Why Your “Reactive” Behavior Is Destroying Your Marriage

🚨 Save Your Marriage And Win Your Wife Back
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to talk to you today about probably the most damaging thing we that we do as men that destroys or really sets us back. And that's that's getting triggered by every little thing that that our wife does. Now, this effectively is the stupid button, right? Like getting triggered is hitting the stupid button. And this this is universally applicable. We're talking in we're talking here in the context of late-stage marriage crisis, divorce, and marriage reconciliation. But this is really going to be uh getting triggered is holding you back. We're in pretty much every area of your life, whether it's in parenthood, whether it's in employment, uh in business, in marriage, getting triggered or hitting the stupid button is not a good thing. So we're going to talk about today why it happens and more importantly how how we stop that from happening. So what's happening here? Well, every little interaction becomes emotionally loaded. So tiny little things that that our wife does create anxiety, panic, fear, anger, collapse, desperation. And I see it, I see it all the time, like people messaging me with the tiniest little thing, or she said this, she said that, she didn't put an X at the end of the text message, you know, and etc. etc. Just the tiniest little things setting us off. And it creates feelings of exhaustion, destabilization, a lack of control of the situation, and it destabilizes us as the man, and it destabilizes our wife by experiencing the result of getting triggered. And it also just destabilizes the situation in general and makes it very hard for anything positive to happen because you can lay a lot of groundwork and you can do a lot of good stuff, and then you get triggered over one small emotional thing, and you're back to square one again, or worse. So uh another way of looking at it is it's emotional immaturity. So the real question regarding this is not why am I triggered, or why am I triggered so easily, or why do I hit the stupid button so many times? The real question is why is my threshold so low? Why is my tolerance level so low? Because when we understand what a trigger actually is, the trigger is the point in time where discomfort exceeds emotional capacity. Or to put it another way, your nose, your nervous system experiences too much pressure in that moment, too much uncertainty, too much emotional discomfort, too much pain, fill in your own too much. So your system attempt immediately attempts regulation, relief, uh immediate pressure reduction. The trigger is simply your effort, your attempt to regulate yourself, basically. And and again, the simplest way to look at this is the trigger, the point, the trigger point is the point where your discomfort level exceeds your capac capacity to handle that discomfort. And it triggers the events. That's why when your wife does something that indicates that the marriage might be over, and instead of looking at it as a moment in time, a mood and saying this is just a mood or this is just a moment in time, and it too will pass, that situation exceeds your capacity to handle that situation. So it causes you to act in a way to get control of that situation again, and that that's the trigger, and then the result is the stupid button gets hit. So the core breakdown here is if we if we look at what emotional triggering actually is, it's the diagnosis that it gives us, it's low discomfort tolerance, it's an inability to sit with the discomfort or an inability to handle what's being given to us, or in other words, that's why I'd say it's emotional immaturity. The solution is not to change your environment or to stop things happening. The goal is to increase your tolerance of discomfort. And and really, when you understand this, you see just how dysfunctional as a society we are right now when we understand that the trigger is just the tolerance level, discomfort level being exceeded at the the top that the pain level exceeding the capacity level or the capacity to handle it. Look at the things we're getting triggered for in society, the tiniest little things. And when it's like people start getting triggered over like he, him, her political opinion, anything you name it, it's like it's on display for everybody to see. We can see just how low our capacity to handle even the most basic discomforts are. And that trigger point is really the canary and the coal mine to show us just how far gone as a society we are and what we need to do as men, not just in our marriage, but how how what we're teaching here, what we're we're learning here, can actually become a much bigger uh mission to really bring that level of tolerance back up. I mean, the the fact that people are so easily triggered just shows that tolerance is absolutely zero right now. So the core breakdown is that emotional triggering, it it's it's low comfort tolerance. It is not external events being objectively catastrophic. That's all it is. So why has the threshold become so low to where we're so easily triggered? Well, it's because certain situations force personal confrontations. We've looked at this in previous in previous lessons, right? Go back, check out my YouTube channel. There's videos posted recently that are gonna really go