4 Toxic Habits Destroying Your Marriage

Hey, Cody here. Today I want to talk to you about the 4 toxic habits that are destroying your marriage. And if you want to save your marriage, win your wife back, you're going to have to identify these habits within your marriage and you're going to have to replace these habits with productive habits because a marriage really cannot survive these habits. So the goal of this workshop today is not entertainment, it's not to entertain you, it's not to inform you, it's to use this as a mirror. The goal here is for you to see yourself in these toxic habits so you can identify, diagnose, and you can start to remove these habits from your life. So let's get into these. There's 4, maybe I'll give you a 5th bonus one at the end, we'll see how the time goes. So the first one is going to be the habit of escalation. So this is the ability to turn sparks into a wildfire, to turn a molehill into a mountain, right? So let's give some definitions to this so we know where we're at. So it's reacting with intensity, defensiveness, or aggression that amplifies the conflict. Or in other words, think of it like this: are you a peacemaker or are you a warlord? When you're faced with potential confrontation, what do you do? Do you de-escalate and turn the situation down, or do you escalate it into something bigger? So what does this look like inside of your marriage? Here's just a few. This is not conclusive at all, but raising your voice is escalation. Anytime you raise your voice at somebody, you're putting them into a confrontation position, and it's going to cause escalation. Matching energy instead of leading the energy. The goal here is we don't want to lower ourselves to the enemy energy that's being presented. The goal is to raise ourselves up to a higher standard and to lead the other person with more productive energy. Now, when I say energy, I'm not talking about woo-woo crystals and stuff like that. I'm talking about taking the baseline of the conversation up. And this is really, really important, particularly— this is very obvious and very evident when we talk about raising children. I've got a 6-year-old son, and if I discipline him for doing something he shouldn't have done, then he quite often says something like, "I hate you, Dad. I'm never going to love you ever again, and I'm never going to be your friend ever again." Well, I, as the parent, I cannot match that energy. I cannot go down to where he is, to his emotional space, and match that energy of, I hate you and I'm never gonna love you or be your friend ever again. I've got to lead him out of that place. And fundamentally, what we do here at Better Marriage, what I do with men that I work with— and there's a free workshop in the description, by the way, if you're interested in learning more about that— is it's leadership training in the most important field that you can possibly leading, which is your family, your children's life, and your marriage. Saving your marriage is about leading it to safe ground. It's not about matching the energy of everybody in it. When emotions get high, when tensions run, of course the energy is going to be negative. You've got to lead the room out of that energy. So what is the root cause of this? Well, ultimately, escalation— the root cause is going to be our old friend the ego. It's about an identity threat. It's about not being recognized, about your viewpoint not being recognized, and using volume and using size and using, uh, escalation techniques, escalate, escalating the situation to force attention to your viewpoint and also to control that viewpoint. A lot of times a more passive person will become submissive to a more dominant person when escalation is used, not because they agree with you or because they see the world the way you see it, but because they just don't want to have conflict with you. A lot of people will just reject the escalation, which of course puts you in control at that point, although it's a very unhealthy, very negative control. So it also comes from, "How dare you challenge me?" This is the ego again, thinking that you're beyond reprise, beyond challenge. Just believing that you're right is going to cause problems. So the insight here is that the immediate reaction to the situation from you is actually an emotional response. It's not truth. We want to operate from a place of truth. Jesus said, know the truth, for it is the truth that shall set you free. He didn't say react emotionally to the situation, and that will improve the situation. So a lot of times what we do, man, is when we're challenged or we feel like we're being challenged or we're being disrespected or— fill in the blanks, right? Any of these things that would cause you to posture up and escalate the situation, to raise the tone, it's an emotional response to a perceived challenge. It's actually not the truth. And as we're going to see, uncovering the truth of what's going on, or at least understanding where we don't even understand what the truth is, is a big key here. What is escalation? Well, we can put it in these terms, right? Escalation in its simplest term is you choose war over leadership. You're choosing war over leadership. You're choosing to cause conflict when you could have chosen peace. Because the reality is almost every situation can be de-escalated. It takes two people to fight. If you refuse to argue, if you refuse to fight, then the situation naturally will de-escalate. And