Why Men Collapse During Divorce (And How To Become Emotionally Strong Again)

Alright guys, so what I'm going to share with you today is the question that we're really all here to answer and none of us want to answer. And what I'm offering you today in this presentation, I'm offering you the choice between slavery and emotional bondage and true emotional freedom, which ultimately is not only going to benefit you, but it's going to give you the very best chance at saving your marriage. So the question that we're here to answer is, who am I if my wife no longer chooses me? This is, this is the question that we need to answer. If we can answer this question successfully, and we can uncover everything that's causing the problems, then we can save the marriage. Because a man whose identity depends on being chosen cannot love freely, because his nervous system experiences the rejection from his wife as annihilation of who he is as a man. It fundamentally destroys your masculine identity. And we're gonna, we're going to show you today, I'm going to show you why there is so much urgency, pressure, emotion attached to this and how to set yourself free of that so you can actually start to act intelligently and experience true freedom instead of the bondage that you're currently in. So this is, this is a problem that goes beyond marriage, right? Modern men globally are conditioned to derive their identity, their masculine identity, who they actually are from achievement, from status, from sexual selection, from female approval, from external competency, and from relationship excess— success. As you can see in the marriage scenario, right, like sexual selection, female approval, and relationship success, very high, even status and achievement really. So, or to put it another way, men globally today are deeply conditioned to externally outsource their identity. You're not choosing your identity. You're not answering this question, who I am, you're being told who you are. And as a result, you are being continually kept in a position of bondage and slavery. So we're in this, on this call today specifically for marriage, but this also applies to career, finances, parenting, aging, your body changing shape, in anything where self-esteem and self-worth or self-image identity, who you are, is derived This— we're talking about this today, right? So what's going on in the marriage specifically is the wife's emotionally withdrawing. She's asked for divorce, separation, etc. Or in other words, your wife is no longer choosing you. So guys, Renee, can I get you to— can I get you to mute yourself, please? So what the man is immediately experiencing here is panic, collapse, obsession with the situation. This is why you're obsessing over every emotion, every emoji she sends on a message or doesn't send, every look she gives you, every sentence, every statement carries huge consequences, completely disproportional to what's going on. Why? Because you're in emotional freefall, because your very identity as a man is being challenged. Your masculine identity and who you are is under threat at this point. So the, the marriage collapse feels deeply personal. It feels like an existential threat, and it is totally identity-destroying. I'm going to share with you how to take back this identity today. So what's actually going on here in the marriage, in the situation right now, it's not just rejection. It's not just she's asked for divorce. There's a complete collapse going on here of masculine identity, of self-image, of certainty, of masculine certainty, because we've been so conditioned to attach and associate our identity with success, with selection, that our very identity is now associated with this marriage. Our level of competence— like, when this marriage, if it fails, then that to us, that means our competency has failed. It means our sense of self-worth is diminished. It means our self-image has been destroyed. It means everything that we understood about ourselves to be true literally disappears, right? The man believes himself, uh, he's disappearing essentially. Who everything he believes about himself is now disappearing. So what happens in this crisis situation is the real man actually emerges. Who you— there's the fiction, who you believe yourself to be, who you've been telling yourself all these years, um, I'm stable, I'm calm, all these things, right? The poster instead of the mirror. You've been looking at a poster of who you want to be or who you believe yourself to be. But in the crisis, the real man actually emerges. And the truth of the matter is you actually get to see yourself truly for the very first time. Now what, what the crisis is revealing is emotional instability, dependency, a dysregulated nervous system within the man. Emotional insecurity, insecurity within himself. He's starting to see himself in a way that is very unflattering to himself, and he's seen himself in a way that he does not like. And the easiest way to deal with this is just to go back to sleep, and the easiest way to go back to sleep and pretend none of this has happened instead of actually dealing with it and setting yourself free emancipating yourself is to get your wife to choose you again, to get her to select you again, to get her to