What’s The Episode About:

In this episode, Paul and Stacey will share a deeply personal story about the night that Paul told Stacey he was leaving her, and why they do what they do today. We are going to show you the challenges that you encounter in your marriage or relationship, tell you what’s really causing them to be invisible to you and give you real solutions that you can implement to get the results that you desire.

Key Points Discussed:

• The power of the perspective shift (01:28)
• Breaking open and becoming vulnerable (05:58)
• Single-handedly saving our marriage (09:06)
• Creating an unshakable love (11:17)
• The 1% divorce/99% success rate program (12:35)
• The amazing eight-step system (17:00)
• Cracking the code on how relationships are really done (20:42)

Where Can I Learn More:

Join us at the next Relationship Breakthrough Retreat.

When Did It Air:

May 12, 2019

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors 

Paul:               00:00 Hey relationship transformers. Welcome to The Relationship Transformer Podcast. Today, Stacy and I are going to share a deeply personal story about the night that I told Stacey I was leaving her, and why we do what we do today. So let’s queue up the intro and dive in.

Stacy:              00:19 Hey guys, we are Paul and Stacy Martino, the founders of Relationship Development. And, for those of you who don’t know us, we invented this relationship development methodology we teach. Our eight step relationship transformation system. We’ve saved thousands of marriages at this point. Our program has a 1% divorce rate and a 99% success rate over six years. No one can touch those kinds of results. And the reason, our method works. We help real families by giving them real tools, actionable, and a proven methodology. And it doesn’t matter what’s going on in your relationship, or how far gone you think it may be. We’ve solved it. We’re not counselors, or therapists, or doctors, we’re real people. We live this, and we had a unique life experience, and accidentally uncovered the secret to save any relationship. We figured it out and felt called to help people. At this point now, we’ve been blessed to help thousands and thousands of people, from all over the world through our programs, and our live events. And now, thanks to this podcast, it’s your turn to get the solution.

Paul:               01:28 Alright, so what can you expect from this podcast? Today, we’re going to share our story and why we do what it is that we do, and each episode of this podcast, we’ll actually be giving you the real solutions that you deserve, that create the results that you want. And how do we do that? Basically, what Stacy and I are always doing is we’re peeling back the layers. Right? We’re making what was previously invisible, visible. Once you can see it, you can do something about it. When you can’t see it, it’s the thing that pushes you around all the time, and you don’t understand why. That’s the power of the perspective shift. It opens the door for the changes that you want to make because you can finally see them, and do something about them. So we’re here to give you a real solutions. We’re showing you the challenges that you encounter, what’s really causing them that’s been invisible to you up until now. And the actual solution that you can implement to get the results that you want. So this won’t be some kind of a theoretical discussion, or some kind of an emotional cry fest, or us venting, not at all. We were all about the real actionable solutions for real people. Relationship Development is personal development for your relationship. Relationship is a skillset and it can be learned.

Stacy:              02:36 So how did we get here? About 19 years ago, Paul came home one night, and I remember seeing him pull up on the driveway, and when he got out of the car, he had that look on his face, like something was wrong. Have you ever had that, where you like, you look at someone and you’re like, “Oh my God, what happened?” But this time, I could feel inside somehow that it had something to do with me. And he said those four horrible words… to me that are, “We need to talk.” And he proceeded to take me inside, sit me down on the couch, and tell me that he was leaving. And as I listened to him say those words, and all of what you were sharing about why our relationship was all crap, and it wasn’t going to work no matter what he had tried, the tears started rolling down my cheeks, and those tiers turned to uncontrollable sobs.

Stacy:              03:26 And honestly, I felt like I was unraveling. And as I broke down, I broke open. I had this crazy surge of love for Paul in that moment, that quite honestly scared me, because I had never felt that love for Paul before, but more than that, I didn’t know humans can feel that kind of love. As embarrassing as it may be to say, I never had… I didn’t know that was real. And so, in one really unfortunately timed moment, I realized for the first time that love like this is possible and oh my God, I feel this kind of love for Paul, and I will never get the chance to live in it, because I ruined it and he’s walking out the door. In a moment of desperation. I begged Paul for a second chance. I told him, “Everything you’re saying is true. It’s all crap.”

Stacy:              04:30 I know our relationship is crap and you can only get so close to me and then I have these walls up and you don’t feel like there’s any room for you because I don’t need you for anything. And yes, I know I’ve had one leg in, one leg out and everything that you’re saying is true, but this is not the best of me. This is not the best I can do. There’s got to be able to do. I’ve never known how to do relationship. I have to throw my whole self into this and figure this out. I can figure this out. Just give me one more chance.

