Is Your Past Breaking Your Marriage?

One of the main reasons why you're not able to take ownership, why you're not able to look at your part, is because doing so requires you take this toxic ownership of the behavior instead of recognizing that what, what is the be— it's a behavior. Instead of saying, hey, this is, here's me, here's my sense of self, and then here's this behavior that I gotta work on. Instead, you see yourself as the problem instead of the behaviors. That's why you can't separate your sense of self from what you do, the behaviors. You've been so self-condemned and talked down to so much of your life that you can't talk about where you fall short without feeling like a failure. And so you refuse to analyze and look at your beliefs. You refuse to change your behavior. You refuse to believe that you can change. And all these parts are parts of a victim mentality, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling. It's all the byproduct of survival mechanisms, ways that you avoided vulnerability in your past. And what has this done? Avoiding vulnerability hasn't made you more connected to the people around you. Avoiding vulnerability and humility, right? Humility isn't thinking of yourself. It's not thinking less of yourself. Humility is thinking about other people more. It's about seeing somebody, something from someone else's perspective. It's about wanting to see the world. It's like your perspective is your reality. Their perspective is their reality. Don't expect other people to think and feel the way that you do or see things the way that you do. Your goal in a relationship is to learn, to understand. How is my behavior antagonizing something going on with my wife? Majority of the time, you don't realize how you're shapeshifting and turning into somebody else from her past. Your behavior is basically antagonizing wounds that already preexisted. And if you care about your wife, if you want to be a protector, then it's your goal to know and understand how I'm doing that without taking it personal, making it about my existence as a human being, and instead making it about my behaviors that I used to survive in my past that got me to this point in this relationship and how the survival mechanisms that I've used are now creating major issues in my marriage. This is the work that needs to take place. You gotta look within yourself. And once you start to look within yourself, you're able to look within other people and understand what's the real source of the trigger. It's never the behavior. It's always things that exist within ourselves, within our shadows, within the parts of ourselves that we repress, that we deny. It's that what you feel unloved, you feel insecure. right? You feel scolded, you feel excluded, you feel powerless, right? These are the real sources of the trigger. It's your responsibility to look within. And once you look within yourself, you can look within others and have x-ray eyes, x-ray vision. You can see beyond the surface layer issue and you can see beyond. Then you can speak to that part of your wife instead of just thinking it's a surface level issue, taking it personal, getting defensive. Instead, you can separate yourself from that. Recognize that I don't want to cause harm to somebody that I love. I don't want to sabotage my relationship. I don't want to end up divorced and alone with some other guy raising my kids because I can't change and I can't step away from what I'm doing and become objective about my behavior that I may have used to stay safe in previous relationships but are now causing issues in this one. Wake up. Step outside yourself. Become the awareness. Start to observe what you're doing before it's too late.