I’m Grieving The Marriage While Still Living In It.

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So today I want to talk about living in the same house with your wife while a divorce is taking place. So this is was a question that I actually got emailed in. So we'll just answer the question directly. So I'm grieving the marriage while still still living in it. How do you mourn something that hasn't technically ended yet? So this is going to apply to uh any anyone that's in in the house with their wife where the mar the divorce is going forward and uh you're not exactly thrilled about that. So how to deal with it, how to give yourself the best chance moving forward, etc. So the situation that this is gonna directly apply to is obviously late-stage marriage crisis, right? A divorce is taking place, but you're still living together, you're still functional and still functioning practically as a unit. So, you know, the the the roommate or business partner scenario, you're still running a house, you're still uh essentially doing everything a married couple would do apart from being married, right? So that's going to be really challenging to deal with because you're still functionally dealing with the marriage, although it's collapsing, and then uh obviously the marriage is is is collapsing in in real time as well. So, how do you live beside someone who is still physically present within the relationship and still functioning as your as your wife fundamentally, apart from maybe the physicality, the sex and stuff, but they're emotionally not present in in the relationship. So, what this obviously produces is a state of constant emotional limbo, which just isn't a great place to be, right? So let's talk about what's going on here, why this feels so devastating, and then we can look at what some of the solutions are. Because if we don't understand why this is so painful, then then we're gonna try and fix the wrong problem. So the issue here is you're not just grieving the loss of the marriage. That's that's the symptom. That's what it's very easy to attach your pain and grief to. But what you're actually what's truly going on here is you're grieving the loss of the masculine identity identity, uh, competency is being challenged here. Adequacy as a man, your leadership, sense of sense of self-worth, etc. etc. When when you go through a divorce situation, it's inevitable that these issues are gonna come up. Even the strongest man is gonna be brought face to face and forced to question his leadership, his adequacy, his identity, etc. etc. And it's bad enough that this is going on internally, right? But unfortunately, divorce is one of those situations where it's very public, everybody's gonna see it. It's unit it's undeniable and it's indisputable. So not only are you dealing with these perceived you know, judgments, failures, incompetences, and and undesirable undesirabilities, it's being made public for the world to see. So the fact if this was just purely private and between you between you and your wife, and the world was never ever going to see any of these things, then the pain will be a lot easier to deal with. So a lot of the a lot of the pain comes from not really separating out where the pain is coming, like, yes, obviously you're losing, you're in the process of losing a marriage, your family, etc. And that is definitely a source of pain. But that's probably it it's the smaller part of the pain, the the greater part of the grief is coming coming from these. So what it feels like is identity death, not just a relationship loss. And when you can separate these two out to where you're able to work on what's going on in the marriage in in one container, and you're also able to work on what's going on inside of you in another container, then it makes the makes success much easier, and you're actually solving the right problems with the right tools. This is why the personal development, the personal growth side of this is so important because really a lot of you are here because you're asking the question: how do I make this pain go away? How do I stop the hurt? And the the personal growth side of that, which which eliminates a lot of the judgment failure, incompetences, and and and the masculine identity issues, a large percentage of your pain will simply go away when you resolve that, and when that pain goes away, you become much more stable within the relationship, which ultimately that is what when you become stable, the the relationship comes becomes stable. So if there's one big idea to take away from this presentation today, if there's one thing that you can really apply and focus on, and then you then funnel everything that I'm telling you and sharing with you now into this one big idea idea, is that most of us have got the relationship backwards in terms of what we see the role of the relationship is, and we're going when the when the marriage stabilizes, when the relationship stabilizes, I will feel stable. And that stability is what you're actually craving. That's that stability is what you want. And you you've decided in error, frankly, that when the marriage stabilizes, then you're stabilized and then the pain will go away. But the reality is the marriage is simply reflect reflecting your internal state. And when you stabilize, the marriage will reflect that stability. Now people go, well, doesn't it take two, Cody? It really doesn't. So let