Paul:               05:02 So for me, you may not know about me is I’m very certain. And this decision to come over that night and say this has to end wasn’t one that I took lightly. It was something I had mold over for months. And no matter how I slice it, I kept saying to myself, there’s no way this is gonna work out. I just can’t see it and I’m going to do the right thing and I’m gonna end it here. I was so certain of that. And the amazing thing too is for those of you who don’t know Stacy is Stacy was like back then she was known as the ice princess. She’s not the Stacy that you’ll see in here today. And what’s interesting about it is I was so certain, but what Stacy’s describing when that happened to her, when she broke open, I felt it. It was a completely different Stacy that was showing up there. It was palpable. The difference, like literally I could feel something had shifted and I didn’t even know necessarily who I talking to anymore.

Paul:               05:58 Like I did. Like I knew it was Stacey, but I, I felt the realness of the real Stacy. I felt like that layer crack on and it was actually really dealing with the real Stacy. Someone I hadn’t spent time with, someone I had known yet and although I was really certain, and I knew this wasn’t going to go easy, but I was committed to the outcome of ending it because Stacy broke open and became open and vulnerable in that moment, I started to question myself and that doesn’t happen often, but I started the question, I’m like, maybe I’m making a mistake here. I think this could be a huge mistake. And of course there was a lot of emotion involved in this moment. This wasn’t easy and it sounds like it happened at like a three minute span and it didn’t. This was, this was a very long night.

Paul:               06:37 But what I want to point out is, um, in that moment I saw something was different. I didn’t know what it was, but I had changed my mind to 180 degrees after we had been talking for a while and something was so different. I decided like, I’m going to give and I’ll use air quotes here, Stacy, another chance. Now my version of give Stacy, another chance was, I’m fine, I’m perfect. There’s nothing for me to do. Clearly this is something for you to do. And okay, Stacy, you go and fix yourself now. That’s who I was back then. Um, but there was that moment where things shifted and because of that one moment, because of how she showed up differently in that one moment, it made all the difference in my life today in Stacy’s too, for where we are today with our family and how different life would have been if that moment hadn’t gone that way.

Stacy:              07:24 So with this second chance I sent out on the journey of a lifetime, like I’m a personal development junkie by nature. So I’m like, if anybody has figured this out, I’m going to learn it. Right? I studied everything I could get my hands on everything on men, women, the masculine, the feminine relationships, intimacy, sex, everything. Uh, most of what I found was for couples, most of what I found said, okay, get your partner to do this. We’re okay. Talk to your husband about this. And I’m like, you don’t get it. Like, my husband isn’t going to come near this with a 10 foot pole. Right? And so that left me a little bit stranded and a lot of what I found was just plain bad and a lot of what I tried in my relationship, which was like can you know, common relationship wisdom or experts in books or whatever.

Stacy:              08:13 Um, a lot of it was just plain bad. And when I implemented it in my relationship, it backfired. Now that be, it might be okay if your relationship is in a strong place, but Paul and I were hanging by a thread and I’m, I’m telling you from my heart every single day I woke up and I tried my best to do whatever I could fix our relationship and every single time I step forward, I was literally taking a risk that if I tried this thing and it backfired, this might be the last time. And Paul might turn around and say, see, I told you there’s no way this can work out and I’m done. And I had to harness my courage every damn day and face possibility because so much of the relationship stuff I figured out or tried red was bad. But luckily I had this personal development background.

Stacy:              09:06 And so what I would do is I would watch Paul’s reactions to what I was doing that were terrible and I would figure out, okay, why was that bad? Why did that backfire? What can I try differently? What else has worked? And, um, based on what I figured out along that journey, I single handedly saved our marriage. Now I’m telling you this was purely accidental. I had no idea though. One person could turn a marriage around, would they without the other person participating? There was no crazy lady telling me it only takes one person the transform early. Then I did this purely by accident that I of,

Paul:               09:45 so if we fast forward like a year from that beginning, from that moment, that night where I was saying, I have to end this. Um, what happened was I found myself literally like, it just occurred to me one day. It just kind of came over me while I realize, I’m like, wow, I’m like, I am so much happier than I have ever been. And in what’s even more Stacy with so much happier than she’s ever been. And she was the most authentic version of Stacey I’d ever known. You know, when someone is being authentic, and I could tell him like, she’s happy, authentically yourself, it seems effortless. And I’m like, Oh, I’m happy. We’re like in this amazing relationship. All of a sudden I feel like the best version of myself, and I didn’t. What happened? Like I just sort of woke up and realized I had arrived in this circumstance.

