Your Wife Shut Down: This Is What It Means
In this live workshop, Cody Butler argues that emotional safety is the foundational, invisible structure of a marriage and that its presence or absence determines whether a relationship can be saved. He defines emotional safety as a condition where a partner can be 100% themselves without fear of consequence, and explains that it is a measurable, fluctuating percentage rather than an all‑or‑nothing state. Butler outlines core principles: safety is a condition, not an intention; people leave environments, not people; the nervous system reacts before the mind; unsafety is learned instantly while safety must be earned over time. He provides diagnostic signs of lost safety (walking on eggshells, avoidance of topics, silence, lack of correction) and a “truth test” to identify complete breakdown. The workshop then shifts to identity, describing five compromised identities (Defender, Prosecutor, Avoider, Victim, Excuse‑maker) that manifest under pressure and sabotage safety. He stresses that communication is merely an expression of identity, so changing identity is essential. Rebuilding safety requires three pillars—consistency, self‑regulation, and humility—implemented through five non‑negotiable behaviors: pause before responding, lead with curiosity, separate the person from the behavior, repair quickly, and reward truth. He contrasts intensity with predictability, emphasizing that long‑term track records, not short bursts, create trust. Finally, he gives a 7‑day assignment to practice a hard conversation without violating safety, and closes with a call to action for divorce‑prevention sessions. The overall message is that men must adopt an evidence‑based, identity‑focused, nervous‑system‑aware approach to restore emotional safety and thereby save their marriage.
Chapters
Cody here, and in this live workshop, I'm going to share with you why emotional safety is the number one factor in whether your marriage can be saved, why without it reconciliation is virtually impossible, exactly what emotional safety is and is not, and everything you need to know to rebuild emotional safety with your wife, even if there's been an affair or broken trust. By the end, you'll have a clear diagnostic outline so you know exactly where you are in the process of building emotional safety, as well as an action plan on what to do next. The two most common questions that I get asked all the time are, is it possible to save my marriage? And if it is, how long is it going to take? Well, those, the answer to both of those questions exist in this, in this class today. So can you save your marriage hinges on, can you reestablish emotional safety? And how long is it going to take? Hinges on how long is it going to take for you to re-establish emotional safety. So emotional safety is the invisible structure behind your marriage. If you've got a great marriage, it's because you've got great emotional safety. And if you have— if your marriage is falling apart, it's because the emotional safety is falling apart. So again, this is, this is across the board. This is, this is Leadership 101. Anybody that you're leading— and your marriage is the primary application for leadership, whether it can be business, children, employee, and anybody really, any situation, the degree to which you're succeeding is going to come down to emotional safety. So this really is the most important topic. So emotional safety is not about being nice. It's not about instilling nice feelings into people. It's about whether or not people around you can tell you the truth without fear. So let's define this so we have an absolutely crystal clear gold standard definition for what emotional safety is. And we're going to define it as emotional safety is the condition where the other person can be 100% of themselves 100% of the time without fear of consequence, reprisal, or punishment in any way, shape, or form. So the degree to which you're able to achieve that, or the degree to which that is destroyed, is the level of emotional safety your wife or the person in front of you has. So if she feels like she can only be herself 10% of the time and she has to hold back or censor herself 90% of the time, then her emotional safety has been diminished to 10% of what it could be. She has 10% emotional safety. If she can be herself 50% of the time but 50% of the time she has to hold back, or she's walking on eggshells, or she's afraid of landmines, then she has emotional safety 50% of the time. So 100% is an ambitious goal. Like, even in a great situation— not that I'm the gold standard, but I, you know, if I had to estimate, and this is me grading my own homework— my wife probably has 80% emotional safety with me. So in reality, it's probably 50%. Because I think I'm better than what I really am, as do we all. We have a tendency to really overestimate ourselves. So this is, this is not a 'I did that, Cody.' Like, I hear that all the time, right? 