Why Men Obsess After She Asks For Divorce

Alright guys, so what I want to talk about today is, is I'm going to answer the question and give some solutions to why am I obsessed with every text, every look, every conversation since she asked for divorce. So as I said, I've been getting, doing a lot of one-to-ones and this is coming up all the time, just obsessed with everything. And if the conversation is good, you're good. If the, if she's cooperating, you're good. And if she doesn't, then everything just falls to crap. So let's address this today. Let's come up with some solutions. So the problem we're facing here is when divorce is spoken in the relationship, either through words or through actions, then we shift into an over-analytical, obsessed, almost addicted personality type where we're constantly analyzing her text messages, her looks, her tone shifts, conversation, body language. All of a sudden everything that she does, every single movement, every single interaction takes on massive and significant consequences. So we literally get into the paralysis of the analysis situation, and what we're actually doing here is we're searching for hope. Obviously, we're searching for that reassurance, and we're looking for signs that will— she'll stay, because that's, that's what we want, right? And we're just looking for that, that reassurance. So the emotional state in when this is going on is constantly changing. Your emotional state is constantly changing. It is totally tethered to not even her behavior, to more specifically your interpretation of her behavior. So you're moving through, you go into these massive mood swings of hope into panic, from devastation to relief. And it can happen in just a snap of a finger. One minute you are hopeful that the relationship is recoverable, and then something happens. Could be the tiniest little thing, like all of a sudden you get a very short text message from her, or you get a very functional message instead of a warm message, and then we go from hope to panic, panic to devastation. And then she says something, and then a few minutes later or a day later, we're back in a state of relief again. We're just on this complete emotional roller coaster that really, quite frankly, obviously isn't a very pleasant place to be. So why does every interaction feel so emotionally significant? Why does it carry so much emotional weight? Well, it's because the marriage has become completely fused with your identity at this point. It's not, her leaving the marriage is not so much about you losing your wife. It— well, she's in the marriage, she, she's providing a lot of resources for you emotionally that you're now going to have to produce for yourself. And it's also going to bring you to a place where you're going to have to look at some things that, quite frankly, you really don't want to have to look at. So when divorce is put on the table, And again, we're saying divorce here, but many of you, you're running this parallel, parallel in your life with finances, with business, with other, with other senses of self-worth and emotional sovereignty that are equally threatening you. So not only your self-worth is not only attached to the marriage and your wife, your, your level of competency, how you feel, how you feel as a man, your masculine identity, is not only attached to your wife in a very unhealthy way, it can also be simultaneously attached to a business that's producing an income, or an investment portfolio, or some other mechanism that's producing that masculine identity that's very important to you, that's telling you that you're competent. And now this is all getting threatened simultaneously. This is not just a marriage that's being threatened, this is absolute existential threat to who you are as a man. So when your wife threatening to leave causes self-worth— so which these things, quite frankly, you haven't had to deal with, right? As long as the marriage is going fine, you feel all of these things— competent leadership, you feel masculine, you feel a sense of adequacy. And that also carries through into other things such as your investment portfolios, your— all of those things. But now this just literally just— it becomes existential. This is— it's not just identity threatening, this is a catastrophic event. This is, this is your wife holding the nuclear codes in her hand and getting to press the button. Because not only is this an existential threat to identity as a man, it's also publicly humiliating, right? So if this goes through, and it's like, again, these things It can just be tied to the marriage, but like typically this, this, there's a chain of events here. So if the marriage fails, then our public image fails, our public level of competency fails, our other sources of competency that we're calling on to get that self-worth, that competence, etc., such as, such as our investments. All of these things, they're going to be utterly devastated. They're going to be obliterated. And it brings about, of course, a fear of ridicule, shame, both internally and externally. You feel, you feel ashamed of yourself, and you also feel the pressure of that publicly as well. It's not necessarily that you are in reality being shamed, but here's, here's, here's the truth: perception is reality. If you feel like this is going to reflect on you publicly in a certain way, then for all intents and purposes, it it is because it's going to affect you internally the same way. If you feel like you're being ridiculed publicly, if you feel like there's shame publicly, or you feel like you're being seen as incompetent publicly, that's going to affect your nervous system in exactly the same way as if all of those things were true. Now, all of these things, they're, they're not true. They're simply not true. That these are mental constructs that we create as men But it doesn't matter, because if they feel true, they are true. So true. So the obsession that we're experiencing here is not just about losing our wife, it's actually much deeper than that. It's actually about losing our identity. And when you understand what's on the table here and what's been threatened, then that's why we obsess so much, because the consequences are so high. There's— they're all so big, the stakes are so high. And if this actually goes through to its conclusion, this, this is going to be such a destabilizing and dysregulating event that it's potentially non-recoverable in your mind. This is how it's being pitched, right? This