Paul:               10:30 So Mike, it, it was fun and profound, but I finally went up to Stacy. I’m like, all right, so here’s what I’m seeing and I’m, I’m just saying like, I’m really, really grateful. I was a true moment from the heart. I’m, I’m fully grateful for this and I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I knew she was doing things right, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. But I suddenly found myself feeling like a neanderthal. I told her, I’m like, I feel like it neanderthal next to you at all. I don’t know what you’re doing, but this has been magic. Uh, we’re happy. We’re the happiest we’ve ever, ever been. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. And both of us are the most authentic versions we’ve ever been. Like, what are you doing? I want to jump in like I’m truly inspired. She completely just inspired me to just know what this is because this was magic. So I’m like, I’m all in. Just show me what to do and I’ll jump in. I’m going to do it with you.

Stacy:              11:17 From that point forward, we put our marriage first. You know, after almost losing it, it became the priority in our world. We were committed to creating what we now call our unshakable love. We’re nothing, and nobody could ever come between us and our alumni. Lee’s passion, where we have crazy ravaging ridiculous amounts of sex more than anybody would ever think of possible. And during our journey together, we made a unique discovery. We crack the code on how to save any relationship, take any relationship to the next level, regardless of what’s going on with only one partner doing the work.

Paul:               11:59 So Stacy night open after that, like I’m committed. So we dove in and we spent two years trying to figure out like how is, how does this work? How can we create something where we can teach what it is that we’ve done? You’re like, you know, how do we form this into some kind of shape? So we created our eight step relationship transformation system. It’s our proven actionable methodology that can transform any relationship and we created our toolbox of over 300 real tools at this point in time for real families, real solutions that anyone can plug in and start using the get the results they want in their relationship. Just like we got an hours and I had to be something that we could teach.

Stacy:              12:35 So at this point, using our proven relationship development method, we’ve saved thousands of marriages. Our program has a 1% divorce rate and then 99% success rate. Like that’s crazy. Nobody can touch that. And truthfully, most people have come to us at this point after years of failed counseling and yet still we have a 1% divorce rate for them in a 99% success rate because we have cracked this code. What we are doing is different than anything else that’s out there. We are changing the way relationship is done and you deserve these solutions. Your family deserves these solutions. You can be the hero for your family and break the chains of how relationship has been done.

Paul:               13:21 So like we’re on a mission and there’s no question, but we didn’t start off that way. Um, just to give you a little background, like why are we doing this? Because we have saved our relationship, but it didn’t really this, this was not at all something Stacy or I wanted to do. This is like the last thing on the planet. I used to be an it person. I was in corporate tax. Yes. For people will know US nowadays. I don’t think either of those two or jive like they would struggle with that. I can’t even imagine. But it’s the truth. And the last thing we wanted to do is get involved in somebody else’s relationship or marriage. Like who were we? Right. We wouldn’t even dream of it until like one day, this fateful day. Tell the story, tell the story. I’ll tell this story.

Paul:               14:00 There was this one day and um, you know, Stacy and I, we, we were, uh, my son was really young, my daughter was even younger and I’m dropping off my son at kindergarten and uh, when I dropped him off that day, you know, he’s just five years old. I love my boy and I’m watching them going to school and I, and I see him with his friends and they go in. Um, and then that day when I picked him up again, when I came back to pick him up, he told me how his friends, which I knew and Stacy and I knew their parents were getting a divorce and his friends were his age. So I’m picturing my little boy with his parents, their parents getting divorced and experiencing what they were going through as children, experiencing what that family must be going through, experiencing the thoughts of like now these, these kids are going to be in separate homes and what’s that’s gonna do for them.

Paul:               14:45 And it haunted me to be honest with you. Like the whole ride home. I was kind of quiet and he said it in his nice way, like know he’s just being a sweet little boy. And when you mentioned I knew exactly what he meant and it just kind of haunted me all the way through. So, um, finally I am, I’m telling Stacy when we got home about this story and I’m like, I feel like we can’t sit back. Like I feel like we have to do something. I feel like, um, basically someone who is watching people because we saw the dynamics everywhere. One, Stacy and I had figured it out on her own. We knew what to do.

Stacy:              15:15 You can see what’s going on, you could see what’s causing it. You can see that people don’t see what the challenges are. And we know that if they had just done what we have done, then those two kids might not be sleeping down the hall from one parent tonight. Exactly. You know, they might be able to be sleeping down the hall from too because it’s just a skill set and it’s a skill set that, that these two parents didn’t have.

Paul:               15:37 Yeah. So it felt like when it came to these two parents, I felt like it’s almost like sitting back and watching someone who’s about to walk into an open manhole cover and you sit back and you do nothing. Like he can’t not do something, even though we didn’t want to do something, we can’t not do something. We have this knowledge. We see it everywhere. Like that family could have had a different destiny if we had done something. So it became too much to bear to sit back and watch. So even though we didn’t want to, now we had to figure out what we can do.