be attracted to you again. If she can just select you again, then you don't have to deal with any of these things. You become emotionally stable again, you become regulated again, you become secure again, you feel competent again. And in our efforts here to get her back, if we can just If we can just get her to choose me again, choose me as a man again, then that proves we're competent, that proves we can fix the situation. But actually, all it does is hide the real man again. So what's actually happening right now, men, this is so important. What you're experiencing right now in your panicked, emotional, dysregulated, unstable self, you are now getting to experience the man that your wife has experienced all along. The man that you've told yourself you are, that the stable man, that all of these things, she has underwritten all of that. Your stability is based on her selecting you. Your, your external, your internal regulation has been completely outsourced to how she's interacting within the relationship. And as long as she's reacting or interacting in a way that pleases you and doesn't challenge you or make you ask the question, who am I as a man, then you're able to see yourself as stable, regulated, etc. But the truth of the matter is you're not stable. She, she's understanding that you're stable because she's regulating you, that you're, that you're not independent and strong You're emotionally dependent, and that— as soon as that emotional dependence is broken by her or she threatens to remove it, you collapse. You're being ex— you're a man who is externally regulated right now. When things are going great within the relationship, you, you're fully regulated, and when things are not going great, you collapse. Or in other words, you are lacking any sense of internal authority. You are lacking any sense of self-control or of your autonomy and emotional sovereignty as a man has been outsourced to the relationship, to her. And now she's removing that. You are actually getting to see the man that she's been experiencing all along, and you're desperate to get away from that man. That's why you've given me money. That's why you're on this call. That's why you're showing up late at night, early in the morning. That's why you're giving your time to this, because you don't want to experience the man that you've subjected her to all along. And this is a true gift for you. Jesus said it, know the truth, for it's the truth that shall set you free. When you see who she's experiencing, and who she's experiencing is who you are, that is revela— that gives you the opportunity to transform yourself and to become emotionally sovereign, which is critical. You're going to see that as we go through this. So why does this feel so terrifying to you right now? Why are you scared? Why are you in such a panic state? Why are you so desperate to fix this? Well, the truth is because all of the fears that you do not want to admit exist, all of the challenges that you have inside, all of the insecurities begin to surface, right? The insecurities, the inadequacy. You're now face-to-face with it. She's left you and you have no choice. And I say this in a loving way, you have no choice but to look at the inadequacy within the relationship. When she's choosing you sexually, when she's choosing you in the relationship, she is providing confidence. She is filling a hole that it's simply not her job to fill. It's your job to provide confidence for yourself. It's your job to develop your sense of self-worth. It's your job to, to, to overcome your competency fears. The deepest fear we have as men is not that we're going to lose our wife or our family. The deepest fear that we hold as men is that we're going to be found incompetent, that we're going to be publicly declared incompetent. And if this, if this divorce continues, if she does not change direction, if she does not select you again, then all of this stuff Can I get you to mute yourself, guys, please? Who's got your mics open? All of these fears that are the deepest fears that we hold as men not only are going to have to be dealt with personally, they're going to be aired publicly for the world to see. And this is truly terrifying. This is truly horrifying. This is, this is what is driving the desperation and the panic. And the desperation and the panic will never go away until we understand that inadequacy is solved, confidence is solved, worth is solved, competency is solved through regaining emotional sovereignty, not outsourcing that to your investment portfolio or your wife or your job or your body or how much hair you have on your head. John, can I get you to mute yourself, please? So this is existential, because not only do you not actually want to address these fears internally yourself, like, you're quite happy. We're all quite happy as men to just pretend these things don't happen. And as long as the wife is participating acceptably within the relationship, they functionally don't exist because instead of developing our own sense of self-worth, our wife provides that for us. We borrow it from her. Not only are we going to have to deal with these fears internally and ask the question, who am I if my wife rejects us? We have to now address that. This is going to happen