I'm not saying that's the way to de-escalate it, but what I The escalation is a choice, and the choice that we need to move is away from the escalation and move towards authentic, genuine leadership that people choose to follow because it feels safe and it feels authentic. So what happens here? Well, when you escalate, conflict becomes unsafe. If your wife wants to bring something up with you, if she wants to bring up a topic or a situation and you're in the habit of, the toxic habit of escalation, then bringing those topics up are going to be very unsafe to her and she's just not going to do it. So what happens is your partner stops bringing topics up. They stop bringing issues to the table and that's where the resentment builds. Now I hear from men all the time, and I'm sure you can relate, that women never forget. She's still bringing stuff up from 20 years ago, Cody. She's never going to let it go. No, that's not true that she's never going to let it go. She's never going to let it go until that situation is resolved within her mind. And the problem is that when she brought it up, it wasn't resolved initially. And when she brings it up again, it just causes more pain through the escalation of the situation and through other mechanisms that we're going to explore here in a minute. Other negative toxic habits will come into play. A lot of these habits stack on top of each other, and then she has no choice but to suppress the issues instead of resolving them as far as she's concerned. From her perspective, and then the resentment builds. And this is what actually destroys your marriage. It's not what's happened within the marriage, it's the lack of emotional safety to discuss what's happened that then creates resentment that ultimately manifests itself in the form of contempt, which then, that's the end of your marriage. So when you escalate situations, effectively what you're doing is you're destroying our best friend, emotional safety, here. So to habit number 2, is invalidation, or again, directly attacking, directly destroying emotional safety. Now, our definition for this is just dismissing, minimizing, or correcting your partner's feelings. The key word here, man, is your partner's feelings, not the facts, not the truth, not correcting what actually happens, how she feels about the situation. And what that sounds like in reality, and again, this is not This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it will sound like, "That's not what happened. You're overreacting to the situation. That's ridiculous. That wasn't how it played out." And what's going on here is she's telling you how she feels about the situation, and effectively you're going, "Your feelings are ridiculous. Your feelings are nothing but an overreaction. Your feelings are wrong and inaccurate." Or in other words, you're invalidating the way she feels. Now, you have to keep in mind that a woman's psychology is predominantly driven through emotions, and for you to invalidate those emotions and to say that they're, uh, dismiss them, minimize them, etc., you're shutting down a highly fundamental part of that woman's psychology, and she just simply is not going to be happy during that. So the root cause of this is, again, it's the need to be right versus the need to be effective. So when that's not what happened, this is you needing to be right versus going, okay, it sounds like you're frustrated. That's ridiculous. Well, maybe it is ridiculous, but if you state that, this is you needing to be right, choosing to be right over choosing to be effective. Do you want to be effective in this situation Do you want to be able to affect positive change and control the direction the relationship's going, lead the relationship, or in other words, assume a position of leadership? Or do you want to be a warlord? Now, this, this is the choice that you're facing in every aspect of your life. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married? It's a simple choice. And it's also an inability to face discomfort. So a lot of these situations, it, it's uncomfortable the way that the woman's seeing it. And in order for us to view ourselves in the way that she's viewing us, this becomes uncomfortable. It's, again, it's an ego challenge. So the insight in this situation is, and this is critical, if you're making notes on this, this is a note to take: when your partner, i.e., your wife, speaks, they are revealing experiences. They are not presenting them to you for a debate. I'll say that again because this is important. When your partner speaks to you, she is revealing experience, not presenting a debate. And when you challenge this— and now I'm not saying you can't debate her, I'm not saying there's not a place— I'm saying understand what is going on. And understand when the time is to debate and when the time is to empathize. When she presents your feelings to you and you tell her that they're ridiculous, they're not valid, and they're wrong, you are invalidating her experience of life. And the truth of the matter is perception is reality. That is worth writing down. Perception is reality. What do I mean by that? You are going to get treated as though her perception is reality. Let me give you a concrete example, and you do this too, so let's not leave a bunch of comments here going, "This is not right. Women are crazy. You shouldn't put up with this." We all do this. Perception is reality for women and men. So if your wife perceives and believes