into much more detail on those things, right? But it's like it's it's rejection, it's shame, it's loss, it's inadequacy, it's it's personal identity, identity collapse, it's fear-driven thinking, it's a lack of emotional sovereignty, it's a lack of emotional security within yourself. And when your wife acts in a certain way or says a certain thing or alludes to a certain outcome, then it triggers a rejection response. And instead of recognizing that maybe we're not as secure in ourselves as we could be, maybe we're not as developed emotionally as we should be, instead of addressing that and going, okay, this is an opportunity for me to look at why I'm taking this so personally, and is that actually justified? And is the is this response actually appropriate? We just want to eliminate the discomfort by getting triggered. Now, great example, just to put this in perspective. I used to do this with my wife when drinking got put on the table. It like I didn't want to stop drinking and I didn't want to face the consequences of anything that she had to say about it, to be perfectly honest with you. So whenever drinking came up, it triggered me, which caused a reaction that meant that that never got brought up because it became emotionally unsafe for her to bring that up. So that was off the table. It became literally a self-defense mechanism for me to keep the drinking and to keep her away. By getting triggered every time it was brought up, it created uh an environment where she simply couldn't bring it up, and that protected the behavior. Now that's going on at some level in all of us. Every time you're getting triggered, it's it's because there's you're feeling rejected, or you're feeling a sense of shame about what's being brought up, or you're experiencing loss, or you're experiencing an inadequacy or an identity collapse as a result. And instead of actually doing the work and going, okay, what is this telling me about myself? What are what is the what is the lesson here? We get triggered, our our ability to handle uh our pain tolerance exceeds our capacity, and we and we just go off like a monkey in a monkey with a machine gun. So the part of the fix here is instead of seeing what's going on as as being negative, the discomfort is a diagnostic. Instead of getting triggered by what's going on, use it as diagnostic. This is why the Bible says count all sorrow, joy. Because when these these things could be classified as sorrow, right? Rejection, shame, loss, inadequacy, identity, collapse, fear, emotional insecurity, you name it, these things certainly can be classified as sorrow. It doesn't make us feel good to think about these things or experience these things. But instead of looking at it as sorrow or any of these things, count it joy because it's a diagnostic of what exactly you need to work on. And the truth of the matter is, all of these things are just illusions. None of them are real. They're identities and personas and fictions that you've taken on as a human being over the course of your lifetime based on other people's weakness, other people's inadequacies, other people's need and desire to control you. It's very easy to control you if you fear direct rejection. All I've got to do is put rejection on the table and you do as you're told. The same with shame, loss, and inadequacy. If you don't want to experience these things, it becomes very easy for me or somebody else to control you by simply bringing these things to you if you do not comply. If you do not comply with me, I'm gonna make you feel shame. If you do not comply with me, I'm going to make you feel inadequate. If you do not comply with me, I am going to reject you. And if you've if if you've been given a persona, a fiction, an identity that can't handle these, then you're gonna get triggered. But my challenge to you today, I'm giving you the key, I'm giving you the keys, I'm offering you the keys to true emotional sovereignty and freedom here to experience life on your terms. Because when you realize that how can you be rejected, the only person that can reject you is you. How can you reject me? You don't know me. Many of you, the only experience that you have of me is on these calls or on videos. You've seen of the hundreds of thousands or millions of hours that I've been alive and the hundreds of thousands of things that I've done in my lifetime, you've seen a tiny fraction of those. You simply are not in a position to reject me. You can't. You don't have enough information to reject me. The only person that can reject me is me. The only person that can cause my identity to collapse is me, truly. The only way I can experience inadequacy within my life is to accept personally that I'm inadequate. But when when we understand that inadequacy is a tool of manipulation and control that's institutionally programmed into you, you're you're emotionally dependent, you're you're effectively an emotional slave. And that's why you get triggered. So what's going on here is that your subconscious is interpreting everything that your wife's doing as an existential threat to you. If she doesn't stop this, it's gonna destroy me as a human being. If she doesn't stop this, it's gonna be revealed to the world that I'm inadequate, that I I'm all of these things, right? I'm incompetent. None of that's true. None of that's true. And when you're