publicly. This is going to become undeniable, and it's going to put you in a position that is utterly impossible to hide from. This is the worst-case scenario. And the truth is, it has nothing to do with the marriage. The marriage is simply revealing what was already there. It's bad enough that the marriage is failing. Now this has to be exposed publicly. This is catastrophic for the male psyche, for the masculine identity. So the core fear here that's driving the desperation, the panic, is it's not just losing your wife and your family. That's the mask that we're putting on it. But the true fear is that the world is now gonna see the man, the world is now gonna see you as you secretly feared yourself to be all along. When those fears were contained internally and nobody saw them, you were able to hide behind the veneer of your life, it was manageable. But the divorce makes these internal fears— the world's going to see them now. This is the core driving fear. And of course, this feels humiliating. This feels exposing. This feels catastrophic. Because in your current condition, it is. This is an existential threat to who you are as a human being. This is not a man losing a wife, which you will get over, by the way. You will love again, you will experience happiness again, you know that deep down inside. But this is not, this is not what's going on. The desperation is not because you want to save your marriage. The desperation is because this is, this is an existential threat to who you are as a human being. And ultimately, if this continues, there's no psychological hiding place left for you. So the real problem here, and we have to understand the problem to come up with the solution, is you've outsourced your identity. You've outsourced who you are as a man. You've outsourced your masculine identity to your wife's validation, to your wife's attraction, to your wife's approval, and to your wife's choice. If she's validating you, if she's sexually attracted to you, if she's offering you approval and she's choosing you, you feel masculine, you feel selected, you feel like a man and you feel happy and you feel safe that none of those issues that are deep down inside that truly have never been addressed within you are ever going to have to be dealt with personally and they're certainly never going to be revealed to the world for the world to see. But here's the problem, right? Your internal sovereignty has been abandoned totally, totally. It is gone. Whether you feel validated, attractive, whether you feel approved of, whether you feel safe, whether you feel competent, confident, competent, whether you feel valuable as a human being is now all been outsourced to your wife. Every little bit of it. Your entire existence as a man has been placed upon your wife. You have completely abandoned your internal emotional sovereignty, emotional sovereignty, and your emotional regulation has also been outsourced as a result because when she's validating, you're stable. When she's attracted to you, sexually selecting you, so on and so forth, you are emotionally stable. So the fact of the matter is you're an inherently unstable man that your wife has now been put in a position of being the regulating stable force. It's not her responsibility to stabilize your nervous system. It's not her responsibility to provide your internal sense of self-worth. It's your responsibility. None of these things belong to your wife— validation, attraction, approval, choice— none of these are your wife's responsibility, yet all of this weight weight has been placed on her shoulders. And now, now, as it inevitably has become too heavy for her to carry, you're asking her to carry another mile. So let's talk about the emotional dependency dynamic that is going on here so you can actually emancipate yourself, set your friend— set yourself free from this and to start to show up in a way that your wife will be attracted to. So here's what's going on. If she validates you, you feel worthy. If she validates you, you feel attractive. If she validates your competency, you feel competent. And when she does this, stability returns to you as a man. The public humiliation or potential humiliation is removed and you feel safe, you feel stable. But how much of that stability and safety has actually been provided by you and how much has been provided by her? It's a complete complete role reversal. We all understand that emotional safety needs to be provided by us to our wives. But guess what's going on here? Our entire, entire emotional safety as men is being provided by our wives and we're given none of that back in return. We're taking everything from the relationship and we're giving nothing back. So what happens here is what's happened, right? If she withdraws from the relationship, if she says, "This is too heavy for me to carry. This is a load that I can't be responsible for," the man's identity collapses, is what happens, which is what's happening. He's losing himself. He's collapsing. This is why the panic sets in. This is why the desperation sets in. This is why a level of urgency has shown up in your life that you've never experienced before because this is total identity collapse. Your entire nervous system has been tethered to her reactions. Your