Tim Arrigo tells people stuck in toxic marriages to stop accepting less than they deserve. He argues that staying reinforces a false belief you're not enough, rooted in family patterns and generational betrayal. Your worth comes from being a co-heir with Christ, not from tolerating a dead relationship.
And it's time that we— me, self— we stop settling for less than what we deserve and what we're capable of. Because if I continue to settle for less than what God has for me, especially once the marriage has been defiled and defaced, then the message I'm sending to myself is the same message that I received in my early life, which is that I'm not enough. So I send myself that message through my own behavior, through tolerating the dysfunction and the toxicity And I'm basically saying to myself that you don't deserve more than this. You're not enough. So I reinforce that message. So it's not that the reality is not that I'm actually not enough because I'm a co-heir with Christ, right? I mean, I'm God's child. So there's a collaborative effort there with me and God. So to say that I'm not enough, in actuality, a lot of that is believing— it's believing in lies. And then living out that lie, right? So that belief that you've held about yourself, your life has been congruent with that quote-unquote truth that you've believed. And you continue to live out this truth that you're not enough and continue to send yourself that message that you're not enough by staying in a marriage that's far below what you want. And listen, that you deserve— if all you get out of this marriage is a booty call, some physical intimacy here and there, breadcrumbs, table scraps. If all you get out of the relationship is that, then is it even— can we even call it a marriage? No, you're right, you really can't. You can't. And listen, bro, your mother betrayed your father. You watched your father's reaction to that betrayal. Your brain absorbed that. Your wife betrayed you. Your brain has seen that and has absorbed that and has seen, well, this is the way to deal with it. And you have to take a stand against passivity, not only because it's generational, but because that passivity is going to only create more pain in your life if you stay on the sideline and you act passive in this, in this spiritual war that you're in. You're going to get raked over the coals, bro. And your son is only going to see you act passive, and he's only going to continue to hang on to things in his life that are dead and gone. You're trying to breathe life. You're trying to do CPR on a marriage that's been dead, bro. And when it's on a ventilator and somebody says, hey, you know, they're going to be a vegetable and their quality of life is going to be very poor. Do you want to have him be a vegetable, live in a home and be in a wheelchair and have to eat through a tube and never be able to smile again? Or would you rather just pull the plug? And let me tell you, brother, pulling the plug is never an easy decision. I don't think there's any family member out there that can say they've stood at the bedside of somebody that they loved and that it was easy for them to make the decision to pull the plug. But in this world, we need people that are willing inside those emotionally charged situations to make to, to make judgment calls and make those decisions. You got to be a guy that makes the decision to pull the plug or not. So what's it going to be? My marriage is basically a vegetable, or that I'm going to give it to God?
