and do that. He shut me off down there, and this is before the internet. There was no CNN back then, no international TV, and I felt very isolated down there, and I couldn't call my parents very often because it was like six dollars an hour. I felt very alone and isolated and started having panic attacks and depression and and started getting treatments for that. And it was because, you know, he had shut me out like that, and I started, I just started feeling like, oh my God, I've already been married once and what's going on here, and I feel trapped, you know, that he changed on me like he did. So I tried everything I could think of, including marriage therapy and everything else, for five years to get him to come back out and play with me. We did have two kids in that period of time, but I could never get him to play with me. And as the years moved on, he started becoming really mean and nasty and snapping at me when I'd bring it up. You know, he got really ugly. A couple of times he left me stranded in restaurants when I brought it up because he worked all the time. So I didn't get that much time with him. So if I got like a little bit of time with him out in a restaurant, I'd go, hey, like we've got to do something about our marriage. And he would just take his napkin, put it on the table, get up, walk out, and I'd have to get a taxi home. There was no Ubers back in 1990 or whatever it was. And I just began to really lose hope for our marriage. And then one fall, there had been a presidential election. He did not like who I supported in that election. And I was on an allowance, I was a housewife. So after the election in November, nothing. But in December, he goes, you know what? Since you voted for that person and they want to raise our taxes by six percent, I'm going to lower your allowance by six percent on January one. Oh man. And he did. And I told him at the time, if you do that, you're gonna have a very bad year. And because he was he made a lot of money in his profession, and he was always making more and more and more. His salary never went down, it always was going wow, way up. So there was no reason for him to do that to me, other than pure meanness, you know, and punishment. So when I got that check, I told myself, I'm going to get divorced by the end of the year. And I started putting my ducks in a row. And then about July, I reached the crux of what I could tolerate. And I set him down and I said, I'm at the end of the line, I've given up hope. I think I want a divorce, but I don't know. And then we went to a marriage therapist, and the marriage therapist said, Well, I can't help you because you don't want to work on the marriage. So he sent us away and we handled this marriage crisis on our own, like two crazy monkeys, didn't know what we were doing, tearing up the town, being horrible to each other. Our kids caught in the middle, and we ended up divorced fairly quickly. I would say we were divorced by February. And I had wanted to take my time and sorting through my feelings, and he wouldn't give me any time. He rushed me. And so, yeah, we ended up divorced. And so that never sat well with me, the whole way that went down and why couldn't the marriage therapist help us and whatnot. I went on five years later to remarry again. And interestingly enough, as we speak, I wrote a book about that experience. Five years with a United States Congressman. Unbelievable experience. Terrible, terrible marriage. I mean, ridiculous. And so I just I've kept that book for 20 years. I've never published it for a variety of reasons, which we could talk another two or three hours about why I didn't publish it back then. But by golly, me and my husband have been going through our things and scanning pictures we want to keep and cleaning out storage rooms and stuff. And my book kept coming up through the pile. And I finally I said, Well, you know, I'm 67 years old, and either this thing's gonna get out there someday or it's not. I started looking through it at the stories, and I thought, damn, these stories are awesome. I even forgot some of the details, you know, and I was so grateful that I wrote it all back then. So I decided about a month ago that I was gonna go over the book a chapter at a time, update it with my new therapist eyes, and revise it and update it. And so I'm releasing it one little bit at a time on Substack right now. And it's called The Congressman's Wife, if anybody wants to check it out on Substack. It's quite a story, but it's also the story that changed my life in such a profound way that I can't even express. But what I figured out in that journey was I knew this man I married was not gonna be a good husband. I knew he wouldn't be. I'd always told my friends I would never marry him. But he was fun to hang out with. And by golly, when he told me he was gonna run for Congress, my ego back then I had a little part in me that was an egomaniac. And her food, her drug of choice was to have powerful wild experiences and to be around power and prominence. And I couldn't top this. I was like, I'd better marry him so I can go up and have this experience in Washington, DC and feed my ego. So I did. And we were divorced within five years, but not even living together after three years. But I was in Washington for three years and had that experience. But our divorce and everything about it almost killed me. I am not, I mean, I'm sure I had a mental breakdown. There's just no other way to put it, and it affected my physical health as well. It was just a mess, and it took me about five years to recover from it. But I was able to kill that egomania part of me. Yeah, I came to know who she was, I knew what her drug was. I understood how I got that way because my parents had classically conditioned all their kids to get ahead by hanging out with people that were higher up than we were. You know, they they literally trained us to do that. And so after I uncovered her, I was able to kill my ego and really have a healthy wife and healthy relationships after that. But going back to my marriage with my kids' dad, you know, like we got divorced and the Texas divorce laws are terrible. And even though he made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, I was destitute overnight after our divorce. And so I had to go get a job, and I was going through all these weekend workshops where like sort of like Tony Robbins, where they hit you over the head with a bat and you come out of there going, I can do anything.

Kellie 15:47

Walk over the coals of fire.

Turning Pain Into A Therapy Career

Dr. Becky 15:49

I came out of those things and I like knew that I was gonna write a newspaper column. I was gonna work for the newspaper in San Antonio, and they were gonna let me work there, even though I had no experience, no clippings, nothing. And so I spent two years working to get this job at the paper, driving them nuts, I'm sure. And they finally hired me after two years and gave me a chance. They said, You have 90 days sink or swim. This is not journalism school. We are not going to teach you, you are going to do, and you better not screw up, or in 90 days we you will be leaving. So then I was just terrified. But I told myself, you cannot fail, you cannot fail, you cannot fail. You have to succeed because this is the beginning of your life dream. And so I worked for the paper for five years. And when I married the congressman, they took my column away from me and said, You can't write your column anymore because you're married to a politician and there's a conflict of interest. And I was just like, oh my God. The thing that saved me back then was I had just started graduate school for marriage and family therapy. And when you're going through a divorce or you're knocked on your butt, there's nothing better than to be going to school to better yourself and distract yourself moving forward in a positive way when all I wanted to do at that time was just go to bed for a few years, you know. And I had two little kids at home. I was a single mom. So yeah, I went to graduate school and I and I was going to do that so that I could write, continue to write columns for other people, but now with credibility, you know, I was gonna be, oh, she's she's a marriage and family therapist. But I enjoyed what I was learning so much, and I loved my cohort that I was going to school with. And so we all agreed that we were gonna stick it out for five years and get our doctorates. So we did. And so I came out of there and had then had to go through the long licensing process to become a therapist. But when I put my shingle out, the day I got my license, I had just finished my dissertation and I researched how people decide to divorce. Because I was so wondering why didn't that marriage therapist help us back in the day? And I learned in graduate school that they don't teach you about marriage crisis when you're in marriage therapy school. They never mention it. And for most people, if they decide to divorce, they just leave therapy. To me, they should not leave therapy then. They need therapy more than ever if they're about to go through a divorce, right? So all the research told me all these wonderful things you could do for couples who were in a marriage crisis. And I just thought, why doesn't anybody know about this? So as soon as I finished graduate school, I just sort of had a purpose now. My purpose was going to fill that void of helping couples in a marriage crisis because the marriage therapy profession wasn't doing it. I was gonna start attracting couples in crisis and using the research I knew to try and help them. And so over these 20 years, I've developed that and eventually wrote a book about it called I think I want out what to do when one of you wants to end your marriage. And I'm still every day working with couples in crisis, and I'm pretty much the only game in town right now. I mean, because you have to have a special interest, you have to go out and learn this on your own. But when I do go to conferences and talk to other therapists about it, they're hungry to learn about how to help couples in crisis. So there's a strong need for it, and there's not enough supply of therapists who know anything about it. So my book will help therapists learn most of what they need to know. And it also helps couples who are in a marriage crisis. So that's my story in a nutshell.