able to separate yourself from that, that's when emotional sovereignty appears. And by emotional sovereignty, I mean the ability to do what you do because you choose it, not because you're afraid of the consequence that somebody's gonna impose upon you or some like this is like people pleasing, right? The opposite to emotional sovereignty is people pleasing. It's that's that's the polar opposite. It's doing everything you do to please people because you're afraid of their response. What your wife is doing is not an existential threat to you. It's not an existential threat to your environment, it's not an existential threat to your identity. It's merely information, it's merely data. So, what happens when your wife creates these trigger events or these trigger event uh trigger events appear, which again is just simply the the the pain being presented to you exceeds the discomfort level, exceeds your capacity to handle the discomfort at that point. Your nervous system seeks immediate pressure relief, it seeks immediate threat elimination and immediately attempts regulation. This is what it does in the moment to the unsophisticated, uneducated, emotionally captured person. You're going to immediately seek relief from the situation. However, you do that, some of you send me a text message and go, This just happened, Cody. Relieve some of this pain from me. Some of you will start watching videos, some of you will start drinking, some of you will just lose the plot and do control, pressure, manipulation, emotional reaction, impulsive behavior as a result. All of these, they're not an indictment of who you are as a human being. You it doesn't say that you're a controlling individual or you're you're a manipulative person or you're emotionally impulsive or whatever. It simply says that your nervous system has exceeded its level of capacity and that you're now seeking pressure, threat elimination, and regulation. That's all it is. And for whatever reason, you just simply don't have the these are the tools that you have to do that with. You simply don't have emotionally healthy tools to relieve that pressure and to restabilize yourself. So you you get into these behaviors simply as a self-survival mechanism, which let me pose the question to you control, pressure, manipulation, emotional reaction, and impulsive behavior. Who can relate to that? Who does this? All of us. How many of these things do you think helps the marriage, helps the situation, or teaches your wife you're emotionally safe to be around? None of them is the answer. So why does this make the marriage worse? Why does this why is this the stupid button? Why does this set us back when we do it? Because the man, in his attempt to relieve his discomfort, he transfers the pressure back onto her. Is exactly what happens. Or in other words, when you're when your discomfort exceeds your capacity to handle it, you need a relief valve to balance it down again. The level of discomfort has to go back down equal to or below your capacity to handle that pressure. So you the way you do that is by the mechanisms that we just said, right? Control, pressure, manipulation, emotional reactions, impulsive behavior, i.e., it all falls under hitting the stupid button. What does that do? It transfers the pressure straight back onto her when she tries to alleviate some of the pressure from her, because again, the same thing is going on with her, right? Her capacity to handle the discomfort that she's in, i.e., the marriage, or her discomfort has now exceeded her capacity to handle it. So she needs relief. This is why she's telling you what she's telling you. She's not doing it to hurt you, to attack you. She simply needs to create balance in her nervous system. The level of pressure that she's experiencing, the level of discomfort that she's experiencing, man, is exceeding her capacity to handle it. And she's trying to balance that. And in her attempt to balance that, she triggers you and you just transfer all of that pressure back onto her. So instead of being the sponge, the man, the masculine authority that is able to absorb his wife's discomfort and stabilize her, which is your job, by the way. Not her job to stabilize you, it's your job to stabilize her. In her attempt to get that stabilization from you, it it triggers you when you just hand it all back to her with interest. So, in her effort to experience stability with you, in her effort to lower her discomfort level back to her capacity, she actually experiences more instability from you, more emotional labor is required from her, more pressure, more nervous system activation is required from her. So she's coming to you for relief, and you're you're aggravating that. You're you're increasing the pressure that she's experiencing instead of releasing that pressure because you're emotionally captive. So, what's the core problem here that we have to address? We have to change if we want to change the results that we experience, we have to change the way that we we uh experience the problems. We have to change how we think. If we change, if we change how we see the problems, the problems that we see start to change immediately. So the problem is short-term thinking, right? It's looking at what she's just said in the moment, which keep in mind she is inherently an emotional creature, liable to change