Why Do I Become Somebody I Don’t Respect During Marriage Crisis?

Hey, Cody Butler here, and I want to answer the question today, which I get asked all the time, which is, why do I become somebody I don't respect during marriage crisis? Why do I turn into a man that, that I don't recognize and I don't respect? So my goal here is to help men replace interpretations of situations that create suffering in their life with truths that create transformation, both in themselves and the marriage. So let's just set the scene here very quickly. So what's going on is marriage crisis, wife's asked for divorce, etc. She said she wants out. All of a sudden the man sees himself behaving in a way that he never really saw himself before, in a way that he doesn't like or doesn't respect. Maybe begging, panicking, manipulation, control, uh, obsessing, emotionally collapsing. He's experiencing a whole bunch of emotions that he really doesn't like to experience and that are just showing up. So in this situation, when he's behaving in these ways, obviously he's going to feel ashamed, he's going to feel disgusted, he's going to feel confused, and he's going to start asking, who have I become? Or who am I becoming? Now, I experienced this myself with alcohol, where every day I'd, I'd, uh, I'd drink in the evening, get drunk, and then the next morning I'd wake up ashamed, disgusted, you know, felt horrible about myself and asking myself the question, how have I become this person? And then promising never to do it again. And then later on that day, later on that evening, drinking again and just going through that cycle of behaving in ways that I didn't even recognize I didn't like. And it caused me to feel shame, disgusted, and really question myself as to who have I become, who am I becoming, and how, how do I fix this? So this can all happen in marriage crisis, right? Because it's a very painful situation and we're looking for some relief to the situation. We want to get some pain relief. So the thing to understand here is that the marriage crisis has not created this man. It's not brought him out. It's just revealed him. When you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice every time. You never squeeze an orange and get lemon juice out of it. If this behavior is coming out of you, it was always in there. It just was never required. It was just in your repertoire. It was in your toolbox. And it was never required to be used. So you just didn't see it in there. So what the crisis is actually doing and the gift that it's providing is that it's, it's exposing the hidden instability, it's exposing the dependency, the manipulation, the emotional weakness and fracture points that exist. And it's showing behaviors that were always there and always present. They were just beneath the surface, or they never actually had to be addressed by the man. So why does the crisis reveal this aspect of his personality? Well, because a stable marriage never required this aspect of the man's personality, personality to be exposed. It's very easy to be honest when you're not in a situation that requires dishonesty. It's very easy to be a man that doesn't exhibit controlling behavior when there's no reason to control the situation. So you never actually come face to face with these, these behaviors because you know, you've never been pushed to the edge of the loss like this before. You've never been pushed into desperation, into this kind of pain, into this kind of fear-based environment. So the crisis introduces a level of pressure, a level of fear, and a level of identity threat that just simply wasn't there before. There was just no need for for the man to actually deal with these situations with quite negative tools really. So now that the crisis is here, the hidden tools start to emerge such as control, manipulation, pressure, emotional desperation, maybe bad behavior such as alcohol use, drug use, porn, et cetera, or creating that shame and, uh, negativity that we talked about, right? So the critical insight here to understand and the real gift is that now you're starting to see just how far you're willing to go. You willing to see the level of behavior that you're willing to engage in, engage in to actually get your emotional needs met. This crisis is forcing a confrontation with yourself that's allowing you to see the man that your wife has been living with all these years, that she's been well aware of who you are, but you're actually probably getting to see this man for the first time right now. So you can take this one of two ways. You can either look at this as a gift and see this is revealing the real work that needs to be done to become a man that I can look in the mirror and be very proud of and have self-respect and self-esteem with. Or you can just go the other way and go, well, so you're just saying I'm to blame for this. You're just saying it's all my fault. Either one of those. Paths you can walk down and which path you go down is entirely your choice at this point. So why did this aspect of your personality remain hidden for so long? Well, the reason is because there was simply no necessity for its exposure. There was no reason for this aspect of you to come out because your wife, for the most part, probably was compensating for a lot of the instability, the emotional weakness, and these hidden behaviors within, within the marriage. Because it was unsafe for her, emotionally unsafe for her to let this man come out. She, she created the stability within the marriage. She, she moderated your behavior through creating the environment. So this man didn't have to come out. So she quite frankly didn't have to deal with him. So she absorbed the dysregulation, she absorbed the pressure, the instability, often without confronting the man because pointing out how unstable he actually