that you've had an affair, you are going to get treated by her in the exact same way as though you've had an affair. And you are going to deal with the exact same consequences as though you've had an affair. Her perception of reality is what guides her behavior and what shapes your reality. Perception is reality. How she experiences reality, you have to acknowledge. And by invalidating that, by going through these mechanisms of invalidation, you're telling her that it is unsafe to express reality as far as she's concerned. It is not safe for you to express reality to me, reality to me, wife. That's not going to end well. So the results of this invalidation is emotional shutdown, a loss of trust, and of course your partner, your wife, stops sharing the truth, what she perceives as being the truth with you. She stops, she stops sharing her truth. And this is where the marriage really starts to fall about, because marriage is that partnership. It is you walking side by side, hand in hand, with equal inputs into the relationship, essentially. And invalidation prevents that from happening, meaning that a marriage— the marriage relationship simply cannot function at that time. So moving on, next, habit 3: negative interpretation. Or also, we can assume the worst. It's assuming the worst in people, right? So what is the definition of this? Assigning negative 10 intent to neutral or unclear behavior. The fact of the matter is, again, do you want to be right or do you want to be effective? We assume that we know what somebody's intent is. We assume that we know what the truth is. We assume that we know what that behavior means. And then quite often we place a negative interpretation on that, such as, she's attacking me, she's disrespecting me, she's always against me, she's always putting me down, she's always critical. When a lot of times it's not an attack, it's not disrespect, she's actually trying to help you. And we're not going to go into that in this video, we can, we can do another video on how that happens. But often a woman's attempt to correct a situation is perceived as an attack from a man, when actually there's no evidence to support that it's an attack or support. When you choose to negatively believe something about somebody, that says everything about you, and it says absolutely nothing about them when there's no evidence other than your imagination, what you think it should be. This is you operating from a place of fantasy and creating problems and rifts within the marriage instead of actually dealing with reality and choosing to recognize that you're negatively interpreting right now. And that the, the best case scenario is you change that into positive interpretation. The worst case scenario for you is just move that to a negative interpretation or neutral interpretation. Sorry, move it to neutral interpretation and say, I actually really don't know what's going on here. So again, the, the root cause of negative interpretation, it's internal security. It's— and it's confirmation bias as well. It's about thinking that you know somebody well enough to, you know, what their motivation is. Nobody knows what another human being's motivation is except them. To think that you know what somebody else is thinking or what motivated them is simply arrogance in the highest form. And it's going to utterly destroy your marriage. And also, the other thing shaping this is past narrative— what's happened in the past. Now, keep in mind, your current relationship is a lagging indicator. The state that your marriage is in right now is a reflection of what happened in the past, in the same way that your health is a lagging indicator, your weight is a lagging indicator. If you're 10 pounds overweight, that doesn't mean that you ate 10 pounds too much food today. It means that you've eaten too much food over an extended period of time in the past. And what the man is looking at today— if I'm looking at somebody who's overweight, I do not— I cannot accurately say anymore that that person is gluttonous or that person eats too much food, because they may have changed that the body just hasn't caught up with the new behavior yet. So confirmation bias of who we think somebody is and the past narrative shaping the present perception are some real culprits here as to what causes that negative interpretation. So here's the insight, right? Often your wife isn't attacking you, she's trying to help you. I've worked with literally thousands of men at this time successfully, and virtually every one of them, their wife told them what they needed to do precisely. It was no mystery. They, they were told what needed to happen for her to stay in the relationship, for the marriage to be successful, and for her to be happy. And it was taken as an attack. You need to stop doing this can be taken personally, but it also can be taken, I'm telling you this because I want this marriage to work, and if it doesn't, then I simply have to believe. We take everything personally. So the mechanism that drives this is our thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. And I'm going to blitz through this very quickly because this is a video all in itself. Our thoughts produce a feeling. If you feel like your wife is attacking you, then that is going to produce an aggressive or negative or defensive feeling from you. Let's say you take it as a personal attack. Those feelings solidify into defensive actions in terms of body language, tone, volume