is how you're selling this to yourself. This is a non-recoverable event because not only, as I've said, is it attacking the marriage and threatening the marriage, it's also spilling over into many other simultaneous identities that are all actually going into building who you are as a man. Your entire masculine world is about be destroyed. And this is really important because if you don't understand what is actually going on, and, and why you're feeling like you're feeling, and why, why those feelings are causing you to act the way you're acting, you're going to continue to act like a 3-year-old with a hand grenade, you're going to be very dangerous. So ultimately, we've talked about this before, I'll mention it very quickly. Reality is created through the TFAR cycle— thoughts, feelings, actions, results. Your thoughts create actions. If you feel like your marriage is an existential threat to your identity, that causes actions to stop that from happening because that's simply unacceptable. That's a loss that cannot be sustained. So when you feel like if this divorce goes through, it's an existential loss, that feeling will produce an action or series of actions. To stop that from happening. Unfortunately, in this situation, those actions are going to be controlling, manipulative, self-serving, etc. Not because you're a bad man, but because the consequences of what's going to happen if this plays out, it's just too— they're just too severe. You have to do this at this point. Those, those controlling, manipulating, manipulative, suffocating actions, of course, are going to produce results within the relationship. When you, when you associate such catastrophic devastation to this happening, and then you produce the according actions that go with that, that produces results within the marriage that are going to cause a very negative response from your wife. And that response is then going to feed back into a feedback loop. When you, when you create, when you take actions to create suffocation, that create destabilization, that create quite frankly, obsessive-addictive behavior within you. Your wife is not going to want any part of that. And then she's going to pull away further from the relationship, not because she wants out of the relationship, not because of any other reason other than you have engaged in a course of behavior that has caused— that's really forced her to withdraw even more. You're now going to reinterpret that back into the relationship. And you're now going to have more thoughts of devastation, and you're going to You're going to get in this cycle. This, this is why marriage reconciliation begins in your mind. It begins in your head. It doesn't begin out there in the world. It doesn't begin in a script. It begins in you. Have to find a new way to interpret the situation in a positive, empowering way that's going to allow you to create feelings that produce actions that pull your wife towards you, not push her away. A man who says, give me the script, tell me what to say, tell me what to do, which is where many of you are when you arrive here, is not understanding that the results is merely a byproduct of thoughts which produce actions. Or thoughts produce feelings. T, thoughts. F, feelings. A, actions. We want to, we want to bypass the thoughts and the feelings aspect of this cycle and go straight to actions. But without, without addressing the thought cycle, which is negative, which is why, you know, we talk about unconditional positive regard, etc., because you have to find a way to produce these empowering thoughts, or else you're going to have this disempowering feelings which are going to produce monkey with a machine gun results. We just simply can't start in the actions phase. It has to start up here with the man. With the mind. So what this tells us when we experience these catastrophic feelings in this, quite frankly, addiction— at this point, when we look at the obsessive behavior and the actions that are associated with it, this is far closer to addiction than it is love. What that behavior tells us is the size of, of the underlying dependency that is present, right? The size of the emotional reaction reveals this: the size of the underlying emotional dependency. When you look at the level of instability that this is causing, the level of the— level of emotional dysregulation that's causing you, which is for most of you is going to be 10 out of 10, right? 9 out of 10, 8 out of 10. It's going to be very, very high. This is diagnostic of the cause of the underlying dependency. Then the solution is we have to address the underlying dependency or we cannot solve the problem. So obviously what this tells us, the reactions, is it tells us obviously that losing the wife is painful, but it also— losing identity feels catastrophic. This is why this is a catastrophic feeling. So why do you become hypervigilant in this situation? Why do you— why do you— why does everything become so significant? Things that would have meant nothing. Something as simple as she didn't put an X at the end of a text message, or she was functional, just functional. "Can you please pick the kids up today?" And that's it. Instead of, "Can you please pick the kids up today? Looking forward to seeing you later." Instead of interpreting that she's just busy, we just put so— we become hypervigilant in every single action that she takes. Well, the reason is because the nervous system has become inherently unstable at this point. You've destabilized yourself and dysregulated yourself by applying such catastrophic meaning to what's going on that you have inherently destabilized your nervous system to the point you really can't function normally anymore. So what's happened here is we're actually— the situation is revealing the wife, what the role that the wife has played all along, right? So now that, now that her role is a regulating force within your nervous system has been removed. We're actually getting to see what was happening, right? The emotional regulation. She was your emotional regulator. She was a stabilizing force within your marriage or your life, even. She was nervous system anchor. Now, what her emotional withdrawal exposes is the lack of, of, exposes the emotional dependency or the lack of emotional sovereignty that was present all along. It's very easy to feel like we're emotionally sovereign and we're making choices when the thing that we need to make those choices is present, and it's easy to make those choices. But when