is or how dysregulated he actually is would have caused big problems within the marriage for her. So the key reframe here to understand, the key point is that the man now is actually getting to meet the man for the first time that his wife has been living with all along. She's— none of this has been hidden from her. It's actually only been hidden from you. So he's finally meeting the man that his wife has been experiencing. That, that she's been stabilizing and that she's been emotional— emotionally buffering and she's been stabilizing the marriage so he doesn't have to collapse all along. So why does this feel painful? Why does this feel so painful for the man? Well, it's because it reveals a split identity. It reveals two different personalities within the same man. There's the man who believes that he's stable, he's disciplined, he's loving, he's grounded, he's mature, he's all of the things that he wants to be, that he believes he should be as a man. But then it's also revealing the same man under pressure and in a threat environment, a loss environment, who is inherently emotionally unstable, reactive to the situation, dependent, manipulative. All of these things that he really doesn't want to face about himself. And the analogy that I always like to use, it's the analogy of the poster and the mirror. Within the marriage, you've been looking at a poster of yourself. You've been looking at aspirational identity, how you'd like yourself to be, idealized self-image, et cetera. You're seeing the ideal man looking back at you from the poster. You're not looking in the mirror. Where the mirror actually reveals the embodied character of the man. The mirror is who you truly are, and the mirror is who your wife has been living with. This man, when he is pressured, he becomes emotionally unstable. When he creates an environment where he's in an environment of loss or threat, then he does start to take on a personality that even he doesn't respect himself. So what, what, what's going on here? Well, there's cognitive dissonance going on in the man, meaning that like there's two, there's two competing ideas going on. There's who you think that you are or who you hope to be, who you've told yourself that you are. And then the man that's actually showing up right now, it's an identity fracture. It's a double, it's a double-mindedness that's going on inside of the man. There's a, there's this ideal poster of a man and there's the mirror of a man looking back. It isn't great. And there's a real gap between the self-image that you'd like to believe of who you are and the actual behavior that's showing up. And this, this gap finally in this situation becomes completely impossible to ignore. So there are two, there are two paths forward at this point. Now, this is a, this is a great day in a man's life when he finally gets to see who he is. This is when real transformation happens and you move from suffering to joy and happiness. Now, Jesus said it better than anybody. He said, know the truth, for it's the truth that shall set you free. It's not the idealized idea of yourself that will set you free, or the version of yourself that your wife creates in the marriage to stabilize you because she doesn't want to have to deal with the destabilized version of you. When you finally get to see who you are, then quite often That is enough to bring about the transformation because we don't realize, we don't realize that we have this neediness beneath the surface. We don't realize that we have this emotional instability, etc. And when we finally see it, then we don't want to do it. We don't want to be that person. And that's when your wife knows that the transformation is going to be real and long-lasting, is when you can look at yourself truly in the mirror and go, I don't want to be that man anymore, and I'm going to change because I don't want to be that man. I want to be a bigger, better man. So there's two paths you can take here. The first one is going to be to externalize the situation, externalize the divorce, and you can blame your wife, you can blame society, you can blame me, you can blame church, parents, trauma, ADHD, circumstances, all of these things. And you can say stuff like, well, she has responsibility too, or it's always the man's fault, right, Cody? I'm always the one to blame. Well, if you want to go down that route, that's fine. That's externalizing the situation. And what you're doing there is you're protecting your ego, you're protecting the poster, and you're maintaining the self-deception that has got you into this position in the first place. Ultimately, when you go down an externalized path of, it's her fault, it's society's fault, it's everybody's fault, it's my parents' fault, it's everybody's fault, you, you're effectively defending and protecting that poster in a way that doesn't require any change from you. Now, path 2 that you can go down, which is what I would advise, is the path of ownership. You tear down that poster, you realize that you've been sold a lie, you've— you realize that the man that you've been showing up and living as isn't the man who you thought that he was, and it's not a man that you want to be. And you, you tear down that toast poster, you throw it in the fire, and you go buy a mirror and you look at yourself. And you look at yourself honestly and see who you've shown up as, who you've been, what's actually going on inside of you that's caused the problems all along. So you accept the split personality, you accept the instability that's taken place, you accept, accept the inconsistency that you've shown up as or shown up with, and you replace that with identity integration, with transformation, with unification. So You become one unified man. Who you see yourself as and who you truly are are one person, and who you— how you