She Said It’s Over_ Do This First to Reset Her Nervous System

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This workshop is built from nearly a decade of working with men in marriage crisis, watching some recover their marriage and watching others fail. The patterns are predictable.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So the words nobody ever wants to hear, she tells you that it's over. Purpose of this presentation today is to give you your first step, what to do if you hear the word that it's over from her. The short answer to the question is you start making it worse and you start to stabilize the situation. And this presentation is actually going to be about how do you actually do that. What we're going to provide here is the reset point for when things in the marriage are moving against you. If it's not going how you want it to go, if things are heading south, going down, uh going downhill, then this is what we're going to do. So, what we want to learn today is how to stop the escalation of the situation. We want to remove pressure from the situation. We want to contain the instability that is inherently present, and ultimately we want to reset her nervous system. This is really the key to all of this. She needs a nervous system reset in order to get to a place to where she feels able to continue with the relationship. So just so we're clear, this is not going to be about convincing, persuasion, arguing your case in front of her, explaining yourself to prove you're right, or repairing everything tonight. This is a this is a process, and this is a step-by-step process. So we're in containment right now. So if we want to fix the relationship, we've got to understand the terrain and we've got to understand the enemy. So the real enemy here is not her emotions, it's not feminism of the women in her ear, it's not another man in the situation. Contrary to popular belief, it's not communication and it's really not therapy culture either. These are all symptoms of a deeper underlying problem that we're going to fix today. And the real enemy that we're actually working against here is drift, unpredictability, emotional unreliability, and chaos ultimately in you. So a lot of men, when their marriage goes into instability or failure, they they do blame these things, emotions, feminism, another man. But that's like saying these spots on my face are causing measles. This is the measles, this is the spots on the face. So what we want to do is get to the real symptoms of the problem so we can uproot it once and for all, so you don't have to continue to experience these problems over and over again. So the main issue here is drift. So let's define drift so we know exactly what that looks like. I'm going to define it as promises without sustained change. Improvement followed by regression, the cycles of tension followed by calm, followed by tension again, the feast famine cycle, and repeated unresolved issues within the marriage, things that come up over and over again that just actually never get resolved at all. So let's have a look here. Okay. So drift is actually the silent killer within your marriage because it sneaks up on you without warning. The the big warning signs are there. If she walks out, then that's a warning sign, right? That's easy. But drift is so dangerous because it's like being overweight or something like that. It sneaks up on you, or alcoholism, for example. You don't all of a sudden realize that you're becoming overweight. It's it's little insidious behaviors repeated over and over again over an extended period of time, and it gives you no warning. You just wake up one day and you're dealing with the problem. So drift causes unpredictability within the marriage, and this is from her perspective, this is what she's feeling when that drift is present and that unpredictability is present. She's unable to predict your emotional tone. She doesn't know whether you're going to escalate the situation or not. She doesn't know whether you're going to dismiss her or not, or whether you're going to hear her argument, and she doesn't know whether this is going to turn into a fight. Now, this is the proverbial eggshells, walking on eggshells or landmines within the relationship. You just don't know, and she just doesn't know what's going to happen happen. And the bottom line is her nervous system hates unpredictability. Unpredictability is the enemy, stability and predictability is our friend. So instability really is the core threat to reconciliation here at any stage of the marriage. At any point, the marriage is going wrong, starting to go wrong, has gone wrong. Instability ultimately is the measles underneath it that is causing the spots on your face. And we have to address the core underlying problem, which is the instability. So the conflict does not destroy the safety within your marriage, the instability does. So when instability is present, she cannot reset emotionally, and if she cannot reset emotionally, she cannot bond to you. So my goal here is to hold up a diagnostic mirror to you so you can actually see yourself as you see, as she sees you, not as you think that you're showing up, or as ChatGPT has told you that you're showing up, or your friends or your mother's telling you you're showing up. What we want here is accuracy and we want precision. This is about really understanding where you are, who you are, what's going on, and how she's seeing the situation. And accurate, precise thinking is what saves marriages. It's not about positive thinking and it's not about motivation. We want accurate, precise thinking so we can diagnose what's actually going on and act effectively where it really makes a difference. So when she says it's over, or any stage of that continuum to where she's moving towards it's over, or she's moving away from the marriage, uh the question is what did you do when that became obvious? When she asked for a divorce, she said it