A man describes how his brokenness damaged his marriage and explains emotional entrenchment, where couples get stuck in anger and contempt. He argues that trying to win back a spouse through achievement creates cognitive dissonance, and urges men to align actions with values and use marital struggle as a catalyst for becoming someone who can lead others.
If you put broken people inside my life, they're going to get better. But see, for a lot of years of my life, I was the broken guy that couldn't help other people. I just contributed to their brokenness. I stayed in dysfunctional cycles, contributed to toxicity, and engaged in my own self-destructive behavior that nearly cost me everything. And see, when we are the broken version of ourselves, when we're not the most optimized version of who we are, we cannot guide other people out of the darkness that they are in. So many times inside of a marriage, you have what I call emotional entrenchment. You both are dug in into the position that you're in, and you can't help one another. Desperate cries for help to have your needs met. That really come through in all of the dysfunctional behaviors that you guys exhibit. The angry outbursts, the contempt, the stonewalling, the defensiveness, the guardedness, the lack of vulnerability, the COVID contracts, the expectations. As you watch your marriage slowly fall apart, so many guys, they've fallen victim to the mirage. They've fallen for performance-based love where all they've done their whole life is equate love to success. That's why they try to work harder to prove their worth, seeking external validation from their wife as a way to what? Try to control the situation to win her back. But brother, the best thing you could ever do when you're in that position is invest inside yourself to get realigned, to recommit to the things inside your life that truly matter. Meaning, are your actions in alignment with your values? Do you act and behave in ways that are in direct alignment with the things that you truly value? Because that's what's going eliminate the cognitive dissonance. That's what's going to create you to be aligned on a path that you want to be on. Cognitive dissonance is when we act and behave in ways that are misaligned with who we want to see ourselves as. So I'm not operating as the man that I aspire to be, the man that I respect, and the man that I admire. I'm operating as a man that's a suboptimal version of myself. And then I'm what? Bargaining with it. I'm providing myself excuses, right? I'm blaming, I'm externalizing, I'm projecting, all to do what? To ease the tension that I feel inside, because I know no matter what I do, that on the inside something is missing, that I'm misaligned. And my marriage just becomes the catalyst for my personal development. A lot of people have catalysts inside their life. They have a catalyst to start a new business. They have a catalyst to get in shape, maybe a health crisis they experienced. And you know what the catalyst is for a lot of guys to become the 10.0 version of who they are? Marital struggles, separation, your wife wants a divorce, a great opportunity for you to use that as the conduit for something amazing that God wants to do inside your life. But what a tragedy to miss that opportunity. What a tragedy to sabotage your personal development by just looking at whether or not you're with your wife as the determining factor of whether or not you invest inside yourself. See, when you're a man that's committed to being better, you're always committed to being better. So we use every opportunity as an opportunity of learning and growth. So we see any potential adversity in our life as an obstacle that we must overcome to develop the skills, the character virtues, the experience, and the attributes that we can then impart onto others in our future. That gives you purpose. See, all of this is not just happening just because. It's not some punishment that you're being dealt. It's actually, if you want it to be, the greatest awakening you will ever experience in your life. But see, that awakening can only happen when you look at it not as something that's happening to you, but actually something that's happening for you. It's happening for you so you can develop the skills, the knowledge, the understanding, and really break through on the inside of who you are to get realigned with the version of you that can save his marriage, the version of you that can lead other people out of their darkness, because that's what you were called to do.
