What happens when we are
in the middle of a conflict, when we are struggling
with
2 disagreements
or 2 two thoughts that are not agreeing with each other? How do we get through that? How do we handle
those conflicts? We're gonna be talking about that this week on episode 24,
241
of the relaxed male.
This is the relaxed male,
a show that comes to you each week, helping men to remove the nice guy from their life so they can actually live their life on their terms.
Join the host certified coach, Brian Goodwin, as he helps
men step out of their heads and become free from the thoughts that bind them.
Amen. Hello, and welcome to the relax mail. I'm your host Brian, and I am certified men's coach
that helps men who are just neck deep in suffering lives. These are the men's who are struggling with their relationships, trying to find a way to make their bride happy,
yet all they end up doing is making themselves miserable
in the process. So how do we do how do we change that? How do we change our approach
to our marriage so that we actually have a marriage that is full of love, happiness,
and and peace? And that's what we're gonna be talking about today because one of the hardest parts a lot of people face with
relationships is they just run face first into conflict. And there's so many different things that happen
when you're in a disagreement, in a fight, in a in a argument, some type of of disagreement that is just
causes things to bubble up more and more and more and more and people start getting angry and
and start yelling and and all this other stuff. And all of a sudden we have
these hurt feelings and and people start blaming each other for different things and and it gets out of hand. And, eventually, the loving couple doesn't look like a loving couple anymore. All of a sudden, you've got husband. He's sleeping on the bed and or sleeping on the couch, and the wife is sitting in bed. She's sitting there texting her, her best friend, and and we
wonder where in the world this went wrong. Why did this
end up happening? And
it is
such a a problem that a lot of people actually
get into just a couple three fights, and they decide, never mind this this you're not making me happy.
And
that's one of the big problems that so many people face
is because
can you make somebody happy? Well, if you've listened to any of the shows that I've done, the answer's no. You can't
make
anybody happy. You can't make anybody sad. You can't hurt somebody's feelings because
it's not actually anything that's possible. Person has to have the thought
that
creates the emotion.
So you have to have a thought that creates emotion. Emotion creates an action. Action creates a result that's called the model.
And
so if your model's not is one of where you're getting your your feelings hurt because your husband said something or your husband
is you're getting your head your feelings hurt because your wife said something,
then you're going to have a lot of
lot of strife. 1 first off, wanna look at what do we mean by conflict?
Conflict is just a disagreement, just,
a
you think something should be done some way or say you went in went and saw a movie.
You come out, your wife thought it was just absolutely horrible movie. You thought it was one of the best movies of all time. You saw this exact same movie. So the movie itself is not
the problem. That is just the circumstance. Our circumstance
is neutral every time. That's a neutral circumstance until you apply a thought to it. You apply the the thought that the movie was great. Your wife applied the thought that the movie was horrible,
and then we've had the disagreement. We do not agree. So we start having a discussion, maybe even a fight. Did you you're always paying the bills late or something along those lines. These are all just thoughts that we're sharing. We get back and forth with each other.
And because we share these thoughts the way we do,
we cause
the other person to have thoughts about the thoughts that you shared. And so and that's what a discussion is.
We and some people, they when it comes to a conflict, they become very avoidant, become very anxious about it. And so they turn away from it. They disappear. They
try to appease the other person. They avoid the conflict in some form, fashion, or another.
And in doing so, they never actually fix the problem. They just say, we're not we're not playing this game. We're we're gonna go away and we're doing something else.
And so they
go they leap and they they
they act like they they disappear for a little bit and then come back
and
act like nothing ever happened. Act like the the problem at hand whether the bills weren't paid or the bills were paid
or the, movie was good or the movie was bad or whatever,
they have the the thought of
it's if I step away, I act like it doesn't didn't happen.
It'll go it it won't ever rise up again and
depending on what the conversation or the discomfort or the
conflict or whatever it is
was about,
it may be something that never goes away or maybe just something that
is agreed to never be discussed about ever again. So when we have that conflict, when we have a major disagreement
and say, like,
you know, how are we gonna raise the kids or,
are you going to go to church or not or whatever else you wanna wanna have,
that discussion
is a can become a fairly big problem.
And so this is where
being,
living a an intentional life, having a intentional thoughts about what you're wanting to do
really come into play. Because when you are in the middle of a conflict, if you
aren't being intentional, if you aren't being present of mind, you're going to allow your your your emotional side of your brain to just take over and just cause you to spin out. You can sit there and start yelling and having
having
saying things that you don't actually mean. It's just you're trying to put as much distance between you and the perceived threat
as you possibly can. And this is where
a lot of
unnecessary thoughts come about. And so we start getting the
perception of hurt feelings and
and and things that are done that don't wanna be don't wanna be done and become big regrets later on.
So one of the big things you wanna do is before you ever have a thought or have a fight,
make sure that you understand what are the circumstances
of the of the
the event, whatever is happening. When you have that fight,
what are the circumstances behind that? And you if you have the ideas
of and at least the
forethought to pay attention to what the thought the circumstances are, you can
actually navigate around the circumstances a little better.