'I've done that. I've done that, Cody. I've established it.' Well, this is an ongoing thing, and it's not a 'you learn it and you're done.' So a great example here is when we, we were really figuring out how to communicate emotional safety. Like, just— I was talking to Justin a while back, and he goes, 'Look, it took us probably maybe 8 months to really figure out how to communicate this effectively. And I agree with that. And the reason I say that is because it's not a case of you just— right, I'm going to establish emotional safety and it's done. It's like you do the best you can do, and then you're always continuously and never-endingly trying to improve the situation. And again, like, we've talked about emotional safety many times before, and there are workshops and recordings available where I've taught that, but this hopefully is, is an improvement on that. So it's constant and never-ending improvement. It's not a case of going, I've done that, I've ticked that off the list. So, but every failed marriage is the result of destroyed emotional safety. Every disengaged employee, every distant child Every woman who shut down, every client who shut down, every coach that you were working with that shut down and stopped working with you, it was because of the destruction of emotional safety. So emotional safety collapsed before the visible failure at the level— it collapsed at the level of emotional safety. Before your marriage collapsed, emotional safety fell away for first, before anything collapsed in your life that involved another person. Emotional safety was the foundation that collapsed prior to it. So let's get into some principles here. So section number 1, first principle about what emotional safety actually is. So this is what we want to write down, and if we're taking notes, are the core first principles, because we want to understand what drives the principle so we can apply it to any situation in any, in any domain, i.e., work, family, wife, children. So the first core principle, or first principle, is emotional safety is a condition, not an intention. Your wife doesn't care what your intention is. If you're unsafe, you're unsafe. If you're, if you're causing your wife pain, it doesn't matter that your intention is not to cause her pain. It doesn't matter that your intention is not to cause her harm. If you're causing her pain and harm, that's the condition that she's in. So this is, this is critical. And it's not just emotional safety. This is across the board. We're looking to create conditions, not demonstrate intentions. Nobody cares about your intention. Very few people wake up in the morning and go, I have a bad intention. I'm going to do damage today. I'm going to hurt my relationship with so-and-so. I'm going to damage my wife. Virtually everybody shows up with good intentions. Not enough. We need to create good conditions. Core principle number 2, which follows on from this: people do not leave relationships, they leave environments. They abandon the environment, or in other words, they abandon the condition. This is, this is why we hear phrases like, 'I love you, but I'm not in love with you,' or, 'I love you, but I'm leaving anyway.' I'm leaving the environment is what they're saying. And if you, if you don't have the level of emotional sophistication to understand that she's leaving a condition, she's not leaving a person, she's not leaving a relationship, you are going to cause problems. When, when your wife leaves you, it isn't personal, it's environmental and it's condition-based. So the third principle that follows on from this is the nervous system decides before the mind explains. So we've all, we've all had situations where We know we've got a difficult situation, a difficult conversation coming up, whether it's with an employee, an employer, a wife, a child. You know, maybe you've had a fight with your wife and now you've got to go home and you have that feeling inside of you in your stomach before you walk through the door. This is your nervous system. Your nervous system gives you a feeling and then the mind seeks to explain it. So your wife is reacting to the condition that's been created, the environment that's been created. This is causing a reaction in her nervous system, a feeling, and then her mind seeks to explain what that feeling is and where it's come from. All she knows is, I'm in an environment I don't like, I'm in a threat environment, I'm in an unpleasant environment. She knows that through her nervous system, and now the mind goes, okay, well she puts two and two together, right? And goes, okay, well, I had a fight with my husband and I'm in this condition, therefore he is causing this condition. In the same way that a child touches a hot stove and realizes that the nervous system responds first and goes, pain, and then the mind goes, where did that pain come from? What caused that pain? And then a relationship is developed between the hot stove and pain. So this is why we need to act on her nervous system, not explain to her mind what is going on. The mind only seeks to explain what the nervous system is already experiencing. We have to create the conditions and the environment that the nervous system is safe. And principle number 4 is that unsafety, or lack of safety, is detected faster than safety is earned. For your wife to learn that you are unsafe is a hell of a lot quicker than her learning that you are safe. And we have to accept this. This is, this is why time— this is why most men fail, or a lot of men fail, because of unrealistic time frames. It takes a second, a fraction, a nanosecond to establish unsafety. It takes a long time to re-establish safety after that has been, has been established. The example that I give is my son when he was very young. I put a, a helmet on him. He was on a scooter or something, and I accidentally clipped his cheek. I pinched his cheek. He was 2 years old at the time, and I hurt him. And what he learned— his nervous system learned that putting the helmet on was unsafe. And every time after that, for months, when I went to put the helmet on him, he goes, don't hurt me, Daddy, don't hurt me, don't hurt me. It took a— it took an awful long time to unlearn the behavior that it took a fraction of a second to learn. If we don't understand this, we have a completely unrealistic expectation of what's going to happen in your marriage. Your wife has been hurt. Her nervous system has associated that pain with you, and now she has to unlearn it through the re-establishment of what we're talking about today— emotional safety. It is going to take her some time