Erin 19:47

It's so fascinating to me. It's there's so many things that I want to ask you about. I have so many questions. Are you great? Thank you for giving us that synopsis and and wrapping all that up. Just the way that you did and explaining so much of that, I feel like there's so much to unpack with that story and with your experiences. For me, it's so interesting to hear you say specifically that in graduate school for marriage and family therapy, that they don't really talk about marriage crisis. Fascinating to me. What I do know about you and your story is that your work is based so much then from your experience. Totally. And not from what you necessarily learned in school or learned through textbooks, but just really what has your life experience taught you. And I actually feel like that's what makes each of us an expert on any subject matter when you've lived through a life experience. It's different. And I feel like there's an element to that that really no textbook can prepare you for. And so your lived experience in and of itself has made you the subject matter expert in this field. That's incredible.

Dr. Becky 21:13

Well, with my kids dead, I was the one who went through the stages of a deteriorating marriage that I describe in my book and had the straw, which was when he lowered my allowance and then death of the marriage after that. I didn't know I was going through those processes, but when I found it in the research, I was like, oh, I did, I went through everything that the research is saying here. You know, it was crazy. And so I was what I call the decider, the person who's going to decide to divorce or not, right? And then my husband was the leaning in partner. He didn't want to get a divorce, but at the same time, he was kind of mean. And his friends were telling him, You better cut her loose because she's going to spend all your money while she's separated from you. And they put this fear in him. And so he just felt like you've got to decide right now. And that's how we kind of ended up divorced. And then five years later with the congressman, he was the decider. And I was the one who would have liked to have worked things out and he wasn't going to have it. So I've been on both sides of the equation from a personal experience. And so I do speak with experience to my clients about it. When I tell them I know what you are going through, I really do know what they were going through. And I know the extreme feelings that they're having and the despair and the anguish and the fear and all of that's normal for the situation.

Kellie 22:37

Yeah and shame too can really get wound up in that. What I heard you describe is that incredible level of empathy that comes from being a wounded healer. Having been divorced three times, Becky, and I have friends who have been divorced two, three, even four times a lot of people can feel shame around that. What helped you transform those experiences into wisdom instead of wounds?

Ending Shame By Telling Truth

Dr. Becky 23:07

Well I was ashamed of it for a while in the beginning. It was embarrassing. I mean put yourself in my shoes. My column in San Antonio newspaper was about relationships. I was a Carrie Bradshaw person in my city of over a million people. And it it was very, very popular and it was pretty much the talk of a town at the time. They would have me on TV and radio shows all the time as their guest to talk about relationships. So I had become a relationship guru and the guru got divorced for the third time. And so you can imagine I'm doing what I was born to do, but I was afraid I wasn't going to get to keep doing it because of my track record. I remember my therapist at the time saying you can lie about it. You don't have to tell people it's none of their business and I just thought I just know I know how people are and there's always going to be that one person who knows and they're going to do a gotcha. I know about you and I didn't want to live in fear of being found out or discovered. And then of course my education taught me that facing your shames head on and taking full ownership of it is the way to kill it. So I decided I was going to embrace my three divorces and my fourth marriage and just out myself. And so what I did to do that was I sat down and wrote an article about being a marriage therapist who's been married four times. And it was published in the Huffington Post and it went viral. Wow. It went viral and so never again have I ever felt any shame about it. It's all a part of me and each marriage taught me something necessary that I use today in my work and it deepened me as a person. And what I tell people is is it better to stay married for 50 or 60 years to someone you despise or that you shouldn't have married? Or what about those courageous lassies like me who get in the mess and are willing to get out regardless of what society says about that. So I think there is a story of courage in people who leave marriages that are not repairable. All of us know someone or have been in a marriage where one person was not going to grow, evolve and change and you know that this is what it is or I have to leave. And right they're raising their hands everybody needs to you know and so as I've done therapy with myself I'm like you see all your clients staying miserable for years within in action and you had the courage to leave and give yourself a chance at a life around people that enrich your life instead of drag you down. Yeah. So yeah I think I'm making the conscious decision to just out myself and the fact that it hit a note on Huffington Post and went viral kind of I had nothing else to hide after that. Let's put it that way.

Erin 27:16

When you were writing that column in San Antonio and I live in Austin so you were just down the road when you were writing that column and then you went through your third divorce what year was that?

Dr. Becky 27:29

2002, 2003 -ish.

Erin 27:33

I'm asking that because I was sitting here contemplating writing a column for a newspaper and what differences that would bring up and that's why I wanted to know the time in a world where social media was rampant and crazy and is what it is today versus when people were relying more on newspapers for news. And you touched on this but I was thinking about were you fearful then for your credibility and would that look different today given that people are just so vocal on social media. Everybody's got an opinion about everything and I'm wondering how much of that you were exposed to and if you feel like you would have been more exposed to that today. So that's why I asked the question about what year that was and kind of the timeframe on that because I'm it was just a thought that I had.

The Internet Fight For A Voice

Dr. Becky 28:36

Well when I um got divorced from the congressman the internet was just starting to fire up and you could go online and easily put together a website yourself using templates and stuff. You did not have to know code. And so what I found was like in my divorce with the congressman the way I was sort of treated through that whole episode was so outrageous. I mean the experiences I had were so outrageous so un so deeply unfair so one-sided in his favor and I could not get anyone who gave a damn about it. He was still the congressman so you would think that if I called the paper back then and said do you care that your congressman is you know stealing money or whatever it was you know like do you care? They did not care. They didn't want to talk to me. And so I had no ability to control the narrative he was controlling the narrative of our marriage of our divorce and I couldn't get a job anywhere. No one would hire me. No one would touch me. I had been the toast of the town when I was a columnist but now as the woman kicked to the curb by the congressman and he was controlling the narrative and no one wanted to hear my narrative I felt a grave injustice. So I took out a website at that time and I called it the Congressman's wife. And I started writing about the truth of what was going on and I basically said I hope you believe me. Nobody so far nobody believes a word I say about our marriage but I hope you believe me but if you don't I don't care but here here's my truth and just so it's being told and so I I knew people in Washington from having been up there. And so I called the Capitol Hill gossip columnist his name was Lloyd Grove. And he had a column called Whispers I think was the name of it. And all the people on the hill were terrified of being shown up in Lloyd Grove's Whispers column. And so I called Lloyd Grove and I said hey Becky the Congressman's wife you know and he he's divorcing me and he's squashing me like a bug and nobody cares. And I said so I just wanted to give you this URL of my new website congressmanswife.com and tell the whole nation to go over there and check it out. Well he did he did I had like 5000 people go to that website and start reading that stuff. That was the power of the internet that I realized for the first time there was a way for the average Joe with no power to have a voice. And I was smart enough and had enough connections through my journalism career and my brush with politics to I knew who to call I knew exactly how to get it going and man he got it going. So of course a lot of this is in my book The Congressman's wife I tell the whole story of it. And then we got divorced and in the divorce you know written out that Charlie was going to have to do this this and this. He didn't do any of it he didn't return my things he didn't do what we had negotiated in the divorce and all that stuff and I and there's nothing I could do about it. His lawyers worked for him for free because he was the congressman and I had to pay people $500 an hour and I couldn't even find a lawyer in San Antonio that would represent me against him. I had to find somebody in Austin. I had to pay for him to drive down to San Antonio. Wow. And I knew there's nothing I could do that affected him. He was like the Teflon man. And there I'd been crushed I was sick lying in bed suffering. He's already squiring his new girlfriend around Washington you know he'd had an affair and left me for this woman and I just wanted to do something that would annoy him. And so I I went down to the Secretary of State's office and filed to run against him. I did I knew I wouldn't win but I knew it would drive him nuts. And I also knew when I did that that the newspapers and people I had called before wouldn't listen to me they would not take my call now they they wanted to take my call people would go why did you file to run against him so you would listen to me. So you would tell my story you were always telling his story about me but never my story. And so I just I said I don't I just want a voice I want a voice that's it that's why I'm running against him in Congress I learned that they have a little book when you first become a congressman they give you this little directory right and in the directory it's got the name of the congressman and it the first thing it tells you is what percentage of the vote they got in their election. And if it was a close race they're looked down upon. If they won by 90% oh they are esteemed if they were unopposed they are the holy grail. Charlie had been unopposed and I knew by opposing him that would be in that little book and and I wanted it to be there just because I knew how proud he was of that his standing in that book. And then of course the national and international press covered me interviewed me but once again they controlled the narrative and told the story that I was a bitter vindictive scorned wife and I was getting revenge on him and just the fact that I once again someone took over my story and told it however they wanted to just I became very disillusioned you know with humanity kind of and that's why I ended up writing the book was I'm the only one that can tell my story. Why I would make it up I you know I don't know why I would do that. It's all true. It's been 20 years over 20 years and I look at it through different eyes today than I did then and and I've learned so much then and I've got lessons to tell people in that book. And so I'm really proud of it now. I'm proud that I'm finally putting it out now because I needed the downtrodden Becky from that those days to finally get her say.

