It Ends with Us DECODED: Lily, Ryle & Atlas Aren’t Who You Think

We're adding in a little bit of gunpowder and eventually she's not going to be able to keep this thing contained. Ryle is more of a black and white thinker. He puts honesty in the very tippy top of the hierarchy of his relationship. This girl cannot tell the truth to save her life. She cannot be direct. She cannot be honest. She's always looking at everyone else's emotional state and trying to figure out and calculate what she can share or how she can share it to not set somebody off. I'm not here to justify someone's abusive behavior, but we do have to take an honest look in the mirror about how we are showing up that may be the very trigger that pushes them into that state that they very much don't want to be in. Abusers don't want to be abusers. And if we just keep saying once an abuser always an abuser and we just kind of cast them out to the side, we're just going to make the problem worse. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is are you ready to listen? The talk that we're going to have today about decoding movie events with us is certainly going to be a bit controversial, especially as evidenced by the little poll that I did in my Instagram stories on whether you are team Ryle or team Atlas. I'll just start here by saying 92% of people voted for team Atlas. And you can see that that leaves only a small amount of people that voted for team Ryle. I will say, one of my favorite features about Instagram is that you can click and see who these people are. And one of the things that I find the most interesting is that every single person that voted for team Ryle has the same exact brain pattern. Now, brain patterns, as you know, from tuning into the show week after week, dictate how we perceive reality. As you know, I've been on many podcasts lately, been traveling all over, going on other people's shows. And as I've been asked certain questions, as my gift tends to work, I tend to see analogies or more tangible examples that people can use to understand a less tangible concept. So I want everyone to start here by remembering when we're perceiving reality, we're actually perceiving individual pixels. And our brain is looking at these pixels and we're grouping them in as we define them. These pixels altogether look like a laptop. These pixels together look like somebody got lip injections. These pixels together looks like somebody may have a specific political affiliation. So it's less concrete than we believe it is. We're generally taking something that is a pinpoint pixel and based on what we have perceived over time in the role structures that we've built, both conscious and subconscious, we start to constrain these pixels and create these boundaries or definitions around them that turn them into an object. Has anyone ever been in a fight with somebody where you feel like you're showing up to the fight that you didn't instigate, trying to be calm, reasonable, trying to listen, and the other person's like, why are you being so aggressive? You're like, oh, you thought that was aggressive? Do you actually want to see what my aggressive face looks like? So I joke here, but I'm sure that this has happened to many of you where someone is interpreting the pixels of your facial expression as something that you are not intending. I have a very different real aggressive face than my face where I may be placating or people pleasing to try to get through something. But nonetheless, if that person senses aggression or believes that they've done something wrong, the through projection may interpret your facial expressions as aggressive. At the end of the day, it truly all boils down to perception of reality. We can't get around it. How we observe and label something matters a whole lot to the behaviors that unfold next. And this is absolutely true when it comes to decoding the movie. It ends with us. I'm going to be breaking down what's actually going on with the movie characters, which I believe starts with everything that we've known about this movie and the lawsuit and the controversy that has unfolded from the very beginning that we've ever heard about the movie. And ironically today, literally today as we're recording this episode, the judge dismissed all of the lawsuit against Justin Baldoni, which those of you that don't know, I've been team Baldoni the entire time. I know Blake Lively's type. I know her brain pattern type. I've been able to spot all of her tells throughout the history of her presence in Hollywood. And for what it's worth, I simultaneously love her style and think that she's like the hottest thing ever, but I think deep down her brain pattern type is very much the covert narcissist brain pattern type. So as much as I love her style, I think she's a fabulous actress in many ways. She is a style icon for me. I do believe she is a covert narcissist and will be spending an entire episode separately breaking down what I believe her brain pattern to be. And she's welcome to come on to the show and challenge me anytime she wants if she thinks I'm wrong. So let's dig into the controversy itself. What it appears is that essentially just before the movie was launching or as the movie was launching this big lawsuit controversy comes out and Blake Lively says or claims that Justin Baldoni had been sexually harassing her and had been causing a large amount of emotional distress, etc. If you look at both sides of this controversy, obviously Justin Baldoni vehemently claimed the entire time from beginning to end that these accusations were false. And eventually now today, the judge has dismissed the lawsuit. And I think over time, Justin also filed a countersuit and the whole thing has kind of unraveled as many of you know, over the last few months, he has maintained his innocence and integrity the entire time and over the months that he has maintained his innocence and integrity. Blake Lively's reputation has seemingly taken quite a tumble. People that were once in support of her little by little, she started to lose that support, people started to feel more emboldened to come forward with other things that had gone on. And I will just take this moment to say, bandwagons are a real thing. And I myself have been part of a bandwagon unfolding where many people started to say things that weren't true. And years later, not only recanted those statements but spent years coming back to me like, because I don't even know why I said that. I'm like, well, it's called mob mentality. And I get it. When people feel like they're going to be ostracized if they don't get on the bandwagon and they're somehow going to lose their friend groups or somehow people are going to pull them into the drama. People do strange things and their specific brain pattern types that are more inclined to do this as a form of self protection. So I'm certainly not saying that this might not be some of what's going on with people suddenly turning on Blake Lively because as I've been through it myself, it absolutely can happen. And we don't know. But nonetheless, people have little by little unraveled her side of the narrative and in many ways even pointed a finger toward Ryan Reynolds and the role that he might have played in this unfolding controversy. I think that we can't discount this. As you dig into the Ryan Reynolds Blake Lively narrative a little bit, I think what ends up starting to unfold is you start to see two different types of narcissism in a relationship with each other. Ultimately, in my opinion, I don't know this for a fact. This is just my opinion. I think the more likely scenario is that Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively had chemistry when they were on the set. And if Ryan Reynolds felt uncomfortable about it, I can absolutely see a world in which either Blake Lively to cover her own ass makes up the story to protect herself and her marriage. Or Ryan Reynolds from the sideline can cock something to retaliate against somebody that he's jealous of. Either way, chances are somehow Blake Lively was somewhat implicit in this unfolding thing. And when you see their chemistry on camera, you can see that there is a spark there. There is