entire stability is tethered to her reactions. If she responds well today, your nervous system is regulated. If she behaves in a way that you can't interpret, don't understand, or appears negative to you, you fall apart. You literally have no ability to regulate yourself as a man. You have no ability to stabilize yourself as a man. You're entirely tethered to her. She is entirely responsible for you. You are dependent in every sense of the way, every sense of the word. And let me ask you, is that attractive to her? Do you think you being completely and totally dependent on her and her being completely and totally responsible not only for her reactions and stability, but also for your reactions and stability. If she act— if she is unable to regulate herself, then that is going to set you off, and now she's got a double whammy to deal with. The weight that you're placing on your wife's shoulders is catastrophic. It's phenomenal. It's a weight that you are unable to carry as a man, yet you've given it to her. So here's the critical distinction here, right? Like, her feelings about you, they reflect— they, they, they say nothing about you, right? As we've said, we've— as men, we determine that the— how she interacts with us, whether she selects us, period, whether she chooses us sexually, whether she's attracted to us, whether the relationship's working. We internalize that per personally and we decide that that says something about us, right? If she rejects you sexually, that means we're unattractive. If she rejects the relationship, that means we're incompetent. It says nothing about you. Her reactions to the relationship are her preferences, her emotional state. There are many women I'm not attracted to. Does not mean they're ugly. It says everything about me. How she reacts to you, how she reacts to the relationship, it says everything about her current emotional condition, about her current nervous system regulation, about how she's interpreting the situation. It says absolutely nothing about you. Yet again, we invert that and we think that her reactions say everything about us. We take her, we take her feelings and her reactions and her preferences and we turn them into a verdict, into a judgment, and we internalize them. Catastrophize them. They are not objective verdicts on your value, your masculinity, your attractiveness, and your worth as a man. They are none of those things. And until you can separate your value from her, from her valid— validation, until you can separate, until you can separate your masculine identity from her nervous system regulation, your attractiveness, until you can accept separate who you are and what you're worth as a man, your value, from her nervous system, which you have dysregulated, by the way, which you have destabilized, by the way, until you can accept, until you can separate these and you can regain a sense of emotional sovereignty, you are utterly a slave to her emotions. You are utterly dependent. You are utterly addicted to her validation. And you're not choosing her. You need, you need her. So, so let's move into the solution. This role inversion must be reversed. This role inversion must be reversed. It's backwards right now. What she desperately needs from this marriage is you to validate her. She desperately needs you to ground her. She desperately needs emotional leadership from you. She desperately needs you to provide her identity. Everything that you are demanding from her right now, that when it's removed, you move into collapse. This is what she's been needing from you all along. But instead of giving that to her, you've taken it from her. And now that weight is too heavy for her to carry. You don't understand why she's leaving. This is simple. She desperately needed validation, grounding, and emotional leadership from you. Instead, you took validation from her. You took emotional grounding from her. You made yourself dependent on her regulation to establish whether you're a regulated man or not. And I say this not to shame you or to embarrass you or to guilt you, but to show you the path forward because this can change now. This is a choice. The question is, who am I as a man? That's the question I'm posing to you today. Are you a man that takes everything from your wife that you should be providing from her and then throws your toys out of the pram when she can't carry the weight that she was never meant to carry in the first place? Or are you a man that regains his emotional sovereignty and learns how to regulate himself, how to control himself? So the dynamic in the relationship currently is validate me first as a man, then I can show up regulated. Validate me as a human being, validate my value, self-worth, give me confidence, wife. Give me stability. You give me stability, then I will show up stable. Give me everything I need, wife, to be emotionally self-regulated, and then I will show up regulated for you, and I will give you back the things that you've given me. This is utterly emotionally exhausting for her. This is not her role. This was never her role. Her job is not to carry you. Your job is to carry her. And again, Who am I as a man? This is the question. I am a man who carries the weight of the relationship, not the other way