Behavioral Magnetics | Why We Ruin Good Things

0:01 Let's talk about what has probably wrecked your relationships in the past and wrecked many other things. It's probably the same thing that's drained your mood and your energy levels in life. And maybe it's the one thing that made you connect to the wrong people in relationships or jobs or take the wrong job in general or maybe just ruin your sense of peace in life. It's definitely not random. And I'm willing to bet pretty good money that you've called it intuition before. In NCI, we call this behavioral magnetics. So, we're not talking about habits. We're not talking about some kind of a mindset. We're talking about something that I refer to personally as emotional gravity. What do I get like pulled into? What are the little gravity vortexes that I get sucked into emotionally? It's the quiet thing that tells your mind, I need that thing even if it's bad for me or even if it hurts. I need that thing even if it's bad for me. And the core of what I want you to

1:03 get from this is harsh. So, I'm going to start with this this bottom line here and then we're going to unpack a lot of this. The nervous system, your nervous system does not want what's healthy. It wants what is familiar. So, let's dissect what emotional gravity means and what what that truly is. Humans are very predictable, but it's not because humans are stupid. It's because our nervous systems are very, very smart. Your brain doesn't want new things. It wants old things that it already knows how to survive. This is why somebody who grew up in absolute chaos is going to feel bored when there's peace. This is exactly why somebody who was ignored as a kid gets addicted to people who give them no attention or take their attention away on a very regular basis. It's why somebody you probably know in your life uh was constantly controlled as a kid and then they start controlling everybody else. And what do they call it? Leadership. When they grow up,

2:06 they're not chasing what feels good like you might think because of needs, decisions, and values. They're chasing what feels like home. Even if home was hell, they're still chasing home. So, write this one down. This is how the system works. If it feels familiar, it feels safe. If it feels safe, then it becomes attractive. If it's attractive, then it becomes repeated. Familiar, safe, attractive, repeated. That's it. So, you're not choosing you're recycling. People are not choosing, they're recycling. And not all of these emotional magnets or emotional gravity traps look the same. Some of them are super loud and screaming. Some of them are very quiet, whispering. So, I want to take you through the four types that you're going to see out there in the wild, even in yourself. [Music]

3:13 And the first one is called the mirror magnet. This pulls you into and toward people and environments that treat you the way that you were treated growing up. If dad was really critical, you're going to find critical people. If mom was distant, you're going to date somebody who's emotionally three states away from you. Type two is the echo magnet. This one makes you just recreate pain to give you the placebo that you're in control. That's all it is. I'm going to remanufacture pain so it feels familiar, which gives me a fake feeling of control. So, this is when you choose burnout, you choose drama because at least you're the one holding the match that lit the fire this time. And then we have something called the reversal magnet. And this one kind of flip-flops the roles. This one flips it over. So, you become the thing that hurt you. If you felt powerless, you become the dominant one. If you ever felt invisible, you take over every room. You're the loudest person in every room.

4:21 This is not healing, but it feels like healing. It's it's the placebo of feeling better. It's armor with a smile on it is what it is. It's not healing anything. And then we have type four, the completion magnet. And this one's kind of sneaky because you keep finding people in your life who resemble the people who hurt you. Why would we do that? Because we hope to God. We pray this time I'm finally going to get the love that I didn't get back then. I need to find that person so I can learn how to control that type. So this is the every one of us probably here tonight has an internal voice uh or a friend with an internal voice that says, "You know what? Maybe they'll fix it. He's going to get better. He's really he's really working on himself now. He's going to he's going to start fixing all those things." Everybody's got a friend like that. It's a trap. It's a fantasy. It's Groundhog Day, but with trauma. That's all it really is. Let's dive into

