Tim Arrigo explains how men's feelings of inadequacy and rejection trigger conflict with their wives. He argues that communicating emotions, not just situations, reduces defensiveness and repairs relationships.
A lot of men don't know how to strike that balance between vulnerability, humility, strength, and resilience and fortitude. It's about becoming a multidimensional man. See, pros don't want to admit that they feel weak and rejected at times, right? Whether it's your wife declines physical intimacy, whether it's your wife— you don't feel like your wife prioritizes you, whether it's you feel like chopped liver inside the relationship, whatever that is. The real trigger for you is feeling weak, rejected, and inadequate. Working with hundreds, thousands of men over the last 10 years inside the Total Breakthrough Academy, what do we always discover? That they're dealing with secret feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, rejection, and weakness. That they— these are feelings that are so intolerable to them that they won't tell their wife. They won't communicate it with their wife, and they won't help their wife understand that so their wife can truly see where they're operating from. Because instead, what they do is they talk about the external. They don't talk about emotion, they talk about situation. And when you talk about situations more than you talk about emotions, then you get in that tit-for-tat argument. You get into the invalidation, whose perspective is right. You get into the defensiveness. And then what happens? Criticism, contempt, and stonewalling. My brother, the solution is to develop the emotional intelligence to be able to convey how you're actually feeling so that you guys can understand where one another are operating from and the true nuances in the essence of the trigger. The trigger is not the situation. The trigger is the emotions and the perceptions that you have about yourself when things happen. So stop blaming your wife so that your wife can get into a position to stop blaming you. You're the common denominator. When you start to actually step into a position of helping your wife understand how you think and feel in reference to what she does, then she doesn't have to defend herself. She doesn't have to take it personal because you're not asking her to change what she's doing. You're asking her to meet you where you're at. You're asking her to see where you're operating from, from a place of true transparency and vulnerability. And I'm gonna keep it real with you. Your wife is probably the only person on this planet that you can do that with, unless you're a part of the brotherhood inside the Academy. So you have to start there. You have to start from a position of identifying the real essence of the trigger because it's not what's happening in the external, it's what's happening internally. And until you understand that and can speak that language, you guys are gonna continue to fight about situations. And what you'll come to discover is that the way you think and feel has been going on before any of those situations even happen. So all that has to happen is a different situation happens and the same thoughts and the same emotions get triggered. And that same confirmation bias, that same cognitive bias shows up again and again and again. And you use those situations as evidence to support and reaffirm and confirm things that you already believe and feel about yourself. So until that conversation happens with your wife, you can't solve anything. Can't fix the inside from the outside, brother. Can only fix the inside from the inside.