was over, or it's become very clear that she's moving away from the marriage. What did you do in that situation? Think about that. So it's gonna fall typically into four types of archetypal men. You're gonna you're gonna be in one of these four categories in how you respond to crises. So the first type is type A, which is the persuader. So the persuader explains the situation, he corrects her, he replays history with her, and he tries to prove that she's wrong. When she says you did this, he goes and says, actually, it wasn't Tuesday, it was a Wednesday. Actually, you weren't wearing a red dress, it was a blue dress. Actually, I didn't say that, I said this. It's explanation, correction, and trying to prove that they're right. Now, the belief that underlies this position of the persuader is that if she understands the truth, if she understands the situation accurately, she'll change her mind. But the truth is the actual result that this produces in the marriage is it puts more pressure on her. Now, the second type of archetypal man is the pursuer. Now, his behaviors include excessive texting, emotional speeches, we need to talk about this, can we just talk about this please? And immediate fix-in attempts. Once he realizes that the marriage is in trouble, this is all about pursuing her to fix the problem and to fix the problem as quickly as possible. He becomes Mr. Fixer. Now, the belief that underlies this archetype is if I try harder, she'll feel secure, and if she feels secure, then she will stay within this marriage. But the exact opposite is it is true. When she's when you're engaging in all of this behavior, all it does is it increases the threat level within her, and it actually pushes her further away from reconciliation. Now, type number C is the man who collapses or the collapser. His behavior is identified through begging, through panic behavior. He panics and freaks out. This creates an incredible amount of emotional instability with him, and he starts to make dramatic promises. Out of the panic and the fear, he promises to change. He promises to do all the things that he said he would do all along and never did. He promises to meet all of our needs. The belief that underlies this mentality is if she sees my pain, she'll stay with me. It's relating to your wife through pain. And the the basic premise that if she feels sorry for me, she'll stay. Now, in reality, that's not the case. What it actually communicates to her is that you just confirm the instability that she's trying to get away from. It's a very negative position to take. And finally, is is the archetype D, and this is me, this is how I tend to respond in these situations, is the stonewaller. So cold withdrawal, giving the silent treatment, fine, whatever. I don't really care if that's how you feel, that's how you feel, whatever. I don't really give a damn. Detachment in a very unhealthy way. And an I don't need you mentality. I don't really I don't need you anyway. I'm better off without you. I don't need this relationship and I don't need you. Now, this is this is my position, this is my typical default, and it's really important that we recognize ourselves in these archetypes because we can't change what we don't see. Once we recognize the patterns that we're running, we're able to change them. Now, the core belief that drives the stonewaller is if I detach from this situation, I regain control. If I don't care about this situation, then I then I'm in control of this situation. But in reality, all you actually do is you confirm that the emotional unsafety that she's trying to escape from is present and is an actively running pattern right now. So the hard diagnostic question to ask yourself is if you were married to you, would you feel calm? Would you want to be married to your chaos? Would you want to be married to your demeanor? Would you want to be married to one of those archetypes? And if the answer is no, I really wouldn't want to be married to myself, I wouldn't be happy in my situation. Well, this is a very accurate diagnostic of why your wife feels like she feels, and it actually is the starting point to moving forward with that. So those are the four types of men that are typically going to show up in a marriage crisis situation. Now let's look at the containers that your wife is in, that the the stages that she moves through. So you're going to be one of those four men, and she's going to be in one of these four stages. So again, it's very important that we identify the stage accurately so we understand who we're showing up as and what stage we're showing up as. Now, in every aspect of life, there are personalities and there are containers. So a personality would be the father, the husband, the employee, or the employer, the man at church, the man at the pub or the bar, right? These are different roles that we play, these are different personalities that we take on. And then there are also different containers that we operate in. So work is a container, church is a container, the marriage is a container. Now, if the personality of the man at the pub shows up in the marriage container, it's a mismatch and it's going to cause a problem. If the employee or employer shows up at church, again, it's the it's the right, it's a mismatch of persona and container. So we need to understand the persona, we need to understand the container so we can match these up accurately, and then this gives us a very tangible, very measurable way of seeing where we are in the relationship and what needs to happen to resolve the situation. So the first container, and we're going to go from low intensity to high intensity. This is where the marriage starts to go wrong or starts to go wrong again. Tension. The container one is tension. So this is repeated unresolved issues. Your wife starts to develop low levels of anxiety and she subtly disconnects. So men will say she keeps bringing up the same issues over and over