her mind at a moment's notice. And we're taking what she says as an eternal truth instead of a temporal moment. In the same way that when I deal with my children, I've used this example before, but I'll use it again. When when my one of my children says to me, when I punish them or discipline them, and they say, I hate you, dad, you're the worst dad in the world. I don't take that as an as an eternal reality. I take that as a temporal moment, and I don't engage in short-term thinking. I don't go, well, this is the way it is forever. My kids are gonna hate me forever. I move to a long-term thinking and think this is this is just a moment in time. It's all it is. It's a moment. And this this is a major problem that many of you experience. You're taking temporal moments, tiny moments in time, and you're take you're applying eternal consequence. You're making them eternal, you're making them forever. Forever. Of course, if every time my children said something I didn't like, it triggered me. Router one, can I get you to mute yourself, please? Thank you. If every time my children said something I didn't like, it triggered me, and I responded as though that was the way it was going to be forever, I'd be a horrible parent. It would be emotionally extremely immature. So, what this results in is no consideration of long-term consequences. Your only goal is immediate short-term relief. Your only goal is to rebalance it, to get out of the discomfort zone and get back into a place where your capacity exceeds the pain that you're currently experiencing. You don't look at the long-term consequences. You don't go, well, if I do this now, yes, I'm going to get some relief in the moment, but it's going to create massive problems in the future. So what reactive behavior solves, the stupid button getting triggered solves, it creates momentarily uh creates momentary relief while creating multiple future problems. You create relief for yourself while making it literally impossible to relieve your wife of any stress or pressure in the future, or making it significantly harder, right? So the critical insight here is that you're solving one problem while simultaneously creating three more. It's not a good strategy. It's like drinking, right? Like you drink for whatever reason to for stress relief or for whatever, but like yeah, it solves the problem in the moment, but you create three, five, ten, twenty more problems simultaneously. You solve one problem by creating three. And then you got those three problems to solve, and you you address those three problems with the same psychology, the same mindset, the same emotions. Emotional maturity, the same emotional sovereignty or lack thereof, the same internal authority or lack thereof, the same man addresses those three problems that really made a pig's ear of trying to solve the one problem. So, how do we raise the emotional threshold? This is the problem, right? We stated what the actual problem is. Getting triggered is when your discomfort exceeds your tolerance to handle that discomfort. When you understand that's you, that's where your emotional instability is coming from. There is only one solution, and that is to increase your tolerance for discomfort. That's it. You have to increase your tolerance for discomfort. You have to be able to sit in the pain. And this ultimately this is this is what masculine strength is. It's not control, dominance, any of those things. It's like how much pain can you sit in without turning into a three-year-old with a hand grenade? And how long can you sit in it for? So the solution is learning to sit in that emotional pressure without reacting, without retaliating, without forcing a relief valve, and without collapsing. One of the things that made no sense to me at the time, that makes a lot of sense now, is David Coggins, where I watched him in an interview and he said he takes all of his negative comments and negativity that he gets from his YouTube videos and stuff like that, and he records them as an MP3, and then he he listens to them while he runs. And I'm like, man, why would you do that to yourself? I'm like, I'm the exact opposite. It's like I try to avoid even reading negative comments and stuff like that. Why on earth would he expose himself to those negative comments on an ongoing basis? It's because he's increasing his tolerance for discomfort. It's not because he's a masochist, it's because he understands what's going on here. When he increases his tolerance to the discomfort that those comments bring, it brings stability to him when he comes into contact with those con with those comments in public and unscripted. So, for example, if he's doing an interview or if he's on a stage or he's out in public and someone says something that's very confronting for him or very negative or very derogatory, he's already played this out. He's rehearsed this, he's exposed himself to the discomfort of those comments so much that he's normalized it. He's raised the level of normalization to where now what it takes to emotionally destabilize him is so much higher that he's now completely stable in public. So raising the emotional threshold, which is the solution to the problem, is learning to sit in the emotional pressure without needing a release. And again, this is what masculine strength is: it's sitting in that pain without