Kellie 35:24

There are so many things that I heard in that story Becky and we have between the three of us we have some fun common ground that we may circumnavigate and talk about as we continue our conversation. Erin and I have both been divorced I've been divorced once she's been divorced twice and we talk about life love and loss in relation to not just the legacy we leave but the legacy that we live. What I heard in your story and I chuckled quite a bit because I ran a congressional office for 10, 12 years and do

Dr. Becky 36:08

You know about the book, huh?

Kellie 36:10

I don't know about the book, but I know US congressional politics very very well inside and out and was working for a U.S. congressman at the time that you were going through all of this and I do know about that little book that Charlie was obviously so proud of.

Dr. Becky 36:28

That's the book I was talking about. You know about that book where they look in there and they totally form judgments you know from information contained in that directory. And I didn't know that till I went up there but they were always and he won by 70% of the vote.

Kellie 36:45

Yes. Because Scott who I worked for always won by more than 70% of the vote. So that was a big deal right in that book. Oh yeah. But as you were talking what I heard was what we had just opened up the podcast episode with and that was a woman who was in crisis and a woman who was facing all kinds of loss on all kinds of different levels. That statement of I want my voice to be heard. I reflect back on my own separation and divorce and I married my high school sweetheart. Our entire relationship was long distance there's a lot of dynamics that go into any marriage situation. And I don't believe in my heart of hearts that anybody ever gets married with the intention of getting divorced especially when you have young children. So like you I had two children and I was more the decider in that relationship going back to listening to how you explained being a decider and one leaning in it's very difficult to walk that path to be in crisis to feel like you're drowning to not know what to do to not know who to turn to to go from having money and resources to not having any at all and whether you're married to orthopedic surgeon and a US congressman or you're married to the average person next door the feelings the emotions the difficulty and the challenge that comes along with making this decision no matter what side of the equation you're on that is very, very, very hard. And crisis and conflict are at the middle of that. Absolutely whether you're the decider or you're the leaning inner what do you think couples most often misunderstand about that crisis and conflict the other question on the heel of that is crisis is defined differently by different people. How do you define crisis?

Coaching An Amicable Divorce

Dr. Becky 39:03

Well I think that in marriage crisis you might have been sitting on the couch drinking a glass of wine thinking about what you're going to do tomorrow and your spouse walks in the room and says, "I'm very unhappy. I think I want out." Your nervous system in about two seconds flat is going to go into the fight, flight or freeze response. And both spouses are in the fight, flight or freeze response. The decider is wanting to run from the marriage, and the leaning in partner is wanting to fight for the marriage by chasing them and pulling them back in. So the fact that you went from a calm moment to a bonfire of feelings and emotions and fears is how I describe crisis. Usually something happened that caused your adrenaline system to go into overdrive whether it's a tornado or car wreck or anything your brain is telling you that your life is under threat. But in a marriage crisis your life is not under threat, but your brain thinks it is so it goes through all the same things that as if you were in a burning house or whatever. What I think people don't think about or aren't aware of in the in the marriage crisis is there's no hurry to make a decision. It's like it's almost like when you first meet them they feel like, "What are we going to do? What are we going... what are we... I don't, I don't, I don't, want..." and I'm just going like, "Let's just table that. Divorce is never an emergency. Just slow down we got to get you out of the your nervous system calm back down because you can't make rational decisions when your nervous system is kicked up like that." You are physiologically incapable of it. So we have to get you calmed down. So I think just by telling them, "Let's not hurry this. Let's take our time with this and see what's going on." And then you know I beg them to have someone like me oversee it and coach them because the dynamic is so unique. And like I said marriage therapists aren't trained in it freaks them out. They don't know how to handle it. So I say get someone like me who knows about crises and can help you coach through it with the least amount of mistakes and things that you will regret later. And we will sift through it all and in time we will come to a very wise well thought out decision for your family whatever that is. If we do decide to end the marriage, I'm going to take you by the hand and walk you step by step through an amicable respectful process that will make your children proud. So I realized a few years ago one of my couples would say, "Okay we're going to get a divorce and we want an amicable divorce" and the next thing I hear is they've hired two family lawyers and they're all punching each other's eyes out. And so I was sitting in a chair one day in my backyard and I went you know what why is this happening? Because they want the amicable divorce but they don't know how to do it. I guess I'm going to have to teach them how to do it now. I'm going to have to teach them how to do it and I'm going to take them by the hand and walk them through it. And so that kind of extended my practice into divorce management. And I found a way to do it without hiring family lawyers. That is like a quest I'm on right now to put family lawyers out of business unless they sign a pledge that they will not be nasty or do anything that would harm anyone in the family. But as soon as you get well I knew when you get those family lawyers involved they are not thinking about how their actions are going to affect the family's ability to collaborate moving forward. Yes.

Kellie 43:13

You bring up a really incredible point and I will share a personal experience. So the very first person I went to see to represent me in my situation happened to be a very dear friend of our mother's but she also happened to be a bulldog of a divorce attorney and she would have represented me the whole way through zero issues any questions asked but that very first meeting when I sat down with her because Erin and I came from divorce parents she was so little she was just three years old. I was 10, 11 years old. And so how that affected us as children was very different. My children are six years apart. I we know You have two children. So we definitely want to talk about that as well. And that's going to open up a whole other big part of your story. But she wanted to immediately go for the jugular and it scared me. And so I ended up going through my divorce without representation, which put me in a very precarious situation that has affected really the rest of my years since that time. And so I really hear what you're saying there. And I I do believe that attorneys who specialize in this space do have a duty and a responsibility, even an obligation, to do what they can to protect the sanctity of the human heart.

Dr. Becky 44:48

I think so too. I just am sickened by the letters they write, the motions they file, designed to enrage, designed to leave people destitute, designed to take people's children away when they're perfectly fine parents. Yeah.

Kellie 45:09

Or alienate parents. You know, parental alienation is a huge issue that's affected our own family.