to— for her nervous system to recalibrate to the fact that you are safe. If you don't have the patience If you don't have the emotional sophistication to understand that there's no bypass of this, there is no bypass, there is no way to bypass this mechanism, you will not succeed. And notice the categorical nature of that language: you will not succeed. There was no amount of language that I could give my son to tell him to put in the hack the helmet on was safe. He had to experience me and safety and the helmet in the same environment 50 more times before he— his, his nervous system recalibrated. So let's look at diagnostics here. So this is practical. If any of these are present, and this is, this is not an all-inclusive list, an exhaustive list, this is just some things. If you are experiencing any of, any of these then emotional safety is gone. So your wife filters herself. She feels like she's walking on eggshells around you. Or in other words, there's hand grenades or, or landmines all throughout the, the conversation. She avoids certain topics. We don't talk about that with Cody. You know, there, there'll be some of you right, who go, well, we don't talk about Donald Trump around him, or we don't talk around so-and-so around him, because, because you're so unregulated that the only way you can be managed is if you— if those topics are completely avoided around you. We all know those people, right, where we say, hey, we don't know, we don't talk about that around that person. Don't be that man. That is the destruction of emotional safety. She stops correcting you. Or anybody stops correcting you. You'll see it in the Q&A section of these calls sometimes. It's just like, you know, myself or whoever's coaching, whether it's Alex or Justin, or just give up and go, okay, well, if that's what you believe, go for it, bro. Like, that's fine. If that's what you want to do, do it. This is the correction stopping. This is because you have destroyed emotional safety in that relationship. And it's not necessarily— when I say emotional safety, it's not like I'm threatened, it's just pointlessness. When she doesn't care anymore, it's not that she doesn't care. You've trained the nervous system that talking to you is pointless. Having this conversation with you is pointless. This is all the destruction of emotional safety. So when this happens, you're not dealing with an attitude, you're dealing with self-protection. My son didn't have an attitude with me when I went to put the helmet on. His nervous system was protecting him against me because inadvertently I trained him that I was dangerous. So here's the truth test. Ask this, and you have to answer these questions. You have to answer these questions. The answer is I don't know or nobody. If you say I don't know or nobody, then this is the complete destruction of emotional safety compounded with ignorance. Who in my life cannot correct me safely? Who has stopped bringing problems to you? Who tells me nothing is wrong but acts distant? And we can see this in our own lives as well. How many times has somebody come to you, your wife possibly, and she's gone, what's wrong? And you go, nothing, or don't worry about it. Why? Because it's pointless talking about it. You know that it's not going to be resolved. Your nervous system has learned that talking about this is either A, pointless, or B, painful, or C, dangerous. So the rule here is non-argument does not mean that there is peace. Silence and a lack of argumentation is often resignation. I talk to men all the time and they go, well, me and my wife, we never argue. It's like, that is not a good thing. That means that she cannot correct you. It means she stopped bringing problems to you, and it means that she feels like talking to you is pointless. It means if your wife is not arguing with you, it means that emotional safety has been completely destroyed. It is not a good thing. Healthy relationships argue. If you think if there's no arguing, it means that the other person is in complete agreement with you, and do you— that, that is not possible. There are no two human beings that are in a complete agreement on everything. What a lack of arguing means, and what silence means, is that you are emotionally volatile and, and that the issues cannot be brought to you. And if they cannot be brought to you, they cannot be resolved. So let's move on. So Section 2 is the real enemy. It's your identity, not communication. Most men believe that if I fix my communication, emotional safety will follow. This is not a communication program. This is— you do not need to learn how to communicate better. This belief is false. Communication is an expression of identity. If you're a volatile human being, your communication will be volatile. If you're disagreeable, your communication will be disagreeable. If you're compassionate, your communication will be compassionate. And if you couldn't give a damn, your communication will communicate that you don't give a damn. Your communication is nothing more than an expression of your identity. When you— the goal is to change the identity so that when you communicate, the new identity is expressed. If your identity is compromised, then communication becomes warfare. If you're an aggressive person, your communication is going to be aggressive. And in this instance, your communication is literally warfare. You know, and many men will say— question I commonly get is, well, how do I communicate to my wife when she won't talk to me? It's like, well, a better question is, what, what, what would I communicate to her if I was in her presence right now? What would I communicate If she did give me the time, the answer is you will communicate your identity. So the only smart question then becomes, what is my identity? Well, there are 5 compromised identities. The first one is the Defender, and this is diagnostic. If you're not seeing yourself in these identities then this is problematic. Because if your wife does not want to be with you right now, then these identities are present in one or more forms. So the first one is the Defender: interprets feedback as an attack, needs to be right, escalates fast. Correction is not an attack. Feedback is not an attack. We ask the question, right? Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married? Many of you, the answer is you want to be right. And many of us are also escalators. How do I fix that? The second one is prosecutor— uses correction as dominance, keeps score within the relationship. Punishes emotionally. We heard it last week, keeping score. If I improve but my wife doesn't, then what? Well, that's keeping score, right? You keeping score of your improvement, and you're also keeping score of your wife's improvement. This is keeping score. This is the prosecutor. This is a compromised position and punishes emotionally. If I don't get what I want, I'm going to withdraw, or I'm going to sulk, or I'm going to whinge, or I'm going to complain, or some form of formal fashion, I'm going to punish my wife if I don't get what I want. The third one is the avoider. Withdraws, stonewalls, surrenders, and calls it peace. When you can't win it, when, when the argument is not going your way, you just, you just give up and go I don't want to fight with you anymore. I can't talk to you. I can't, I can't deal with this. And withdraws. This is avoidance. This is the avoider. Then we've got the victim. They blame a condition for the breakdown. It's not my fault, I've got dyslexia, I've got ADHD, I've got this, I've got that. Again, it just doesn't matter. You, you can, you can make any excuse you want, but remember, we're— it's— we're looking— you're training your nervous system. And if, if you have every condition in the world that is legitimate and you train your wife's nervous system that you are unsafe, you do— it does not get untrained by giving her the diagnosis. You are either safe or you are not. Her nervous system accepts you or it doesn't. And this is the same in a child. Past trauma. I understand now why I do what I do. It doesn't matter what— if you understand why you do what you do, it's about what is your nervous— what is your wife's nervous system being trained to If you're training her to feel unsafe around you, even if it is due to past trauma, it's game over. It just doesn't matter. And the fifth— the fifth compromised identity is the excuse maker. Yes, I did it, but I'm not responsible. It's not my fault. Shifts responsibility to others. Well, what about her? I don't feel emotionally safe with her, so what about her? This is the excuse maker. Blame shifting. So the goal here is for you to locate yourself in these identities. This is diagnostic. You can't fix what you don't know is wrong. We can't correct what is undiagnosed. So here's the first principle in this: your behavior under pressure reveals identity. When you're squeezed, what, what's inside of you comes out. So nobody loses emotional safety when things are calm. They lose it when tension enters. We don't learn who you are when you've had a good night's sleep, a full belly of food, and you just got paid. That is not when we find out who you are. We find out who you are, man, when you're tired, you're hungry, and nothing's going your way. That's when we get to learn who you are. Your identity is revealed in that environment. This is why pressure is a good thing if you're trying to re-establish emotional safety with your wife. This is what, this is what stage 4 is, which we talked about last week in the 7 stages to Heal your marriage. Stage 4 is the test. You will be tested under pressure because this is the only way identity can be truly revealed. So this is— now we're going to talk about the moment that emotional safety actually dies. Emotional safety doesn't die in the moment, it dies in the attack thought. So the emotional safety collapses before any word is ever spoken. It collapses when the attack thought happens. She's disrespecting me. He's challenging my authority, or she's challenging my authority. I'm being blamed for this. This is unfair. These are attack thoughts that are going to result in you— if, if in your mind you think she's disrespecting me, you're finished. This is why we talk about unconditional positive regard, because it's the only way to guarantee that the attack thought stops. Because once the attack thought happens, the damage is done. The game is lost before a word ever comes out of your mouth. So once the attack thought is accepted in your consciousness, your tone hardens, your curiosity dies, your defensiveness activates, safety leaves the room. You've now created a condition and an environment that is utterly counterproductive to your position. This is why when men say it's not fair or she's doing this, who cares, bro? Do you want to save the marriage or do you want to be right? We're not talking about what ideology should be. We're not talking about what a relationship should be in a fantasy world if she does this and you do that. We're talking about what is. We have to deal with reality. And you can ignore reality if you want, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. In the second that any of these compromised identities show up, you are actively destroying your marriage. You are actively sabotaging yourself. So here's the principle. The first principle is you don't react to reality, you react to the meaning that you assign reality. I may be genuinely trying to help you from my perspective, but you interpret it as an attack or an insult or disrespect. You are going to react to your