around. So what happens when this role inversion and dynamic is going on? Well, he cannot regulate himself internally. You completely become completely incapable of self-regulation because if she has a bad day, or she says something to you, you just fall apart. You have no ability to control yourself. If she indicates that she wants the marriage to end, then you just completely fall apart. So what she learns is that she has to regulate what she says to you because she's still, even in the collapse of the marriage, even in extricating herself from this responsibility, you're piling even more of the responsibility on her that she's looking for. This is an opportunity here, right? This is not an indictment. This is revelation, and revelation is opportunity. You're, you're seeing the man now that she's seen all along. So your confidence becomes completely conditional on her. If she sends you a text with an X at the end of it, you're completely, you're very self, you're confident, you're happy, and you're having a good day. If she sends you a text without, or an SMS message without an X on the end of it, you completely fall apart and you lose all of your confidence. You've not only outsourced these things, you've destabilized yourself to the point that the tiniest thing, the tiniest thing will set you off. In a massively disproportionate response. Your self-worth becomes completely conditional. Your competency, how you feel as a man, becomes completely conditional, and your emotional state as a whole becomes completely and totally externally controlled by your wife. You are a total slave. You have 100% outsourced your internal authority, your emotional stability, and your regulation to a creature that is inherently unstable. You have tethered yourself emotionally as a man to a situation that is inherently unstable. And when your entire existence is dependent on the emotional stability of an inherently unstable emotional source, there's no path forward. This has to change. This is not optional. This has to change. So here's the fix, right? A healthy man, a healthy man that is attractive to a woman, that is sexually selected by a woman. And let me tell you, attraction is not physical. It's— attraction is behaviorally based. A woman is attracted to behavior. A healthy man generates confidence internally. He generates his self— sense of self-worth internally. His regulation is internal and his stability is internal. It is independent of me. It is independent of her. It is independent of your day trading account. It is independent of your job. It is independent of how much hair you have on your head. It is independent of your investment portfolio. It is independent of your career status. Well, any of these things are dependent on any of those things, you are emotionally captured. You are controlled. You are inherently unstable. You have given up your own, or you your own autonomy and your own sovereignty. You are now a captured individual. The healthy man is independent of approval, independent of rejection, and independent of external validation. You, you generate these conditions internally. None of these should be coming externally. Only, only once you are independent of external approval can your wife actually start to feel emotionally safe around you because you feel secure, safe, confident, valuable, have a sense of self-worth, even if she calls you every name in the book, even if she's with another man, because that simply— none of these things, none of these internal conditions which you all crave, by the way, this is why. This is such a desperate situation for you because you want these things so badly that you're willing to go to great, great, great, great, great, great lengths to get them. So let's, let's ask the question again. Who is he if she no longer chooses him? Who are you if she no longer chooses you? Well, the truth of the matter is you are potentially the first authentic version of yourself ever. Because when you understand this stuff and you go, right, I can see now that this, this marriage collapse, this marriage breakdown is actually diagnostic of a fact of the fact that I've been emotionally captured, that I've been emotionally imprisoned, and that I am actually, I actually have zero emotional autonomy or sovereignty. And I'm not acting in a way that's authentic to myself. I'm acting in a way that produces— or I think produces— controls, manipulates, and produces the responses in others that actually regulate me, that allow me to feel what I need to feel. That's not the authentic version of you. That is you— that is a you— that is a version of you desperate to get approval from somebody else and is willing to sacrifice everything of themselves to get that approval. Nothing authentic in that at all. Zero. So when we started this call today, the, the, who is the man she no longer chooses? It's a man in full collapse, a man whose identity has been destroyed. But here's the truth. It's potentially, if you choose it, it's the first authentic version maybe that you've seen of yourself in your lifetime. And it's a version, it's an authentic— most men will never see the authentic version. They have no idea who they are. They have no idea that what it feels like to be almost, to be emotionally