The One Thing That Reset My Marriage (When Nothing Else Worked)

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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

Today I want to talk about how I saved my marriage from the brink of divorce and how I was able to win my wife back. And the purpose of this presentation today is it's a mirror. Seek yourself out in this because this is the same path that every man takes in destruction and resurrection of their marriage. The mechanisms might be slightly different. The things that tripped me up, the ambushes that got me are going to be slightly different to the ones that got you. Don't get hung up on the actual mechanisms themselves. Try and find yourself in this because if you can, you're going to see where you're going wrong and you're going to see what you need to do to get out of the trap that you've fallen into. So the first thing I want to talk about is what really destroyed my marriage to the point of almost losing it, and that was her hope. I played on her hope of the marriage being saved. As we started to descend down the slippery slope of the marriage failing, she had a lot of hope and she tried everything. She offered counseling, she wanted to go to counseling with me. She sent me to pastors, uh couples' retreats, women's groups, men's groups, you name it, anything that it put hope into the marriage, she wanted to try. And I went along with that, not because I knew that it would work, I went along with it because I knew what the real problem was. And the real problem was I was drinking. The real problem was that I was drinking, and every time that I agreed to one of these mechanisms, whether it be counseling, therapy, seeing a pastor, it introduced more hope into the relationship for her, which allowed me to keep my problem, which was drinking, without actually having to deal with it. As we've talked about, there's other videos on this channel you can find. Hope and tolerance are directly proportional. The higher the level of hope, the higher the level of her tolerance of your behavior. And I really played on that. I I understood that and I really played on that because every time I agreed to a new mechanism, it brought me another six months to where I could keep drinking. And those were the games that I played. I had no hope, I had no desire to really fix the marriage. I just wanted to create an environment where I could keep drinking. Now, the lie that I believed that allowed me to stay in this mess that cost me almost everything was I have time. I wasn't looking at the situation like I'm gonna do this forever. I was just gonna do it for another six months, another 12 months, another two years. I knew that I had a problem, and I knew that that problem had to be resolved or dealt with eventually, but it just wasn't gonna be today. And I believed that I could continue to do what I was doing, and I would just deal with it later on, and I believed that she would stay with me for uh as long as I took to resolve the problem, and it almost cost me everything. Here's the thing, right? There's something called confirmation bias, which means that you confirm whatever you're biased towards the mind, whatever the mind chooses, it finds evidence to support. So a good example of this is politics, right? Whether you're red or whether you're blue, it doesn't matter. If you're very red, you watch red media, you read red newspapers, you vote red, you find reasons to support your position, and you completely disregard the blue media, and vice versa. We find things that support our position, not challenge or confront them. We seek to have our biases confirmed. Now, understand that in a marriage situation there are two positions that your woman takes, your wife takes in the destruction of your marriage. One is she has hope and she's trying, she believes that the marriage can be saved, and two, if she believes that it cannot be saved, at which point she's made the decision to leave. Now, wherever she is at that point in the process, she's got to confirm that bias. So if she still believes that the marriage is worth saving, she will find everything she can find to support that. She will see little changes in you and take them as positive. She will see that you agree into counseling, see that you agree into this, that you modifying that behavior. It doesn't matter how small it is. If she has decided that she wants to save the marriage, she will find a bias to confirm, or she will find confirmation of her bias. Now, the exact opposite is true at the snap of a finger, right? When she decides that the marriage is not worth saving anymore, or you cannot be redeemed, that you cannot change, her changing shifts completely in literally the snap of a finger, to where she is no longer looking for reasons that the marriage can be saved. Her bias now is that you are not redeemable, you cannot change, you cannot be saved, the marriage cannot be saved, and she's going to seek out reasons to validate that. That is why a marriage that could easily have been saved today, 24 hours later, is almost an impossibility to save. Because she's crossed that Rubicon and she has made