me explain that quickly. It's like arguing. It takes she can't argue with you unless you argue back. She can't fight with you unless you fight back. You have to participate. Anyone who says we just argue all the time, it's like, no, you argue all the time. Because if you at if you refuse to engage or participate in that argumentation, then the argument cannot take place. You have to participate for that to happen. And the same is true, the same is true with the stability within the relationship. You can say, well, doesn't she have a role to bring stability as well? It's like no, because you can you can create that stability by yourself. Like maybe she doesn't feel that stability, but this that that's not what you're going after. You're going after your sense of stability. You're trying to get some solid foundations here. And and when you focus on creating that stability internally, then the marriage reflects that stability, then she reflects that stability, the pain goes away, the marriage improves. If we do this the other way around, where we go, um when my marriage stabilizes, I'll feel stable, then effectively you're putting your stability in her hands. This is a role reversal. This is this is a role inversion to where it's your job to provide at the very least your own stability, if not stability for the marriage. I would say it's your role to provide stability for the marriage, but if you want to argue that that's fine. It's at the very least your role to produce your stability. So when you can only feel that stability when she is acting in a regulated way that allows you to feel stable, now she is responsible for your stability, which is a complete role reversal. You've effectively made yourself a dependent. So the hidden layers of pain here, which when we can peel these back and understand the the pain can go away. So there's fear of public shame, public humiliation, exposure, etc. Internal fear of the the world will now see what I fear about myself. What divorce actually does is it simply removes all psychological hiding places. You can't hide your insecurities anymore. You can't hide all of these things anymore. There are a lot of psychological aspects to myself that I don't even want to I don't even want to face myself. I don't even want to acknowledge myself for true. There's insecurities, there's a lack, there's there's masculine lack of confidence. There's a lot of things that I need to work on that I don't even like to acknowledge, that I don't even like to look in the mirror and see, let alone show that to the world and have that revealed to the world. So what this crisis is currently doing, it's it's forcing that confrontation with yourself. It's forcing you to confront your own inadequacies and your own fears or your own feelings of inadequacy. And we can view that one of two ways. It can be an absolutely horrible experience that you just want to go away, or you want it to go away, and you're gonna blame her for all of these things, or you can use this as an opportunity to reveal parts of you that never would have come to light otherwise. That if you want to have an extraordinary life, an exceptional experience, a great marriage, these inadequacies and fears which we all have, they have to be they have to be addressed, they have to be faced and confronted because it's these inadequacies and fears that are actually causing the breakdown of the marriage. It's when we get triggered, when we hit the stupid button, when we become unstable, when we become unsafe, when we become dangerous to our partner. It's because these inadequacies have been rubbed up against. And instead of acknowledging that that's inside of us and working on that and removing the feelings of inadequacy, which quite frankly are just fake anyway, they're just stories. There's nothing inadequate about anybody other than the story that they tell themselves. And instead of addressing that and removing those feelings of inadequacy, which remove the triggers, which remove the stupid button, which removes the instability, which removes the lack of self-confidence, self-esteem, which removes the pain that results from all of those feelings, we just blow up. Or we blame her, or we blame the situation, or we just want the pain to go away without confronting it. So, why is this different from normal grief? Well, for one, it's because the loss is not fully complete. It's not like someone's died here and there's closure. You're still emotionally attached to the situation and it's an open wound. There's still she's still physically present. And when when all of these things are true, you're still exposed to you're still exposed to hope, to rejection, to confusion, to uncertainty. And and when these two things exist simultaneously, depending on her mood, right? Today you feel hopeful because she's in a good mood, tomorrow you feel rejected because she's in a bad mood, and as a result, you feel confused and uncertain, then of course, this is going to create an environment that's very unstable, very unpleasant, and very painful for you. So when this is going on, your nerve, your nervous system is unable to resolve your issues around attachment, fear, identity, destabilization. This is what's actually going on in the shared living environment, is there's there's a severe identity destabilization going on here. You you've got the old part of you that was allowed to live in, quite frankly, an