sovereign. So who is the man she no longer chooses? Well, he is the man who is forced to confront his dependency issues. He's the man forced to confront his insecurity issues. He's the man who is forced to come face to face with his lack of sovereignty and his emotional immaturity. Here's what this is revealing. Here's what this breakdown in the marriage is revealing. The revelation, the reveal, and why it's a gift is because it's revealing that you are emotionally dependent, insecure, you lack sovereignty, you're emot— you have emotional immaturity, you have no ability to self-regulate yourself. Are you happy with that? You happy with being that man? Do you think that's attractive? Do you think she finds that attractive? She was never going to choose this man, and she was never— she wasn't choosing this man. She was staying with this man out of fear, out of her own insecurity, out of her own dependency, out of her lack of emotional sovereignty, and out of her emotional immaturity. You were two starving people coming together saying, 'Let's share our food.' So this crisis is not an existential threat to who you are as a man. It's revelation. Revelation is not destruction. It's opportunity. This is the greatest opportunity that you have ever been faced with in your life. This is, this is an opportunity for you to experience true freedom, true emotional emancipation. To really actually find who the true authentic version of you are. Because until you can show up as who you choose to be independent of the validation of others, you're going to show up in a way that you think conforms to what they need for you to get that validation. You're an emotional captive. You're a slave. You're a prisoner. Imprisoned by your own needs. So what is real masculine strength? We started this call with your wife leaving. Actually, the challenge with that is it's the destruction of the masculine identity and it makes us feel weak as men. What's, what's the antidote to this? Well, real emotional strength, which your wife is going to choose every day of the week. And let me tell you, this is, this is Beyond rare within this world. We're in an epidemic right now in the Western world. Real masculine, masculine, masculine strength actually is emotional sovereignty. It's internal regulation, it's internal authority, it's identity independence of independent of outcome. Do you do what you do because that's who you are, or do you do what you do because it provides validation and creates an environment where you don't actually have to face any of the things that you are scared to face. Because if it's the latter, you're not independent, you're not free. What is masculine strength? It's stability under rejection. This is what none of us have right now. There's no stability under rejection. How do you, how do you know if you're strong? It gets tested. If you can remain stable, if you can find stability in the situation that you are in right then you have true emotional sovereignty. Real masculine strength is determined in a sense of self-worth independent of external validation. I don't have worth because my wife tells me that I have worth. I have worth because I know it, because I know who I am. And I don't need you to tell me that I'm valuable, and I don't need her to tell me that I'm valuable, and I don't need the comments in YouTube to tell me that I'm valuable, and I don't need Facebook to tell me that I'm valuable. I know that I'm valuable, and I genuinely believe that I'm valuable. And when you arrive at that place, external validation, although desirable, is utterly unnecessary. And when you are able to develop that sense of internal validation, you go to the relationship needing nothing. I need nothing from you. Now, that's not to say you want nothing. But when you, when you have real masculine strength, which we're going to call emotional sovereignty, you are able to go to the relationship needing nothing. You go as a giver. Not a taker. Right now, because you're emotionally captive, you don't have the sovereignty, you're going to the relationship as a taker, not a giver. So what does that mean? It means you transition from choosing instead of needing. You choose her instead of need her. You need her right now, and you can say you're choosing her because that means you can avoid everything we've just talked about, but The truth of the matter is you need her. So here's the key learning point. If you take anything away from this, take this: a woman feels safest, right? Emotional safety. We all get that. We all understand that. A woman feels emotionally safe, the safest, and the most attracted to you when she is chosen by you, not when she is needed by you for emotional survival. The only one fooled by this current situation is you, brother. She knows that you are not choosing her. She is oxygen right now for you. Your emotional survival is dependent on her, and you are not choosing her because you have the choice to not choose her because you need nothing. You're choosing her because this is survival for you. And the truth of the matter is, do you want somebody to be with you because they're emotionally dependent or financially dependent on you? Or do you want them to be with you because they choose you because they love you