Dr. Becky 45:16

Oh, yeah!

Kellie 45:17

It's so bad.

Dr. Becky 45:18

It's just so awful. So I really would love to chip away at the nastiness of divorce. And I would love to make it socially unacceptable to have a nasty divorce. Now, I do think the jugular bulldog lawyers serve a purpose when you are married to someone with a serious mental disorder who is vindictive and nasty and has no self-control, won't be controlled, you know, like there's a place for that. But I think it's it'd be in the minority. Yeah.

Kellie 45:51

So let's go back to this place that you found yourself in the middle of a third divorce from a very high powerful, influential human being. You're a single mom to two kids. This was their stepdad, if I'm tracking correctly. How old were they at that time?

Dr. Becky 46:10

Let's see. When I married Charlie, Benjamin was 11 and Casey was eight.

Kellie 46:18

So they were three years apart. You are in the middle of crisis. You're experiencing so many different layers of loss because loss doesn't come with just death, and grief doesn't come with just death. You have the loss of your own identity, your marriage, your dreams, your security, your finances, your jobs, all of it. And pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to be a single mom, complete your degree, start your practice, and that all of these experiences pave the way to something really beautiful and really great. And you really built your confidence and you really built your strength. And you were going to need that for what was to come down the road in your own life.

When Divorce Shapes Children

Benjamin Joins The Marines

Dr. Becky 47:09

Like I said, the the Charlie divorce where I was, it took five years to recover from it and to analyze it and sort through it and learn how to take the gold from it, you know, learn how to mine some possibilities and growth out of it. And how it the whole marriage affected my children, you know, the regrets that I had was, oh my God, I felt so terrible because after that divorce, you know, my children were depressed. We all three were depressed. I think I was in bed sick and recovering from surgery, and I was depressed and having all sorts of health problems. And and I think I they may have gotten their depression through me, you know, because I was in such a bad place. I they may have absorbed my darkness at that time. But they were all depressed, and so they became very difficult teens, angry teens, you know. And I had my hands full with that. I just I could not control them. My daughter got hospitalized like four times for cutting herself and suicidal ideations, and for a little a very short period of time, I was like she was possessed, honestly. Like I don't even know how else to put it. And we did get through that. And but my son, you know, I'm not sure he ever recovered from it. I I I asked him about, you know, about it many, many times. Because what I'm like, you were such a happy-go-lucky little boy. Like you were hilarious and lighthearted, and then you kind of went over to this dark place where he was hanging around the bad kids, you know, and they were doing drugs and they were drinking, hooligans, you know. And I just couldn't believe this because you know, me and his dad were like we were pretty upstanding folks, you know, and it just made no sense that he was in this low place. I remember one of my professors, I asked him about it, like, why is Benjamin hanging out with these people? And he said, because his self-esteem is so low that that's where he feels he belongs. He's hanging out with the other angry kids. They're listening to angry music. The music that he listened to in his room sounded like men with deep voices gargling. It's what his music sounded like. I don't know if any of you let your listeners have heard of Mud Vein, but Mud Vein was the vein of my existence back then. Just terrible. So, no, he told me that this God, this breaks my heart. He told me that in our divorce, you know, me becoming poor overnight, you know, and his dad moving along just fine, and his dad wouldn't help me, you know, his dad was done with me, not cooperative. He said he saw the injustice. He could not help me. He said he wanted to help me and he was a little boy and he couldn't help me. And he he felt angry in that. Angry in that. And and then the same thing with Charlie is he used to hear Charlie yelling at me, screaming at me, and he felt like he wanted to help me and he couldn't do it. He could not do it. And so that cognitive dissonance of witnessing or seeing something that you can't control and the powerlessness of it. I guess he just wanted to medicate himself so he wouldn't feel that. But he he was a charmer and he wanted to go to Texas Christian University, TCU, when he graduated from high school, and his grades weren't good enough. He had never worked hard. You know, he'd made like B's and C's probably without studying. But he went up to the interview at TCU and talked him into letting him in because he was handsome and charming and he had the gifts. And he had probably had the lowest grade point in TCU history that first semester. Like it was like a 000.1 or something. That's and I said to him, like, how in the hell did you get this grade point? And he goes, It was all F and a D. Oh my God. You're gonna get kicked out. So he was on academic probation and he did had another terrible semester. And so before they kicked him out, we pulled him out and brought him back to San Antonio. He was in, I had been up in Fort Worth and brought him back to San Antonio. And it turned out he'd been at the frat house doing drugs and drinking, carousing, and sleeping all day and not going to class. So I was a therapist by now. I'm a therapist now, and I'm seeing that my son is an alcoholic and a drug addict, and I'm wanting to get him in rehab immediately. But his dad was always the man with the money and the My favorite thing about his dad was I whatever I asked him, he'd go, Well, maybe in two weeks. But two weeks would come and then it'd be another two weeks, and you realize in time that the day he's going to take action isn't going to happen. But he said, I would like to see him go to the community college one semester here in San Antonio, and then we'll do rehab, maybe after that. Well, he started at the community college, and which is right next door to the Marine Recruiter's office, and he started visiting the recruiters over there at the Marines, and he had always been attracted to the Marines. You know, and I just used to tell him, like, there is just, you're never going to do that. That is not something, you don't have to do it. Your education's paid for. You have every privilege in the world. You can do whatever you want. But he came home one afternoon and knowing it was in May, because he was gonna have to go to rehab in June, probably when the semester was over, he said, Mom, I joined the Marines. And so I just thought I was gonna die. I'll never forget that day that he walked in the room and told me I was just like, is like frozen in time. And that was an amazing experience. He kept a journal of those days in the Marines, and I've learned so much about him. And I've talked to many of his friends about him and the Marines and the kind of guy he was. And I've made many videos about my son that are on YouTube and our whole experience of that. He was gonna do four years and get out, and he wanted to go back to TCU, redeem himself, and become a military professor.

Erin 53:41

Wow.

Friendly Fire And Unthinkable Loss

Dr. Becky 53:42

He wanted to teach about the evils of war. Wow. He was totally turned off by the Afghanistan war and what was going on over there. A bunch of his friends got blown up, as they as they call it. They always go, I got blown up. And they were amputees, you know, maimed. All of them are have post-traumatic stress syndrome, all of them have hearing aids, you know, all of them are on 100% disability, every guy in his platoon. He had seven months left in his four years. We were counting the days for him to get out. And he told me, like, I'm not going to be deployed anymore. Like, I'm home free now. And then by God, if he didn't go and volunteer to go with a platoon that was going to Afghanistan during the surge, Obama did a surge. So they called up more troops to go. He volunteered because he was a Marine Scout sniper, and they had no experienced guys in the group who had ever been deployed, and he had been deployed, and he didn't want them to go without an experienced man. So he went with them. And a month after he got to Afghanistan, he was killed by friendly fire. They were in a battle, you know, and it's just like everything that goes wrong, you know, what goes wrong, you know, and um their walkie-talkies weren't working. They told everybody explained their positions in the battlefield, but the tank people didn't know that the snipers were over there. And they saw a blast of gunfire and decided to tank fire over at that, you know, that spark. And when they did that, they killed my son. We found out about that by the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Well, it's just this is life, y'all, is the the ridiculousness. The Marines were inept. They just were. The way my son died was inept, the way they told us was inept. Everything that ever happened with them was disorganized and just scary because that's our military. And nobody knows what anybody else is doing. It's really crazy. So, yeah, then my son was killed, something that I've still have to deal with every day. It's been 14 years. Seems like yesterday.