of voice. Maybe you walk out of the situation, maybe you react aggressively, maybe you smash something against the wall. Who knows what you do? But those thoughts produce a feeling within you, those feelings solidify into actions, and those actions inevitably, inevitably produce a result. The result is directly tied to the thoughts that you have. If you want to change this, which is what most people who are watching this video right now watch, it doesn't start here. It doesn't start here. It begins in thoughts. You cannot change your actions without first changing your thoughts. Or to put it another way, if you want to change the fruit, you have to change the roots. You cannot produce a different fruit without changing the roots. And the roots are your thoughts. And when your thoughts are constantly revolving around negative interpretations or negativity, negative interpretations of a person's behavior, motivation, all of that stuff, you're simply going to get negative results, and there's no way around that. So the result is that you in fact fight problems that don't even exist, and you reject help from yourself or from your wife or from somebody like myself you, you reject that help. This— you take feedback and you take it and you interpret it as criticism. And all that does is teaches the person, every time I try to help this person, it causes me pain or it causes me problems. So the feedback stops and the, and the help stops. And this is when a lot of times men go, my wife just won't fight for this marriage. I don't understand why won't she fight. Well, this is a big part of it. Because the feedback that she's been given, or has been given, is negatively interpreted. It's taken as criticism, not feedback. It creates her pain, so she stops. So let's move along to habit number 4, which is stonewalling, withdrawal, etc., or basically pulling away from, from the relationship. This is, this is my favorite destructive toxic habit, is when I get into a conflict with my wife, or anyone really, my natural instinct is just to pull away or to end the relationship, to separate it. If somebody causes me an issue or I get into a conflict, my natural response is just to go, I don't need you anyway, you're not important to me anyway, and to abandon the relationship. So what it is is shutting down, avoiding, or disengaging emotionally or physically within the person. And this is really a very negative one as well. So what it looks like is going silent, just going silent in arguments, or refusing to talk Avoiding conversations, emotional distance. I don't care, I don't need you, screw you, I don't need this, I can do this by myself. All these attitudes— if you want a divorce, fine, I don't care— all, all of this is withdrawal, withdrawal. And the root, the root cause of this is going to be overwhelmed, really learned helplessness. It's not knowing how to deal effectively with the situation. Now I'll give you an example. I was, I was helping a, a 10-year-old recently who had, uh, got into a big argument with his mother. He was feeling very, uh, he was feeling wronged basically, and he was somewhat helpless in the situation, and he was becoming obstinate, and he was refusing to talk. He was withdrawing because he didn't know how to deal with the situation. So my question I asked him, do you want to make this— do you want to escalate this situation and make it worse, or do you want to make it better? What do you want to do? And he was silent for a second. I said, you don't have to talk to me, but I like— do you want to make this situation worse, or do you want to make it better? And he goes, I want to make it better. I said, you just don't know how, do you? And he goes, no. So then once he acknowledged that he wanted to make the situation better, it's like, well, the first thing we're going to have to do is re-engage with your mother. This is not getting better until you talk to her. And he's like, well, she attacks me every time I say this. She attacks me and blah blah blah blah blah. Negative interpretation from the mother. So again, you can see he was overwhelmed. He didn't know how to handle the situation, which moved him into a position of learned helplessness, which was the same as the mother. She didn't know how to deal with this. Again, the position of the child and the mother here, which can be you and your wife, or you or your wife. Nothing I do works, so I stop trying. If I do that, it doesn't work. If I do that, it doesn't work. Well, the situ— the, the solution is not to withdraw. The situation is to acknowledge that you don't have the skills at this point. Do you want to make— do you want to escalate this situation given the choice, or do you want to de-escalate this situation and make it better. I think every single one of you watching this would choose to de-escalate. Well, why don't you? Because you don't have the skills. And that's the starting point, right? That's the starting point, is acknowledging it and then starting to move forward. The ego is going to protect that. The ego is not going to want to acknowledge that you don't have the skill to progress the situation in a positive, de-escalated way forward. And it's also a need to control. So a good example of this is my wife loves to talk. When we have a fight, she wants to talk it out. And if I've lost control of a situation, or if I, if I'm in the wrong, which I often am, and I know I'm in the wrong, quite often my natural instinct is going to be