reacting to it, without re without retaliating, without forcing relief, or without collapsing. Many of you, that the the second something happens, it's like you're trying to get a hold of me, going, Cody, reassure me, Cody, reassure me, Cody, reassure me. And it's like, that's fine if that's what you want, but it's not helpful. In that moment, the right thing to do is sit with the pain, to sit with the discomfort and normalize it. Because it's gonna happen again and again and again, and the solution is not to remove the pain, the solution is to increase your capacity to handle that pain, or in other words, become stronger, become a stronger man, become emotionally stable. Because emotional stability is a muscle, it must be trained, it must be exercised, and it must be strengthened. This is what David Coggins recognizes and is doing, right? He recognizes that his ability to handle those comments maturely and appropriately and to do what he does without the weight of that negativity just collapsing him. That must be trained, it must be exercised, and it must be strengthened as a discipline. This is about you developing internal authority. It's about you understanding that that internal authority and that internal stability and that emotional sovereignty is a muscle. And you can't just claim it, you have to train it. And the only way it's gonna be strengthened is to be exercised in the same way you go to the gym. And in the same way you go to the gym, if you go to the gym once a month, you're not gonna get much benefit. If you go to the gym and you don't lift much weight, you're not gonna get benefit. It's a no-pain, no gain scenario. If you want your wife back, you need to be a man that can carry the weight of the relationship. If you want to grow your business, you need to be a man that can carry the weight of the business. If you want a better relationship with your children, you have to be a man that can carry the weight of parenthood. It's as simple as that. And as I say all the time, the life you live is the man you are. I'm not saying that any of you are inadequate in any of those areas. I'm saying look at your life and see if see where it's collapsing, where your life is collapsing is evidence and diagnostic and the diagnostic of what's going on here. It's an area that needs to be strengthened, and you need to increase your capacity in those areas. And that is only grown through tolerance, tolerated discomfort. Again, this is why all sorrow should be counted as joy. Because when you look at it in these terms, only sorrow can produce growth. Only discomfort can turn you into the man you need to be. Only pain can refine you. You have to become okay with pain, you have to become okay with discomfort. If you can't, if you refuse that and you just simply want to live in an environment where you're never challenged and you're never triggered, then quite frankly, like spray paint your hair purple and become a snowflake. That's all there is left. To where when someone says there are only two genders, you just can't handle it. There's only male and female, you just completely flip out and have a total meltdown. That's where it leads to. Discomfort exceeds capacity to handle it. So, what does emotional maturity actually look like? Let's get into the practical here. Emotional maturity, internal authority, emotional sovereignty is being strong enough to feel pressure. It's being strong enough to sit with the discomfort without the need for it to be removed from you and the ability to deal with fear. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Feel the discomfort and do it anyway. Experience the pressure, but move forward anyway. This is the identity part, right? Internal authority says that we operate through identity-driven rules, not through feelings, not through emotions. How many soldiers do you think advance into fire because it feels good? Because it feels like the right thing to do. How many soldiers advance into battle based on it feels feels good? No, it's pressured, it's discomfort, it's fear, it's the worst thing in the world. But that the internal authority exists to advance in spite of all of those. It is the man that flees, turns around, and runs away in the back because he's submitted because he's subjected himself to his feelings and he can't overcome those feelings and he has to reduce the pressure level. Or the man that moves forward in spite of those feelings and deals with the pressure, the discomfort, and the feelings. Which one of those is a man? Which one of those is honored by society? Which one of those gets the woman? Which one of those has self-respect? Which one? So we need to be able to sit in those feelings of pressure, discomfort, and fear without an immediate action required, without impulsive behavior being engaged in, the stupid button, and without an emotional discharge. These things are unacceptable to an emotionally mature, strong man who has internal authority, emotional sovereignty, and can carry the weight of a woman. So the result here is every time you tolerate discomfort without a reaction, without the need to eliminate that discomfort, just being able to sit in it, you increase your emotional strength, you increase your nervous system capacity, and you increase your emotional sovereignty. This is this is how you this is how you stop getting triggered. You