the decision that the marriage is no longer savable. Now she's no longer looking for reasons. Her confirmation bias has moved from this can be saved and she's looking for reasons to this cannot be saved, and now she's looking for reasons that it cannot be saved. She's looking to have that bias confirmed. And a lot of you, once you cross over into that, it unfortunately it's just too late for you. You don't want to let it get to that point. I remember going to a castle, I visited a castle, Warwick Castle in England one time, and they have a torture chamber there. I went on a tour of the torture chamber, and the man giving the tour said, You don't want to let it get to this point. If you let it get to this point, I'm telling you, you're going to have a bad day. And it is exactly the same as that within a marriage. You think you have time. I I talked to a client, or it was a pre-client recently, actually, and we're having a conversation, and my question was, How long do you have to sort this problem out? And he goes, I've got 18 months. And my question is, Well, who told you that? Who told you you have 18 months? Where do you get that from? And the answer is he was in the same position that I was in at the time. He knew he had a problem, he knew his marriage was failing, he knew it had to be fixed, he knew he had to take action, but he didn't want to take it today, so he told himself the story that he has 18 months, pushing the problem into the future, saying, I'm gonna fix the problem, I'm just not gonna fix it today, essentially. Well, here's the problem. You don't know, she may be 18 minutes away from crossing that Rubicon and going from, I want to save this marriage and I think it can be saved, to crossing over to I don't believe this marriage can be saved. That is the disastrous mistake to make. So, what were the signs? She was starting a life without me at this point. She invited me a thousand times into that life. She would say, Let's go get a coffee this morning, let's go for a walk this morning, let's do this, let's go for a weekend away. She was starting to take those walks without me. She wouldn't even ask me in the morning anymore. She'd go, I'm going for a walk. On a Saturday morning at eight o'clock, she'd go, I'm going, I'm going for a coffee, I'm going to the coffee shop. Saturday night, she goes, I'm going out with my friends. She stopped inviting me into her life. But here's the thing, right? When the woman actually leaves, we just go, she's just given up. No, she made a thousand attempts to get me in her life, looking back. She invited me on vacations, she invited me on walks, she invited me on everything. And I turned it down. Because I wanted to keep my hidden life, which was one of alcohol consumption. I wanted to keep drinking. And the fact of the matter was, she started going away for weekends with her family. She'd go with her aunt and uncle on a church retreat for the weekend, and they'd invite me and I'd say, No, I've got work, I have to stay. And all the reason I did that is because I wanted to drink myself silly over the weekend without her seeing it. So while all of this was going on, and this is it, when I say find yourself in this, locate yourself in this, there's a mirror here. Each and every one of you watching this has a hidden life. You have a problem, you have an indiscretion. We do these group coaching sessions, and a man will talk and say, I had an affair, and another man will say, Well, I didn't have an affair, so I can't relate to this, or another man will say, I had a gambling addiction, or I have a gamble, and another man will say, Well, I don't have I don't gamble, so I can't relate to this. My thing was alcohol. I don't have affairs, I don't gamble. Some of you have affairs and don't gamble. Everybody has an indiscretion, everybody has a hidden life that is wholly on the surface and absolutely corrupt to its core. And what I used to do as an example to keep this deceit going on, we go to we I'd go to a restaurant with my wife or family or friends, and I'd order a beer, just one, just one beer, and I'd sit there and I'd sip it all night long, like I was a social drinker, like I could have one beer and that was fine. But what nobody saw on the surface I was holy, on the surface, I was a man in control. On the surface, I was just socially drinking at an acceptable level, but at the core, I had a flask of vodka in my pocket. And I'd excuse myself, I'd say, I'm going to the restroom, I'd go to the toilet, and I'd down half a bottle of vodka in the toilet. And then I'd go back, I'd quickly have a couple of mouthfuls of beer to cover up the smell. So if anybody could smell alcohol, I'd just say, Oh, you just, you know, if my wife occasionally said, Well, is that what's that on your breath? And I'd just say, Oh, it's just the beer. I had it all planned out. And then at the end of the night, I'd feign, I'd feign sickness. I'd go, Oh, I don't feel very good, I'm tired. Can you drive home, please, sweetheart? And she'd drive us home. And on the surface, I was a man in control. There was holiness on the surface. To friends and family, we were a completely functional