again. Well, yes, that's because it's unresolved. This is a this is a sign that you are in this container. Tension is starting to show up. And when those issues don't get resolved, it causes her anxiety, and that lack of resolution and anxiety inevitably causes her disconnect. There's very little she can do about this. This is not a conscious thing. So the man's thought at this point is this is normal. This is just what women are. This is what they do. Women never forget, they've got the memory of an elephant. She's still bringing up stuff from 20 years ago. This is just normal. This is just women. This is not normal. Container number two is the is recognition of the instability. She starts to recognize that actually this is not a feeling, she's not subconsciously experienced it. She's now consciously recognizing the instability within the relationship. Now, she starts at this stage, she starts to notice the patterns that are showing up. Things don't really ever change. That's a pattern. You say you're going to change, you don't. It becomes a pattern. This keeps happening over and over again. It's a pattern. I don't feel settled in this relationship. This becomes a pattern. It stops being it stops being an isolated individual episode, and now she's forming pattern recognition and she's developing some deep highways within her neurological system that we really need to deal with at this point. We need to do battle with the monster, well, it's a baby. If we let this monster grow into a full-grown beast to where these patterns become established, it's going to be much harder to deal with. So again, at any stage in the relationship, from you just got married to she's leaving you, this is going on. So what is happening here is in this stage, this container, her nervous system is starting to form pattern recognition. And she starts bracing in certain situations. When she brings up certain topics, topics, her nervous system is now responding to pattern recognition, not the situation. And she starts to brace. This is where she's expecting emotional trauma. If this isn't resolved in container number two, it inevitably results in exhaustion. She becomes exhausted. Now, what happens here is there's less fighting, the fighting slows down or stops, there's less emotion displayed, there's less engagement. This is where you become roommates or just partners basically, raising kids or paying bills together because it's convenient. And the relationship becomes calm but distant. This is where you're in the same bed, but she's on her phone and you're watching a movie on Netflix. Or you're in the car, she's looking out of the window, and you're driving, and there's no conversation. You're at the restaurant together, but both of you are on that on the phone. Now, again, the the thought that the man has in this situation is the situation's improving. I hear all the time that we we just don't fight. Me and my wife, we don't fight. That's not the problem. That is the problem. Like this, this is what's going on. She's exhausted and she is trying to mitigate that exhaustion, and she's doing it from just abandoning the relationship, basically. We we as men think that the situation is stabilizing and improving when actually it's shut down. She's going, I just can't do this today. I just can't engage with this today. And it can be very deceptive because a lot of times when she's exhausted and she just needs a respite, she'll give you sex. She in her mind she'll go, if I just give I'm just gonna give him sex just to shut him up. I just can't deal with this tonight. I just can't deal with his mood tonight, so I'll just do that. Or I'll just agree with him, I'll just agree with what he's saying. I'll just go along with what he's saying. It's not that she's agreeing, it's she's exhausted and she no longer has the energy to fight you. And the end is it is showing up at this point. Healthy couples fight. If there's no fighting and disagreeing within your relationship, it's because she's shutting down, and that's a problem. It's not about eliminating the fights, it's actually about learning how to fight in a healthy way. This is what healthy couples do. And finally, container number four is now she transitions into the exit phase where she said that it's over. So this was not a spontaneous decision, right? It was years of accumulated nervous system fatigue that she can no longer ignore and is going to is going to manifest and it's going to surface regardless. It's not it's not it's not conscious at this point. This is the nervous system taking over. And when we talk about emotional debt that can't be repaid, you have a debt to your wife that can't be repaid. This is it. It's years of accumulated nervous system fatigue to where the pattern recognition now is so deep and the the the utter destruction of emotional safety that goes along with that, she can no longer handle that. So the first step when this happens is containment. So why does this work? Why is your first step containment? Because right now, when when she moves to this stage of exit in the relationship, you have to understand she's in self-preservation mode at this point. When you understand she's in container four, she's in a state of exhaustion, and she simply cannot continue as is, and over an extended period of time, you've trained her pattern recognition to recognize that you're not going to change, she now goes into self-preservation mode. Now, the thing to understand about the nervous system, whether it's yours, mine, or hers, is it's indifferent. It doesn't care about you, and it doesn't care about me, and it doesn't care about the marriage, and it doesn't care about Jesus. It cares about self-preservation. When the nervous system goes into that fight or flight self-preservation mode, it is now purely biological. And it could not care less about your logic, it cares about preserving her, and that is it. It conserves, can it is concerned with preserving itself. So