something that's undeniable and it is partly what makes the movie real and good and believable. But I do think that it's interesting how in general art tends to mirror life and that this movie as it was coming out kind of unfolds this whole controversy that really digs into different types of abusive tactics, which really is what I want to center on today because I think often we get really stuck on understanding physical abuse because it's obvious, right? Sometimes there are scars left over, there are bruises left over. But typically the more common and more pervasive types of abuse that in many ways can over time become physical abuse are more of the emotional psychological. And often we are taught to look left when we really should be looking right when it comes to how toxic relationships unfold. In movies we start to see the finger pointing of like this person's the abuser or you know, obviously I'm not here supporting physical abuse just to be very, very clear. But in many cases it does take two to tango and I frequently work with both sides of the relationship. So I have seen this and experienced this firsthand. You can't ever look at one person's behavior in a vacuum. It doesn't exist that way. In fact, sometimes you have one person who on their own, delightful, not easily triggered, they know how to kind of silo their lives to not get easily triggered. But then what happens? Eventually this person can't silo themselves anymore or someone tries to kind of push on their boundary and change the setup of their life. And then next thing you know, somebody who kind of seemed like they had their ish together is now a physical abuser. All of these things matter very much. And I don't think that we can look at one behavior without looking at the entire system and both sides of the entire system. In break method, we work on understanding how the underlying motivations drive behavior without getting distracted by simply focusing on the behavior itself. Very frequently people misunderstand why somebody does something that they do. And if you don't understand why they're doing it fundamentally, then you can't change it and you can't work with it. And in many cases, if we look at how pop psychology and much of the mental health space has treated complex cases where there is a label of emotional, physical or psychological abuse, they immediately latch on to whatever the story or narrative is of the person that's on the receiving end. And if you're listening, I'm air quoting here, receiving end, not taking into consideration that again, it often takes to detango. And what can happen is that there can be emotional or or psychological abuse on one side that is little by little triggering somebody or pushing their boundaries to eventually act out physical abuse. And that doesn't mean that it excuses physical abuse. However, if you're in a relationship with somebody that you love that you have spent time building into the relationship and there have been many years that hasn't been like that. Does that mean that one time that that thing sparks, you should just back away forever and, you know, hold out garlic and say the power of Christ compels you? No, we need to understand the broader cycle. And I will say, working with so many relationships, it's actually more common than you think that it might be years and years and years and then one day there's cycle or physical abuse. Just seemingly random. Like why why this one day did it push over the edge? That's something that we can help you obviously understand in break method. So before we get too deep into the movie itself, I want to just help you get acclimated to what I'm referring to when I say behavior cycle. In break method, we track nine distinct markers with brain pattern mapping. Four of those markers have to do with how behavior unfolds chronologically over time. Another way to look at this would be early stage behavior, transitional behavior and then late stage behavior. If you look at your life historically, you tend to either be impulsive in early stages or slow to commit and possibly getting stuck in over analysis or decision paralysis, etc. You're not typically both at the same time. What can happen is that some people may start more impulsive and overly committed and then at the end of that four part cycle may then go up into their head and over analyze in retrospect, right? So replaying everything that's happened to pick back through for detail. And then there are others who do the exact opposite. They're more slow, methodical, possibly even withdrawn delaying, not committing in early stages because they really want to understand the whole thing before they take a step. By the way, that process could make you lose momentum on things because you could think your way into a loop for so long that you miss your opportunity. That can happen to you. And then perhaps when you realize, oh crap, I missed my opportunity. Then you take some snapshot, impulsive action at the end that plot twist ended up being kind of reckless and messy. And then you're like, see, this is why this is why I don't do it like this. When really you can see that there are a variety of other ways to do this. But in general, and again, I am generalizing, we can essentially break ourselves down into these types. We're either kind of overly committed and impulsive and going right toward the danger or we're waiting, watching, analyzing both. We step into the danger and then typically we reverse that process. But there are some, for example, who wait and watch and then wait and watch some more. There's a very specific set of brain pattern types that will wait and watch and then wait and watch some more. And as you could imagine, their lives don't materialize in too much. They don't have much to speak of because they're not taking actions. They're taking a very passive role in their life and they're actually living life a little bit more like a tumbleweed. Like whatever they accumulate has kind of happened to them rather than causing it to happen. And then you have others, for example, who may just be like impulsive to another level of impulsive, right? These people do exist for sure. But it's important for us to remember that we each have these four distinct phases and we may start off one way, transition to something that seems very contradictory and then go right back again, right? We have four opportunities to really royally screw ourselves and contradict ourselves along the way. It's important for us to understand how behavior cycles transition over time when we're looking at characters like in the movie It Ends With Us. Because we get to see the characters in their early stages of the relationship. We get to see them in transition when commitment is very much secured, anchored and on the table. And then we get to see how their behavior transitions over the late stages of a relationship. We also get to see how one person's behavior cycle is triggered uniquely by one person versus the other. I also want to remind you that our own behavior cycles, right? We each have a four part cycle. I do, you do. Everyone that's here tuning in today, you do. Our four part cycle interacts with the people that we are around and we can't get around that. Our behavior cycles actually function in tandem. And in my line of work, I refer to this as symbiotic dysfunction. My behavior doesn't exist in a silo. And in fact, let's say I go through a period of pretty significant isolation where I don't really interact with somebody. I'm still going to unfold my cycle chronologically, but I'm not going to have a lot of triggers. So most likely I'm going to have very, very prolonged periods of each one because I'm not going to be, nothing's going to be inciting me to move or to cycle, right? And then for what it's worth, I do believe that at a certain point, this is why some people do isolate. They're like, you know what? I need to be away from human beings right now. Like you human beings are too much for me. Does anybody go through this in your own personal life? And I've been like this before too, where I will go through periods if I have to travel a lot or if I'm walking, you know, going around an event and I have to sign books