Helping Your Wife Overcome Trauma

You can absolutely help your wife through her trauma. So many guys that have marital issues are not conscious of how their wife's trauma shows up in the marriage. And what happens is they take a negative view, a negative attitude towards these experiences, not realizing that, yeah, relationships can damage people and traumatize them. Could be your wife. Could have been a relationship that has nothing to do with you, a relationship before you even met her, something that you had no part of. But now you are paying the price in your mind for what somebody else did. But I want to tell you something. As much as relationships can be damaging, brother, relationships are also healing. It's the relationship, right, with an emotionally stable individual who leads, who's predictable, and who lives a life that is congruent with who he says he is. He has integrity. So your wife's nervous system reacts under pressure, times where her brain perceives the behaviors that you engage in as similar to something else she's been through in her past. Working with thousands of guys over the last 10 years, helping thousands of men, I can tell you this: they make a mistake inside their marriage and they can't overcome the mistake because what the mistake does is it might trigger their wife, and that trigger compounds on previous traumatic experiences that their wife has had, and their wife enters a state of what I call hypervigilance. Hypervigilance. Your wife is in a state of fight or flight. She jumps to conclusions. She has irrational beliefs. She makes false accusations. She has a distrustful interpretation bias. She's skeptical of you. She doesn't trust you. She's constantly triggered. You have to walk on eggshells. Why? Because hypervigilance is a byproduct of post-traumatic stress. And the issue is so many men look at this and they take what their wife is doing personally, which inhibits their ability to have empathy, meet their wife with compassion, and lead her out of the darkness. My brother, you are that man. You are him. You are him. It's not a marriage therapist. It's not a marriage counselor. My brother, it's you. You spend more time with your wife than anybody on this earth. You know your wife better than anybody on this earth. You care about your marriage more than anybody on this earth. My brother, it's you. You are the leader. God is calling you to walk your wife out of her darkness and pain. God is calling you to rise to the occasion, to be the man that she needs in her life for her nervous system become regulated, to feel safe again. My brother, it is you. And so many men go, I don't want to deal with that. That's not my responsibility. My wife needs to go and get help. Well, I can tell you this. Me, as well as hundreds and thousands of other brothers that we have worked with, have done what? Found a system, found a pathway where they looked inside. They gained the resources, the insight, the knowledge, the virtues that allow them to meet their wife in the darkness, to turn on the light, to become the torch in the darkness, to lead their wife out of that place. And here's the thing. At the end of the day, when you really think about it, your behavior's instigated it, right? The reality is men want to give up because they can't see a strategy to overcome it. Don't throw in the towel just because you're exhausted. And I get it. But my brother, I want to tell you something. Nobody's more capable than you. Nobody's more capable than you. Of solving your marital problems. You're capable of leading your wife out of the darkness, and it's time for you to do that.