Tim Arrigo explains how to save a struggling marriage through validating your partner's emotions instead of dismissing them, using "I" statements, and practicing humility and empathy in conversations.
Poor communication skills are killing your marriage. When you invalidate one another and tell each other that you shouldn't feel the way that you do, what you're doing is you're belittling the other person's emotions. You're denying how they feel. Guys, a part of having a healthy marriage is learning to validate each other. When somebody says, hey, it made me feel this way when you did this, The response to that is, what I'm hearing you say is that you feel this way. Is that true? And I understand how you would feel that way, and I can see that. And you know what? I had no intention on making you feel that way. I had no intention on having my behavior affect you that way. Guys, so much of the time we see invalidation. It's like we're going at war with our spouse. We're not listening. We're not hearing our spouse out and validating their emotions and letting— without taking it personal, letting them know. It's like, hey, I don't need to get defensive, that you can feel how you feel and I can be with you in those emotions and still validate you. That's called healthy communication. Invalidation kills the marriage. It's when one person tells another person that they shouldn't feel the way they do. It's when one person tells the other person that that's not the right way to feel. It's when one person tells the other person that that's not what they did, or They just brush off their emotions, brush off their emotional reaction, brush off the pain that they're going through like it's not a big deal because they don't want to have to look at themselves. There's no humility. There's too much pride. There's too much ego. And guys, that's killing the marriage. See, humility isn't thinking less of yourself. It's thinking of yourself less. And when you start to think of yourself less in a marriage, it opens you up to empathy. It opens you up to compassion, which opens you up to better communication. Empathy is understanding what someone's feeling emotionally. See, when you open yourself up to empathy in a marriage, you're opening yourself up to the fact that you can be there for the other person and how they feel, and you can understand that you're a fallible human being that makes mistakes, but you have no intention— like, there's no malice here, there's no ulterior motives here, there's no negativity here. I'm not trying to put the other person down. You— the invalidation, it's telling— it's the argument. That's what creates the argument. It's when someone doesn't feel like they're heard. And so they need to raise their voice because that's the only way they feel like they can get through to you. But how many times have you said something in anger in an argument? And because you said it in anger, the tone that you used it in caused the message that you were trying to send to get lost in translation, right? You said, well, you don't even care about me. When you really wanted to say, I feel unseen, unloved, and hurt in this relationship. See, the way we communicate is so important. Using I statements instead of saying, you make me feel this way when you do this, I can say, I feel this way when this happens. The way we communicate is critical to having a healthy marriage, and so many people are invalidating one another. Their communication skills are causing the marriage to slowly disintegrate, deteriorate. And guys, I want to tell you right now, don't wait until it's too late. Start to change the the way you interact with one another. And remember, a marriage can always be salvaged if two people are willing to invest and commit to a process of bettering that marriage. And if they're not, then you need to ask yourself, if you're still stuck in a marriage that's unhealthy, why am I staying? And I keep blaming the other person for why this isn't working out, but the reality is I'm choosing to stay at this point. And if I'm allowing fear of leaving and what's going to happen and the fact that I'm dependent on this person, well, that means that I don't have a vision for the future. And that means I'm going into what-if scenarios. What if this works out? And I guarantee that when you think about leaving the relationship, that you're probably going into the worst-case scenario out of the quantum field of possibilities of what could happen. You're going to the worst possible scenario. And let me tell you, that's not somebody that's living in creation. That's somebody that's living in survival. You're living in chronic stress. And if you're worried about what's going to happen with the kids when you leave that relationship, let me ask you this: what's worse, that you're there for for your kids and you teach them how to overcome adversity and your kids learn how to adapt and build resilience because you were there through the divorce and they have to adjust to that and you're there to help them do that, or your kids continue to watch you communicate in an unhealthy way and be completely emotionally disconnected from your spouse in the marriage and watch the unhealthy relationship unfold right in front of their own eyes. What's worse?