family, completely functional couple. Below the surface, corrupt to its core. Deception, deceit, lies, secret life. All of us have this corruption. It's why we're here. But this was not free. This again was the deceit that I was telling myself at the time. I'm gonna deal with this later. I'm gonna I I know this is bad. Like, I'm not saying that this is good. I'm and I'm I am gonna deal with it. But here's the problem, right? Collateral damage was happening. She was being destabilized. Her nervous system was being absolutely destroyed. Because the alcohol was causing me to be utterly unstable in every way. One of my mechanisms to defend, to protect the alcohol consumption was aggression and violence. If something came up, if she brought something up that threatened the habit of drinking, I would get verbally, I'd start shouting. I'd scare her to the point she shut she shut down and stopped talking about it. That was the defense mechanism. I was physically violent, not towards her, but I'd break stuff. I'd I'd punch holes in walls. I'd took a glass and throw it across the room and smash it against the wall. I didn't throw it at her. I thought, well, what I'm not being violent towards her. What do you think that was doing to her nervous system to be with a man who was so out of control in a confined space? I was absolutely destroying her, I was wrecking her. The collateral damage was was terrible. Her mental health was declining. I was destroying that woman. Until the final bombshell finally happened. I got kicked out of counseling. She arranged again for me to go to counseling. Of course, I'm I was all up for it, right? Because that buys me another six months. But what I used to do was I'd go to these counselors and I would toy with them. I was so arrogant and so conceited that I thought I was smarter than them. And I'd play games with them and I'd make fun of them thinking that my my game was I'd go in there and I'd make fun of them without them even knowing it. And for six months I would go to these counseling sessions and just play games. Until finally I went to one more one session, and the council after it took him about 60 seconds to see right through me and just kick me out. He just kicked me out. Said, get out, you're a waste of time. There's no hope for you, Cody. There's no hope for you, there's no hope for your marriage. You're wasting your time, you're wasting your money. Get out of my office. Took 60 seconds. And the only thing I can think of that he did that is like he was me. He was looking in the mirror and seeing me, and he knew what had to happen in order to wake me up. The delusion had to be destroyed. And if the delusion wasn't going to be destroyed, if it was undestroyable, he wasn't going to participate in my games. He wasn't going to be played by me. He was smarter than me. And that was the first time for in in history that I ever actually saw losing my marriage as being a possibility. When he kicked me out and said there's no hope for you, and there's no hope for your marriage. That was the first time that I'd actually been brought face to face with the reality that I can lose my marriage here. I just thought that I had forever, I'll deal with this 18 months from now, she'll put up with me forever. There's no drama here. I can continue playing these games. And that's when I realized I had a choice to make. I've got to choose. And I chose my marriage. So I went home. This was a few days later, and I used to go up into my, I had a loft space in the in where I was living. And I you my wife used to think I was up there doing my hobbies or whatever. And I'd go up there and she gave me no grief when I went up there. So that was where I had a secret stash of alcohol and drugs. And I'd go up there and I'd get drunk and I'd get high. And a couple of times during the night, I could go or during the evening, I could go up there and do my thing. And she was, God bless her, she was naive. She was no, she was no match for me in the game of deception. She was very easy to deceive, and I took full advantage of that. But I I was up there one night, a couple of nights after being with the counselor, getting kicked out, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I've got a choice. Like I was sat there, the bottle was in front of me. I've got a choice. It's this bottle or it's my wife. And in that moment, I chose my I chose my wife. I went down from the loft and she was in the shower. I said, There's something I gotta tell you. I said, I'm up in the I'm not up in the roof doing whatever it is you think I'm doing, playing with my toys. I'm up in the roof getting high and getting drunk. And the reason that we have so many problems is because I go up there every night, I get loaded, I get drunk and high, and I come down here and then I abuse you. Is what happens if I'm being truthful. And that's why this marriage is failing, and that's why we have the problems, not because of any of these things, but because I'm just full of deceit. And she could have she she could have done anything at that point. She could have got dressed and left the marriage and never come back. She could have done, she had