it is now constantly in threat scan mode, it is constantly in emotional defense mode, and it is constantly in exit preservation mode. Now, what do I mean by exit preservation? It has taken your wife a lot of courage and energy and risk to present the exit of this marriage as a reality to you, and she's not gonna let you close the door on that. It was very costly and very expensive for her to say this marriage is over or I'm moving away from this marriage. And your instinct is gonna be to shut that door. She's not gonna let that happen. The cost to open that door was so expensive that if you start to get between her and that door, she's gonna attack viciously. So again, this is biological, not logical. As men, we go to the logical. We want to convey facts, we want to convey what we perceive as truth, and we think that if we show the logical path forward, that we can change her mind or we can show her logically that she's making the wrong decision. Understand, this is not logical, this is biological, this is biological. And as such, you are not dealing with in the nicest way possible a rational human being. You're dealing with a nervous system that is in self-preservation mode and will defend its survival at all costs at this point. So the first step promise here is you've got to stop making the situation worse, right? You've got to stop reinforcing her decision to move in the direction that she's moving in, whether it's to move away from you emotionally or to exit the relationship, you have to stop reinforcing that decision. That's your first big win. So let's talk about what making it worse actually looks like in reality. Because I want to I I want to give you practicality here. I don't want to just give you abstraction and go stop making the situation worse. How useless is that? So, what making the situation actually looks like in practicality, it's like continuously arguing with her. When she says, you do this and this and this, and you argue with her because you go into logical brain, you go into man mode, defending your behavior. She says, You never do this, you never do that, you always did that to me, and you defend yourself. Over talking, explaining yourself, demanding clarity, saying, Well, what do you mean by that? What are you talking about? That's not true. Clarify yourself. Emotionally flooding the zone, flooding her with guilt, with shame, with your depression and your pain and what's going to happen to her children and the family and all of that stuff. Just emotionally flooding her. And forcing resolution quickly. As men, we hate unresolved issues. We want we want the situation resolved. We just want to know that it's going to be okay. This is bad. This is making the situation worse. We have to understand that you're not going to get resolution today. And when it does come, it's going to come on your schedule, on her schedule, rather. So all of these behaviors here. Equal one thing, and that's pressure. You're pressuring her. And pressure, surely, as the sun is going to rise in the east and set in the west, is going to backfire on you. It's going to cause multiple irreversible problems within the relationship if you don't catch this. So here's what's going on. Again, remember we're communicating to her to a nervous system that is in self-preservation mode at this time, and we are dealing with a nervous system that is in pattern recognition scan mode, not logical fact mode. So here's what her nervous system does: it's a machine of prediction. It is not actually reacting to what's going on, it is reacting to what is likely to happen next in the situation. And what her nervous system predicts when she sees intensity from you is that is going to lead to escalation, and that escalation is going to lead to even more instability. So when you escalate the situation, you're actually all you're doing actually is confirming her predictive mechanism that this is going to cause a problem, and this reinforces that loop within her nervous system, reinforces the predictive mechanism and her certainty that she wants out of this relationship, and her certainty that you are not the man for her or you cannot change, you just harden it at that point. You just make it more certain in her mind. It has the exact opposite effect to what you think it has. For you, you think you're fighting for the marriage, for her, you're confirming that you're unstable. So let's make this practical. What is the action step here? Anytime you find yourself in a situation where you feel your wife becoming defensive or aggressive or removing herself from the relationship or ending the relationship, it doesn't matter. This works any stage of this process. Here's what you say. I'm not gonna argue. I don't want to pressure you, sweetheart. I understand that you're leaving this marriage and I respect that decision. And then button the beak. Stop. That is it. I understand that you're leaving this marriage and I respect that decision. Now, this is containment of the situation because she has nowhere to go with it. And this is hear this very clearly, man. This is your only move. It's your only smart move. Let me rephrase that. This is your only smart move that gives you any chance of staying on the field. So when you do that, here's what happens, or what does not happen, escalation does not happen. Okay? And that breaks her predictive model. And when prediction breaks within her nervous system, the threat level reduces. When the threat level reduces, regulation within her nervous system begins. This is the reset we all want. Reset is not an accurate word because it indicates an instantaneous change of situation and you go from broken to fixed. This is not how it's gonna happen. What we're actually the reset that we're looking for within the marriage is regulation. We want her nervous system to be regulated. And when the threat level reduces, and she her predictive mechanism is now broken, the model is broken, regulation can