that stabilizing factor is removed, then we're forced to come face to face with the fact that we're actually emotionally dependent on the, on the marriage, on the wife. And as you can probably start to see, this is a very, very unattractive position to be in. A man who's become dependent on his wife is not an attractive man sexually. She's not going to choose him sexually. She's not going to choose him for any other reason other than at this point she feels sorry for him, to be honest. This is where the 'I love you, but I'm not in love with you anymore' That, that's where this is coming from, right? The man is now completely emotionally dependent upon the woman to where she can no longer feel the masculine presence in him. She fundamentally has taken the masculine role within the relationship and has now become the regulating, stabilizing force while you assume a position of dependency. Should be the other way around. And that's why she, that's why she can't be attracted to you right now, because attraction is behaviorally based and we're attracted to the We're attracted to emotional sovereignty and strength. We're not attracted to weakness and dependency. Who is actually— who, who here can honestly say they're attracted to weakness and dependency? Who is attracted to emotional independence and sovereignty? Sovereignty. So what you have, what you're experiencing now in this situation is complete dysregulation, complete instability, complete emotional chaos. Who can relate to this? So what's happened here again is a complete role revert, role inversion within the marriage. All along she's been stabilizing you, when in truth she's needed you to stabilize her. You viewed yourself as the rock or the oak tree or the shelter from the storm, but you've only been able to do that because she's been stabilizing you. As soon as— as you are seeing now and experiencing, she removes that stabilizing support from you you actually get to see what, what you are, which is not a rock, it's jelly, unfortunately. But we can change that very quickly. So the stabilization that she's been producing within you, that has come at her expense. That's a bill that she's had to pay. So that's come at her own nervous system stability and her own emotional stability. She's dysregulated herself, she sacrificed herself, she's given herself in order to stabilize you, because when that's a better option than allowing you to destabilize, because then you're going to destabilize the marriage even more. So a great example of this is like in my own journey. For years, my wife just, she just gave in to me, not, not because she agreed with me, because if she didn't give in to me, then I could become quite verbally aggressive. My behavior, I wouldn't I wouldn't direct the aggression necessarily towards her, but I would punch a hole in a wall or a door. I'd scream, shout, I'd act in ways that were utterly destabilizing to her. So if she challenged me in a way that I didn't like, or she challenged how I was behaving, she knew that that would destabilize me. And if she destabilized me, the consequences of that was significantly greater and more unbearable than just sacrificing her own nervous system, just sacrificing her own self and her own stability to provide that stability for me. Because ultimately, that is the way she has a quiet evening. That's the way she has a nice day. And this is why many of us, we go, well, I don't fight in my marriage. We don't fight. We don't— like, that, that's because she's completely destabilized herself in order to keep you stable. That's not a good thing that you're not fighting. That's not a good thing that you're not having arguments, not at all. But here's the thing, right? Well, she's doing that. Well, she's destabilizing her own nervous system, dysregulating herself and sacrificing her own emotional stability to keep you emotionally safe for her. She's getting the bill for this. And she was never designed to do this. The female psyche was never designed— femininity was never designed to stabilize a man. It was designed to be stabilized by a man. And this is why she doesn't find you attractive, because you've assumed a feminine role. A woman is going to be truly attracted to a masculine man in a masculine role, engaging in his masculine behavior. And that's not Andrew Tate, red pill, tell the bitch to go screw herself. It's, I'm stable and you can depend on me. You can get your regulation from me. You can get your stability from me, not the other way around. So now what happens when she says divorce? She stops regulating you and she redirects that energy towards regulating herself. All of the energy that she was putting out going into keeping you stable is now gone. She's withdrawn it and taken it from you and she's gone, "I can't do this anymore. I have to stabilize myself." So, what you experience is a very destabilized version of yourself and that gets— that comes across as a woman who stopped caring about you, who doesn't care about the marriage, who doesn't care how you feel, who just cares about herself now. And it's just not true. She's just taken back what she, she never owed you in the first place, which you shouldn't have been taking in the first place, quite frankly. And out of necessity, she's redirected that stabilizing energy towards herself. And now she's done that, you, you're all up, you're all bent out of shape and upset about that. And, and instead of recognizing the gift that she's given you, which is to see your own emotional instability and your own lack of emotional sovereignty, you just gaslight her and you put it back on her and go, she's the problem. So what happens to the man in this point? Well, he just goes into emotional freefall. For maybe 20 years or more, he has had no need to learn how to regulate himself, and he's had no need to learn how to stabilize himself because he's outsourced all of that and his wife's done it for him. Now she's refusing to do that. He's He's just in absolute freefall. Doesn't know how to stabilize himself. It's why you're here. That's what we're learning, right? It's not a case if you just go, "I get it, Cody. I need to stabilize myself." Well, you have never had to do it. Your mother stabilized you. Then your wife stabilized you. Now, to some extent, I'm stabilizing you. But this isn't— that's unsustainable, right? Like, the, the goal here is not to— for me to go fishing, buy, catch a big fish, and then feed you all. It's to teach you how to fish yourselves. It's how to