or talk. When I get home, I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to be around anybody. I just want to completely retreat and pull back into my little safe space because I don't want anybody to be pulling on me emotionally, behaviorally. Obviously this can also become a type of avoidance that we don't want to do. We have to relate to people. We have to be out there communicating, engaging, of course. But we have to remember that as soon as we are engaging another person, now both of our behavior cycles are functioning together in this cluster. And there are things that I naturally exude that will naturally trigger you into your cycle. And then when you respond to how I've triggered you, that might just well be something that triggers me. And these cycles can take off and level up very, very quickly. So we want to keep this in mind because not every person will be a trigger for somebody who may be inclined toward physical, emotional or psychological abuse. There are certain triggers that will push this far more. And you guessed it, Blake Lively's character, Lily Bloom, has literally the worst behavior pattern and trigger for our dear friend Lyle. And on one hand I could say he couldn't have picked a worse partner, but at the same time I understand why they had so much chemistry. And we're going to dig into that. So keep in mind here as we're unfolding this narrative specific to Ed Ainsworth us that behavior is not a one-way street. It's a two-way street and there's always going to be a flow of trigger and response, trigger and response. For context here, we have spent the last 11 years in break method mapping the data of brain pattern outputs. And I can tell you definitively 40% of the general population experiences anger as a protective emotion. This protective emotion is how we respond after the fear state. So after we've been placed into fear, how we choose to act out our protective reflex is going to be anger for 40% of the population. Some of this is going to be overt anger and some of it's going to be covert anger. Over anger, there's likely a physical or verbalization element to it that's physically observable. When someone experiences covert anger, they might have a smile on their face and be saying, sure honey, whatever you want. But on the inside, they're like, I haven't hate you. Right? That's everything is kind of suppressed and closeted anger. Nonetheless, I want to start off in this movie thinking about Lily's character. And if you haven't seen the movie, you can either wait and watch it with us all together when this episode comes out. Or obviously you can hit pause and I won't ruin the movie for you. You can go watch it on your own, but definitely a movie worth watching. It's a great movie. Honestly, even without the break method behavior, diagnostics element to it. It's still a great movie. But in terms of understanding and decoding brain patterns, it is an exceptional movie. So a few things that I just want to note about Lily Bloom's behavior. Her biggest issue as far as I'm concerned is that this girl cannot tell the truth to save her life. She cannot be direct. She cannot be honest. She's always looking at everyone else's emotional state and trying to figure out and calculate what she can share or how she can share to not set somebody off. So I say this because I have empathy for it in the movie itself. She grows up with an abusive father. So this is an adaptation or a coping mechanism that makes sense when you grow up with an abusive father. You have to learn how to read people's facial expressions, their body language to make sure that you can be a few steps ahead so that you're not setting off any landmines. Another word that you may be more familiar with is walking on eggshells. She certainly grew up walking on eggshells. In the movie, she also has a mother that clearly just takes the abuse, has a very low level of self confidence, if at all, and absolutely just kind of placates and appeases and to some extent maybe even believes that she deserves it. So let's start the very opening scene of the movie. I think is very telling. Lily Bloom walks in the door and her mom's immediately doing her kind of baddie making no sense thing very up in her head, worried about the future, saying all these things that are not very practical or present moment. Lily does this great job instinctively of appeasing her mom and kind of deescalating the situation while telling her kind of what she wants to hear, but getting her mom to kind of stop. Right. This is a tactic that she's had to cultivate over the course of her childhood instead of getting into the weeds of it with my mom. So that things continue to escalate. How do I, what do I have to say to get her to keep things together right now? She says it. She does it beautifully. If you're familiar with break method, another way to say this is she green-coned the shit out of her mom. Right. Boom. Right away. Now, in the early stages of the movie, Blake is coming home because her father has just died and her mom has asked her to give a eulogy at her dad's funeral. So you can tell that she's grappling with this. She's trying to figure out what she's going to write. She can't come up with anything to write, but she reluctantly agrees to do this. But you can read all of her face that she clearly doesn't want to do it, but she's going to do it anyways. So now fast forward to us getting to the funeral itself. She gets all the way up there and she's still kind of been palming this list that was like five things I love about my dad or something like that. And it's blank. She hasn't written anything. And she gets up there, she looks at the audience and she kind of is just like, no f that crumples it up and just walks away. Now, for those of you who are familiar with brain pattern types, Lily is an abandoned holds it all together. She's on the left side of the spectrum. So kind of middle left side of the spectrum. If you've grabbed a copy of my book, your brain is a filthy liar. You can flip forward to the sections on abandon hold it all together, learn about this brain pattern type, and it will give you more context for what I'm describing today. It's available on all platforms. So an abandoned hold it all together. They're always looking for what is possibly going to escalate outside of themselves, whether situationally or in a person. And they're willing to self sacrifice to keep the peace and keep everybody deescalated. The reason that Lily maybe for the first time in her life is like, Nope, after this, I'm not going to do it is because he's dead now. She doesn't have to hold it together for him anymore. She almost does. And then she's like, wait, you know what? He's dead. I don't have to do this anymore. I don't have to keep up the trade. Bye. I'm out. And she leaves. So that's kind of our first sign as to her pattern type. But then things unfold. We start to see that Lily actually has a thing for the wounded bird. She immediately starts to observe and fall for this boy that she sees that is homeless living next door. She tends to his needs. She starts to bring him food and clothes and does what she can to take care of him. This is a classic feature again of abandoned hold it all together. They're instead of focusing on self preservation or having any self preservation instinct to think of, they're always looking outside of themselves to figure out what problems they need to help. Fix in others. And the wounded bird is certainly one of the most attractive features in an intimate partner when we're looking at something like this, because they have this. This very strong belief that they will figure it out and they'll find a way to get the person to heal or change. By the way, this is also my brain pattern type. So I know this one very, very well. So she kind of takes on this wounded bird, which is our atlas character. And they meet in high school and she's kind of nurturing this relationship. Now, another couple telling signs that she's a hiate as we say it in break method is they find themselves on the school bus and you can tell that everyone in school knows this kid is homeless. And they are starting to kind of whisper in the bus. They're making fun