In a 42-year marriage, one partner uses the other as a scapegoat to avoid her own denial, moving the goalpost so she never has to change. Tim Arrigo tells the participant to stop taking all the blame, set boundaries, and reconnect with male peers like Justin Walton. Healing cannot happen alone.
You can only make somebody the scapegoat for so long, and they can only change so much before you actually realize that you're the problem, right? So it's, it's like saying, I haven't— you haven't changed, you haven't changed, you haven't done enough. That's back to what I said, it's the goalpost. It's the never-ending goalpost that you can never reach because it's not actually about you changing. It's about her staying in denial and then blaming you and using you as a scapegoat to justify why the marriage is the way it is. Although every marriage has two people that play a part in the marriage, right? I don't care if it's a 90/10 Somebody has responsibility on the other side, even if it's that they shut down, don't set boundaries, don't speak up, don't express themselves. So right now you have a wife who's unwilling to participate in healing a marriage of emotional disconnection for 42 years. And I would say this, I would say that you are conditioned to continue to shut down even right now and not establish boundaries inside your marriage about what is right and what is wrong and what is tolerable and what is not tolerable. If you had a best friend out there, you got a good buddy of yours, Uh, not really.
Basically, my friends are her friends, basically.
Okay, well, that's a problem. You got to get brothers to connect with. Do you talk to anybody inside the program?
I did, not lately, but I talked to Justin Walton. I do text people once in a while, but I haven't really spoke to anybody.
Oh, you got to do that, brother. You got to reach out.
Yeah, okay.
You got to reach out more, bro. Yeah, you can't do this alone, man.