see yourself and how your wife sees you becomes the same thing. So the harsh reality here is if you find yourself in a situation where divorce is on the table and you want to save the marriage, there's no painless option here. There's only work or or continued pain in the same way that if you show up 100 pounds overweight, there's no, there's no painless way to get back in shape. If you haven't gone to the gym for 30 years and you're overweight and you're sore and stiff, there's no, there's no painless way to get out of that. You can turn that around, but your choice is either work, work on that, or continued pain. If your finances are a mess, if you've been spending too much money for a long time and you, you've outspent your capacity to pay and now you have a huge amount of debt. Can you turn that around? Of course you can. Are there strategies that will turn that around? Of course there are. But unfortunately there's no painless option. You're going to have to stop spending and you're going to have to suffer for a while, or you continue in the pain and it just gets greater and greater and greater. So it's a situation of either you pay now and you can play later, or you choose to play now and pay later. Either way, if you want to pay, there is a bill you're going to have to pay at some point. So the crisis, the marriage crisis here, it forces a choice upon you. It forces the choice of transformation or collapse. Those are your only two options, really. What are you going to choose? Are you going to choose— you're going to recognize that that these are the two options. Choose transformation and be willing to pay the price for a short period of time so you can reap the benefits, or are you just going to allow the collapse to continue? Because at the end of the day, the, the, the question that we're answering here is, why do I become a man that I don't respect during this crisis? So what that really leads to is how Do I become a man who can respect himself again? How do I become that man? So the answer is you become that man who you can respect again when you write yourself, when you realize that you've been looking at a poster of an idealized version of yourself, not who you truly are. And when you change how you see yourself, and that changes how you behave, and that changes how other people respond to you. So ultimately the marriage stabilizes when the man stabilizes, or in other words, fix yourself, fix the marriage, fix the man, fix the marriage. When you change how you see the marriage, the marriage you see changes. When you change how you see yourself and you, you decide that you don't like what you're seeing in the mirror and you change because you want to change, that's when your marriage changes. Now, if you want to go down the path of going, well, Well, I don't want to change. Why should I have to change? Then don't change. That's fine with me. I support your decision not to change. I'm not, I'm not here to speak to people that want to stay the same and not change, but they want their situation to change or they want other people to change. I don't, I can't help you. And I quite frankly don't really want to help you, to be honest with you. I want to help the man who is seeking emotional sovereignty. To be a man that he can look in the mirror and honestly say, I've been, I've been coming up short. I don't like the man I've been showing up as, and I want to get bigger, better, and stronger. Not because that's going to win me my wife back, but because that's who I need to be. So the man begins to respect himself again when he becomes a unified man, one unified man, one integrated man, one singular identity. So that's one man at work, one man at home, One man at church, one man in, in happiness and peace, the same man in crisis, he's able to control himself, regulate himself. One man under pressure and one governing value system that's driving all of this. So the instability comes from ultimately being emotionally driven. The formula for failure is inconsistent activity or inconsistent execution driven by emotion. You get emotional and you make decisions based on those emotions. Conversely, the success formula is very simple. It's consistent execution regardless of emotion. You go to the gym every day, you say, I'm going to the gym every day regardless of emotion, that then you start to lose weight, you start to get in shape. The man who fails doesn't fail because he doesn't mean well or has no intention of going to the gym. He's the man that wakes up and says, I'm tired today. And he allows his emotion to cause him to execute inconsistently. The same is true here. The way we become a man that we can respect again, that you can look in the mirror and say, I'm proud of you, regardless of what your wife says, is you have a governance system, you have a value system that you base your decisions against. We become rule-based, not emotionally based. You make decisions because, based on doing things because it's the right thing to do, not because it gets you an outcome. So the solution really is one consistent identity. If you get your wife back, you're this man. If you don't get your wife back, you're the same man. If things go well, you're one man. If things don't go well, you're one man. There's no, I'm going to be stable if she comes back and I'm going to be destabilized if she doesn't. That's two different men. That's a split personality. So the goal here is one integrated identity, not multiple masks, not multiple selves, not multiple identities, not emotional shape-shifting based on your situation. So ultimately what I'm saying here is the core principle is to become law-driven, not emotionally driven. Set plays Wins games. You know that you're going to have situations with your wife. Set the law before it happens. Understand how you're going to