interpretation of the situation. You're not going to react to the reality of the situation. You react to meaning. Now here's the kicker: meaning is 100% in your control. This is the difference between an emotionally sophisticated man and an emotional infant. The emotionally sophisticated man says, I get to choose the meaning. The emotionally infantile man says, she's disrespecting me. He's reactive to the meaning instead of choosing an empowering meaning. And the antidote to this is you've got to ask the question, what else could this mean? What else could this mean? I feel like I'm being attacked right now. What else could this mean? And you got to keep going until you find that meaning. Well, it could mean that she's trying to tell you how to fix this marriage, which would be an act of love, not an act of disrespect. We've neutralized the attack thought, and now we're going to create a different environment and condition. If she tries to help you help the marriage and you attack her, guess what she's going to do? She's going to stop trying to help you, and then you're going to— then you're going to interpret that negatively as well. So we need to understand that emotional safety is proof, not promise. I— there's no amount of times that I could tell my son I'm not going to hurt you, son. I had to prove him to— I had to prove it to him multiple times. I had to put his helmet on and clip it together however many times— 10, 20, 50, 100. I had to prove to him that I was safe. You don't declare emotional safety, which is What a lot of men do, right? They go, I've done that, Cody. I've told her she's safe. I've told her that she can talk to me. You demonstrate it repeatedly through behavior. This is why we started where we did. You are communicating to her nervous system, not her conscious mind. This is why scripts don't work. Letters don't work. Words don't work because those speak to the conscious mind, and the conscious mind is not the decision maker for her. Her nervous system is. Whatever her nervous system is experiencing, her conscious mind will find words to validate. So the formula to adopt is emotional safety equals consistency, regulation, and humility. Let's break it down. Consistency— same response today as tomorrow. No emotional roulette. You've got to be consistent, man. Like, the way— the only way you train the nervous system is through consistent repeated behavior. Right now, her engagement with you is a game of emotional roulette. 9 times out of 10, you might be completely safe, but the one time you're tired, you're hungry, you've had a bad day, or you're just— lack of self-regulation in that moment takes one time. If I'd have clipped my son's cheek again before his nervous system had reset, it would have extended the process by months. It's not the 99 times I do it right that trains the nervous system. It's the one time that does it wrong. Because here's the thing about the nervous system: it's not here to find pleasure. It's here to protect you from pain. It's here to seek out damage and keep you safe. It cares nothing about your marriage. It cares— her nervous system cares nothing about you. It cares nothing about her pleasure. All it cares about is her self-preservation. And if you demonstrate through a lack of consistency you're a threat to that, you are at odds with her nervous system. The second one is regulation. You've got to learn to manage your own nervous system. You've got to learn to regulate yourself. Many of you are a 3-year-old with a hand grenade, a monkey with a machine gun, and you've outsourced calm to others. Your calm is dependent on their— on their behavior. As long as Cody doesn't trigger me, I'll behave well on this call. As long as so-and-so doesn't talk to me about that politician, I'll be fine. As long as this doesn't get brought up, everything's good. Your calm is dependent on others meeting your conditions. This is not emotional self-regulation. This is outsourcing your regulation to others. And 3, humility. What's your willingness to be wrong? What's your willingness to learn? And what's your willingness to repair? Most of us have no willingness to be wrong. We don't. We want to be understood. We want to be right. Not— we don't want to be corrected. And our willingness to repair, in all honesty, is very low because Without the, without the willingness to be wrong, without the willingness to learn, there can be no repair. And this is why a lot of times, like, we'll do a one-to-one or a hot seat here, and people go, well, that seemed harsh. Well, no, it's like, because you've got to get the man to this place, you've got to get the man to this place, you've got to get the man to this place. Unless there's a willingness to be wrong, a willingness to learn, then there is no ability to repair. And without the ability to repair We're finished here. There's no conversation to have. The marriage is over. So here's the first principle, and this is a mistake almost everybody makes. Your wife does not trust your intensity. She trusts your predictability. Many men show up enthusiastic, full of beans, and go, well, I'm going to hit this with full intensity, and they hit it hard for 3 months and they don't get the result. And they give up. Why? Because they've mistaken intensity for trust. Anybody can behave themselves for a few months. Anybody can behave themselves. I, when I was, was in the restaurant industry for a number of years, and I would never give an employee a pay raise within 3 months because I learned after dealing with literally thousands of employees that 3 months was the period of time that people can behave themselves. After 3 months, you start to see the true personality come up. The, the real man, the real identity can be suppressed for— I've, in my experience, 3 months, and then it