Erin 57:02

It's a pain that is truly unimaginable. There are so many things about your story and sharing that experience of walking through divorce and life and the effect on your children that deeply resonate with me. The shame, the regret that my first marriage was to my kids' dad. And then when we divorced, I got remarried. And we were only married for a short time, for a few years. And the feelings that I feel that you spoke of are so real. Kellie and I talk about this all the time, and I'm sure you talk about this in your sessions all the time, is that I really try not to live my life in a space where I have regret over most things, right? Because we have to walk through all of that to be the people that we are today. You know, all of those life experiences shape who we are. And so it's easy to think for me, to my personality, it's easy for me to, in my 48 years of life, look back on things and have that wisdom and ex, you know, to to even be able to say that, right? To be thankful for the things that I've walked through from losing my mom at 17 to all of the life experiences and to be who I am today. But it's a different feeling watching my kids go through life and their pain and their experience. And as a parent, it's so painful to watch your kids hurting or making life decisions that you know are not the best for them. There's no and so I really can relate heavily to so much of those feelings. But then to lose your son the way that you did, my heart just breaks for you. It just really breaks.

Dr. Becky 59:13

Well, I thank you. I thank you for caring about that. He spent extra time at home in the spring and summer. He got killed in October. So in the spring and summer, he spent extra time with me. And he visited my mother twice up here in Arkansas. He loved his grandma, which was very unlike him because you know, all he cared about was drinking and carousing with his friends. So the fact that he was like stopping this and making kind of making his like tour to see everybody, you know, kind of a now in retrospect, kind of a farewell tour, you know. And but in August, he told me, I'm so sorry I joined the Marines. I wasn't thinking about anything but myself.

Erin 59:54

Wow.

Building Community With Benjamin's Brothers

Dr. Becky 59:55

He said, I wanted to get out from under dad's control, and I always wanted to be in the Marines, and he had lost all respect for the Marines. Really, I had no respect for the Marines having been in it. And he said, I'm just so sorry I joined the Marines because I know now that I caused you and dad agony when I was deployed and all the things that I've situations I've been in and been subjected to, and I I terrorized y'all, and I'm so sorry. And I take that as now extending it in my imagination that he's apologizing for getting killed over there. I had told him, I don't want to live in a Benjamin-less world. Don't do this to me. I then I told him that when he back when he was drinking and carousing. And I said, You're one of those guys, everybody knows something bad is gonna happen to him if you don't clean up your act. And he's like, I know, I know I'm going to get my shh together. And I think he hoped that the Marines would help him get his. And we don't know. He had fallen in love with a really great girl about four months before he deployed. And he was real he could really foresee a future with her. He was so excited about that. And he told me, like, I want to be a better man for her. Because I she's gonna dump me if a drinking, carousing loser, you know. Like, I've gotta get my and he's like, I am going to be somebody, I'm gonna make something of myself. She gave us hope, and his words gave us hope that he was gonna climb out of all that, but we'll never know, right? As far as I'm concerned, he I have letters that he wrote. They make you write lots of letters to your mom when you're in the Marines, which is a wonderful thing. And I've got all these little letters from him and love notes, and he told me numerous times how proud he was of me, how he thought I was the strongest woman in the world, that he'd never known anyone like me. And so when he died, I thought, well, I can just lay down here and die, or I can use the rest of my life to live to the fullest extent possible in his honor because he didn't get a long life, and I got a long life, and I can do this for him. So we've done a lot of great things since then. Like we social media is horrible, but when your son gets killed, it's wonderful because that's how I was able to tell everybody without having to call everybody, you know, and then we were able to tell everybody about the services and what all's going on. But then one by one, the guys that knew him in the Marines started contacting me and wanting to meet me and they wanted to talk to me. And so we started convening Memorial Day get-togethers at our house, and all the guys would fly in and spend the weekend with mama, and they would let me cook for them and goo-goo over them, and they all call me mama, and they tell me all about Benjamin and the Marines. They have told me so many things, many stories that things I would never have known without them. And they've given me so many photographs and videos of him and the Marines I wouldn't have had, and some of them I'm madly in love with, and I told them, like, I wish you didn't have a mama because I would like to divorce, I'd like to adopt you. I'm sorry, adopt you. I love them that much. I would adopt some of them. They're they've become angels in my life. There is lemonade to the lemons, you know. It's bittersweet. Those boys have really, really helped us. And you know what, and they say we have really helped them. So it's been a beautiful thing.

Kellie 1:03:44

You've walked one of the deepest losses a parent can experience and navigate. It sounds to me like losing Benjamin really taught you so much about love and connection. I just heard that so beautifully in how you nurture and stay in contact with and care for the young men that served with him. How do you keep Benjamin's memory and his spirit alive in your purpose, your work, the way you show up for others today?

Dr. Becky 1:04:21

You know, like I said, he's my inspiration to do the work, and I'm doing it in his honor and for him. And honestly, I hear his voice in my head saying, Mama, if you don't do everything you can, I'm gonna kick your ass. So I really do feel if I stopped and felt sorry for myself, and you know, a lot of gold star mothers like me fall apart and are never the same. You know, they're not resilient. I had no choice. I felt like I had to be resilient, or Benjamin would be so mad at me. He would be so mad at me for throwing my life away like that, where two lives are gone. He really fuels. Like I look at my watch and I go, okay, I'm 67, 67, I'll be 68 in four months. Like I got time's a waste and I gotta see how much I can do now. Can I write another book? Can I write another blog? Can I make another video? And I do make videos about his life, like I said, on uh and put them on YouTube. I've always been the family historian. I'm the person everyone hates that has the video camera going around at the parties. But you know what? When people pass away, who do they call? That's exactly right. Dr.

Kellie 1:05:36

Becky.

Dr. Becky 1:05:37

Yeah. Becky, you have photos of my son or or sister or whatever. And so I'm glad I've taken all these videos. But a lot of his friends, people I've never met from all over the country, have contacted me and said, I know a guy who served with Benjamin, and he talks about him like he was a legend. And I got to go on and watch your videos, and he's come to love. Life for me now. And I r just want to thank you to let you know that this is very meaningful to people. So I get a lot of positive feedback for doing all those things. So what a beautiful gift. I'm a journalist. I can use my gift, I guess, to tell people who he was. You know, one of the first thoughts I had after he was killed is it's my responsibility to keep him alive in my lifetime. And so I felt it as a responsibility to make sure he's not forgotten. You know, if a mama's not gonna do it, who's gonna do it? You know, his sister is, you know, she and I have made videos together about what our grief experience was like, is like, is still ongoing. It just seems that everybody mourns him in their own way. Like his dad started a scholarship fund at TCU in in the history department, and they raised so much money for it that they also now have a professorship paid for by the Benjamin Whetstone Fund, a Schmidt Fund, and then and now they have a symposium every year where they fly in military history experts from about whatever war they're doing that year, and the whole family goes and we meet the history professors and we talk about Benjamin, and the whole point of the symposium is the cost of war.

Erin 1:07:23

Wow.

Dr. Becky 1:07:23

You know, which Benjamin loves. So this year it's the Revolutionary War.

Erin 1:07:29

And you also have a memorial page dedicated to him. Is that correct? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Becky 1:07:37

I couldn't get access to his Facebook page after he passed away. Because I've tried to. And I'm like, we gotta have some page for him, you know, we gotta have something for him. So I created one, and that's a a lot of how we planned our Memorial Day weekends with the boys. In fact, this year we haven't gotten together in three or four years because the boys have gotten older, right? They're getting ready to be 40-ish, and they have kids and wives, and they're tied down to farms and jobs and whatnot. So the boys were telling me they couldn't come see me this year, and I said, Well, can I come see you? So we're gonna convene on at one of the Marines farms up in Michigan this year. Oh, I love that. They were so excited. So, yeah, so we're looking forward to going to, I think it's Cadillac, Michigan, yeah, this year for the Bengy Fest.