have to sit in what the pain is and accept that that's how this works. Don't immediately run the chat GPT or the internet or someone else. When you experience discomfort, accept it, sit with it. So when you don't do that, this pressure dynamic appears. Unstable men take pressure off of themselves by handing it back to their wife. That's what's happening. That's what almost all of us do. That's why we're here. This is this is the societal uh training that we've received. Whenever we experience pressure within the relationship, we hand we hand that pressure right back to the wife and go, here you are. You you carry this pressure for me. It's too heavy. She can't. That's why she's leaving. She was never designed to carry that load. She's not capable of carrying that load. And if you continue to put that load on her, she's gonna it's gonna crush her. It's gonna utterly crush her. She can't carry it. And she's gonna leave. The only way to get her back into this marriage is to remove that pressure from her and to do what it is you were designed to do as a man and carry that weight for her. Carry the load. Put it on your back, not hers. Stable men absorb the pressure, they regulate internally and they create relief externally. By absorbing the pressure internally, you create relief in the environment externally, which your wife experiences. This is what a stable man does. A regulated man. So the deeper lesson to learn, man, the stronger your emotional tolerance becomes, the less emotionally reactive you become. Direct relationship between your tolerance of discomfort and your emotional instability. The higher the level of emotional intolerance, the higher the level of emotional stability. Vice versa is true. When you learn to increase your tolerance of discomfort, your emotional reactivity lowers. You start to stabilize, and then you stabilize the environment that you are overseeing, and as a result, your wife's emotional, uh her nervous system starts to destake starts to stabilize also, and then she's able to re to respond to you with a much stronger assurance that you're not going to get triggered, which means emotional safety is being established. There's no emotional safety without you doing this work, essentially, or there's no increasing emotional safety. So the less reactive you become, the safer your environment becomes to be around. The safer your environment becomes, the lower the overall stress level within the relationship becomes, and the higher the emotional safety that she experiences becomes. So what helps raise this threshold? Long-term thinking, this is one of the most important phrases in my arsenal personally, how I deal with things, is this is a moment and it just it too will pass. This is just a feeling and it too will pass. It will pass. Stop thinking that the stop turning temporal moments into eternal realities. It's catastrophic. Think through the consequences, the outcomes, and the future impact of what you're about to do is going to do. Yes, yes, you will lower, you will bring an equilibrium again in the short term into your discomfort and your your capacity to handle that discomfort. You will regulate yourself in the short term. But think of the long-term consequences of that. What's going to happen? What is the cost of short-term regulation versus the cost of sitting in the pain? It's about deciding to become emotionally sophisticated, to become emotionally intelligent, to actually become aware of your emotions, how those emotions are driving your behavior, and what the consequence of those behavior of the consequence of those behaviors actually is on the relationship, the marriage, the business, the family, the children, your own welfare, ultimately, society. It's about nervous system conditioning. You have to condition your nervous system. We've already said it. When pain and discomfort arise, you have to sit in it like a man. Take your bloody medicine. Take your medicine. Every time you sit in the discomfort, your ability to tolerate discomfort goes up a little bit. Your ability, look at wartime, right? Look at the blitz in London in World War II. Those people very quickly adapted to that, and it was a right that it became a new normal. Look at the pandemic, what was going on very quickly became a new normal. Why? Because we were forced to deal with the discomfort. We give a way out, there was not a way out given. There was not a way to reduce the discomfort back down to capacity. Capacity had to increase to match the discomfort. It had no choice. In forced environments, this happens. You're not in a forced environment. You have to execute this through decision. You have to execute this through emotional sophistication and willpower. You do it through value-based execution. You do it because it's who you are, not how you feel. Successful people make their decisions based on values, not on feelings. The man on the battlefield advances because he has a value system that says I am not a coward and I will not run away. His value system forces him to advance into fire. The man that has no value system runs. He flees. You have to decide who you are as a man. You have to decide what you're willing to tolerate as a man. You have to decide how much weight you're going to carry as a man and then commit to carrying that weight regardless of how heavy it is, of the