starts to leak out. Your wife is not interested in short bursts of intensity that you have— you're willing to fix this marriage. She wants predictability. And predictability is track record, and track record is established over time. Unless you're willing to play the long game, it ain't happening for you. Anyone who's telling you there's an emotional reset, or you can press this button, or do that, or say this— it's absolute nonsense. Prove it to yourself. There's no way for me to reset my son's nervous system after hurting him apart from extended periods of predictable behavior. There is no way to do it. To say anything else is to deny human nature. Anything else is to put yourself on a path of guaranteed failure. Guaranteed. Can you get results in the short term? Sure. Can you, can you get some positive momentum in the short term? 4, sure. But reconciliation requires predictability. Predictability requires track record. Track record requires time. So again, let's diagnose. Find yourself. The goal here is not to go, this is really interesting, Cody. The goal here is to find yourself in the diagnosis so you know where you are. Where you broke emotional safety. This is the audit. Where was the last time someone stopped talking to you? Where was someone goes, you're right, you're absolutely right, man, yep, 100%? Many of you will have experienced that with me in calls. I just go, yep, you're right, you're absolutely right, yep, yep, yep, yep, do it your way. It's because you've destroyed emotional safety. And again, it's not a masculine thing, it's not a manly thing, like, oh, I'm threatened, I feel unsafe in this call. Now I can handle myself, I can handle the call. I haven't just gone, oh, I don't want the confrontation, so I'm going to give in. No, I've stopped talking because it's pointless. You've proven that talking is a waste of time. You have no humility, you have no willingness to learn, you have no ability to accept correction. So the person goes, you're right, you're absolutely right, I can see that now. The last argument that never got resolved— well, we'll just agree to disagree. That's surrender. Surrender is not you win. Surrender is you're a waste of time, you're a waste of my time. That is what they're saying. You are a waste of my time. Or when was the last time someone said to you, you always do this, you always say that, you always resort to that, you always make excuses, you always say, you always blame, you always— is their nervous system recognizing the pattern in their body and then feeding the language, the vocabulary, back to you? You always do this, Cody. 'You always' is a dead giveaway for emotional safety. You've destroyed it. So the question becomes, what did it cost them to tell you the truth? Many of you— and we'll do some hot seats probably at the end of this, right? Or when we do one-to-one calls, it's like, for me to reach many of you, I have to be willing to risk confrontation. I have to be willing to risk argumentation, but that's because you're paying me and that's my job. You're paying me to bear a cost. You're paying me to push through and break through these barriers and tear these walls down with you. But it— quite frankly, if you weren't, I wouldn't. Not because I don't care, but because it's too hard. It's too hard. It will cost me too much, and the reward for me would be too little. So here's what most men discover in the identity exposure: they value control over connection. I'd rather control you than connect with you. And this is demonstrated in, in these statements, the need to be right. Do you— having a connection with your wife can be difficult. Connection is not necessarily agreement. Connection can be disagreement, right? Like, for you and I to connect we're going to have to bump up against each other. And it's like, this is who I am, Cody, and this is who— this is who I am as a person, and that this is who you are. And for us to actually connect, those two— those two worldviews that don't agree might rub up against each other, but that's connection. Can I accept your worldview? Or, or at least be— not necessarily accept it, but can I be in the presence of it, right? Like, I, I had this conversation with a mother two weeks ago To hear your son out is not agreeing with him. To hear him out is not agreement. To hear him out is not endorsement. She thought that if she listened to her 9-year-old son explain his negative behavior, that she was endorsing it and agreeing with it. No, no, no. To hear him out is to connect with his viewpoint. It's not to endorse it. How, how can I connect with you if I know nothing about you? You can give me a viewpoint that I completely disagree with, but you're revealing yourself, and that revelation allows me to connect with you. This is what argumentation is. Well, I know if you just understood my political viewpoint, you'd agree with me. I know that if you just understood my spiritual viewpoint, you'd see it my way and you'd agree with me. It's control. Whereas now, like, people take it harshly, right? They go, why aren't you nice, Guy Cody? I go, quite frankly, I don't care if you agree with me or not. It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to me. I'm not telling you you need to agree with me. I'm not trying to control you. I'm not trying to be right. I'm simply telling you who I am. So you can choose to engage with me or not based on the truth. If I present a politically correct, dumbed-down version of myself, how can you connect with me? You're connecting with a, a persona that doesn't exist. Most men value being right over being effective. I understand that most men will disagree with my viewpoint. I understand that, and I've stopped needing for people to agree with it. So my point of view now is, here's my viewpoint, honestly. Choose