of her and having no self preservation instinct whatsoever. Honey badger doesn't care at all what everybody else thinks on the bus proceeds to make him get up in front of the bus and kisses him in front of everybody. That's the way she handles it. Most other brain pattern types on the spectrum wouldn't do that. They'd be too concerned with what others are thinking and feeling and how that could escalate over time. A hiate is going to do something that's much more impulsive in the moment that puts their own reputation at risk only to then be like, well, whatever. Like, well, what are you going to do about that? I'll figure it out later. Right. The classic thought bubble of a hiate is I'll figure it out later. Will they? Maybe. So we've got all these signs that this is who she is and a hiate generally is going to struggle profoundly with just being direct and honest. They want to be direct and honest. Here's kind of the clinters. They know what's true. They're not in self deception. They know what's true. They want to be able to share that, but their underlying framework or belief is that other people can't handle the truth. I immediately jump to the question of what is the best way to do it? What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. What I would say about this question is correct. things simultaneously. That can be true. The other person might not handle the truth well, and they might escalate, but is withholding it or twisting it still a lie. Yes, right? These two things can happen simultaneously. This is a really tough pill for this brain pattern type to swallow. Talking to myself here, it's a tough one. It's really hard. So now we see that her whole relationship trajectory now is going to be really kind of cycling around covering and protecting people and keeping secrets, right? She kind of has to keep her relationship with Atlas under wraps at home. We know dad won't approve of it. Eventually, dad and Atlas have this knockdown drag out blowout that ends up leaving Atlas very injured, which then kicks her into again, the self-sacrificing feeling bad wanting to save him, which persists essentially throughout the movie. Now, in this phase of the movie, they're both teenagers. And if you recall back to teenage love, teenage love can be a doozy. When love first becomes something that you feel, similarly to how trauma imprints can happen to any child, even if the input is not necessarily objectively that bad, because they have nothing to compare it to. All of our early stage teenage love feels very intense, because we have nothing to compare it to. So like heartbreak feels intense, love and passion feels very intense. Everything feels like the most intense it's ever felt, because we haven't become hardened or jaded and we don't have any context yet. So many of us have some really actually profound relationship wounds that very much trigger us today. I'm 40. I can tell you for sure one of my biggest relationship pattern inputs happened when I was 17 years old, and I've had to work extensively to get over it. Don't even know that I really 100% have it's very much still back there, and I have to do work to move through it, but it's very much still there. So we have context now for what that was for Lily and for Atlas, we know that it was each other's first love. So we know that intensity and how Atlas at one point discloses that when Lily saw him and decided to bring him food that night he was going to commit suicide. So he actually now has this even more intense experience of like, I didn't kill myself because you showed me kindness. So now their trauma bond, if you will, is now intensely secured. So now take your teenage love and escalate at like times 1000 at all that trauma bond potency into it. And that's now what we're dealing with with this relationship between Atlas and Lily. Atlas is not like Lily. Atlas is more direct. In fact, we find out that Atlas is homeless because he basically stood up to his mom's abuser into his mom, and the mom wouldn't leave him. And he basically was like fine, and he got kicked out. So we know that Atlas does actually have this more justice centric perspective where he is going to stand up for what he thinks is wrong and be overly direct about it, even if that's going to piss people off. So now we see that, huh, okay, so Lily and Atlas have this opposition. Sure, we see Atlas as a character as this slightly wounded burden early stages, and we don't see his overt nature, but we have inputs that we know about from his own words when he's in the bus. And we know that after we get to meet him as an older character that this persists. Now, the movie ends up moving forward, and we see that all these characters, right, Atlas and Lily have grown up hard to say how much that they've aged, but let's say, you know, for an arbitrary number, maybe like five to eight years, they don't look that much older, but older. And they find themselves again, when Lily moves to Boston. But I want to, for those of you that haven't yet seen the movie, or we're trying to actually unfold this timeline, we can't start there. We do know that they're going to link back up, but we now have to start with this funeral that Lily attends in the very beginning of the movie, where she's her current age that she will persist to be in the movie, not the teenage flashbacks. And she, after storming out of her dad's funeral, maybe in her most bold stand that she's ever taken, is now going to the city, right? And when she's in the city, she, it looks like breaks into some apartment or like condo complex. So she breaks into an apartment complex, and she goes up to the rooftop. This is where she meets the character Lyle for the first time. So she's up there. And when she's up on the roof, Ryle doesn't know that she's up there. And I think this is very important information, because she's kind of like dangling off the edge in a reasonably unsafe way. They didn't show her smoking a cigarette, but I feel like she was smoking a cigarette, but that might just be me filling in gaps here. So she's kind of off on the side. He has no idea she's up there. And he blazes upstairs, like kicks the door open and like starts kicking a chair, and he's having this big expression of anger. But he clearly is embarrassed when he realizes that someone else is up there. Their conversation sparks. And I share this because it does appear as soon as Ryle sees her reaction to it, it's very clear that he was trying to express his anger in a controlled methodical way away from people, right? That he understands, for example, he may have anger as a protective emotion, which 40% of the general population does. And he's trying to figure out workarounds or techniques to express the anger in a way that is more productive and less destructive. But it just so happens, Lily is up here. By the way, remember Lily loves a wounded bird. So she's like, Oh, cool, you struggle with anger. What's your name? So she goes over to Ryle, they start this conversation. It actually also unfolds where he then comes up to her and he's worried about how she's sitting on the edge. And she kind of is like, Well, you can't control me. I do what I want. But it's also obviously flirtatious. Eventually, he's like, fine, I can't get you to not be reckless, I'll go be reckless with you. So he goes and sits next to her. Their chemistry obviously is palpable. And what I want to mark here is right away, Ryle makes it very clear that he doesn't date, he doesn't do love, he doesn't do commitment. He's very adamant about this. And just as I said, he found a solution for his anger to express it in a way that's away from people like going upstairs to the roof where he thought nobody was to go express it rather than acting it out in front of people. He clearly has thought his way through this he has a level of awareness to the fact that he struggles with aggression. So one of the ways that he has managed this or self managed this is to not be in committed relationships. I want to remind you, as I've said on some previous episodes, intimate relationships tend to trigger us in more and unique ways than situational triggers. So any intimate relationship, especially when there is commitment