When a man's wife stops reacting to him, he often escalates his anger trying to get a response. The speaker argues this is a warning sign to take extreme ownership: stop blaming her emotional distance and recognize your own actions created the dysfunction.
One of the main reasons why you can't control your anger is because your wife is starting to get checked out. And as she starts to get checked out, it gives you anxiety and you start to feel fear because you can't read your wife anymore. She's starting to gray rock you. She's starting to not engage with you emotionally. And no matter what you do or what you say, your wife is not giving you the control that you once had. And how did you feel the control initially? By getting other people to react to what you said or what you did. And now it's turning into a scenario where you feel like you're losing control because other people aren't giving you the signs or the reactions that you're used to, meaning other people aren't engaging in dysfunction with you anymore. They're choosing not to. And so as this is happening, you become more and more desperate. So what are you starting to do? You're starting to go for lower blows, and I know, right? You're starting to basically swing for the fence. You're trying to get your wife to react to situations that she would normally react to, but now she's choosing not to. She's pulling away, she's disengaging, and you feel that. And the fear creeps in, the anxiety creeps in, because now you know that you lost control, and now you know that people can walk away from your life. And inevitably, you'd be in a situation where you have to have that conversation, that difficult conversation with the man in the mirror. And let me ask you, when people in your life no longer choose to engage in dysfunction with you, then what are you forced to do? One of two things: either allow it to go into the brink of basically destruction, your relationship just tearing apart at the seams, that family photo just shattered into pieces, or you start to pick those pieces, you start to put it back together. You start to look at yourself in the mirror and you start to realize that real leadership requires you to take extreme ownership and realize that the problem is you. Looking in the mirror and acknowledging— it's like, I can't get mad at somebody for something that I created. You're getting so upset, but it's like, you have to realize that you created this. You've created a situation that you can't point the finger anymore. I know you want to. I know you want to look at somebody else. I know you want to look at your wife and point the finger, but you can't get mad at your wife for shutting down when you created that reaction. So if you created it, then what are you going to do to fix it?