illusion, which is now falling down. You've got that old reality that everything's fine, and you can just continue to plot on through life, and then you've got a juxtaposition that against the new reality, which is everything's not fine. You felt very secure here, you feel very unsecure over here. This creates an identity destabilization that your nervous system simply cannot resolve. So this the solution here to this, man, is again you can't resolve this situation externally. You can't resolve this situation by fixing the marriage or stabilizing the marriage. You can only resolve this identity destabilization and confusion by resolving that identity destabilization within yourself. You have to figure out who you are, what you are, what you're about, what you believe, what you care about, what you don't care about. Where does your sense of competency come from? Where does your sense of value come from? Where does your self-worth come from? Where does your value as a human being come from? When all of that is internal, when all of that comes from internally inside of you, nothing extra, and it truly does, nothing external can destabilize you. When your wife says I want a divorce, you don't go, that means I'm worthless, or you don't go that means I've I'm a failure. You just go that this is a sit this is a problem that needs resolving. This is a situation that needs dealing with. There's no emotion attached to it. Or if your wife's cheated on you or had an affair, the reason it's so painful is because of the the attack, what this speaks to in terms of these things, right? The the the shame, humiliation, exposure. What does this say about me? What does this say about who I am? What does this say about my adequacy? The reason it sucks so bad is because you've outsourced all of those things to an external environment. Or in other words, you you effectively you've voluntarily entered yourself into slavery. You've voluntarily said, I'm gonna give my happiness to you, and if you behave if you do behave well, I'm happy, and if you don't, I'm I'm a wreck. I'm gonna give my sense of competency as a man to you, and if you decide to return that, then I'm gonna feel great, and if I don't, then I'm gonna be completely destabilized and unable to function. So really what we're looking for, it's the internal, it's the internal authority resolves this, and the sense of emotional sovereignty resolves this. How do you live in a house in a relationship that's still functionally there but moving towards an end? You you you can only do it through claiming emotional sovereignty, meaning that everything that's valuable to me in terms of my sense of self-worth worth, certainty, etc. etc., comes directly from me or some internal source. It can be God, whatever, you know. That that personally, that that's my that's where my sense of self-esteem and security comes from. I I don't deem myself worthy through narcissistic tendencies, I deem myself secure and worthy, etc., etc., through by virtue of being created. That's how I do it. But regardless of how you do that personally, until you can arrive at that place of emotional sovereignty, meaning that nothing that's important to you is is or nothing that that stabilizes you is derived externally, you're going to struggle, period. You're gonna struggle in every aspect of life, and if if the you know if the winds are favorable, you're gonna have a good day, and if the winds are not favorable, you're gonna have a bad day. So some of the misunderstandings here, the man is the man often feels like he's experiencing grief, he's experiencing loss, but what he's actually what what he's actually experiencing, what actually is happening, is the destabilization is coming from anticipatory fear, from catastrophic projection, from fear of future suffering, from fear of identity collapse, both internally and publicly, right? Fear of public humiliation, fear of what this means afterwards, what happens if the divorce goes through and I find myself single? What happens after that? Do I experience love again? Do I get to have sex again? When do I get to have how does all this stuff work, right? Huge amounts of uncertainty. And and and we can daisy chain these together. So anticip you know, catastrophic projection produces anticipatory fear, which produces fear of future suffering, fear of uh public humiliation, creates fear, creates catastrophic. All of these things, right? These are actually what's happening inside of you that's causing the real problems, right? It's not what's going on in the marriage. What's going on in the marriage is going on in the marriage. It's neither here nor there, really. If you want the pain to go away, this is what you have to address. And quite frankly, it doesn't really matter if if she's separated and moved out, she's in the marriage, but she's distant and cold, she's in the marriage, and she says she wants a divorce, but she's gonna stay in the marriage for right now. You live in as partners, you're living as as housemates, you're there for the kids, whatever. The marriage is just turning going south, right? It's not catastrophic yet. It's just these this is what's actually going on inside of you that's causing the pain. You address these, the pain goes away. So right now you're living inside of uncertainty, emotional suspension, unresolved attachment. The real pain is coming from that there's no stable reality to orient