on the line, it has the ability to trigger us as much or more than our childhood. And this also means that maybe things like career or friendship maybe won't trigger us quite as much. And that's normal, that's to be expected. Intimate relationships, they pull on our heart and our emotions in different ways. So it makes sense that through self awareness, Ryle would decide, yeah, I don't do that. So he's very overt, he's very honest, like overly honest about what he wants to do to Lily. And she's kind of like, yeah, I don't do that. I'm the I think she says something like, no, no, no, I'm the girl that you take home to mom. So she knows how to play the game. And going back to reminding you about these behavior cycles, right, that are unfolding simultaneously and interacting with each other, it does appear that many of the people that Ryle go for throw themselves at him in early stages, and then he discards them. But no, no, no, Lily actually knows how to make him chase because she doesn't just go in and go into the commitment, she's more avoidant, right? Avoidant, disorganized, we'll get into that a little bit more as we unfold her relationship behavior. But she doesn't just take the bait and immediately rush in, she plays the game, which allows him now to chase. And she in the movie makes him chase just long enough to really actually make him consider long term commitment, perhaps where he's never considered it any other time before. So now we have this kind of cat and mouse game that's unfolded. And eventually, Ryle starts to little by little back down on some of the established methodologies he's created to protect other people from his anger, which he obviously very much knows that he deals with. So he of course now Blake has Blake, Blake, Lily, excuse me, Lily has made him chase just enough in the with the right sort of flirtation, the right sort of not quite giving him the cheese that he's searching for that eventually, he says that he wants to date her seriously. Remember when I said that some people are one way in the early stage, and then they're one way in the transition that could be contradictory, and then they're a different way in the late stages. Well, this is precisely what's happening here is that Ryle, for example, he's kind of like non committal, pulls back plays the game, he's not easy to really lock down. But once he does lock, like dude is locked down, obviously, because really what ends up happening is that he becomes much more obsessive. And I think he knows this. So because he naturally becomes more obsessive, his way of trying to deal with this is to try not to commit at all, because he knows once he crosses that threshold, that things can go bad very quickly. But Lily played the game just right, because she is more avoidant and similar to him is kind of like, well, I don't need to go rushing into this. But the interesting thing is, Lily doesn't seem to actually go full send on commitment really until very late stages. So even her transition is kind of like, Oh, yeah, like I'm in it. But she there's always an openness to other potentials. Even when she's fully committed. Is she is really my question. But Ryle's the opposite, he's slow to commit. But once he commits, he really fixates and locks in and becomes obsessive. And that doesn't go away all the way up until the the end stages. So Lily kind of does more of this dance of kind of like, hold back, pull back a little bit more flaky, a little bit more spontaneous. And then for a short period, she gets somewhat committed. But her commitment and her, her commitment and how she shows up in a relationship is never going to be 100% compared to Ryle's 100%. In fact, what Lily might think is her 100% is Ryle's like 50% because Lily doesn't actually really know how to commit to things. That is in fact, one of her biggest issues. A bigger issue is that Lily doesn't know how to tell the truth because she doesn't want to set people off. And would you know it? She attracted a partner in Ryle who gets easily agitated. So now is this perfect combination where she naturally is inclined toward holding things in, compartmentalizing, keeping secrets. In fact, it's kind of her MO is keeping secrets. Right. She grew up having to keep the secret of her dad's behavior. Then she kept the secret of Atlas. So holding secrets is something that her brain is very much addicted to that feels familiar. So as we start to see all of these worlds collide, right? Ryle and Lily have finally really anchored in this relationship that appears to be really like honest and direct. And Ryle, because he's actually made the commitment, now he's locked in, he's very direct and clear about what he wants and doesn't want. So there's no gray area. Unfortunately for him, Lily only lives in gray area. So he couldn't have picked in this way a worse partner for him to be triggered because his biggest trigger will be dishonesty. This episode is brought to you by HealingSana, the most advanced portable infrared sauna on the market. And it's trusted by people like Dave Asprey and Peter Diamandis. I've been using this consistently at home and it is truly next level. I found them at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference. The girl ran me down and was like, Hey, Bizzu, we love what you do. You have to try this. It's got 99% purity with every single one of its infrared ceramic chips, zero EMF. That's right, zero EMF, and it heats up in 60 seconds. 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If you are serious about your health, recovery, and longevity, go head over to Healing Sauna's, use my code BGHeal for $100 off. So his biggest trigger is dishonesty, and it is the one thing that until Lily Bloom does break method, which I know she can because she's a fictional character, she will not be able to do. And in fact, she doesn't do it really basically the whole time. So the only way really to prevent any of this in her relationship with Ryle would have been to learn how to be direct and honest. And when putting a lot of that direct honesty out there, there would have had to be accountability and change, right? She would have had to kind of, I don't know another way to say this, like, should her get off the pot situation. But she has all these other guys, you know, well, she's got this other guy on the hook really. So they finally secure their relationship between Ryle and Lily. And then boom, it just so happens that they pick a restaurant. And would you know it, they're there with Lily's mom for the first time. And boom, guess who is waiting the table? But Atlas. Now I just want to say, I personally can't stand Atlas's character for a variety of reasons, which I will give receipts for. But seeing as that 92% of people in my Instagram feed voted to be on Team Atlas, you're probably not going to like a lot of what I have to say. And that's okay. It's still true. So Atlas, I believe from that very first moment, cared more about getting what he wanted than truly seeing Lily happy. This is very important. Because this entire unfolding of events, I believe if we were to go back and of course, you know, we can't go back, we can't hit the God replay and be like, wait, I want to do over, right? What's done often ends up being done. But if we could go back and roll the tape, and if Atlas was able to actually suppress his own wants and needs to truly want Lily to be happy more than he wanted Lily, this whole thing could have gone very, very differently. But every person plays a role in this, right? Lily plays a role because she plays right into it. In that first instance in the restaurant, she obviously goes back, she talks to Atlas. This is an option that she did have. But because of her brain pattern, this was hidden and she didn't say anything, she could have gone back to the table and said, babe, this is really awkward. The guy that was our waiter I have history with as a teenager. And there's nothing going on. I didn't even know that he lived here, but I just wanted to be honest with you, that's who that is. Oh, let's never come to this restaurant ever again. But did she do that? No, she for sure didn't. That would have also solved the problem. And I say this because in