reg— it's to teach you how to become emotionally sophisticated, emotionally sovereign, emotionally independent, and self-regulated. How to actually do that. That's the goal here. That's the outcome that we're all looking for. Your goal is to become a self-regulated man. When you learn how to regulate yourself, the emotional freefall ends. When the emotional freefall ends, the obsession, the dependent and addictive behavior towards your wife goes away because it's no longer necessary. You're able to provide everything that that behavior you think is going to get you for yourself, and you become attractive again because you move back into a true masculine role, which then frees your wife up to enter into a feminine role. She doesn't have to be your mother or your keeper anymore. So the revelation here is what you are now experiencing. You're experiencing the man yourself that she's experienced throughout this entire marriage. Like, now she's removed her emotional regulation from you. You're experiencing the emotional instability within yourself that, that she was stabilizing. You're You're becoming emotionally exhausted. How many of you are exhausted with this? How many of you just absolutely beat, beat down, worn out? The exhaustion of trying to interpret everything, trying to understand everything, trying to desperately get that stabilization and regulation. It's utterly exhaust— exhausted. And how many of us can feel that now? Well, that's what she's been living with all along. And, and honestly, that is what she's trying to escape from and get in, in leaving the marriage. The emotional exhaustion that having to regulate you has caused her is what she's actually looking to escape from. And when you pursue her the way you do in order to become regulated again, you actually double down and increase more of the exhaustion that she's trying to get away from in your attempt to not experience the exhaustion that you're causing. In your effort to sort this out, you, you're just doubling down on the problem. You're experiencing a completely dysregulated nervous system. The feelings that you're having right now, when functioning properly, are designed to be present maybe 15 minutes every 3 days. You go into the hunt, you see an animal, and you go into the hunt. You need that heightened state of alertness, that heightened state of obsessive behavior, of obsessing over every little detail. If you're being pursued by an animal, or if you're in a fight or flight situation, or if you're on the hunt, then this is desirable. And the nervous system is designed to experience that maybe 15 minutes every 3 days. I don't know exactly, I'm making it up to some extent there. But it's going to be significantly, significantly less than what it is. Your nervous system is not designed to be in this state of heightened dysregulation 24/7. It exhausts you. And now you're experiencing a lack of emotional safety. It's just a different form of emotional safety. You need— your form of emotional safety is you need to know that you're not going to be exposed publicly. You need to know that your competency is not going to be threatened. Publicly. You need to know that there's going to be no— you need to feel safe and that there's going to be no public shaming. You need to feel safe that your investment portfolio that is established in your identity is going to be maintained. You are desperately clinging to the emotional safety, just in a different way, that your wife is desperately searching for as well, that you have failed to provide for her. And when we look at it like this, it becomes very easy to understand the significance of emotional safety. If all of these pain points that you're desperately trying to avoid were removed immediately, you'd be happier than a pig in slop. Every problem that you experience would go away immediately once the emotional safety is there, that you're not going to have to experience any of the identity collapse and the consequences that go with it. That, that's the power of emotional safety. If I could take away all that pain now, you'd go away and probably not come back because you'd have no need to come back. This is the emotional safety that your wife is desperately seeking from you that you, that you're still not providing. You're still looking to take. So again, why do you obsess over every interaction? Well, because you're desperately seeking regulation. You're desperately seeking some stability. You're desperately seeking reassurance that everything's going to be okay, that you're not going to have to deal with any of the consequences consequences that you're potentially facing right now, and you're desperately looking for emotional grounding. So every interaction with your wife becomes completely emotionally loaded and it becomes survival orientated. It's not about having a conversation, it's about, am I going to survive? You, when you're in this state, you are, you are in 24/7 fight or flight. You're obsessing over every detail because you're in fight or flight. Now let me ask you a question. Which one of those two states is going to reconcile your marriage? Is the fight— is fight going to help, or is flight going to help? Is going into an aggressive state of fight and deciding you're going to fight with her, or it's just running away and abandoning the situation? Like, these are the two options that— there is no other physiological response available to to you. This is why this is so important to understand, because you have to change your state. You have to get out of the fight-or-flight state, because while you're in that fight-or-flight state, you are literally a monkey with a machine gun. You have no— there's no option available to you other than damage. You're going to fight with her, or you're going to flee the scene and abandon her. There's not— what, give me another option? So that's why these tiny signs become the tiniest of signs. An X on an SMS text message gets interpreted as hope, as catastrophic failure, as relief, or as doom. None of those things. So why this actually makes the situation work when the stated goal is to save the marriage is because this emotional dependency that you're in right now— don't worry, I'm going to give you the solution to this. I know this bloody seems like end of the world right now, but we've got to understand the problem before we can move to the solution, or else you just, you just will reject the solution offhand and go, just give me the script, Cody. You need to see