yourself around, and you're in constant nervous system activation. So, again, if we if we just look biologically at this, like the nervous, the sympathetic nervous system is designed to be in a high alert state, maybe 15 minutes every two or three days. So, in if we look at just a natural non-westernized environment, hunt of hunt to gatherer or farmer environment, you your nervous system is calm most of the time. It goes into this hyperactive state, hyper-vigilant state, maybe once or twice a week when danger shows up, or you're in the hunt, and the adrenaline and cortisone and everything that happens is valuable at that point, but it was never designed to stay in that state for an extended period of time. It was designed to stay in it for a short period to give you a heightened level of performance when needed. You're in this state 24-7. Uncertainty, emotional suspension, unresolved attachment, all of this is putting you into constant activation, your nervous system into constant acts of activation. And the reality is all of these things should be resolved inside of you through your emotionally, your your own emotional sovereignty and your internal authority. That's where these things are resolved. Not within the marriage, not within your job, not within your business, not within the housing market, not within your finances. Many of us are just grabbing onto these things, going when when this whatever it is is working out and is fine. I'll be stable. No, not true. That thing will be stable when you stabilize. So why is living together so destabilizing? So well, every interaction you have challenges reality, right? It destabilizes your certainty, it attacks your identity. We've covered that. Her reactions stop making sense. Is she staying? Is she going? Why is she acting nice when she says she wants a divorce? She cuddles me, she still has sex with me, she takes her clothes off in front of me. These all tell me that things are going in the right direction. But then she tells me she wants the divorce. Can't make any sense of her reactions, totally destabilizing. Reconciliation attempts are met with hostility, withdrawal, shutdown. Everything that you believe about yourself, about her, about you, about relationships, about people, about marriage, about human behavior, everything that you believe to be true is challenged in real time in every interaction. Or in other words, the living with somebody in a divorce scenario is so difficult because it's it is constantly and never-endingly challenging what you think reality, what you believed reality to be. Everything is challenged in every interaction. Again, what's the solution? You have to find the stability within and project that into the marriage. There is not going to be any stability in the marriage. If you're in a place where you're going, when this marriage stabilizes, I'll stabilize. When she stabilizes, I'll stabilize. This is not going to work for you. Again, this is why the personal growth part is so so important because it's the only way you can produce that stability, which is the only way the marriage can stabilize. So again, this what what is the sort what is the core psychological problems that we're facing here? Well, hopefully, as you've just seen, you've got no side, you've got no solid ground psychologically to stand on. Nothing makes sense, and nothing is going to make sense. You're in a state of constant interpretive collapse. The situation isn't is is fluid, inherently unstable, and constantly changing. She doesn't know what she thinks, she doesn't know what she wants, she doesn't know what she believes, she doesn't know, she is inherently unstable in this situation, so so there is no constant ground. Somebody who is who is in this state, especially if you're starting to change, right? Especially if you're doing this work, you're making the changes, you've destabilized her considerably. She's gone from being very certain about who you are, what you are, and what you're capable of, to now being be she's being destabilized as well. So she has no solid ground to stand on. And if you if you're interpreting her every move, you you're looking at a structure that is is inherently unstable, i.e. her, and trying to interpret what's going on. It's impossible. You can't. You'll be wrong most of the time, and if you're right, it will change tomorrow. Again, this is why emotional sovereignty, internal authority is the only way forward. You can only interpret effectively what you're experiencing, what you're going through, what you're doing right now. This is where the stability has to come from. The solid psychological ground is inside of you, not out there. And as long as you're looking for it out there, you're going to be experiencing instability, unpredictability, unpredictability, and ambiguity, and as a result, guess what? You're gonna feel you're gonna experience emotional and ultimately physical exhaustion. And the worst possible result here is that you just lose faith in love, you just lose faith in relationships, you just lose faith in people. You just say people are unstable, people are unpredictable, people are dangerous, and then you exclude yourself from ever having another connection with another human being again, completely unnecessarily, because we demand this constant interpretive uh constant interpretation, which this is going to result in this interpretive collapse I'm discussing