a lot of options at that point, but she looked at me and she said, I love you and I appreciate what you've just said, and we're gonna get through this together, is what she said. This is where I this is where I learned the three pillars of marriage reconciliation, emotional safety, mutual admiration and respect, and a shared vision. All three of those things happened simultaneously in that moment. When I confessed what I'd been doing and told her, it removed the mechanism for me doing that anymore. I took away my mechanism. My habits relied on deceit and lies and manipulation. Once I turned the light on and brought how I was actually doing this, I told her about the flask in the pocket. I told her about what was going on in the roof. I told her about alcohol and drugs hidden all over the place. That wherever we went, whether it was a friend's house, family for dinner, for whatever, it's like I had mechanisms that allowed me to get significantly more high and drunk than she was aware of. I removed all of those mechanisms in that moment. And I was truthful with her for the first time in a very long time, which created that level of emotional safety for her again. It also allowed a mutual admiration and respect to come into the relationship in that moment as well, because she respected what I'd just done. And I respected her response. She could have gone, how dare you! That actually could have been the end of the marriage in that moment. I respected how she responded, and she respected the honesty that I'd given her. And a mutual goal, a shared vision was given in that moment as well. We're gonna get through this together. That became the goal. Now it's gonna be different for everybody. Those for me, it happened in an instant, and that's why I was able to spot that and see that mechanism and see that pattern, and it's why I teach that now because I know that the healing happens in a second when those three pillars align. It may take longer for you, but those are the three pillars. So the transformation after that happened very, very quickly. The marriage started to heal tremendously quickly because we were now on the same team, we'd now we're now moving towards the same goal. Her judgment here. She judged what she could see and what she could feel. Not my intentions and not my promises. This is critical here. She judged what she could see and she judged what she could see and she could feel. She rejected. She didn't look at every one of those mechanisms that she tried before and tried to justify them. Counseling, church groups, couples retreats. She looked at it and said the fruit doesn't lie. None of those mechanisms work. This is where I'm seeing fruit. I'm gonna judge, I'm gonna judge the tree that produces fruit. And I can tell you what tree produces fruit, and I'm gonna get to that in a minute. This is this is why I'm opposed to therapy. This is why I'm opposed to these long drawn-out processes, because in my life they never produced any fruit. They just gave me the opportunity to continue in my deception and my story. We're gonna talk about that more and more in a minute. So she didn't judge my intentions, she didn't judge my promises. This is why telling her you're gonna change, telling you it it's useless, it's pointless. She's not judging that anymore. What actually happened was I was given a binary choice. The counselor that kicked me out of his office made it very, very clear to me, very succinctly and very skillfully. I had a choice, my behavior or my marriage. I was looking for a third option, which was my behavior and my marriage. The reality is I had my behavior, which I could keep, which for me was alcohol. For you, it might be workaholism, it might be gambling, it might be porn, it might be sex, whatever. The three options I thought were behavior, option one, marriage, option two, or behavior and marriage, option three. Every counselor, every retreat, every mechanism that I went to kept that third option alive for me, which was Cody, you can keep your behavior and your marriage. They'd never removed that from the table. I'm removing that from that table from you today in the same way it was removed from me. You can't have both. You have to choose. You have a binary choice to make as well. You have to choose the behavior that you're engaging in, whatever that is, or set of behaviors, or your marriage. That is it. Which produced the necessity of an identity change. This is why there is no marriage restoration reconciliation without identity change, because the mechanism that I was using, which was alcohol, it was serving a purpose, as is your mechanism. Whether it's adultery, whether it's porn, whether it's video gaming, it doesn't matter. Pick your poison of choice. It was serving a purpose. It was numbing pain. It was filling holes, it was it was putting a band-aid on wounds. I didn't drink because I liked the taste of alcohol, I drank because I needed to. And I needed to because I was broken inside. And without addressing the wounds that were inside of me that were causing the necessity for the behavior to exist, the removal of the behavior was only ever going to be temporary. And it