why that's not going to work first, right? So this emotional dependency that you're in right now, and this is what it is, you're in dependency. You're not in a marriage where you're choosing to love this person, you're simply dependent on them. This creates suffocation. You're suffocating her. It creates pressure and it creates— it's emotional collapse. It projects your emotional collapse onto her. So as we said earlier, right, fundamentally, we can— in this simple— in the simplest form we can put it, the reason she wants out of this marriage is because she's suffocated and she needs some relief from the pressure. That's it. Everything else just is just a mechanism to achieve that. Some, some women do it through an affair, some women do it through alcohol, some women do it through just silence. Some women do it through restraining orders. Some women do it by letting you stay in the house and going into a bed, different bedroom. Some women do it by going into silence and stonewalling. None of those things mean anything. They're just the mechanism that she's decided to use to relieve the suffocation and pressure. This is the core underlying problem. And when you want to address stonewalling or an affair, anything, right? Anything you want to choose, the mechanism that you choose. And when you want to address that, basically what you're saying is, Cody, these spots on my face are causing the measles. These spots on my face, Cody, are causing me to have measles. No. All of these spots that are on your face, i.e., the blemishes that are in the marriage right now, whatever that is— an affair, stonewalling, whatever— pick poison are the physical outpouring, the physical manifestation of the suffering, suffocation, and the pressure that she's experiencing within the marriage. Or in other words, the affair or the stonewalling is the spots, the suffocation and the pressure and the emotional collapse that you're now projecting onto her is the measles. It is the cause. And if you Most all men, when I start working with them, want an ointment for the spots. They think, well, give me the ointment, give me the cream, Cody. What do I do to get rid of these spots on my face? Nothing. Remove the pressure, get rid of the measles, and the spots will go by themselves and they'll never come back. Remove the suffocation, remove the emotional collapse and pressure, and all of the symptoms that are causing you pain right now go away. But when you're in a position of emotional dependency, you're creating more of it, right? It's like saying, "This fried— I'm fat, Cody, and I hate it, and this fried food is causing me to be fat." Okay, well, what did you have for lunch? "I had fried fish." Okay, well, what are you having for dinner? "I'm having fried chicken." What do you think's going to happen? So what she experiences when you're in this dependency is an inability for her to self-regulate herself around you. You're making it impossible for her to feel stable, stable. You're— she's experiencing an inability to experience her own emotional sovereignty. Which means I'm going to do what I want to do because I want to do it. I'm going to choose what I choose because I want to choose it, not because I'm dependent or because I'm afraid of what the consequences. And it's creating emotional imprisonment for her. So when you're in this obsessive state, which, you know, I'm not going to repeat it again, how you get there, this is a hostage situation. You are holding her emotionally hostage while simultaneously preventing her getting the very things that she needs to come back into the marriage. So again, your dependency is, is blocking her ability to stabilize herself. So the core, the core psychological problem that's going on, your identity right now is fully integrated with her emotions. It's fully integrated with her reactions, and it's fully integrated with her behavior. So what that means is her autonomy— and remember, emotional safety is the solution here, right? What do we define emotional safety as? What percentage of herself can she be? What percentage of her time? Um, emotional safety could be stated as her personal autonomy. Can she be 100% of who she chooses to be 100% of the time without any threat or any threat of destabilization? No is the answer to that question right now. So when she moves towards that autonomy, that's totally threatening to you. That's totally destabilizing to you. So the very thing that is required for you to save this marriage, which is emotional safety, it becomes the threat to the marriage for you. This is the paradox of men go, well, I've created emotional safety, Cody Butler. That, that, that is literally an impossibility while you are still in a dependent state. You cannot do it because that emotional safety is totally threatening to you. It's an existential threat to you as a man. So he unconsciously needs her emotional state to stabilize his own state. So what's the big misunderstanding here, right? Most men think that emotional detachment, which is required for this. This is if we want a minimum viable solution here, it's emotional detachment equals giving up. Or that emotional sovereignty, which is becoming independent of your wife, be, or really anything really. I do, I don't depend on you to feel secure. I don't depend on my wife to be stabilized. I'm able to stabilize myself. Independently of anything external to myself. That is true. That is true sovereignty. But what we feel as men, if we move to this state and go, I don't— you're basically saying, I don't need you. That gets translated into, I don't care. And then you have to understand, this is the refinement of language. This is emotional sophistication. I don't need you and I don't want you are two different things. I don't need my wife to stabilize me. I don't need my wife to feel like a man. I don't need my wife for me to move in a fully masculine identity of leadership. I don't need her for any of those things. I want her to be there, and I want her to approve of me, and I want her to respect me, and I want her to validate my sense of self-worth and competency. I want all of those things. But if she withdraws that, I don't collapse. And in fact, I don't change at all. My emotional stability is entirely independent of my wife. Entirely independent. And if she left me, I would hate that, but I would not think of myself as less of a man. I would hate that if she left me, and I would want to change that, and I would want her to stay, but I would not feel