here. So the solution, right? Let's let's have a let's have a solution for every problem, not a problem for every solution. We've we've given the solution already. So the stability does not come from the marriage, from stabilizing the marriage first. It doesn't come from working on her, it doesn't come from changing her mind, it doesn't come from emotionally reassuring her, and it does not come from any kind of external certainty. The stability that you desperately seek comes from internal regulation, emotional sovereignty, nervous system regulation, and a grounded sense of self-identity. We can reverse engineer this very simply and go if you're feeling unstable right now, it's because you have no internal regulation, you lack emotional sovereignty, the nervous system is deregulated, dysregulated, and there is no sense of grounded self-identity. All of this is coming from the marriage. So, what does emotional stabilization actually look like in the real world? Well, you have to accept, you have to separate your identity from your marital condition. The condition your marriage is in is just a statement of fact. Doesn't say anything about who you are. In fact, it's a lagging indicator, right? Like that the state that your marriage is in today is not an indication of who you are today, it's an indication of who you were six months ago, twelve months ago, two years ago. It's a lagging indicator. Any changes that you've made today or in the last however long will not actually realistically be reflected till some point in the future. So you have to separate your identity from the condition of your marriage. If you don't, hopefully you can see at this point, you're gonna suffer unnecessarily. You have to detach a masculine value from emotional state, and I mean your value as a man and from the relationship outcome. The relationship failing does not mean you're less of a man. Her emotional state does not mean you're less of a man. Does not mean you're a failure, it does not mean you're incompetent. One of the most liberating philosophies that you can adopt is that if you take any man out of his area of expertise, you're dealing with an imbecile, you're dealing with an idiot. We're all very good at the things we do, but if you if you put me in a dental office and gave me a drill and then put somebody in a dental chair in front of me, it's like you're dealing with an imbecile now, you're dealing with an idiot, you're dealing with someone who's highly incompetent. You put me in this environment, which you know I've trained for, I have a natural inclination, I have a natural understanding of human nature, I gravitate towards it, you know. I I do I'm I'm good at this, like some people are good at basketball, some people are good at you know, sport, whatever. Some people are good at music, it's like I'm good at this. You put me in this environment, and I'm very competent. The same is true for your marriage. Just because your marriage is not necessarily going how it is, it's not a reflection on who you are, it's not a reflection of your competence, it's a reflection of your educational experien and experience. And all of these things can be fixed. If you like today, if I put you put me in that dental chair or behind that dental chair, I'm gonna cause someone a lot of pain. But if you sent me to dental school, to medical school, and I studied that and I practiced and I got feedback, then I could become probably a quite competent, quite reasonable dentist within a within a re if I give myself a reasonable period of time, let's say four years. I can become a very competent dentist. The same is true with your marriage. It's not failing because you're incompetent, it's failing because you just don't have the skill at this point. And and quite frankly, why would you? Who taught you how to be a husband? Who taught you how to do these things? Competency is domain specific. Just because you're competent in one domain does not, that doesn't transfer into any other domain. That competency is valid only for that specific domain. And when we can separate that out and go, well, this marriage is not a reflection of who I am or what I am or my competency, then a lot of the pain goes away and a lot of the a lot of the significance and importance of the relationship or or the stability of the relationship goes away because you no longer need the relationship to function, to feel whole. So instead of placing your value within something that you have no control over, claim emotional sovereignty, attach your identity to your behavior, your integrity, your emotional regulation, your leadership under pressure. The outcome, you have to detach. This is this again, I don't want to get into detachment too much because it's a big subject, right? But here's what detachment is: it's like I'm going to behave in a way that's integrated, has integrity, that's regulated, that's leadership under pressure, regardless of the outcome. I'm judging myself, my behavior, my competency, and and who I am as a man based on how I behaved and how I performed under pressure, not the result that it produced. I cannot control outcomes, I can only control inputs. And when my identity starts to become attached to the inputs that I control, not the outcomes that those controls produce. I can I can do everything right and still get a bad outcome. The farmer can do everything right. He can till he can he can remove the