And so you don't fall into the emotional pitfalls
that
a lot of us wanna fall into when we are being unintentional with our thoughts.
So what are you making the circumstances
mean? A lot of times, like, if our we if our wife doesn't like the same movie that we do, we wanna make it mean that
and we start having arguments about
it, we'll start having the thought that, yeah, this is a
this is our wife
telling us that we are terrible judges of of cinema
or or something along those lines.
The perceived
insult and that's what we do is we may end up making circumstances
mean something very personal to us.
When we're
our wife,
you know,
you're always late. Well, if you agree with what she's saying,
then, yeah, you're going to take an offense to that. You're gonna take that personally.
While if she said something that you're always late, but you're always, you know, on time, then you're gonna see that as just being a, an observation and that's not gonna matter as much. So you actually have to little bit of agreement for an emotion to or for a thought to actually
hurt if you if you wanna call it that.
But if you're having disagreements
with with saying,
anything
at what we wanna make sure that you're not falling into that
those emotional pitfalls.
So you wanna pay wanna understand
what is it that you're feeling? What is it that whatever emotion that is cropping up, bubbling up, can you actually describe what that is? Now
being guys
our or is gonna be a lot like how we looking at emotions is a lot like how we look at pic at, at colors. For us guys, we've got the 8 primary colors. So we're gonna have the primary emotions down.
While girls, they're gonna have the 4,000 primary colors.
And so they're gonna have all these other names for
a lot of the different emotions. There's a lot of those little nuances. So you're, you know, not just fear, but we may have fear or shame.
But also, you know, all the other types
of emotions that we can feel,
but we're going to know I'm I'm not happy.
Why are we not happy? Well, I just I feel sad. I feel
angry. I feel ashamed or or all these other types of, of negative emotions. And if we can understand
that what those emotions are and we can at least put a word to that emotion, we can
navigate our world a little bit better. We can understand that I'm just feeling an emotion. That emotion means nothing. This is just a vibration that we feel throughout our body.
It is not
a matter that we're going to die because I I feel anxious about the fact that my wife is calling me out about
how often I pay pay a bill or not. When we realize that, yes, we are just feeling whatever emotion we end up feeling at that time, we then can decide because our emotions are created by her thoughts. So if our
thoughts are that she's, you know, I I failed hers. I have I feel ashamed.
Then we can we can actually take that thought and decide, you know what? I'm I don't this this thought of I failed my wife isn't going
to to happen. And a lot of times we will have that
that that thought
of
I failed my wife because I paid the bill late and we'll feel the shame. But because we the shame is such a
a un
unpleasant emotion. It's an uncomfortable emotion to have.
We'll jump to something that gives us a little more power. Instead of having a disempowered emotion like shame, we'll have something like anger,
frustration. These give us a little bit more sense of power.
Do are we more powerful because of them? No. We just have a better we have a sense
of being able to take control when we get angry or when we feel frustrated.
And so we'll actually use an emotion to cover up another emotion and but yet if we can actually look at what emotions we're feeling, we can actually sit back
and examine. Okay. I feel a little bit of shame here. I feel and we can allow that shame to just kinda hang around for a while and allowing ourselves to and allowing that to emotion to just hang around is not gonna last all that long. We're it's gonna last a minute, minute and a half, maybe 2 minutes at tops,
and then it fades away. The only time that we end up
refilling that emotion again is when we have that thought that kicked off that emotion once more.
So,
you can choose to change a thought over to a different thought and have a different emotion
in that place.
So if your wife is yelling at you and she's getting worked up and you're yelling at her and you're getting worked up and you all of a sudden you catch yourself
wanting to
break the 97%
rule, which if you don't know what the 97% rule is, that is 97% of the stupid stuff you actually wanna say. You don't wanna say it. You wanna keep your mouth shut.
And so, if you
can have enough forethought to
not
say those
something stupid,
you can actually help keep a, keep a fight
more centered,
if you will. But if you if
you pay attention to what your thoughts are, you can
actually change
the emotion that you're feeling. You can actually change
the results that you have. If you are
wanting this
disagreement
to have a good resolution, you can actually change the thought that you have, which changes the emotion,
which allows your actions to change the results
of the disagreement
so that you may come to understand your wife better. Because if you want to know how you show
how the emotions that you have, you also wanna pay attention to what type, how you wanna actually show up for your wife. Do you wanna show up as the caring, concerned husband,
or do you wanna be the hot headed prick?
Which one do you wanna be?
You can be anything. You can show up as the word cleaver of the family, or you could show up as as the,
as Barney the drunk. You can show up how any way, any number of ways that you wanna show up. The difference, though,
is
is it showing up the are you showing up the way that you actually intended to show up?
Because if you don't, that's where you're gonna have a lot of problems with yourself. And it's not that your wife is gonna have problems with you. You're gonna have problems with yourself.
You could be the grumpy, sulking,
over, overgrown child,
or you can be
the man who's got it together. And it takes practice, especially if the first time you're trying to apply. I wanna I wanna show up
as the as the caring man. Okay. Well then,
how do you do that? And you have to take the time to figure out
and practice
how you're gonna show up.
Because first time you go off and say, oh, I'm gonna show up as the, as the caring man and things go sideways.