incompetent if she left me. I've, through this process, managed to detach my identity from external sources. So the reality here is that emotional sovereignty, man, the true masculine identity, is the only path to genuine care. The only way you can, the only way you can genuinely care about your wife is to be detached from her. Dependency is not love, it's addiction. And dependency is, it's just nervous system survival. One of the The highest value that we seek as a human being, the highest, the highest desire that we want to have fulfilled is to simply be chosen. I want to be chosen. You want to be chosen. You want her to choose you. She wants to choose you to choose her. Well, the only way you can truly choose somebody is to not need them. If you're dependent on somebody, I can't, I can't choose you because I have no choice. I have to have you for my own stability. But if I'm emotionally sovereign, sovereign, and I have the ability to not choose you, then when I choose you, that is— that's, that's a free choice, and that's unconditional love. And she knows right now— many, many of you make the claim, if she could— if I show her how much I love her, if I show her how much effort— you're not showing her, you're not choosing her, you're showing her how dependent you are. You're showing, you're showing her how much you need her. You're not showing her how much you want her. You know, if you want to know how prevalent this is in society, I mean, it's like the book, isn't it? The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. It's a best-selling book. There's a whole movement around it. The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. That's, that's, that's how, that's how prevalent this is. And let me just clarify that, like, it's not that I don't give an F. I do. It's not that I don't give a flip, I do. It's that I choose about what I give an F about. I, I have the ability, because I'm emotionally sovereign now, to choose what I give a flip about. If you just go, I don't give an F about anything, I don't give a flip about anything, I'm independent of you and everything, that's, that's arrogance and that's ego. And it's you doing what you need to do to emotionally survive, going back to sleep without actually addressing any of the underlying psychological drivers that caused the problem in the first place. The strong man, the masculine man, says, it's not that I don't give a flip, I do give a flip. The difference is I get to choose what I give a flip about. I get to choose that. I don't just blanketly go, I don't give an F about anything. No, that's called arrogance. So what actually begins to eliminate this obsession that we're in right now? Well, it's— we've said it, right? It's building that emotional sovereignty. It's like, I, I find, I find my worth in who I am internally, irrespective. So I cover this actually in my book, The Cut the BS: A No-Nonsense Guide to Happiness. This, this was one of the first things I ever discovered on my journey to happiness, right? I was very unhappy. I learned that until I can find my sense of self-worth internally, until I find my value internally, until I find who I am and my confidence internally, I'm basically a ship without a rudder on the ocean. I'm going to get blown around. You have to find that sense of self-worth internally. The easiest way for me was through spirituality. For me, I find my sense of self-worth in Christ. Nothing externally to me can challenge that. Now, I'm not saying you have to do that. This is not an evangelical message. I'm just telling you that my pathway to it was that I find my self-worth in that, and that allows me to completely detach from finding independence out in the world. Once my true sense of identity, self-worth, competency, all of these things are found in that source internally, and that nothing in the world can take that from me, then the world becomes a safe place to operate in, operate in again. But right now, that role is fulfilled with— is being fulfilled by your wife, you know. And I don't care what it is that you find inside of you that you need to find, that your ship is anchored to. That allows you to become a worthwhile human being in your own mind, regardless of what's going on, going on outside of you. But until you find that, you are going to be a ship blown around by the wind. That's all there is to it. When you find that internal stabilization, whichever it is for you, that becomes nervous system regulation. It starts to build emotional safety independent of her reactions or independent of the reactions of others. It doesn't matter. I'm a very public figure and I'm going to get criticized a lot. Anytime you put yourself into a public position, you're going to get criticized. If my internal stability was dependent on a lack of criticism or people saying nice things, or if I was completely destabilized— everybody said something about me that I don't like— then I would be very limited in how much good I can do in the world and the amount of scope that I have and how far I can actually progress, right? I would have to create an environment that was devoid of criticism, which means my potential shrinks from whatever it is down to a tiny marble size. I have to become completely insulated. I effectively have to wrap myself in bubble wrap, cotton wool, and go sit in the corner and tell people, stay away from me, don't criticize me. But in my situation, I've been able to separate criticism from identity, self-worth, and emotional regulation because I found my internal self sovereignty elsewhere. Doesn't matter to me. Now again, don't confuse this— don't confuse the separation of attachment as not caring. Of course I care. I don't like being criticized. I don't like being called names. I don't like that, and I would prefer for it not to happen. What, what I am stating here is that I am able to separate my nervous system regulation from that external behavior. I would, I have a preference that people are nice, but if they're not nice, it doesn't destabilize me and it doesn't challenge my identity, self-worth, and emotional regulation. The same needs to happen for you here. Your emotional stability needs to be separated from her behavior, from her moods, or from her outcome. Or to put it another way, you have tethered your stability to an inherently unstable creature. You have made it almost impossible to win this game and almost certain that you're going to lose. That's what's happened. So here's the critical test. If you need