Tim Arrigo talks to a client who realizes his emotional outbursts are unacknowledged triggers, not other people's fault. When someone's rudeness stems from a sick spouse, perspective shifts everything. Families don't need a better life from us, they need us present, and our unresolved burdens become dead weight for our children.
I just got off a call with a client inside my private program, and he says to me, he said, Tim, he said, I've learned to control my emotional reactions. And what I've come to realize through this process that you taught me is that in reality, I was just having adult-like tantrums. I was having adult-like tantrums because I wasn't aware of what was really being triggered inside of me. See, someone's behavior towards you says nothing about you. Stop making it personal. It says everything about that person. But why their behavior triggers you says everything about you and nothing about them. See, we think that people make us feel a certain way when in reality it's all about our relationship to what we're seeing and what we're observing and how we take things personal that were never personal at all. It's like someone that's rude to you and then somebody tells you afterwards, Hey, that person's, you know, wife or husband just got diagnosed with cancer. It almost automatically takes away the sting and the burn of the disrespect that you were given because you realize that having another perspective and realizing that that person was in pain changes the way that you perceive their behavior. And when we realize that our wives are in pain, we stop taking— we stop taking what they're doing personally, and we start to realize that it's our behavior that's antagonizing and triggering it. And why we're triggered by what they do is a complete reflection of what goes on inside of us that we don't want to acknowledge, that we don't want to pay attention to. We spent our whole life avoiding the inside, trying to fix the inside from the outside. But trust me when I say this, your family didn't want you to give them a better life. Your family wanted you to be a part of that better life. Your family didn't want you to give them all this stuff. Your family wanted you to have it in here, to be available to give them everything they needed emotionally, mentally, physically. You're the leader. You're the mold. You're the one that's modeling it. What are you modeling? And when we start to pay attention to what we're modeling, we start to realize how we're leaving a trail. And the chains that we don't break today, we leave those as a burden for our children. And other people end up having to pick up the dead weight that we refuse to carry inside of this life. So are you going to pick up that cross and carry it? Because it's your cross to bear. Are you gonna make somebody else take responsibility for the work that you didn't do?