Kellie 1:08:31

I love it. Bengy fest.

Dr. Becky 1:08:34

That's beautiful. Oh, yeah. You know, it's seeing those big old boys, they got their tattoos and their muscles and their scars, and like some of them have their fake legs, their prosthetic legs. They get drunk, they cry, they kiss each other, they love each other, then they get mad at each other and punch each other, and then they cry. And it's just so sweet. It's just so sweet.

Kellie 1:08:57

They become family with each other. We have a lot of service members in our family, including our brother is a Navy Jag, and our dad served in the Navy, and lots of nephews and cousins or stepbrother, and we have very deep respect for military service and for your son's service and your son's sacrifice. So thank you for sharing that part of your story with us because, like you said, life is really messy. And, you know, we very purposefully talk about the messiness of life on this podcast because we can allow these experiences to defeat us and devastate us and divide us, or we can use them to help us become more and learn and grow and discover and become. I love the family that you have, you know, having so much brokenness in your family lineage to hear you celebrate the family that you now have with all of these men and their wives and their children and their families, something that probably never would have come along.

Dr. Becky 1:10:22

Never would have come along. And we love to say, what would Benjamin think if he saw us all here right now? Yeah. I'm sure he would just I you know, I know that he was very humble, even though he came off as cocky, but I know that he would find it hard to believe that so many people have been touched by his life and his death. Like I cannot begin to tell you the ripple effects of it. But there were a lot of people that love that boy and cared about him, and think that he would be stunned to know that, honestly.

Erin 1:11:01

It makes me think about the word legacy, which we talk about in every single episode. It's part of who we are and what we do as sisters and our family, and even starting this podcast, honoring our mom's legacy. Quite an undertaking. And it is. That's why I don't have a podcast. We talked about it earlier, you know, this concept of legacy isn't only what we leave behind, but legacy is how we live each and every day. It is really profound in your story and in this conversation to me, how without knowing it, probably at the time, that Benjamin was really living his legacy in a very profound way. And we don't ever know what's going to happen to us, and then certainly how we are going to be remembered. But it's part of the conversations that we want to have very intentionally on this podcast is to talk about your legacy is how you choose to live each and every day. And so, like Kellie just so beautifully stated, this new family, your chosen family that you have surrounded yourself with, the legacy piece of that for you, for your daughter, for each one of these men that he served alongside. Benjamin's legacy continues to live on through each and every person who knew and loved him. And it's such a beautiful story, as heart-wrenching as it is.

Dr. Becky 1:12:49

Oh, it sucks. You know, I feel ripped off. You were? You know, there's a Facebook page for Gold Star Parents only. You get a special invitation, you go in there, and some people are talking about how they would be dead or sick or whatever if they didn't have that page. But I went in there for quite some time and tried to, you know, get to know these people, but most of the people in there were not resilient people. Their stories told me that they weren't gonna have a good outcome. I couldn't bear it. I could not bear hearing how they were dealing with their suffering. Maybe with a little mental help. Good therapist. A lot of these people won't even think to go to a therapist. I mean, they're just dealing with it on their own, and it becomes a huge part of their story. I'm a gold star mom, a gold star, and I can't I can't function because of my, you know. And the gift for me in that was seeing I am doing so much better than even I thought I was. So I'm seeing the perspective of other people who can't come out of it. They just can't come out of the agony of it. But I always go back to Benjamin would kick my ass if I didn't come out of it. He would. I know he would. And you know, a lot of people that have lost a child come see me now because of my experience with Benjamin. And we always talk about how would your child would feel if they knew you were in a massive, ongoing chronic depression. You know, that's not what they would want for us. They'd want us to thrive. Benjamin, he keeps me going in many ways. He's an inspiration to me.

Kellie 1:14:29

The inspiration that he is to you is evident in the energy that you exude. Erin and I can see you, our listeners cannot, but when you talk about him, your face lights up. Yeah. There's just glow. And so I can tell that the relationship between the two of you was as strong and meaningful as my relationship is with my son as a mother. And I was thinking about him also being a firstborn and how they are very protective of and cared very deeply for their mothers. And Erin has two boys 15 months apart to the day. Oh my lord. So we are all boy moms. I was also thinking about the dichotomy, Dr. Becky, between your experience as a mother and losing a son and all of the grief and the journey that you have to navigate through that. That's a loss that you can't control. And the work that you do with couples, families who are navigating that loss, the loss of their dreams, the loss of their vision, the loss of their hopes, the loss of the sanctity of that sanctuary of a family, that is a chosen loss. All three of us have experienced both sides of that equation. We've lost people that are very meaningful and important to us. We haven't lost a child. Our father lost a child. So talk to me a little bit about that. Because I'm processing the dichotomy of that and the differences of that in your world now, post having lost Benjamin and this amazing work that you're doing to help people carry on and carry forward.

Dr. Becky 1:16:16

You know, in the early days, like when he was first killed, I went back to work pretty quickly because what was I going to do? You know, like sit at home. It was helpful for me to go back to work. And Benjamin's death was covered widely in San Antonio, and it was a front page story. And my picture was on the front page at his funeral, and it was a big deal. And so pretty much everybody knew about it. And couples would come in and tell me they felt ashamed to talk to me about their marital problems in comparison to what I had just gone through. And I was like, Oh my God, you know, like I said, pain is pain. You know, and you can't measure pain on a scale. Your pain is important, it is not less important than my pain. Human beings are comparative people, unfortunately. Well, your situation is worse than mine. Mine's better than yours. Yours is better than mine. But when you're feeling fear and sadness, anger in a marriage crisis, you're feeling all the things that I feel about my son and what I have felt in my own marriage crises too, you know. I just found it so sad at the time that people wanted to diminish their experience compared to mine. It made me really sad. But that's what I tell people when they they tell me, like, you've lost a son, who the hell am I to be? And you're telling you my wife pisses me off, you know, like your feelings are important. Period. What's going on in your life is very important. And I don't want you to compare yourself to anyone else or minimize or anything. All of us, and our concerns, our worries, our fears, our anger, our hurt, it's important. Not less important than anyone else's.

Kellie 1:18:06

And you brought up previously the importance of listening to your body and recognizing and understanding the physical responses that come along with pain, no matter what that pain is coming from, but especially emotional, spiritual pain, that triggers that flight, fright, freeze response in us as human beings. And again, it doesn't matter where that comes from, paying attention to that physical response is equally as important. And it's probably a helpful cue for a lot of the people that you work with.

Dr. Becky 1:18:44

Yeah, I uh became interested in the mind-body connection in graduate school. I had a professor who was very into it and very influenced me greatly. And so I've studied it a lot over the years of years. And then maybe 10 years ago, I went and got training in somatic experiencing therapy, which y'all probably know about. And so that was really a profound, you took it to a higher level. I do also hypnosis with people, but yeah, your body's trying to speak to you all the time. That's how your soul speaks to you, and that's what I tell my clients. You know, you're feeling that angst in your chest or your stomach is tweaking down there. It's that's like your soul tapping you on the shoulder going, Hey, look at this. Yeah, look at this.

Kellie 1:19:33

Pay attention to me. Yes, don't bury this thought, don't negate this thought, don't destroy this thought, open it up, embrace it. There's a gift inside your body saying, pay attention.