any given moment, we have the opportunity to completely change our future trajectory. But we often miss these moments where instead of choosing X, we choose Y. Right? So the very first layer is that Atlas could have chosen to put Lily's happiness above his own wants and needs and could have let that be that and not pursued it. Right? And then for Lily, that moment was tell Ryle the truth about who that person was because Ryle's perceptive, he knew something was off, he could tell, he could read it. And what's his biggest trigger? Well, dishonesty. So now it's like, we're adding in a little bit of gunpowder, a little bit of gunpowder. Every time Lily does this, it's like adding in a little bit of gunpowder. And eventually, she's not going to be able to keep this thing contained. And by the time it blows up, it's going to blow up really, really big. And again, I went into that whole bit about first love and teenager love and passion, because I understand that for her character in this moment, you know, this reuniting that I'm sure felt very confusing for her. But nonetheless, this is a, I don't, I feel bad calling it a character flaw, but in some ways a character flaw, because she wanted her cake and wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Right? There was no part of her that was so committed to Ryle that she was like, Hey, it's really good to see you. I'm glad to know that you're alive and that things are going well for you, but I'm in this committed relationship and I have to, you know, keep it very clean and 100. She doesn't really do that. She kind of tries, but it's in her very high eddy way. That's very gray and still very much flirtatiously leaves a door open. So again, if you haven't seen the movie, I'm totally ruining the plot here, but eventually things start to spiral way out of control. Lily starts to walk herself more into the gray area, thus have more to hide and compartmentalize and Ryle is perceptive. So he's seeing that something is off two plus two is not equaling four, but whenever he pushes a little bit, she lies or covers it up. She's not cheating on Ryle with this other person, but little by little, the puppet strings have kind of set this whole thing in motion. And I do believe really that Atlas is one of the prime culprits here for setting this whole thing up. I do feel like from the very onset, he wanted to destabilize this relationship for his own benefit. So eventually, obviously we see their relationship unfold, more commitment and security gets brought in, eventually we even see that, you know, they eventually get married and so on. But now we start to see these sprinkles of physical abuse start to pop up. I think the, the sprinkles of physical abuse here are very important when we look at behavior cycles, because I, having worked with couples who have experienced this ranging from emotional to psychological to physical, again, one person's behavior cycle may trigger it and another person's may not. So one partner, let's say one X is like, huh, they weren't like that with me. I wonder why they're like that with you. Well, it has everything to do with how your behavior cycle unfolds chronologically. So unfortunately for Ryle, Lily actually rushes in and kind of like tries to fix things and overcommit at the exact wrong time for Ryle. So when Ryle really needs to pull away and self protect and isolate, she rushes in, making his outburst have a lot more issues over time, right? The outcome becomes much more detrimental to both parties, right? So we see that early say early stage scene where he goes up to the roof, he's trying to act it out on his own without it affecting somebody. But now there's somebody in his space and not only is there somebody in his space, but instead of pulling back and letting him work through it, she engages. So we have this first little bit where he's making breakfast. It's to celebrate some special surgery that Lily has completely forgotten about because she's flaky and distracted, which is actually a big trigger for Ryle because for him, it feels really important and it feels like he's not being made to feel important, which do with that what you want. Some people really care about that stuff. And once Ryle really commits, he really cares about that. And Lily is not great at naturally making those things a priority. She's just a little bit more flaky and spontaneous across the board. So this thing unfolds. She tries to tell him like, Hey, I think that's burning, but she doesn't really casually because she doesn't want to set people off. She's not like, Hey, I think that's burning. She does it kind of like flippantly. He kind of overlooks it. Eventually we see that whatever he's cooking starts to burn and smoke. He appears to kind of like burn himself and she actually rushes into him, which again, makes sense. I'm not saying that rushing into your loved one when they are in a state like this is a, you know, a bad or an inherently bad quality. It's, it's an inconvenient quality in this case, because had she been able to stand back and say, are you okay? Is there anything you need from me? Or do you just need space right now? He would have been like, I just need a minute. I just need space. And honestly, nothing else would have been likely to occur, but she doesn't do this. She engages. So she engages at the exact wrong time for a pattern type like Ryle, because Ryle knows for me to navigate this safely, I need space. I need you not to get in my physical space. I need you not to rush me. I have to work through it. So that's instance number one, right? She ends up getting hit. There's like glass flying. The glass has gone into his hand. He's got this high pressure surgery, right? So there's all these other elements happening, but that's the first instance that we see of physical abuse. Then we have another one. And there, I believe that there are three primary, obviously the third is the most escalated and we're going to get into that. But the second one I find also very interesting, because if you recall from watching the movie, it's yet again triggered by Lily lying. He finds that Atlas's phone number is hidden in her phone case back behind the phone. Now, so many things to say with this. Again, if Lily could just be honest and direct, she actually could have built a really solid relationship with Ryle, in my opinion, because Ryle is more of a black and white thinker. He puts honesty in the very tippy top of the hierarchy of his relationship. And for her, it's in like literally the last place. This is the thing she does not know how to do. Even if she thinks she's being honest, she doesn't really realize that it's still extremely distorted and compartmentalized. So the one thing that would have absolutely transformed her relationship with Ryle and made it, I believe, steady, consistent, built on trust is the one thing that she has a blind spot on that she couldn't do. So I realized that Atlas in the movie gives her his card because he's like something about him doesn't seem right. You know, just keep my number in case you ever need it. There's so many other things she could have done there, but keeping it in that place for it to one day eventually be found and for her to get completely exposed. I think that again, it goes back to this not trusting that she can be honest with her partner. I get again more gunpowder into the mix. So when this is found out about the abuse escalates again, but here's the key. When this happens, Ryle actually tries to leave. So his instinct isn't see it and attack. Okay. He sees it says, I'm sure some harsh things, but he tries to leave. But what does Lily do when someone tries to leave? That's the one and only time that Lily engages. So yet again, she engages at the exact wrong time for a person like Ryle because his only way of self management is to remove himself. But instead she follows him and not only follows him, but gets in his space, which if any of you have ever dealt with somebody who deals with anger is not the thing you want to do. And like I said, 40% of the population deals with this. And we can't just say like, you know, these people are all bad and we need to stay away from them. We need to actually learn