because they need nothing from you? They love you because of who you are. Only when you need nothing from the other person can you choose them for who they are. Only when You need nothing from the other person. Can you validate the other person and say, "I choose you as a human being because I have nothing to gain from this. I choose you because I choose you. I choose you because I love you, not I choose you because I need you." Now, the two can exist simultaneously. You can love the person, but how is she possibly going to feel chosen when it is absolutely obvious to everyone involved that this is an addiction for you. You're not choosing her. This is an emotional dependence. So this neediness, by needing, not choosing, through a lack of emotional sovereignty or a complete absence of it, creates pressure on her. It creates suffocation. It creates dependency. Like, how, how would you feel if your wife only came back to you and said, I'm only coming back because I I love your money. I'm only coming back because I love the house that we live in. I'm only coming back because I don't want to damage the children. You want her to choose you. You want to be chosen, yet you're not choosing her because you can't. So what does sovereignty create? Safety, attraction, and respect. Simple. So here's the difference between needing her and choosing her. Dependency says, I need you to regulate me. Now, you may not have articulated it that way or told or seen it that way, but hopefully after this presentation you can see that now. You're showing up not— you're showing up from a position of need, from a position of weakness. I need you to stabilize me. I need you to regulate me. I need you to validate me. I need you to tell me that I'm competent, that I'm desirable, that I'm attractive. Sovereignty speaks from a place of I'm stable without you. I regulate myself. I'm responsible for my own regulation, and I choose you freely because I have the choice not to choose you. Love without sovereignty is dependence. It's all it is. Love without sovereignty is dependence. And sovereignty without love is loneliness. Sovereignty without love is isolation. True love is sovereign, because only when you can choose her freely can you truly choose her. And while you're dependent emotionally on her to regulate you, you're not sovereign. And if you're not sovereign, you simply do not have the ability to choose her. You simply don't. The deepest, deepest desire we have as human beings is to be chosen. The most valuable you can make yourself as a man is to put yourself in a position to choose. I tell people all the time in this program, I reject them. I tell them, I'm not working with you. I don't want to work with you. Why? Because I've created an environment where I have emotional sovereignty. I don't have to work with you. If I have to work with you, then it completely devalues the relationship with the men that I choose to work with. I work with you because I choose to. I work with you because I want to. I work with you because I love you, not because I have to. If I'm financially desperate and I have to work with everybody who's willing to give me money, then I'm compromised. I no longer— I'm taken captive and I no longer have emotional sovereignty. So what actually changes a man? Let's get into the nuts and bolts. The foundation here is emancipating yourself emotionally. What does that mean? It means reclaiming your internal authority. It means being able to regulate your nervous system yourself without the need for external intervention. It means understanding your sense of worth. It means developing your own confidence independent of other people, situations, or outcomes. It means becoming emotionally sovereign. It means becoming internally grounded. It means becoming stable regardless of outcome. I do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. The choices I make, I choose because I choose, not because I have a necessity. So let's make some important distinctions here because we can go off the rails with this and take this in the wrong direction very quickly if we're not careful. Emotional sovereignty does not mean coldness. Emotional coldness. It does not mean not caring. It's not arrogant. It does not mean just detaching from the situation and go, whatever, whatever, I don't give a crap, whatever. It doesn't mean not caring, and it doesn't mean not going into isolation. Of course we care. Of course we have a profession, a preference. Of course we want things to go in a certain direction, but it does not matter. Is the point. Of course I want you to like me, of course I want you to respect me, of course I want you to see me in a way that's flattering to me, but if you don't, I— my sense of self-worth comes from how sincerely did I try to help, how honest was I in actually creating this presentation. Did I create this presentation to manipulate, or did I create this presentation to help? If I created this presentation to help and I genuinely know inside myself that's what I did, but the whole world sees this as a manipulation, doesn't, doesn't matter to me. My judgment comes from my intention, not the response from the world. Of course I would like the world to respond to my motivation, but if it doesn't, I I'm good