reassurance, validation, or emotional stabilization from her, which is driving this obsessive behavior, then this is the canary in the coal mine. This is the diagnosis that you are not emotionally regulated. This is the diagnosis. You are not emotionally regulated. That is the problem. Let's see, let's even make this more impactful. Let's bold it. This is the constraint within your marriage. This is the single point of failure within your marriage. Everything downstream is after this, until you learn to internally self-regulate, until you learn how to become emotionally sovereign, or at least start to move towards that. It's a goal, like, we're never truly going to become that. Of course I'm somewhat dependent. Like to say I don't give a crap about, or I don't take actions based on what other people think, of course I do. Of course I do. I mean, the biggest one, my most recent one, is I bought a car that I probably wish I hadn't bought because my ego couldn't handle driving a 2006 Mazda. I needed people to see me as successful, if I'm being honest with myself, and that's why I bought the car, right? If I'm being honest, we never actually truly completely detach from that necessity for external But it's a goal, right? And we can go from being 100% dependent right now to being, you know, I'd say I'm probably 20% dependent on external validation and moving towards 0%. But to go from 100% to 20% makes me— it's significant enough to where I'm emotionally stable most of the time. So what we're saying here, man, is that when you develop emotional sovereignty, It changes the dynamic of the marriage. It creates the emotional space that your wife is so desperate for. Hopefully you can see that now. It just instantaneously removes the emotional suffocation. It allows her a sense of autonomy, allows her to emotionally regulate herself or experience emotional regulation. It allows her to experience sovereignty. Sovereignty is the most valuable thing, the highest thing that we value. None of you are going to tolerate having your sovereignty taken from you. You show up on this call voluntarily, and as long as I give you the choice to show up, I get very little— I will get no pushback from you, and you'll show up call after call, you'll watch video after video. But if I mandated it and said you have to show up, you push back against that. Why do you push back? Like, why do you push back on something that's mandated when you would have chosen it voluntarily anyway? It's not the situation that's causing the issue, it's the fact that I've challenged your sovereignty. Sovereignty is one of the highest values we hold as a human being. And when you, when you are not allowing your wife to experience that emotional sovereignty because you can't, you are, you are fundamentally, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. You're just, you're sabotaging your marriage. And until you, until you actually learn how to become emotionally sovereign, you're not going to have a true relationship. She may come back out of fear, she may come out back out of emotional pressure, she may realize that yes, she's experiencing pressure and suffocation within the relationship, but now she's left the relationship, she's actually going to experience even more pressure and more suffocation when she goes out into the wild by herself again. And she comes back because the pressure you create is less than the pressure the world creates. She may come back for that, but again, she's not choosing you. She's dependent on you. So this, this, this sovereignty that you engage in, again, reduces pressure, suffocation, and catastrophic reactions, and it begins to create emotional safety instead of emotional dependency. So what real love actually looks like when you choose to love your wife and she experiences true love from you, what does it look like? Well, it starts with you supporting her sovereignty. Or in other words, we can— this is another way, we're just getting very philosophically into emotional safety right now. It starts with you not collapsing onto her nervous system. It's loving her without emotionally imprisoning her. If you want to leave, if my wife wants to leave, she can leave without me emotionally collapsing. If she wants to leave, then she's free to leave without emotionally hostage-taking or me projecting all kinds of guilt onto her. She's— she has freedom to stay or go, up to her. That's when you actually start loving the person. It's caring for that person without emotional dependency. I love you because I choose to, not because I need to. And it's stability without control. I'm able to stabilize myself without controlling you to create that stability for you. So in other words, this is, this is the crux of it, right? You fix the man, you fix the marriage. You fix the man, you fix the marriage. Write it down. Put it in your billfold, your wallet, put it in your car, put it on your— put it on your wall. The marriage is unstable right now because the man is unstable. She's unstable because he's unstable. She desperately needs leadership and masculine authority. And what that looks like is stability under pressure. So let's just make these important distinctions because some people go off the deep end here and go, so I'm just supposed to— and they'll just go, I don't give a shit, basically. So this is not emotional sovereignty. Does not mean not caring. I don't care, I don't give a crap, I don't give an F. It doesn't mean giving up, giving up, I've given up on the marriage. No, this is, this is fighting for the marriage at the very highest level. It's easy It's easy to fight for the marriage when that fight is playing on about— playing out on a battlefield you're happy to fight, which is you looking for reassurance for your own dependencies. It's much harder when the battlefield is detachment. It's not emotional coldness to give her the space that she desperately requires right now to, to recover from the emotional suffocation and pressure. When you create that space, when you create that space through functional communication instead of emotional collapse, it's not coldness. When you reduce communication down to a functional minimum, it's not coldness. It's recognizing that she needs relief and providing it for her. It's actually, and it's the most loving thing that you can do at this point, and it's the most productive thing that you can do for your marriage. Men all the time go, well, This feels wrong. If I, if I reduce communication down to a minimal