stones from the field in the winter, he can plant the seeds, the right seeds in the soil in spring, he can protect the crop from the animals and the weather and water it in the summer. And one day before the harvest, a hail storm can come, knock the entire crop down. The man can do it, the farmer can do everything right and still fail. But the judgment of his ability to farm is not on the outcome, he's not a failure because the hail came. He had no control over that. The failure does not define who he is as a farmer. He is an excellent farmer, he's a competent, skilled farmer. He he did everything right, but he's it still went wrong. And this is this is a big piece of the detachment piece, right? It's it's detaching the outcome from the behavior. And when you when you start to judge yourself and your competence and your self-worth from your behavior and your inputs and your integrity, not from the outcome, this is where the internal authority and the emotional sovereignty starts to show up. And this is where the impact of the marriage becomes less and less and less on you emotionally, and it allows you to pump stability into the marriage instead of take stability out of the marriage. So our critical learnings here are that stability originates inside of you first, then it transfers into the relationship. Relationship stability does not translate into personal stability, but personal stability translates into relationship stability. So, what begins to change when you when you move from emotionally dependent to emotionally sovereign? When your sense of value comes from internal sources, not external validation? Well, your emotional reactions become proportional, your nervous system calms down, your level of fear decreases, your identity starts to stabilize, internal certainty grows independent of outcome. So again, we have to deal with reality, right? And then on any given day, you're dealt a hand of cards to play. And it may be a great hand of cards and it may be a crappy hand of cards, but nevertheless, you have to play that hand of cards. So in any given situation, as bad as it might be, that there's a there's a behavior that you can engage in in that situation. There's a way you can play that hand of cards that makes it more likely that she comes back versus less likely that she comes back. And that that choice is always present, that decision is always there. In any situation that you're facing, the question is you know, men ask me all the time, do I do this or do I do that in that situation, Cody? Well, does that make does that make it more or less likely? Makes it more what makes it more likely. Well, does that make it more or less likely? Makes it less likely. Okay, well, there's your answer then, right? So the question that I pose to you is, is a man that responds, his reactions are proportional to the stimulation, attractive or unattractive? Is a man whose nervous system is calm, he's regulated, he's living relatively free of fear, he has a stable identity, his internal, his sense of certainty and stabilization is found in internally and he's able to act appropriately regardless of the circumstance or situation. Is this a man that's more or likely, less likely to restore his marriage, recover his marriage? And it's like, again, it's it's a hand of cards. Will doing these things guarantee you get your marriage back? No, but it'll make it more likely than not doing it, and that's all you can do. In any given situation, that's your move. What makes what is the highest probability play? What is the best move in this situation? Very rarely do we have the perfect move, but we always have the best move. So some important distinctions so we don't go to outliers and off the deep end, not talking about emotional suppression, pretending not to care when you do care, becoming emotionally numb to the situation, or just giving up on the marriage. This is not what we're talking about ever. Means becoming emotionally grounded internally, regulating your nervous system, developing a sense of that internal stability, separating identity from external conditions, and reclaiming your emotional sovereignty. So the core internal shift is really stop asking the question, which the question being asked is how do I stop this pain? How do I make this pain go away? And start asking the question of how do I become internally stable regardless of uncertainty. This question means that you're gonna spend the rest of your life in pain because that you can't make it stop, you can't make it go away. When you become internally stable, you minimize pain. Life's a painful experience. It's all there is to it, unfortunately. So our summary is that most men collapse because they tie identity to the condition of the marriage. The grief that they're experiencing becomes amplified by fear, shame, identity collapse, uncertainty. Emotional stability, which will make the situation give you your best chance, cannot come externally, it can only come internally. Internal sovereignty, emotional stability, emotional sovereignty comes, it creates clarity, groundedness, emotional steadiness, steadfastness, reliability. So ultimately, here's our here's our conclusion, right? The man must become first in stable, must become stable first internally before he can exist rationally. Before stability can exist rationally. And that's it, man. That's what I've got to share. So let's jump over to some questions.