with it. I won't collapse. I won't change direction. So what emotional sovereignty does mean, it means becoming emotionally stable. It means becoming grounded in an identity that is unshakable, unchanging. Right now, the answer to the question of who, who am I as a man if my wife rejects me, you don't know the answer to that question. But the true answer should be, who I am as a man, if my wife or my children or my finances or my employment or my body or society rejects me, is the same man if they all accept me. It's the exact same man. There is only one man. There's one man on this call on Monday morning. There's one man at church Sunday morning. There's one man with his wife. There's one man with his children. There's one man in the grocery store. There's one man when he's alone. There is only one man, one unified sovereign individual that does not change his identity or his behavior dependent on the environment, because different environments require different men to show up to get the validation that is needed. Or in other words, an integra— an integrated single man who is confident, independent of the validation feedback loop of his environment. And here's the kicker. If you can master this next sentence here, you can get your family back. It's like, it's loving without dependency. It's love. It's loving her without needing her. It's a difference between need and want. When you are able to detach the dependent emotions from the love, now you are a man loving. This is, this is true love. This is true unconditional love. Right now, your love for your wife is highly conditional. And she knows that. So new realities come from asking new questions. So let's ask some better questions, right? So stop asking the question, "Why doesn't she choose me?" which could take many forms, right? We're asking questions, "Why is she behaving this way? Why is she doing that? What do I need to do to get her to choose me?" All of these things. And start asking the question, "Why have I abandoned choosing myself?" The only person who's left anybody here is you've left yourself. You've abandoned yourself. You've abdicated responsibility for your own life, and you've rejected yourself. And instead of looking at that and asking the serious question, which is, why have I abandoned choosing myself? You've projected that onto your wife and you've asked the question, why has she abandoned me? Because you taught her to behave that way. When you abandoned yourself, you showed her that that's how you want to be treated. So our core learnings here, our core learning points: most men mistake the external validation that they're receiving for identity. I'm secure, I'm competent, I'm confident. None of that is coming from you, it's coming from external validation. That's not your identity, that's somebody else's. Spoonfeeding you their identity. The collapse of this marriage exposed this identity dependency. This is the gift. You can curse this and you can try to make it go away if you want to, but this— the collapse of this marriage, it serves one purpose, is to expose this dependency. And when you, when you can accept that, and when you go, this is the purpose of this, it's not— it's for no other reason other than to re-establish emotional sovereignty within yourself, then every aspect of your life improves. Every aspect of your life. This is what is holding you back everywhere. If you're anxious, this is why. If you're suffering from depression, this is why. If you got any kind of disorder, this is why. Simple as. Real masculinity begins when the internal identity becomes internal. And I would go even further than that. I would say it becomes unified. It's one man in every situation. I've already said it, I'm not going to repeat it, but one man in church, one man in the pub, one man with his wife, one man with himself. The healthiest love, the love that we crave, comes from Putting yourself in a position to choose, not in a pla— not coming from a place of emotional survival. Again, we're reiterating it here, but you're not choosing your wife. You're simply, you're simply in a state of emotional survival right now. Healthy love comes from choice. You have to put yourself in a place where you're capable of choosing her. A sovereign man chooses his wife, he does not emotionally require her to exist. And again, this is where the majority, if not all of us, are. We're requiring her emotionally, we are requiring her to exist emotionally, we are requiring the relationship to exist. We're not choosing it, we're not choosing the relationship, we're not choosing the marriage, we're not choosing her. I challenge you to change that today. So this is our conclusion. A man becomes emotionally dangerous when his identity depends on being chosen. He becomes emotionally safe when he can love without needing another person to stabilize his existence. Again, we all understand emotional safety, right? Emotional safety is the key to reestablish in this marriage. The emotional safety is established when he puts himself in a position to love her without needing her to love him back to stabilize his very existence. That is the key, brother. That is the key to everything. So that's it for this. I'm going to jump over to, I'm gonna jump over to the Q&A now.