to engage with it or choose not to engage with it. That way, if you choose to engage with it, we can be honest and open with each other because I'm not hiding back, holding back views that you might find offensive, because I've put those views out front and center. Just, just in those, like, yeah, I, you know, I, I make posts on Facebook that are controversial. I don't make them to be controversial. I'm saying this is what I believe, so if you don't agree with me, you don't have to engage with me. I'm not having this argument with me— with you. I'm not having this argument. I don't need to be right. I need to be effective. And most men value comfort over leadership. Anyone, anyone that's been in an environment with me understands that it's not comfortable. I don't prioritize my comfort. I'm here to lead. I prioritize leadership over comfort. I prioritize my effectiveness over being right, and I prioritize correction over control of the environment. It's like like, my primary goal is to lead, is to lead. I don't care if it's comfortable or not. So your family doesn't need you to communicate better. Your family needs to be safer in your leadership. They need to know that you're leading them to a safe place, not you have a sophisticated vocabulary that has the words of safety and the vocabulary of safety, but leads into danger. They need to know that you're an experienced warrior, not somebody who's watched a YouTube video on leadership. So let's talk about the installation of this. These are non-negotiable behaviors, right? This has to happen. There are fundamentally 5 behaviors that create emotional safety. Pause before— number 1, pause before responding. Interrupt the attack thought. A great example of this is there's interviews going around right now of Elon Musk being interviewed by Don Lemon on YouTube. You can find it, just search it. Don Lemon, Elon Musk. And, and Don Lemon is asking some very aggressive questions, basically accusing Elon Musk of being a racist. And Elon Musk pauses for a very— pauses for a very long time. He just sits there and you can tell he's really offended by the question, but he pauses and he's like And then he answers the question. He interrupts the attack thought because he has the level of emotional sophistication to know that the attack thought is going to destroy him. Another great example is Jordan Peterson. If you want to, if you want to see an example of this pausing before responding, Jordan Peterson is masterful at it. When he's in a highly hostile environment and he's being aggressively attacked, He pauses sometimes for a very long time before responding because he's interrupting the attack thought, because the attack thought is going to play into the ambush. 2, lead with curiosity. The phrase is, help me understand what I'm missing. A great example of this is most people choose to lead a conversation with what is it— what, what is in disagreement instead of what is in agreement. So in any environment, two people can agree. So a husband and a wife that are in complete disagreement on a child, how to raise a child, What we can come to the place of— do you, do you agree, Justin, that we both want what is best for this child? We both want what is in the best interest of this child. Yes, we can agree on that. That is the common ground. Well then, the disagreement is on how we arrive at what is best. The end goal is agreed upon. We want the same thing, we just don't know how to get there. So I think this is the best path. Help me understand what I'm missing here. Help me understand what I'm not seeing that you are. In, in virtually any situation, common ground can be found. Start by finding what we agree on and building on that versus starting on what we disagree on. You can go, why love Donald Trump? Why love Kamala Harris. Okay, so polar opposites. All right, so that, that's recipe for disaster, right? So we could easily go, well, can we agree that we both want what is best for the country? Can we agree on that? Sure. Okay, so let's build on that. We both want what's best for the country. So help me understand why you think that is what's best for the country. Help me understand that. This is— this then creates dialogue in an environment where dialogue was previously impossible. Separate the person from the behavior. No character assassination. Well, she's a narcissist. She's just selfish. She just wants her own— what, like, how's that going to work out for you trying to get cooperation from your wife when you call her a narcissist? How's that going to work out for you? Attack the behavior, not the person. Repair fast. There's no silent punishment. Don't go, 'Whoa, if you don't agree with me, I'm just going to disappear for 2 days.' Reward truth. Thank honesty even when it stinks. So this is really important. We're going to go into this in more detail now. So the first principle is You reward— what you reward, you reproduce. What you punish, you banish. So truth costs people closeness, they stop telling truth. So if I'm trying to help you, genuinely trying to help you save your marriage and you punish me for that, the help stops because you've destroyed emotional safety. If you reward that behavior, you get more of it. Great example, we talked about it last week. I want transparency within my children because I want to know— I would rather know what they're doing, even if it hurts, than not know what they're doing, having to do it behind my back. So I have to— I want transparency, so I have to reward that transparency. And people go, well, your son's just told you he's done this, you're not gonna punish that? Well, that would be emotionally unsophisticated because my primary outcome is not necessarily to correct that behavior. My higher goal is transparency. It's