how to work with every single type of person because I do believe that every single person on earth can be rewired and redeemed through work like break method. So in this case, he did have enough self awareness yet again to remove himself. But what does Lily do? She engages him, she gets up in his physical space, and she is unrelenting about that. Does that mean that he has the right to either accidentally knock her down the stairs or to push her down the stairs? Of course not. Absolutely not. But does one incite the other? Yes. Can we safely say that if Lily hadn't engaged and had just let him leave and self manage that he might have come back up 30 minutes later and said, we might need to break up. I can't navigate a relationship like this. It's too big of a trigger for me. I would bet any amount of money that that is true. He would have left and come back in a more regulated state and handled it like an adult. But what did she do? She pushed and engaged and eventually ended up going down a flight of stairs and hurting herself. Okay. Did he push her? Did she fall? Even in the movie, it's extremely gray. Even if he did push her again, I think the bigger issue here is learning how not to engage somebody who is trying to self manage by needing space and to pull away. Okay. So that's kind of lesson number one that I want you guys to wrap your head around because Ryle is absolutely a man of principle. And again, he's very black and white. So the reality is if Lily's character had somebody like me or someone on my team working with her, I absolutely believe that this relationship could totally be salvaged and for what it's worth, like jumping all the way to the end. I think that her and Atlas are too close to each other on the source belief spectrum to actually have a lot of chemistry. And you even see that unfold in the movie that really ultimately like they don't actually have a lot of chemistry. There's not a lot of spark, but any amount of money their relationship would never make it at all. So now we have two instances of physical abuse that have unfolded. Lily's behavior now starts to kind of pull away again. She's definitely very much trapped in her lies. She's confused. Eventually things spiral totally out of control. And eventually the abuse takes an escalation to rape, adjacent rape. And eventually I believe he like bites her on the, like around the collarbone area. Okay, so here's what I want to say about that with somebody like this, once they get into that, what we call their escalating emotion in break method, then like the gloves are off, they're not trying to maintain anything. They're, they've literally been pushed to the absolute brink through repetitions like this. So their brain is willing to escalate the behavior because no matter what he's tried to say and do to be like the only thing I need from you is honesty continues not to be met. But at this time, he's also fallen more and more deeply in love with her and has of course also become more obsessive and fixated. Now by the time this one scene escalates, I think his aggression is now at max threshold. And again, physical proximity, she's right in front of him. So at this point, he's not tried to remove himself as the one situation where he doesn't really try to remove himself. He actually just goes full send. So now at this point, the attempt to self manage is completely out of commission. He's not even trying to consider that anymore, which is why it escalates so badly. Eventually, Lily becomes pregnant. It seems like from this instance, she has the baby. And in the end, even though he, you know, tries to keep showing up and tries to get the relationship back and going, she decides to end the relationship. She also, I will say I forgot to mention this part, it's unclear exactly in terms of a timeline, how deep the relationship had gone before she found out about Ryle's traumatic background. I think she, she assumed that there was something going on there, but she didn't know exactly what. And she eventually finds out that Ryle accidentally killed his brother because they were playing with a gun. And somehow the gun went off, killed the brother, and that was what led him to become a neurosurgeon, right? So he's been trying to like atone for it ever since. And that is actually what happened in that very first scene is he goes up and like kicks the chair, the table or whatever, because he was operating on a child who the same exact situation had unfolded as his childhood situation. So she finds this out, obviously. And as she's finding this out, she's, I think, of course, putting two and two together. But we don't ever really see her dig deep in this with him. Again, her, when it comes to stuff like this, she's kind of more of the mindset, avoid and deescalate, avoid and deescalate, don't face things head on. But she does eventually decide to name her child after the brother that had passed away. And you see this kind of sweet moment where he's really full of gratitude that she was willing to do that. But she also then asks him for a divorce. I do think that the end of the movie, there's, I think there's a lot of stuff in the end of the movie that I think has some sort of like socially politically adjacent spin on it. And I get why they put it there. And I get that it's the, you know, the appropriate thing to say and do, etc. Which is, of course, her final line to him is basically she walks, they have a daughter and she walks him through if the daughter found herself in a relationship with someone like you who had done this, what would you tell them to do? So eventually he backs off and he agrees, yes, we can get a divorce. And in the end, she kind of, you know, she runs into Atlas again, and they seem like they could have a thing, but it's left relatively undefined. Here's my take on it. Not only will Atlas never be a good partner for her, because I think they're far too close to each other on the source belief spectrum. I think he is wounded and conniving, and he wants what he wants more than he actually cares about Lily being happy. And we've got enough evidence to that effect from watching the entire situation unfold. I think he, his agenda has shown through the entire time. And I think any opportunity that Lily had to build a truly sound stable foundation with Ryle was very much triggered by the incoming of Atlas and how he chose to engage in that part of the relationship. I think he tried to meddle. Now, having said that, everyone has free will in this life. And I'm sure many of you have been in relationships before where you find yourself maybe one year, two years down the road, and you reflect back and you're like, geez, if I had just done this or this differently, like so much would be different now. And sometimes that's a negative. I can say in my relationship with Gordon, one of the decisions that we made in the very beginning of our relationship was we both quit drinking. And we say all the time, I don't think our relationship would be the same if we didn't both make that choice together in the beginning, because think about how many times you do stupid stuff when you're drinking, right? Like you say you share overshare too much truth, or you say it in a way that's weaponized, or you make a dumb decision that you wouldn't have ever made sober. Think about how many relationships are plagued with these one-off moments, and then you can't ever escape them, right? They're in the collective memory of the relationship for the rest of the relationship. So what I will say is if Lily had found work like break method toward the beginning of the relationship, and she'd been like, Hey, I don't know what to do. You know, this guy that I was completely in love with her, my childhood popped up. I'll tell you exactly what I would have done is I would have said, Hey, you need to address this head on with your partner. I would have given her exactly what to do and what to say and showed her exactly what Ryle prioritizes so that she can make sure that she, because those are not her natural priorities or underlying motivations, she can do the work to actually meet those and make sure that she's holding herself accountable to a standard that will resonate