Dr. Becky 1:19:46

Absolutely. And then you can learn it to give those feelings in your body a voice. And I'll have my clients sometimes say, if that feeling in your chest had a mouth, you know, what would it say? And we'll go straight to the problem. Straight to the problem. So I think that's so incredibly important. Uh, one of the things they taught me in somatic experiencing is how many people, like a huge amount of people's trauma manifests itself in their throat and their jaw. And they actually use me as an example because I'm always hoarse. I keep a big jar of throat lozenges here all the time. I have to keep my throat coated all the time. I take all kinds of medicines for it. And I get TMJ periodically. And so they are trying to tell me that that that was my trauma. Your trauma normally rises up through your body and it's trying to discharge itself and gets stuck in your throat, in your jaw. And the truth is, my husband and I went to a marriage boot camp, which he didn't want to go to, of course, uh, about a year ago. A year ago, November. Well, we're going. We're going, man. They had everybody write some little story. I can't even remember. Oh, yeah, I remember what the story was about like you're writing a letter to your immature self. And you talk, tell the letter, thank you for this, through you for that. And here is what's gonna happen now. As soon as I finished reading that letter of the class, I could not move my jaw. I mean, I'm not even kidding. Could not even move it. I it took me like six months. I had to go get Botox shots in my jaw and stuff because it hurts so bad for so long. But that's the power of the mind-body connection. And then we human beings are so shut down and weird that we don't allow ourselves to discharge that energy right now. So, y'all, there's so much good news out there. If you will just take the time to learn a few things. That's all I say. Take it, take the time to learn a few things.

Erin 1:21:56

I feel like we should have you back on the podcast as a guest again to talk about that specifically.

Dr. Becky 1:22:04

Wait a minute, I've already told you everything that ever happened to me in my whole entire life.

Erin 1:22:10

It's a powerful message, and people need to hear it.

Dr. Becky 1:22:13

Yeah. It's one of the most interesting subjects that there is. The vagus nerve and all that, and people don't realize, like, I think just a little education is unbelievable. You know, I had a client today who was telling me that she's been going, she sees me like every two months for some reason. And so today's the day. And she's telling me about how much stress she's been under. She's had so much stress that she thought she was having a heart attack, went to the emergency room. She wasn't having a heart attack. She's had the cardiologist tell her you're fine. So I just had this intuitive thought today that I might do like a little, we had like 20 minutes left in the session, and I told her I'd like to do a little hypnosis dealiani right now. And she's a musician, and she in the last couple of years has developed an extreme fear of performing in front of people in the last two years. So much so that she's thinking of quitting performing for she's like a classical musician. Like she's the bomb. She's unbelievable. But the stress, she just can't take anymore. And so I did like a little mini hypnosis on her, and she really just sort of barely closed her eyes. She was really sort of just talking to me still. I had her visualize all these things, and I took her back in her life in a little regression where first of all we had her meet with her power animal, which will happen to be a swan. And then she and the swine went back in her past to the moment that this fear of performance entered her life. And she went straight to this scene from when she was 18 years old and getting ready to perform in a competition. And she made a mistake, and the judges laughed at her, and she was so ashamed and embarrassed and all that kind of stuff. I said, Well, you need we need to have you talk to that you back then. And she made a decision that day. What was the decision? The decision is it's not safe to perform in front of people. The decision is, you know, you might be hurt, emotionally hurt, performing in front of people. Well, we need to change that decision, which we did. And I mean, this woman, she said, Becky, I feel perfectly calm. I feel like that is gone out of my life. I feel like a thousand pounds has been taken off my shoulders. And you only talk to me about that for like 14, 15 minutes. Y'all, I'm just telling everybody out there the power of energy healing and visualizations. I mean, people laugh, you know, oh yeah, you want me to do a guided meditation or whatever. Y'all, there is nothing more powerful. You can change an old trauma that has been tripping you up your whole life through in less than an hour by doing stuff like this. It's amazing.

Kellie 1:25:43

Those practices have been extremely instrumental in my own management of some severe trauma responses and stress experiences through especially my adult life. My husband and I always talk about this after 50 as our third stage of living. Then we get the bonus of Jerry gears later down the road. It's almost a magical moment where you shift gears because you have more years behind you than you have in front of you. Are you sure? And those particular practices just have really helped me develop a sense of calm, a sense of inner and outer connectedness, taking more control over my mind, body, spirit, and emotions than letting them control me. I have the same trauma response in my throat and chest and in my gut, my stomach. Diagnosed with esophagitis when I was in my 20s. Erin has a very similar, you know, how those adverse childhood experiences show up in our lives later, but they are really powerful. What are some recommendations that you might give to people listening to tap into that mind-body connection in the moments that they need it?

Dr. Becky 1:27:18

You know, there's a great book that that professor had us get in grad school called Focusing. It's a form of somatic experiencing. It's a very, very powerful tool that you can use to monitor what's going on in your body, keep tabs on it. And in somatic experiencing, the first thing you learn is, okay, so I'm sitting here right now and I'm gonna find some place in my body where I'm feeling some kind of something. Feel something in my stomach. And so you focus on that. You just sit there and focus on it. And as you focus on it, it will change form and it will move into other parts of your body. That energy. That you're feeling in your stomach or your chest or your neck or wherever it is is trauma energy. And it's crazy because you don't know what trauma that is. You don't know what day that one was. There's bunches of them in there. But by focusing on it and following the exercises that this guide tells you to do in the book, teaches you how to discharge the energy from your body. But not before you speak with it and learn its message that it's trying to tell you. And sometimes when you're doing it, you'll have these spontaneous memories from the past. Or why is this showing up? But I really believe the subconscious mind, when it does that, it's going, hey, remember this thing right here? I want you to take a closer look at this. This was a pivotal moment in your life right here. Even though it might have seemed like nothing at the time. People that I did hypnosis on were they had super anxiety problems, and we do a regression to find out the first time they felt anxiety, and their memory was as an infant in the grocery cart and their mom walked over to another aisle and left them sitting there. Yeah. Wow. For some reason, when you draw that connection between the past and the now, it breaks that cord and heals that trauma. And we don't know why. So that's a great exercise, too, for people. It's like if your husband pisses you off tonight and you get activated, you're nervous, you know, what's the theme? What did your husband say or do? What was the theme of it? He was trying to control you. Okay, well, go back in your mind's eye to sometime in your childhood when somebody tried to control you. And then this your dad will show up in your head, and you'll remember the story of him controlling you. When you can draw those connections between the two, then it breaks the cord. And then the next time your husband does this thing, you won't have that intense response that you had previously.

Kellie 1:29:59

You brought up a really great point, and that is so many times our adolescent selves show up in our conflicts and our crises as adults. Yes. Our infant selves. Like, yeah. Yeah. And that's actually one of the discoveries that I have had as an adult that has helped me so much in my relationship with my sister, in my relationship with my children, in my relationship with my husband. To being able to, as Marcus says, catch, stop, and redirect yourself to where is this coming from? And I have the power to control this in this moment by recognizing that this is my infant or adolescent or scared, lonely, anxiety-ridden little self, and wrap my virtual arms around myself. And I can choose a different response. You sure can if you'll slow yourself down in the moment.

Dr. Becky 1:30:59

Yeah. Slow yourself down. Like my husband pisses me off, and your heart starts racing. That means that your less than five-year-old wounded child just got zapped. You know, like one of those old unhealed wounds just got zapped. And when that happens, your teenage nasty self wants to respond to that. So it's the wounded child and your kind of rebellious teenager self. Well, how are you? You want to be, you know, attack them back. But in the model that I work from, you recognize that you're having a trauma attack that you're going to do an analysis of later to try and figure out where that's coming from. But slow yourself down. The teenager's standing there right waiting to do damage, you override them and move over and find your functional adult self to respond. And you have to say something because if you don't, you're doing the freeze of the fight, fly or freeze, like shutting down, going mute. You're storing that trauma energy in your body. So by saying something out of your functional adult, you allow the trauma to release and your your body will decompress. Shh.