Stacy:              16:06 And that’s when we started to dive in. We spent two years looking at everything we had done and um, and dissecting it and putting in a strategic order and, and building tools where someone else could plug it in. And what would we want people to know to do and what do we want to make sure they know not to do, right? That everybody’s telling them to do, but we know it’s damaging. Like, what do we want to make sure people know not to do? And how would we do that if we want it to help them get the same kind of results that we did and we spent two years putting together that eight step system and the tools that go with it. And, uh, now we’re on a mission, right?

Paul:               16:39 Absolutely. You know, we want to stop that unnecessary suffering that the families are going through all across the world, not just in this country alone and the unnecessary divorce that’s ripping apart families, give people real solutions and create that unleashed passion that we always talk about. You know, the, we’re on a mission and this is a calling. We’re here to help.

Stacy:              17:00 Amen. Now I discovered this the hard way, right? My journey I had no Stacey and Paul Martino handing me an eight step system and all the tools that the with it I the only solutions I could find or for couples, a lot of the advice that I was given was just playing bad. And if you’ve been struggling in your marriage or any of your relationships, this is probably why no one ever teaches us how to create an unshakeable love and unleashed passion in real life today, we never get a relationship education. So if you’re anything like me and you don’t have role models for this either, it’s almost impossible to figure it out on your own. And if you’re like most people, you’re either waiting for your partner to change to fix things or you’re trying to get your partner to do whatever the work you want to do with you and they won’t.

Stacy:              17:56 And that leaves you feeling stuck. Like nothing can change for you. And this is the person you spend the most time with. I’d have anyone in your world. It’s the relationship that impacts you the most. See when your love relationship is in pain, it will bring you to your knees, but when your love relationship is rock solid, you are unstoppable in the world. The point of this podcast is to shortcut this for you and give you the easy way. When you implement what we teach you in this podcast, you can see results before your head hits the pillow tonight, right? And it doesn’t matter where you are in your relationship. You might be like Paul and I are hanging by a thread, one or both of you is thinking about leaving. You may not even want to leave, but you don’t know that you can stay with the way things are and you need a last ditch effort to turn it around, right?

Stacy:              18:45 This is the solution for you or you might have a good relationship, but the passion, the sex they keep, the excitement has fizzled or is completely gone and you just want to bring that passion back. You just want to be able to bring that back or maybe you never had it and you want to know if you can bring that passion into your relationship. This is the solution for you, or you might have actually a great relationship. Your marriage is really important to you and you don’t want it to slip to the back burner. You don’t want it to drop off to mediocre. You want a divorce, proof your marriage and protect your family. This is the solution for you where you might be someone who you know that the relationship you’re in is not your forever love relationship. Look, every marriage is not meant to laugh.

Stacy:              19:29 Yes, we want to empower people who want to stay in their relationship because most, a lot of their forces that are going on don’t need to go on, but not everybody is meant to be married. And you the want to save that coparenting relationship so that you can go parent from a peaceful, harmonious place and create your family by design, right, the family you deserve. Paul and I are very proud of the work that we do by changing the face of divorce today. Uh, the, the divorce that we’ve all been handed is crap. It’s so evil and terrible. You’re supposed to hate everybody, but you’re supposed to keep raising kids. It’s a miserable, the work that we do is empowering you to save the coparenting relationship, create your relationship, your family by design. This is that solution for you or you might not be in relationship at all today, but you really want to be in a great relationship for you, not some of the relationships you’ve had in the past and maybe not even some of the relationship just to be around you, but you want to be in a great relationship and you want to be ready for that.

Stacy:              20:28 This is definitely the solution for you. This is what our relationship transformers do in our community, our programs, our live events every day and now thanks to this podcast, it’s your turn.

Paul:               20:42 In the next episode, we’re going to tell you about our unique discovery that crack that code, right when we talked about what changed for us, we cracked the code on how relationships are really done. Now this is the king pin one. It’s what’s causing relationship problems and what the solution really is. If you don’t know what we’re sharing on the next episode, then I can guarantee you you are suffering far more than you have to. And that’s not a judgment, it’s just the fact this is the key for getting what you want in your relationships. So make sure that you check out the next episode and we’ll see you on over there.

Stacy:              21:11 Awesome. So thanks so much for being with us today. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Relationship Transformer Podcast. If you’re not subscribed already, be sure to do that right now. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, please help us by rating and reviewing this podcast. Right? Then they’ll get it shown to more people and we would be super grateful. We’re on a mission to make sure that everyone who wants a relationship education gets one, and we can do that together by sharing. Right? And getting this out there. Until next time, remember together we are changing the way relationship is done.