react. React based on values and predetermined actions versus just emotion. Have hard boundaries regardless of the cost. Your internal authority stabilizes your behavior, your reactions, your identity, the stability that you bring into the marriage. So when you do that, it creates an environment where she can feel safe, where she can feel— she feels stabilized without the necessity to bring that stability to the marriage. So what we're talking about here truly is integrity, right? And I'm not saying you're a man that doesn't have integrity. But what I mean by this is real integrity removes all hidden behaviors, the, the, the things that we're hiding right now. There is no secret self, and there's complete and total consistency between the private man and the public man. The man you are in public is the man you are in private. The man you are under pressure is the man that is the man, the, the, the, the man, the same man when things are going well. There's consistency between the aspirational man and the actual man. So why does this change your situation? Well, because ultimately many of us are looking for that self-respect and self-esteem from our wives. We want her to respect us. We want the world to respect us. It's a deep need as a man. We want to be respected. We want to be appreciated. But how can we expect that when ultimately we don't respect ourselves? And the reason we don't respect ourselves is because we, we have these different personalities of who we aspirationally hope to be and who we actually show up as under pressure. So self-respect emerges through identity integration, through unification, and through consistent behavior, and through that emotional sovereignty. When you behave the way you want to behave because you choose it, not because she's emotionally triggering you, or because you, you can't tolerate the idea of losing her or pain. So you behave in a certain way to get an outcome. That's not an emotionally sovereign man. That's a man who's in bondage. It's a man who's in bondage to the situation and is controlled by that situation. When you become a man who can raise his hand and say, I am a man who does the right thing because it's the right thing to do regardless of the cost, I behave in a way that I find consistent. I behave in a way that's aligned with my value system regardless of what anybody says, what they say, what they do, or the cost to me. That's a man who has emotional sovereignty. He has a unified identity. He's one man in all situations. And you will respect yourself when you become that man. You'll look at yourself, and you'll be able to sleep better at night. Everything will start to get better in your life. You will respect yourself. And when you respect yourself, the world will start to respect you. If you're looking at your, your marriage right now, go, she doesn't respect me, or she's demonstrating a lack of respect. Ultimately, man, this is, this is an indication that you simply don't respect yourself deep down inside. You have a lack of self-respect. And instead of addressing that, and going, okay, why do I not respect myself deep down inside? We look to her and go, well, you just show me respect and then I can borrow that respect from you. And it's a role that she was never designed to fulfill. It's a weight that she can't carry, and it puts you in a position where you are never going to experience happiness. So when you do this, your stability becomes embodied. It becomes lived, not performative. The question I get often is, how do I create emotional safety for my wife? Well, it's not something you create, it's something she experiences by being close to a stable man. How does she— how do I create peace for her? You don't create peace for her, you become peaceful, and then she, she experiences that then standing next to you. It's like, it, it's like saying, how do I explain fire to my wife? Don't. Just become the heat. Just become the fire. Let her stand next to you and experience the warmth. She needs to experience stability within this marriage. And this is not something that you can say to her or you can convey to her. She experiences it when you become it. And I would suggest to all of us men, like, we truly want to become these things anyway. It's why it really baffles me sometimes when men push back saying, "Well, so I have to change, Cody? So I have to do all that?" Well, no, you don't have to change. You can stay as you are, that's your choice, but are you really happy? Are you happy? Are you really happy? Is this working for you? If it is, do it, keep it. If it's not, then throw it out and start again. It's really— it really baffles me why men that are really, quite frankly, not happy cling to things that are not working. Why would you not want to change if you're not happy, if you're not experiencing joy to its full fullest. Why would you not want to look at yourself and say, what's what? This is not working. It's not that you have to change or you have to forsake your identity here. You don't have to do any of that stuff. You're welcome to keep any identity that you have. But my question to you is, is it truly working for you? If it is, keep it. But if it's not, if you're not there, if you, if you don't have that sense of self-respect yet to the level that you want to, if you don't have that If you're not the man that you can respect in the crisis, why would you not look at yourself and go, what do I need to change here to become the man that I want to be? So the important distinction to make here so we don't go off into the outliers is this does not mean becoming perfect. It does not mean suppressing emotion, never failing, never struggling, never making mistakes. What I'm suggesting is— and what it does mean is radical honesty. You've got to look at yourself and really honestly ask the question, who have