Kellie 1:32:13

You know, just like it's almost like an instantaneous reset in the moment.

Dr. Becky 1:32:19

It is. We are not designed to hold on to our trauma. There's tons of videos that you can see of animals in Africa that have been chased and survived. And they go off in the bushes and their body goes into these shakes. Yeah. They're expending the trauma energy from their body, and then they can go sit out in the sun tomorrow and act like nothing happened. Right. Yeah.

Kellie 1:32:45

Yeah. If you could give a piece of advice to couples that find themselves in crisis, what would that piece of advice be? And on the heels of that, I want to ask you if you could give a piece of advice to parents or a mother who has lost her child, what would that be?

Dr. Becky 1:33:09

Well, my advice for couples is to accept the fact that you probably know very, very little about how to have a healthy relationship with another person. Everybody that comes to see me is at the remedial level of understanding and knowledge and awareness and professional guidance and whatnot can make all the difference in the world in a family. I wish I could force people to go to community college and earn an associate's degree in family and relationships before being allowed to get a marriage license. That would be my wish. Because there's so much to know and it makes all the difference in the world. So most of us are very emotionally immature. And by arming yourself with knowledge and good therapy, you can mature and be an adult in your relationships. So that's the number one thing that I would ask people to do is go out and dive into the process of learning how to have a healthy relationship and what it is and what it looks like. On the child thing, take care of yourself. Learn how to nurture yourself and be compassionate to yourself and love yourself through it. You know, I just think that being able to parent your wounded self through that is a crucial skill. And to not be afraid of feelings. That's beautiful. Feelings are just the way your soul speaks to you. They're not bad. There's no such thing as bad feelings. They're just feelings and they're they're messages. And if you're crying and crying and crying and devastated, that's probably equal to how much you love your child. That's all it's telling you. Yeah. It's a huge loss. You're gonna miss that person. You know. So feel, don't be afraid of feelings.

Kellie 1:35:04

I love that, and I also love not labeling those feelings, just letting those feelings be what they are. Yeah. Let them come, look at them, feel them, but just let them pass through without attaching that label. Absolutely.

Dr. Becky 1:35:21

So many people are conditioned in our culture to not want to be uncomfortable, to not want to have those feelings. And that's screwing us up. Yes, it is. You cannot live life without discomfort.

Kellie 1:35:36

Yep.

Dr. Becky 1:35:37

A good life, anyway, a fulfilling life without discomfort.

Erin 1:35:41

It's just like so many things, it's the perspective of you can't appreciate what's good if you don't experience what's bad, right? Exactly.

Dr. Becky 1:35:53

Exactly.

Erin 1:35:54

So you do have to experience it and acknowledge it. It brings awareness and appreciation for the opposite.

Dr. Becky 1:36:04

And I think it it helps too to focus on the 24 years I got to have Benjamin.

Kellie 1:36:10

Yeah.

Dr. Becky 1:36:10

And instead of what I don't have.

Erin 1:36:13

Yeah.

Dr. Becky 1:36:13

I think uh if you'd have told me he was going to leave after 24 years before I had him, uh maybe you don't want to have him because he's gonna leave when he's 24. Never I would still have had him. Of course. Still would have experienced absolutely everything. So that's my life.

Erin 1:36:30

I cannot thank you enough for sharing everything that you have shared with us today. And as we come to a close, when you think about your story now, your whole story, your life, your work, your son. What does legacy mean to you?

Dr. Becky 1:36:54

Not much. I just feel like that's something out of my control. And I wanted to come into this world and leave something a little better than how I found it and do something that might help somebody. What happens after that? I don't know, but that's what I was here to do. I tried to kill my ego a long time ago after the congressman debacle. And those kind of ego-based things don't mean much to me anymore. I do my best and let the chips fall where they may.

Where To Find Dr. Becky

Kellie 1:37:27

Famous quote in our household. That exact same one. Erin's shaking her head up and down. Dr. Becky, we are The P-I-G. You may or may not know the story of how we got our name, but our mission is to honor our work through the lens of purpose, intention, and gratitude. The side story to that is our beautiful mother collected pigs her whole life, was born in the year of the pig. So we knew that pigs or PIG had to be somewhere in here. And so we ask all of our guests if you have a PIG. And sometimes that's a P word, an I word, a G word. And sometimes that is just a thought, a feeling, a reflection that embodies your purpose, your intention, your gratitude. And that may be your family, it may be your work in the world. And that we'd also love to have you share how people can connect with you, learn about your work, get your books, and stay connected to Dr. Becky.

Dr. Becky 1:38:33

Yeah, well, you can find me at marriagecrisismanager.com. I write a blog under my name, Becky Whetstone or Dr. Becky on Medium. I'm up to almost 200 blogs now. And I write all about everything I know. I'm just putting it out there. And then, of course, I have my book came out last February, and it's in bookstores everywhere. I think I want out what to do when one of you wants to end your marriage. And I do therapy, you know, so you can find me that way at marriagecrisismanager.com. And then my other book about that little five-year episode in my life. The Congressman's Wife is being unloaded bit by bit right now on Substack, The Congressman's Wife. And I've already put chapter one out there. I'm getting ready to start putting down chapter two. It's called Mrs. Gonzalez Goes to Washington. I cannot wait to dive into this. Now, my purpose, I'm a very curious person, like insanely curious. And I consider that a gift. Yeah. I think my purpose is to use my curiosity about human beings and why they do the things they do to learn and grow and help people with the knowledge that I uncover from my search for learning. And my intention is to help families who are struggling by giving them really great information, support, and leading them to healing. And then what I'm grateful for is for having something that I am insatiably interested in that happens to help people and for my gift of writing and for my family. So yeah, I'm so grateful. Whoever designed me for this piece of my life, I'm really pleased with how they put me together and the gifts they gave me, and I'm enjoying them very much. So I'm I'm maybe most grateful for my curiosity.

Kellie 1:40:38

That's beautiful. Curiosity is an incredible gift, and we embrace it wholeheartedly here on The P-I-G. Thank you for sharing time with us today. Thank you for your honesty and your authenticity and your vulnerability and your wisdom and expertise, and we really hope you'll come back and join us again.

Dr. Becky 1:40:59

I would love to. You know, I'm from Arkansas and pigs are our animals. That's right. You're in Razorback country.

Speaker 1:41:07

So it must have been meant to be. That's fantastic. Wiggly wiggly. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Kellie 1:41:41

Hearing the stories of others helps us create a more meaningful connection to our own. We hope today's conversation offered you insight, encouragement, or even just a moment to pause and reflect on the story you're living and the legacy you're creating.

Erin 1:41:55

If something in this episode moved you, please consider sharing it with someone you love. A small share can make a big impact. You can also join us on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and connect further at thePIGpodcast.com.

Kellie 1:42:10

And if you're enjoying this podcast, one of the most meaningful ways you can support us is by leaving a five-star rating, writing a short review, or simply letting us know your thoughts. Your feedback helps us reach others and reminds us why we do this work.

Erin 1:42:25

Because The P-I-G isn't just a podcast. It's a place to remember that even in the midst of grief, life goes on, resilience matters, and love never leaves. Thanks for being on this journey with us. Until next time, hugs and kisses everyone.