give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime. I can teach my son transparency and have transparency over an extended period of time Or I can punish his transparency and I can fix the one problem one time, and now it's all behind my back. Visibility is lost. When your wife tries to tell you what you need to do to fix the marriage and you punish that because of all of the qualities that we've previously discussed— we're not going to discuss them again— you banish the behavior of her trying. You banish it. If truth costs people closeness, they stop telling it. It's simple as that. So this is, this is the oath of leadership, or the promise. I am not entitled to comfort. Comfort is not a right. I am responsible for safety. You know, there'll be, there'll be men watching this, whether it's the replay on YouTube or live now, going, what about her? What about my emotional safety? It's over for you. It's finished. Because you're focused on the wrong thing. You will get— you can have your emotional safety, and the way you have that emotional safety is you sever the relationship. You will get what you want. I will regulate myself under pressure. This, this is the number one collapse of emotional safety. You are not self-regulated. You do not have self-control. You do not know how to regulate under pressure. I will not punish truth. If somebody tells me the truth, I'm not going to punish them for that. And as much as I hate the term 'my truth,' this has to be included in this. You can't be the arbitrator of truth. You can't decide, well, that's true, so I'm not going to punish him. But that is not true. What she's saying is not true, so that is, that is viable for punishment. No, no, her truth cannot be punished. I will choose leadership over defense. If I've got to take some arrows, if I've got to take some bullets, so be it. So here's, here's the assignment. Here's the action steps. 7-day assignment: one hard conversation without any of the aforementioned conditions. Have a hard conversation with somebody you don't agree with. Find somebody who has a point of view that disagrees, that's disagreeable to you. Find a worldview that is not your worldview. And see if you can have a conversation with them that doesn't destroy their emotional safety, that doesn't control, manipulate, lead in the wrong direction. Pause instead of react. See if you can find one conversation where ordinarily you would jump in. I ask men questions all the time, and they, they answer so quickly. It's like, how, how could any new thought process be developed? You've answered so quickly that all that's happening is trodden neuropathways are firing, and you're going into the existing character, the existing, uh, the existing person that you are. No new evidence has been introduced. The only way new evidence can be introduced is for new thoughts, and the only way new thoughts can happen is if you pause. Okay, ordinarily I would respond this way. My desire is to attack or dispute. Put a pause on that. I'm going to find another way. One repair without justification. Concede. Say you're right, you're right, but the reason I did it was because I've got ADHD. No, just accept it. Just own it. One repair without justification. Yes, I shouldn't have done that, Cody. End of. Yes, I 'Yes, I shouldn't have done that, Cody. I can agree with you, but it's not my fault because what would anyone have done in that situation?' No, that's wrong. No. So what we need here, men, to save your marriage is proof, not intention. No one gives two craps about your intention to do better. No one cares. That is the truth. Your wife's nervous system, your children, Anyone who's important to you requires proof of new identity. So here's the conclusion, then we'll open it up to questions. Emotional safety is not built by the man you are when things are easy. It is built by the man you are when your ego is threatened. Or to put it this way, and this is all-encompassing, The life you live is the man you are. I say it all the time. I'm not your guru. I'm not your coach, counselor, consultant, therapist. I'm none of those things. I am simply observing reality. Your marriage is broken right now. That we have— that means that You are a man who is in a marriage that's broken. You have no marriage skills. Your relationship is not great with your children. That tells me that you lack parenting skills. Your finances are not where they need to be. That tells me you lack financial skills. There's no— this is not attacking the person. This is simply looking at truth, looking at reality, and going, okay, let's start from a baseline of reality and move from there. Most men will look at their marriage that is in total chaos and go, it's not my fault. Or most men will look at their marriage that is in collapse and go, there's nothing wrong with my marriage skills, if only she understood. No, if your marriage is in collapse, it's because— it's because you have no marriage skills, no relationship skills. And the sooner we can arrive at that level and go, you're right, I have no skills in this area of my life, I'm open, I'm willing, I'm listening, and the version of me that brought me and this marriage to this point has to go— that is the day that your life turns around. That is the day that your marriage turns around. Hey, Cody here again. I hope you got a lot of insight out of that workshop. If your marriage is unstable and you want an unemotional assessment of whether it can still be saved, book a divorce prevention session using the link below. This is not advice or therapy. It's for men ready to take responsibility and act. We'll look at your marriage and I'll give you an unbiased view. This is also the first step to working together if you want serious help.
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