Tim Arrigo argues that uncontrolled speech is the main driver of marital conflict and life dysfunction. He traces the problem to emotional hijacking that leads to impulsive words, resentment, and damage to relationships and work. Arrigo offers a four-step method: pause, digest, reflect, remove ego.
Your inability to control this one thing has led to most of the conflicts in your marriage. It's led to major blowouts with your wife. It's led to moments of passive aggression, even acts of violence, hostility, your wife holding resentment, you leaving the house in a fit of rage, feeling shame and guilt, you engaging in self-destructive behaviors, your kids having to watch dysfunction and being wounded as a result. It's creating a stressful environment in your house, and it's creating such stress for you that you go to work and you can't be as productive as you need to be. And this is your inability to control what you say, your inability to control what comes out of your mouth. So you say things that you don't truly mean, you say things that you regret, which causes you to do what? Break character, say things you regret, and then inevitably what? You have to end up apologizing. So even though you might have been in a position where you could have, you know, communicated, cooperated, and compromised with your wife, it put you in a position of looking like you're complicit in the interaction and the problem. And it looks like you're guilty. You have a guilty conscience and you look like a hypocrite if you try to say anything about it. So your inability to control what comes out of your mouth is because you can't control your emotions. In a flash of anger, you can't control your emotions, so you try to go to the external environment to develop control. So you're trying to fix the inside from the outside. You're trying to develop control by saying something. You're trying to make her feel the way that you feel when you're in an interaction because you can't control your emotions. So you don't know how to stop, pause, digest, and reflect. You don't know how to remove ego and emotion and create a response, formulate a response that's congruent with the person that you want to be and congruent with the way that you feel. The only emotions you normally notice are anger. And so you, in a flash of anger, you just immediately go to what gives you control, which is what? Saying something. And invariably what ends up happening is you end up regretting what you say. So you end up having your emotional brain hijack your cortex, your thinking conscious brain, which every time gets you in a rut. And see, learning how to do this is something that you have to be shown, is something that is, is steps to do this. I teach all my clients these steps about how to pause, how to digest, reflect, how to remove ego and emotion, and how to formulate a response that's in alignment with the person that you want to be. You know, again, when we learn these techniques, they're, they're revolutionary because our whole life we've been trying to fix the inside from the outside. Trying to fix the inside from the outside. And that's why learning how to control what you say, that's only— that's truly one of four things that you can control. You can only control these four things: how you think, how you feel, what you say, and what you do. So developing control over these things is essential to having a healthy life and just living empowered. It's not too late for you. It's not too late for you to learn these tools and really salvage what you have left and start to repair some of the emotional damage in the relationship. Don't wait until it's too late.