level, a functional level, then she's going to see that as me being cold and not caring. No, she's going to see it as you becoming emotionally stable, is what she's going to, or she's at least going to experience it as you becoming emotional, emotionally stable. As long as you don't fall into this alpha male, red pill, I don't give a crap attitude, do what you want. I don't give a crap. If you go into that, yes, that's cold. That's manipulation. It's not withdrawal. It's not, it's not going, I'm going to withdraw from the relationship. It's knowing when to tactically withdraw to reduce pressure. It's knowing when to tactically pull back to give her the space that she needs to see that yesterday you would have pushed in this situation to gain certainty. She's expecting that from you. Today you pull back tactically because in your mind you're going, you're starting to recognize, yesterday I would have needed her to react a certain way for me to feel secure and to be regulated, and I would have pushed and caused more pressure. Today I recognize that that's my responsibility, and I'm going to pull back and I'm going to stabilize myself. And it's not detachment from the relationship. Detachment is not detachment from the relationship, it's detachment from the necessity to be validated from the relationship. You— I am utterly attached to my relationship with my wife. What is detached is my sense of self-worth. I'm very attached to my wife. I'm very attached to my family. What I am not attached to is the validation that it brings. So again, simple stuff, right? This means becoming internally regulated. Developing a grounded identity, becoming emotionally stable, reducing pressure, loving without dependency. Who thinks this— a woman's going to find this attractive? Do the math. Decide for yourself. Test this. If you think that a man that's grounded, regulated, emotionally stable, strong, precise, able to be emotionally sophisticated within a situation and know when to pull back to reduce pressure, loves his wife because he loves her, not because he's dependent on her, who is a rock Do the math. Is she gonna be attracted to that man? Probably. Or is she going to be unattracted to that man? Probably. Test this stuff out. Don't believe me. Put this stuff to the test. So as I always say, let's wrap this up with new questions. Better outcomes start with better questions. So here's our question section, right? Stop asking the question, how do I get reassurance from her? How do I get confirmation that this is going to work out and start asking the question, how do I become emotionally— how do I become emotionally independent of her reactions? Or how do I become emotionally stable, completely independent of her reactions? Many of you do so well, do you do so well for so long, and you go through the program and you you work on yourself, and then in an unrealistically short expectation period of time, she goes, "I appreciate what you're doing, but it's too late and I'm getting a divorce anyway." And in that moment, we just totally collapse and we validate to her that actually none of this is true, that we're still emotionally dependent on her. It's not who you are when things are going well that she's looking to, that she's testing. It's who you are when you're under much extreme emotional pressure. And if you're showing signs of emotional stability and then she says, "Thank you very much, but it's too late for this relationship. I wish you well in the next one," and you collapse, your, your stability was nothing but performative. It did not exist, and she just exposed that it did not, did not exist. This is why the only response when that happens is, "I understand why you would feel that way, and I don't want that decision, but I support your decision." "I understand I don't want that outcome, but if that's what you choose, I support that outcome." Most men cannot handle what I've just said. They go, "So I'm agreeing to it? No, I have to fight. I have to—" If I agree to her and tell her that it's over, then she's just— she wants me to fight. No, she doesn't want you to fight, dude. She wants— she does— trust me, she does not want you to fight. She wants you to stabilize. That's what she wants. And if you can— when she tells you that she wants to continue and persist with the pathway to divorce and you are able to remain stable, steadfast, and grounded in face of that, then you're communicating more to her in that moment than however much change you've made and however much performative change you've presented and projected into the relationship up to that point. So that's it, man. So the core takeaways here are going to be: obsession is a symptom of emotional dependency. It's the canary in the coal mine. It's the diagnostic tool. If you are obsessing over stuff, it's It's because you are emotionally dependent right now. Hypervigilance reveals nervous system instability and deregulation. If you're hypervigilant, it's because your nervous system is entirely dysregulated right now. Again, now we've got a diagnosis. Now we know where to go to work. Emotional sovereignty is not abandonment of the marriage. It's stability. And it's the only— it's the healthiest way to love. The stronger your internal sense of self-regulation becomes, the stronger your emotional sovereignty becomes, the, the more detached you can become from the need for external validation, the less suffocating the relationship becomes to your wife. That stability creates space. That space creates emotional safety, and the emotional safety is what saves the marriage. That is the chain of custody. There is no other pathway to this. This, there's no other pathway to saving your marriage authentically other than creating an environment where the pressure externally, if she leaves the marriage, is greater than the pressure staying. Or in other words, to control and manipulate her back into the marriage. If that's you, see, you wouldn't want to be here. You're going to have a very unhappy marriage even if you kill your wife or you get your wife back. If you kill the divorce, and quite frankly, I don't really want to help you if that's where you are. I'm here to help men that want to move into a strong masculine role of leadership that involves emotional sovereignty, which then in turn creates— in turn creates stability, that creates safe space, that creates safety, that creates restoration. That's it for me, man. Jump over to the Q&A and stop the share. Hopefully that helps somebody.