5:23 these a little bit. I want to give you a a picture of some of these so you can see what they look like in the real world instead of some abstract description of them. So when it comes to the mirror magnet, let's say we have this guy, he's mid4s, great career, really sharp, charismatic, but every relationship ends the same way. He's drawn to that tone of voice, that disapproving tone of voice, what I would call passive disapproval. And it's not because he wants it, it's because it feels like his mom. He didn't like it when he was a kid. That's not what I'm saying. He hated it when he was a kid, but it taught him how to love on a leash. And now his little compass is pointing to north and saying, "That feels like home. Let's go to that because it feels familiar. It feels like home." In a reversal scenario, I personally met a woman. She used to be really quiet, gentle. uh she got steamrololled very constantly on a very regular basis and now she leads a team

6:34 of 200, controls every decision, keeps people very much on edge, she's respected, but no one's close to her at all. So she says she's just kind of like I'm really just focused on work. She's not. She's terrified. She's scared. The part of her that was vulnerable got punished. So now she becomes the punisher. That's the reversal magnet. She became the threat so she would not feel threatened again. And it works. It works. It's actually effective, but it's lonely. And then we have the Let's do an example of a completion magnet. And this one's kind of nasty. Actually, this this goes back to a guy that I've coached one time. There's a guy I coached and has a he's got a brilliant mind, amazing, beautiful heart, and he keeps falling for these women who are really chaotic, like emotional hurricane type of people. And every time he's trying to help, he's trying to make her get better so she's finally going to love him back. And what he doesn't realize is he's chasing his dad, not his mom. He's

7:56 chasing his dad through women. So dad was volatile, never said, "I love you." So now he's on this lifelong quest to finally be enough for someone just like dad. So his little script says, "Find somebody like dad and complete the process. Then I will complete this unresolved story arc that's been going through my entire life. Not because it's good, because it's unfinished business. What I told him is like, you are not dating women. You're dating the hope that this time the monster becomes safe. I'm going to make a monster become safe. That's all you're doing. You're not dating women. I want you to let this sink in really quick. Just because something pulls you in does not mean that it's right for you. It just means that it matches your oldest pain. That's really what it is. How do we break this spell? Like, what do we do to get out of it? What if our compass is pointing to some dysfunctional, toxic, awful human being or awful situation? We have to rewire

9:01 it. Step one of this is to spot the loop. And a pretty easy question here is just asking, "What keeps happening that I say I don't want, but I keep allowing." And then we get to step two and we want to name the magnet. It's a mirror or is it echo? Is it reversal or is it completion? And then step three, we want to trace the original source. So there's three questions here. Question one for this step three is who taught you that this was normal? Two, who and this is a big one, whose love came with conditions? And number three, and this is even deeper, who in your life made you feel that safety has a cost? Like you had to invest something in order to feel safe. But then we get to step four, exposing the lie. So the pull that that we feel, the the adrenaline spike, that's not chemistry, that's childhood. So where is the lie that happened in childhood that I'm continuing today? And if you start going through some of these transitions and un undoing and

10:10 unraveling it, I want to tell you one thing. You have to go into this knowing that peace will be absolutely unfamiliar at first. So let me just tell you that the hardest part of doing any of this work is peace doesn't feel peaceful when your system is wired for chaos. It feels like disruption. It feels like something's around the corner. It feels like I don't deserve this. What's What's about to happen? So peace is never peaceful if you have a system that's wired for chaos. It feels boring, maybe like something's missing, like a let down. But that's the absence of adrenaline that's going to trick you into coming back to that gravity trap, whatever you want to call it, the magnet. You're not bored, you're healing through this process. So, if you go through this, it's not hard. Everything we're talking about, the back of your mind is going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could do this, but yeah, it's going to take like years. It'll take 6 months. It'll take

11:12 me 19 days just to walk through all these four questions that Chase put out there." That's not true. It's easy. If you don't think it's easy, you're bullshitting yourself because you don't want to become a little bit uncomfortable for a little bit. So, don't expect peace to feel like uh some hot tub. I want you to expect it to feel like withdrawal. You're detoxing from pain you thought was love. And what I can promise you is that you don't have to figure all of this stuff out right away. You just need to get honest on paper and where it's out in front of you where you can read it. Let the truth show up even if it feels uncomfortable. And I would say that is where freedom starts.