was going to come back at some point. This is why the personal growth, the identity shift is absolutely. Essential because without it, the behavior will simply return. Even if you can reconcile your marriage in the short term, it will be a temporary reconciliation because the behavior that your wife has rejected will return. And all you've done now is show her that any change is temporary, and you've made saving your marriage an order of magnitude difficult harder, more harder. So personal growth is really the only pathway to this. Marriage, saving your marriage. There is no other way. The man that is currently running the show has been weighed, he's been measured, and he's been found wanting. He's been found inadequate. And some men will reject that and say, screw you, Cody, so it's always the man's fault. Well, then go lose your marriage, bro. I don't really care. It's not, that's not as Jesus said, my sheep will know my voice. If you don't recognize the voice right now, then go do your thing and that's cool. I'm not here to, I'm not here to speak to everybody, I'm not here to help everybody, I'm here to help those who recognize that this is actually the problem in their marriage, that this is the solution, and they actually want help with that. I'm not here to argue with anybody. If you believe that there's another path, I support your decision to walk that path. But I have no idea what that outcome is going to be. And I I can tell you I walked many of those paths and they failed me. So here is the truth. It's the truth that will set you free. That counselor gave me a gift that I want to give you today. He gave me the gift of losing my marriage without having to lose it. When he said there's no hope for you, and there's no hope for your marriage, he in my mind, in that moment, I actually got to experience what losing her was like. I'd never I never had to face that before that moment. When I was utterly shocked when he said that to me. When he looked at me and said, You waste of time, Cody. Never before that moment had I actually had to face losing my marriage. In that moment, he told me the truth. The iteration of Cody Butler that was stood before that man was a waste of time. The version of Cody Butler that was in that man's office, there was no hope for him. And that man's marriage was dead in the water. He absolutely told me the truth. And in fact, he was the only person that ever told me the truth. Everyone else told me that it's not my fault. You're forgiven. Jesus died for you. Give it to Jesus, and Jesus will sort it out. You're doing your best. All might be true. None of it brought me face to face with the truth that, yes, I may be forgiven for what I've done and what I'm doing, but I'll be forgiven alone. It's the truth. He also collapsed time for me. You all think you got time. Who told you that? 70% of men never saw divorce coming. That means 70% of men thought that they had more time to sort this out than they did. Or put it another way, the vast majority of men are utterly clueless to the timeline. He collapsed time for me. I thought that I had 18 months, two years to sort this out. He collapsed the time to a second. You have no, you don't have 18 months to sort this out, Cody. You need to make a decision now in my presence. I spent over a year with certain counselors, once a week. 50 plus sessions, hour and a half each, 75, 80 hours, and no fruit. I spent less than a minute with this man and he saved my marriage. Less than a minute. That's what skill can do for you. He removed all of my delusions. I thought I could have my I thought I could have alcohol and the marriage. I thought I could have both. That was utterly delusional, which is where many of you are. You think that you can keep your poison of choice and keep your marriage. You think you can avoid the hard work and keep your marriage. You think you can keep the current identity and avoid the marriage. Well, again. Maybe you can. And I wish you luck if you decide to move to walk down that path. But here's the problem, right? It didn't work for me. I was utterly delusional. I was lost. I thought I was a good man. I thought I was a good husband. I thought I was a good husband that just had problems. I thought I was a high-value male. I was a man that controlled my wife through violence. Through shouting. That's violence. Through throwing stuff and smashing stuff. I was, she still has scars today emotionally from what happened during that time. I wasn't a good man. I was corrupt to my core. I was utterly corrupt to my core. And I was utterly delusional. That counselor in 60 seconds removed those delusions from me. He refused to let me hold them anymore. He gave me a choice. If you want to keep your poison, keep it. But understand the price is your marriage. And that's it. So if you want to learn about the next steps, then watch the next video here. If not, if you're watching this on YouTube, do me a favor and subscribe, give me a like. And outside of that, if you're on the private group here, let's go to QA and let's have a conversation about what's going on in your lives and how we're going to help you save your marriages today.