to abandon the situation, which is a way to control it. Because I know that if I abandon, if I, if I stonewall, and if I remove myself and go silent, withdraw, she will chase me because she needs that conversation. So it's also a way, a very unhealthy way to get control of the situation back. It's ego, it's control, it's overwhelm, and it's just really not having the emotional, uh, intelligence and communication skills to really work through what actually is quite a simple situation, really. So the insight here is that when, when you, you move into this withdrawal phase as a way of dealing with conflict, it's the fight— it leads to apathy within the relationship, and that leads to collapse, right? Both parties go, well, this is a waste of time. If I bring this up, you're just going to walk off. If I bring this up, you're just going to walk off. So this is the result. This results in, if you're in a transactional relationship or a functionally dead relationship, a business partnership, you know, roommate dynamic has replaced the, the lover partner dynamic. This is why. This is, this is a big part of it. This is the result of this. So the real enemy here These are not separate habits. They are expressions of one single operating system that you are running. These, these habits can— they stack on top of each other, and one can follow the other. We negatively interpret, which leads to an escalation of the situation, which leads, which leads to withdrawal, for example. These can escalate and cascade. So what they actually are, it's, it's It's the operating system that you are running that is choosing emotional chaos and war over clarity and authentic leadership. This is what, what is currently installed. This is what needs to be installed. And I know a lot of people are going to go, well, that's not me. Well, I'm not here to— again, this is not me criticizing or having a go. This is giving feedback in, in order to provide progression within the marriage, right? If— look at your marriage. If it, if it is emotionally chaotic and warlike, there's lots of fighting going on, this is the operating system. If your relationship is full of clarity and authentic leadership that your wife, children, and people around you choose voluntarily to follow and are not trying to actively get away from, then this is what's going on here. And ultimately This is where we need to move to. We need to see ourselves as, uh, men of clarity, integrity, authentic leadership, that our— the people in our environment follow us because they choose to, because they feel safe with us, versus a man who's in emotional chaos and starts war everywhere he goes. So the standard here is our old friend emotional safety. We've talked about this, there's lots of videos on this channel, but emotional safety. So again, the target here is that your partner can speak freely, your partner can feel heard, your partner does not feel retaliation. And when I say your partner, I'm talking about your wife. If she's holding back from speech, if she doesn't feel heard, if she doesn't— if she's afraid of retaliation, whether not necessarily physical violent retaliation, but the retaliation can be she ends up being in a horrible environment for a week, or you don't talk to her for a week, You're destroying your marriage. The solution here is going to be this, the daily question: am I engaging right now in a habit that creates emotional safety or destroys it? It's as simple as that. If you— men ask me all the time, is this marriage savable? 'Can it be saved?' and 'How long is it going to take?' These are the two questions that I always get more often than anything else, and my answer is always the same. Can you re-establish emotional safety with your wife, and how long is it going to take you to do that? If you can re-establish emotional safety, there's a high probability the marriage can be saved. It's not 100% because I don't know what you've done. I don't know what's happened in the marriage, and I don't know her either. This is not a press the button and it's a guarantee, but But if you can reestablish emotional safety, then there's a high probability that all of the other problems can be saved if you have the right guidance. How long is it going to take to save the marriage? Well, the question is, how long, how long, how long is it going to take for you to do that? It becomes the question. If you can do it very quickly, then the marriage can be saved very quickly. So my point here is the goal is emotional safety. You need to reduce this down to a binary decision. Every communication you have with your wife is, is this building emotional safety or is this destroying emotional safety? There's no middle ground. You're building it or you're destroying it. That's it. You can't say it's neutral. You have to choose. Neutral is negative. Everything you do needs to be measured against that question. Is this creating emotional safety right now or is it destroying it? And it has to be reduced to the binary. Now, if you want to know much more about emotional safety, because it is the most important aspect of marriage, then watch this video right here. I'm going to go into that in more detail than you've seen anywhere else. I'm going to demystify it. And make sure you get the free workshop, You Can Win Her Back, link in the description. And give us a thumbs up, subscribe, leave a comment if you like this comment— the content. Leave it if you don't. And we'll see in the next video.