with her partner, and then he would need to do the same. So I would have told her you have to be honest about who that person is, because then she wouldn't have an out when you're honest with somebody about something. Even if she had just said to Ryle, Hey, the guy that we saw at the restaurant, this is XYZ person from my past, I just wanted to let you know it was super uncomfortable. I kind of panicked at the time, but I didn't really know what to do. But I'm telling you now, they would have never gone back to that restaurant. So really like the whole second situation never would have happened. They wouldn't have gone back to the restaurant. And her and Ryle could have been a team on this, if she could have just trusted that she could say it and stop letting her early stage conflict avoidance escalate into a far bigger form of conflict. Far off in people with Lily's pattern type, with Holden compartmentalized because they don't want to cause conflict, but they don't realize you're setting yourself up for a far greater conflict on the other end. So being honest and direct in those early stages is one of the number one things that could have completely prevented this whole thing from unfolding. And to be honest, somebody like Ryle, if she had learned when he gets upset, I back away and give him space and I don't engage him until he's ready to engage me. They could live years in a blissful, committed, perfectly sound relationship without him being abusive. And I know that's a tough pill for some people to swallow, but that is absolutely unequivocally the truth. If both parties could learn how to meet the other person halfway and understand what their natural pattern is so that they can not intentionally trigger it or incite the very thing that everyone's trying to avoid, people can heal and they can do it quickly. I know that's a tough pill for some people to swallow and that the temptation is to kind of look back at relationships past and think, what could have changed? Could I have done things differently? And yeah, I mean, the hardest pill is yeah, you probably could have, but those are in the past now. What are you going to do right now? What are you going to do differently this time? In any second, any moment in intimate relationships, we always have a chance to do something different, to learn the lesson and to do something better. So when you understand your brain pattern type and the other person's brain pattern type and each person's behavior cycles, you can understand exactly how what you are doing is somewhat involved in the behavior that you don't like. And when you stop doing that thing, plot twist, a lot of times they stop doing that thing. I've said it so many times before, we've been tricked into believing that behavior is this unknown mysterious phenomena when it is math input equals output. And if we understand how your behavior cycles unfold over time, we understand theirs and whether engaging or inciting each other, you can heal virtually any relationship. And that is just a fact. I've seen it too many times. So despite the 92% vote for Atlas, I'm way thumbs down on Atlas. I think he is the conniving agenda driven person who really is more self serving. And I realize also he's been through a lot and there's a lot of wounding there. But I think he's in pretty deep self deception and could have could have minced himself that he's trying to help her while really him just wanting to be the knight in shining armor to get what he wants. So I'm not on team Atlas, I'm on team Ryle all the way. That doesn't justify or excuse the incidences of physical abuse. However, I think I have shown you my perspective on what could have been done differently than in my opinion would have never actually made him escalate into any sort of physical violence with Lily. I think if she could learn to stop engaging and let him have space and to stop lying, a lot of this would never have occurred. So this might be a good moment of reflection. Look back at some of your relationships. It's not uncommon that when we're real, we're in a relationship with somebody who we know has a quick response to anger that we might find ourselves compartmentalizing or lying or dissociating or telling a version. You also have to sit with that. Because one of their biggest triggers in the whole world could be being lied to or tricked or duped. So what are you going to do about that? Because we can't, I'm not here to justify someone's abusive behavior, but we do have to take an honest look in the mirror about how we are showing up that may be the very trigger that pushes them into that state that they very much don't want to be in. Abusers don't want to be abusers. And if we just keep saying once an abuser, always an abuser, and we just kind of cast them out to the side, we're just going to make the problem worse. I've seen many men and women completely come back around full circle into living their life very differently. And in a lot of these cases where I have seen women point like abuser, abuser, abuser, once we start to go through their behavior, in many cases, they themselves are a covert narcissist, and they're very much engaging this entire situation. And if they learn how to stop, oh, plot to us, the other person's not like that anymore. So all of this to say, we shouldn't be, I think, so quick to fall into the once an abuser, always an abuser trap, and that we have to be able to look more significantly at each individual, their behavior patterns, their brain pattern, because I've seen people completely turn things around when given the right tools. And I do believe that relationships are our greatest teacher. And without being in relationship with the right tools, we often can't work through something. And I just want to say that I think it's interesting that Ryle from the very beginning had learned to self manage enough that he knew how to keep himself out of harm's way. But again, Lily engaged and the irony is for both of them, it was the right thing to do. The only way that they could have each really learned to heal would have been to be in relationship and learn how to do things differently. But sadly, they didn't have break method. So I hope that you watch the movie again, we will also when this episode goes live, we will watch it all together on my circle community. If you haven't yet head over to the circle community, I'll make sure to drop the link in the show notes, it's completely free. We have moderators in there talking about all different types of things. If you're having relationship issues, you can also post your questions there for me to answer on the show or in our community. And we also will do watch parties. So I hope that this episode was enlightening for you. If you enjoyed this episode, or you know, a movie junkie or a gossip junkie that you want to get into the mix, be sure to share this episode, please do me a favor and go to all the different platforms, give it a five star rating, write a review, whatever you can do to boost how people are going to see and experience this podcast, it would mean so much to me. And if you haven't yet checked it out, right there, my book, your brain is a filthy liar is out on all platforms right now. It went to number one in the category of cognitive neuropsychology. I think in the category of psychology right now, it's 31, which is amazing. So let's keep those numbers going, buy one for yourself, buy one for a friend. It literally is a manual to explain why you do what you do. And guess what, you can use that on other people too. Just like I explained to you that Lily's characters and abandon holds it all together, you can now go to that book and learn all about them. And if you're curious, I think that Atlas is an abandoned control switch. And I think that Ryle is an abandoned control overt control. And if you're a junkie and you want to know all the timeline numbers in the emotional addiction cycle, we can have that conversation over in the circle community. And I'll tell you what I think and why. Thank you so much, everybody for tuning in. I think this was really fun. I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. And I will see you on our next session. Bye everybody.