A man explains why avoiding conflict and chasing status kills respect in marriage. His method: fix yourself first through hard conversations and character work, not money or avoidance. Pain is the path.
You've unintentionally emasculated yourself. Number one, it's been your lack of effort and lack of commitment towards bettering yourself and being a better man and investing in yourself and changing and growing and evolving so hard that people have to get to know you again. Number two, it's the fact that you've caused all these problems over the years and the only way that you've dealt with it is you haven't faced it. You've avoided it, and avoiding it has made you indifferent towards the situation. So you've just emotionally disconnected from it as a way to cope with it, number one. So meaning you tolerate a marriage that's far below what you could have and should have. And also what you've done is you've walked on eggshells and you've given up the confidence that you once had to address the problems. So you'd rather just avoid the conflict. So avoiding conflict has caused you to do what? Become passive. So you don't get in front of it anymore and address it as it's happening. Now you just avoid it. You walk on eggshells and you tailor every little thing that you say to try to placate your wife. So you take on a role of being a passive man. And this passivity has unintentionally caused you to emasculate yourself, meaning you don't even have the confidence that you once had in the marriage. You don't feel like you're respected, and you feel like you've been— you're being usurped. So there's this power struggle inside your relationship, and that power struggle causes you to get reactive, to break character, and to do things later that cause shame and guilt. So you're in this reactionary state. And the biggest problem is that you don't want to have the hardest conversations that you need to have. You can't keep sweeping this under the rug. You know, for a lot of years of my life, I took on the position of just trying to live in denial, walls of self-deception that were so thick. I didn't want to hear it from anybody. You couldn't give me advice. You couldn't give me feedback. I couldn't take constructive criticism because my whole entire existence was based on what? Not looking inside myself. That's why I created the Inside Out Method. The Inside Out Method is about fixing the inside from the inside. See, money doesn't impress me. Shouldn't impress you either. Status All the things that you have— houses, nice cars, a big business— yeah, that's all great. You know what's more impressive? Character, morals. A man that lives in alignment with his values and has integrity. A man that doesn't sit on the sideline while his marriage disintegrates right in front of his eyes. So stop giving up your God-given right to be empowered. Stop trying to avoid the pitfalls and the pain in your relationship. You need to learn to walk into the eye of the storm and get comfortable in that place, because in order to resolve the problem that you're in, the problem that you're having in your relationship, It's going to require you to get uncomfortable. It's going to require you to embrace the pain and be less connected to your wife's reaction to what you're doing and more connected to the process that you're engaging in that's going to make you a better man in the end.
