Tim Arrigo tells men that blaming their wives for relationship problems often means they're projecting past hurt and family patterns onto their partner. He argues ego and refusing to learn will destroy what you have. The fix is humility, self-reflection, and actually changing.
Here's the truth about your emotional reactions, especially when it comes to dealing with your wife. See, your wife, most of the time you don't even realize it, she's subconsciously taking the form of somebody else in the argument. She's subconsciously shape-shifting and morphing into somebody else, and you don't even recognize it. Who you're really reacting to is somebody else. It's the words and phrases from somebody else. It's a dynamic and interaction that happened before. Sound like your ex-wife, she sounds like your father, she sounds like your mother, she sounds like somebody else in your life. See, when you've experienced love, love being fused with dysfunction, then that's— that becomes normal for you, and you get used to the interactions of love fused with dysfunction, love fused with dysfunction, and that becomes a pattern for you. And then you start to engage, and then your ego gets involved. And what do you want to do? You just want to win the argument. Why? Because you want to be right. And what has being right caused you? What does being right truly cost you? And at what expense is it to you to have to own and admit when you're wrong? And see, everything's not so black and white either. You have to learn how to compromise. You have to learn how to own your part. You have to learn that in this moment right now, her behavior doesn't say anything about me. It says everything about her. It doesn't say that she doesn't love me, that she doesn't respect me, that— that it doesn't say that I'm not good enough, doesn't say I'm not man enough, it doesn't say I can't run this house, it doesn't say I'm not a leader. You're saying those things about yourself. Her behavior says that she feels unseen and unheard. Her behavior says something about her. It's your job to figure that out. It's your job to stop taking that personal, stop reacting and allowing your ego and emotion and not digesting and reflecting to really look inside yourself and realize that her behavior towards you says nothing about you. It says everything about her. But why her behavior triggers you is because of you. It's because of you. It's not because of her. Stop blaming her for why you reacted the way you did. Well, I wouldn't have reacted if you didn't do that. That's called making your wife a scapegoat. That, that's called making yourself a victim. Wake up to this reality. Stop with the self-sabotage. Stop with the blaming. Your wife is truly taking on the form of somebody else. If you've had multiple marriages, you've already been in that dynamic, and so you're quick to react. And what you haven't done is you haven't been teachable. You You haven't been humble. You haven't— you haven't truly realized that you got to adapt. You can't continue to behave the same way that you behaved in all these other dysfunctional relationships in the one now. Why? Because you know and realize that the person you're with right now is a truly loving, caring person. Evidence to support that: they wouldn't be with you right now if that wasn't the truth. She's been there for you at your very worst, at rock Fucking bottom. So what's preventing you from truly being teachable, truly being humble? The only thing that's preventing you is your ego. It's not that you don't know what to do. It's that you just don't do it. You just don't take action. You're so used to just solving it all on your own. But the irony with this is that this has been going on for a long time and you haven't solved any of it. Haven't solved any of it. Why? Because you don't know the solution. You're so close to it. You're blinded by your own life. You're blinded by your own experience. You're blinded. You can't solve the problem that you're in in the same exact mindset that created the problem. And that's why it's necessary that you reach out. That's why it's necessary that you learn. That's why it's necessary that you execute even the smallest bit of humility, brother, to admit that you've tried and tried again, but it's not working. So at what point in time are you going to pull the trigger, stop procrastinating, stop living in the self-doubt, and stop being embarrassed about the fact that you don't have the solutions?
