A coach tells married men that conflict isn't the problem, defensiveness is. When you get curious instead of logical, listen instead of shut down, and treat your wife's feelings as data rather than something to fix, conflict becomes the place where you actually understand each other.
Conflict is a liability when you don't have a strategy to appropriately handle it or deal with it. But conflict becomes an asset when you have a strategy, a blueprint, and a plan to execute and deploy specific conflict resolution strategies because that allows you to get to the heart of the issue. So many guys, they perceive conflict inside their marriage as a negative thing. Like they walk on eggshells or They're just waiting to be triggered, or they're dreading coming home to their own house because conflict sets them off. The conflict makes them nervous, and the conflict is perceived in their mind as a negative thing. So these men walk around and they're so hypervigilant and hypersensitive to any potential conflict because anytime conflict happens, their perception is that it's a negative experience. And so what do they do? React negatively to it. But see, once you have the right tools, the right system in place, you realize that without conflict, you're not going to be able to solve anything. See, when you guys are in a roommate situation, when your wife emotionally shuts you out of her life, that's when you need to be concerned. But when there's still conflict that there— that's happening between you and your wife, that's a good thing because that conflict is a doorway. It's a gateway into something new. But the problem is a lot of times when you guys have conflict, there's invalidation and defensiveness. So you guys get into arguments about whose story's true. You roll your eyes. Your body language reflects what? No empathy. You don't want to actively listen. You don't want to communicate. You want to try to prove that your point is the way to view a situation and why you are right. And you're trying to use logic to override emotion. You can't use logic to override someone's emotions because their emotions are their experience. So a lot of guys try to use logic to try to show their wife why what happened and why her perception of what happened was wrong. And what this does is this creates invalidation. Somebody feeling unseen, unheard, and invalidated. You're basically telling them, you're gaslighting them, telling them that their experience is wrong, that they shouldn't feel the way that they do, or that that's not the way to accurately view something. My brother, you know what's powerful is when you take a step back and take a perception of curiosity, like you actually want to become a student of your wife, and you learn inside the conflict that the more that you learn, the more that you grow. The more that you learn, the more reconnaissance, the more information you can extract about why the triggers happen. The more that you develop a higher state of consciousness, you develop intelligence. Because conflict is necessary and required if you want to heal this thing. So stop looking at conflict as a negative thing. It only is a negative thing when you don't have the right skills, the right tools, and the right strategy. So remember, it's on you to realize that the conflict, it's not negative, it's actually positive. It's required for you to heal this marriage. And if you're interested in learning more about how to resolve this conflict, get access to my Downshift Technique. I'm gonna put the link right here in this video, and I'm gonna put a PDF of the 5 steps to resolving that conflict right here. Check it out.