begin, and when that regulation begins within her, neutrality becomes possible. So again, we are not looking to heal the marriage, we're not looking to get her to come back, we're not looking to do anything other than introduce neutrality into the situation to where she goes, okay, I'm willing to talk to you again. You can't fix a marriage if she's not willing to talk to you, and she's not going to be willing to talk to you until you reset her predictive neurological protective mechanisms that allow neutrality to become a possibility again. So this is going to be the pathway to the reset or the recalibration, however we want to call that. Right now she is has exited, is threatening exiting, or is moving towards exit. If this is where you're at, then your next stage is going to be containment. You want to contain the situation. So the best way to look at this is if you're walking by a river in winter time with somebody and you fall into the river, the only thing you need to do at that point is contain the situation. You need to get your butt out of that river, you need to get out of those wet clothes, and you need to get some heat into your body. When you're in when you're in that river three minutes from being hypothermic, you don't say you pushed me. You don't say it's your fault I fell in. You don't say who's to blame for this. You don't say let's work on this so this doesn't happen again. You have one goal and one goal alone. Get out of that river, get out of your wet clothes, and get in front of a fire. That's it. That's containment. Contain the immediate threat. Once the immediate threat is contained, then the goal is to remove pressure from the situation. Once that pressure is removed, then the threat level is reduced. Once the threat level is reduced in your wife, the body starts to calm down, the nervous system starts to recalibrate to where it can actually hear you. Or in other words, you start to establish a neutral emotional grounding with her. You're no longer a threat to her, you're no longer a danger, you're just neutral. Now, again, most men want to skip stages, right? They want to go from threat to asset. That's not how it works. You have to follow the sequence. You go from threat to neutrality to ally. That's how it works. And once the neutral emotional ground is established, which look how far down the sequence this is, most people want to go over start that right here. A window of safety opens up to where you can now talk to your wife. Now you're not reconciled at this point, but there's a safety window to where she will she will tolerate communication, she will her pattern recognition modeling has been interrupted and is being questioned whether it's accurate or not at this point. And this is the possibility where this is where the possibility of re-engagement starts to occur. This is the goal. So as I just said, you cannot skip these steps. This is sequential. There are no shortcuts here, there are only wise paths. And the only way to speed this up is to slow it down. My favorite phrase: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. If you try to rush, if you try to rush this, all you're doing is rushing your divorce. That's all you're doing. So let's talk about what that reset, emotional nervous system reset feels like, both in you and her, right? Because you're you need this as well. Your emotional uh your your nervous system is is on high alert right now as well, which is not good for anybody. So what an what an emotional reset actually looks like is it's it's boring. It's very boring, it's very predictable, it's calm, measured, slow, stable, predictable behavior. You you need to know what you're gonna get, and she needs to know what she's gonna get. If she has a conversation with you, she needs to know that it's gonna be boring, predictable, measured, calm. If there are eggshells or if there are landmines, then forget it, ain't happening. And the same with you, until your nervous system reaches that reset level to where you're calm, predictable, and measured, you are also a monkey with a machine gun and as much a part of the problem as her still at that point. So recovery here through this stage is it's very low intensity, it's not intense, it doesn't feel passionate, it doesn't feel intense, it doesn't feel like something big is happening, it feels it feels stable and it feels like nothing really is going on. There are no big breakthroughs happening here, there are no passionate moments of explosive energy. So let's talk about the mindset shift that you need to adopt here in order to make this successful. So you don't fix chaos, which is where your marriage is at right now, with intensity. You defeat chaos with stability. Chaos in your marriage is the enemy, chaos within her nervous system is the enemy, chaos in your nervous system is the enemy. The only defense you have against that, or the only repair you have is stability to become a stable man. So let's give the final praise report here because there is good news. Understand this. When she tells you it's over, when she said it's over, she's not rejecting you. It's not personal. She's rejecting the instability that you embody and that you bring to the relationship, she's rejecting the chaos, she's rejecting the exhaustion. And she's been left with no choice through self-preservation and biology but to make these decisions. So here's the beautiful thing. If you remove the instability, this is the goal, right? It's not to add something to the relationship, it's to remove something. If you remove the instability that is present within the marriage right now, then you remove the enemy. And when the enemy is gone, then reconsideration of the situation becomes possible. And when reconsideration of the situation becomes possible, reconciliation becomes possible. So if you want a detailed breakdown on how to do that, how to remove that enemy of instability, I'm gonna put the video, I'm gonna put it here if.