I been showing up as? Is that who I actually want to be? And is that conducive to the outcome that I'm looking for in this marriage? Because at the end of the day, it comes down to this, man, that who you are is that it's not right or wrong. It's not like when I work with men on one-on-one, I'm like, I'm not here to criticize you or put you down or tell you anything. I'm here to help you get an outcome. Now, there is only right or wrong in, in light of an outcome. So if you're saying your outcome is to save your marriage, then that, that becomes a right and wrong pathway to that. In the same way that if I ask the question, is eating McDonald's every day, 3 meals a day, and supersizing it right or wrong, good or bad? And everybody will almost immediately say, well, that's bad. Eating, eating McDonald's every day, 3 meals a day is bad. Well, depends what your outcome is, doesn't it? If your outcome is to die young fat, unhappy, miserable, and never go up a set of stairs by your own power and your own esteem, esteem ever again, then eating McDonald's every day is the right decision for you to make. If your goal is to die miserable, then it's the right decision for you to make. But if your goal is to be healthy, happy, nice body, nice shape, you know, nice lifestyle, then it absolutely is the wrong thing to do. So behaviors only become right or wrong, directions only become right or wrong in light of the fact of what is your destination. So if your destination is to save your marriage, then you have to look at your behavior in light of that destination. And men go, so everything about me is wrong, Cody Butler. No, not everything about you is wrong. Nothing about you is wrong. But if your goal is to achieve this outcome of saving this marriage with this woman, yes, then you have to look at that and go, yes, it's wrong. In that light. It's not going to produce that outcome. And you have two choices. You can accept that and go, well, you're absolutely right, the man that I've been showing up as is not the man that's going to save this marriage. The man that destroyed this marriage isn't the man that's going to turn it around, and I accept that and I'm willing to change. Or you can go, well, so I should have to change, I'm wrong. Well, no, then stay the same, bro. It's fine, you can stay the same, no shame, but you're not going to save your marriage. She's not. She's already told you that she's not living with the version of you that you've shown up as. She's already told you that. And if your response is, well, why should I change? Then don't. But she's not, she's not coming back. That is the reality to that situation, right? So it means what we're talking about is radical honesty, identity integration, a disciplined character, not an emotionally reactive character, a man who has true emotional sovereignty. That embodies consistency and stability. So the, the core shift here, the questions to change yourself or to ask yourself— stop asking the question of how do I stop feeling ashamed, or how do I stop not liking the man that I am in this situation, and start asking the questions what parts of me need to be unified to bring my heart What parts of me and my personality need to be unified to bring myself into complete integrity? Which parts of me are inconsistent right now? I'm saying I want to be married. But this part of me is behaving in a way that makes that impossible. I say it all the time, alcohol is not compatible with parenthood. If you're saying you want to be a good parent, then you really can't be a drunk. This is a, this is a contradiction. And this is the question that I'm posing to you: what parts of you are in conflict right now that need to be resolved, that's causing the problems? And when you look at your outcome and go, this is my outcome, to save my marriage, to win my family back, then you have to look at the parts of your personality that are actually in conflict with that and just simply going to make that impossible to happen. And if you, if you unable to look at that honestly and do it in a way that doesn't trigger you and go, so I've got to just change everything about myself, do I, Cody? If you, if you can't do that, then you can't have her back. If you can do that and you're strong enough to do that, then you stand a very, very good chance of getting her back. So core takeaway here is the marriage crisis doesn't create a different man. It reveals the man that was there all along. So the pain that you're actually experiencing right now, it's coming from a fractured identity. It's coming from, quite frankly, self-deception. And I don't, I don't mean that in a negative way. It's our ego and our subconscious protecting ourselves, protecting us from, from things that we really don't want to face. Inconsistency. Pain comes from being inconsistent in our execution. But on the bright side, right, the good news Transformation truly begins when the poster comes down and you go by a mirror and look in the mirror. As I've already said on this, on this, on this live, Jesus said it best of all: know the truth, for it's the truth that shall set you free. When you can see who you've truly shown up as, then you can decide if that's the man you want to be or not. So self-respect become— comes from being one unified man in all conditions. Not multiple men in multiple situations. So that's it for this live for me. So if you want to know more about saving your marriage back, getting your marriage back, and say, I work with men all the time and do this, and I've got a workshop, there's a link in the description where you can grab that workshop and you can see a little bit more about exactly how that is. And if you want some help with this, check out the links in the description. Thank you guys for staying to the end here. Bless you all, and we'll see you soon.