cost. And you simply have to develop a willing a willingness to tolerate pain without seeking immediate relief. That's just a choice. I'm going to tolerate pain without seeking immediate relief. I'm going to sit in it. How do you sit in it? You just sit in it. I go for a walk, personally. That's my strategy. When when when the pain that I'm experiencing exceeds my capacity to handle it, I walk. I did it yesterday. I was having a bad day yesterday. I ended up walking for probably 90 minutes until there's an equilibrium again. Until the pain that I'm experiencing comes back into my capacity to handle it. Or more more appropriately, until the pain that I'm experiencing, the capacity to handle it increases. Exercise will do that for me. Sometimes I have to walk for two hours, three hours until that equilibrium happens again. I don't go and do silly stuff. I don't explode at my wife. I don't do silly stuff to remove the pain. I'm willing to sit in it without earbuds, without internet, just me and the pain. So let's just go into some let's not do this things here, where a lot of people go immediately. It's like what I'm talking about, increasing your ability to handle, increasing your comfort level and capacity. It's not emotional suppression. It's not telling yourself this isn't real, this isn't happened, happening. It's facing it and sitting with it. It's not becoming numb or numbing yourself. It's not pretending not to care, go and she's done this, and this has really hurt me and it's triggered me. And I'm just going to pretend it doesn't bother me. No, it does bother you. I'm not saying you shouldn't pretend that it doesn't bother you. You should just sit in that pain. And it's not about emotionally shutting down either. It's about handing this emotionally intelligently. What this does mean, it means you increasing your capacity to carry weight. It means you increasing your capacity to emotionally regulate. How many you're in the mess we're in because we have we had a lack of emotional regulation too many times. It does mean increasing your discomfort tolerance levels. It does mean learning to internally stabilize yourself through internal authority. And it does mean delaying your reaction. Holding back. So the core the core principle here is that a weak nervous system requires immediate relief, i.e., the trigger. If you're getting triggered, it's because you have a weak nervous system. And again, let me ask you the question: is this attractive or unattractive to a woman? A strong nervous system tolerates discomfort long enough to choose wise behavior. In other words, to show discipline to move beyond the trigger moment, which is essentially an impulsive reaction, into a chosen behavior. Whether the behavior is right or wrong moving forward, you're actually choosing it in a so sober moment versus emotionally reacting. So what needs to happen here to make this happen in your life, your marriage? You've got to stop asking the question, how do I stop getting triggered? And you've got to start asking the question, how do I become harder to destabilize? That this is the real question. How do I become harder to be be destabilized? And the answer to that, we've covered it right, is when you when you experience discomfort that's beyond your current tolerance levels, you sit in it. You create a new norm or you normalize it. So, summary is emotional triggering, it's simply low discomfort tolerance, it's all it is. Stability grows through tolerated discomfort. Strong men, masculine men, internally regulated men, emotionally independent men, are not emotionless. They don't have to pretend that they're not hurt by what's happened, or it's uncomfortable, or they don't, or that they like what's happened, or they don't care. Strong men are capable of carrying emotional pressure without transferring it onto other people. That's what a truly strong man is. He's able to carry emotional pressure without transferring it. Some of us transfer it onto our kids, some of us transfer it onto our employees, some of us transfer it into co-workers, and almost all of us, or all of us, in fact, as soon as we're on this call, transfer it onto our wives. All of that is ours to carry. So emotional sovereignty, put in plain English, it's increasing your threshold of discomfort. It's not eliminating the emotion that causes the discomfort. So I'm going to finish on this, and it is emotional triggering is not proof that your life is unbearable or something catastrophic is happening. It's proof that your nervous system has not yet developed enough capacity to remain regulated inside the discomfort being experienced. That's what it is. Growth occurs in your life when the man stops escaping discomfort for long enough for the nervous system to adapt to that discomfort. Will, as I've said, human beings create adapt to horrific situations: war, pestilence, disease, poverty. Our nervous system is designed to adapt, and it does, but we have to stop escaping that discomfort for long enough to allow the nervous system to adapt. And when we do, it increases our capacity to stabilize the environment that we're in, which in turn stabilizes your wife, which in turn stabilizes her nervous system, which in turn does everything that needs to happen for dialogue for this marriage to be healed and restored. That's it for me. Let's jump over to the QA.