You've gotta figure out, okay.
How did I how where did I screw up on this? Where did I not show up for my wife the way I wanted to show up? And go back and rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And so you can actually as you're having an argument, you can actually ask yourself,
is this how I wanna show up? And
you can
make a fairly honest decision at that time of, yeah, I'm I'm in the right place. I wanna show up as the this is the calm, cool, collect person.
And you still may go off the
rails, which a lot of times we do. We try and we fail and we try and we fail and we try and we fail and eventually, we try and we, hey. We got pretty close to it that time. Alright. We still failed, but we're a lot better than what we were before. So let's we now know we're on the right track.
So
is this how you wanna show up? Do you are you showing yourself as being the concerned husband
or are you being the
the moody, grumpy
guy who's in in emotional childhood?
Because you can if you're in one that you don't wanna be, then how do you change that? And, you know, this is stuff that you'd wanna do in what's called an after action report.
What went wrong? What what went right? What went wrong? And how do you change
what went wrong into what went right? And so it's important to to think and pay attention to after everything's said and done, knowing that one,
what she said had no bearing upon you. It was just her sharing her thoughts.
And what you said,
you can actually control because there's only 2 things you can control yourself, and that is your thoughts, your actions.
Your actions can being well, did you say something, like, where you were being a a jerk? Okay. Then don't say the jerk stuff next time.
Try that. See what happens with that. But, also, what is the react and, you know, again, we've talked about what's the result that we wanna get from this interaction.
Did that result
or
come about?
Are you being the being the the the man that you're wanting wanting to be or are you just being
the nice guy? Trying to patch things up, trying to smooth it all out so that you don't have to feel whatever emotions are being being shared.
Because a lot a lot of nice guys, we that's exactly what we wanna do. We wanna do the avoid conflict avoidance at all costs. We don't wanna be a part of the conflict.
Let's just try to be friends, try to make things better
and avoid the uncomfortable
anxiety ridden
discomfort, the shame riddled discomfort that we that we
will experience
with some of our emotions, some of the thoughts that we have from our emotions. And this is where so many men
do
slide
and
and avoid
being able to
have a good,
thorough,
healthy disagreement, healthy conflict in their life because we won't allow certain emotions to happen. We wanna see the
at the end of the, at the end of the the inner exchange,
we wanna allow ourselves to have this good feeling of that we, we got the we won the fight.
Well, it's a disagreement with your wife. So there's not an actual fight to win. It's not that the purpose of the disagreement isn't to send her into the bedroom in tears and you get to sit on the couch sulking.
That's not the that's not not the main point. The main point is,
first, to understand what,
you know,
what that is that you're trying to accomplish. Most of the time,
conflicts aren't bad. Conflicts are actually
very
beneficial to a relationship. And I get it. You're like,
what? No. You don't wanna have it wants to be rainbows and unicorn farts all the time. No. You don't want those
because that gets real boring. 1, it gets boring,
but it also
allow it it doesn't allow you to grow. It doesn't allow your wife to grow. It doesn't allow your relationship to mature.
You're gonna have to have those
hard, rough
discussions
at times, and those discussions
aren't always pleasant, are rarely pleasant, actually. Those are hard those 4 o'clock in the morning discussions of that, where our wife wakes us up and goes, we need to talk.
Those are the times where she has just hit her limit and you can either fall into victim mode
and not get anything resolved
or you can stay
present with your wife and you can talk it out and you can be okay with the emotions that you're feeling. They're just emotions. Like I said, they're just vibrations you're feeling throughout your body.
And you can choose to just
not react to what you're feeling. You can choose to respond
and express, you know, I'm feeling a little confused here right now. I'm feeling a little
disappointed. I'm feeling a little perturbed.
You but you because you're allowing those emotions, you're not holding them back because society sadly
believes that men don't have emotions or don't men shouldn't show their emotions. And so they express to
the world around.
We've get men
we need men to express emotions. The problem is is that they're not the folks who think we need men need to be expressing emotions
aren't
seeing when men express their emotions.
When we are laughing and joking and having a good time, they're not saying, oh, look. It's a man. He's expressing his emotions. He's being happy.
Man walks around grumbling. Oh, look. Man's expressing his isn't,
expressing his emotions. He's being a jerk.
They're seeing just part of what the emotions are.
Men have all the same emotions that women do. We just show them in in a different way. We talk about them and express our emotions
in a completely different way than what women do. And so
when they're being told men need to tamp down their emotions, no, that's not the case.
Men express their emotions,
express your emotions
in a constructive way.
Because if you don't, that's where we and men who try to bottle them up and try to avoid those emotions
are avoiding the exact same emotions that women avoid.
And that's why women overeat. That's why men overeat. That's why there's all these other quote unquote addictions that are out there that aren't actually addictions. They're just
badly
handled coping mechanisms.
Alright? And so we have these different dis
eases within us. We don't feel at ease because of
whatever we're holding back. We're fighting to keep this
this horrible
one and a half to 2 minute long
emotional experience
from happening, which sounds ridiculous. I get it. It's you're like going, what? It's just a minute, a minute and a half, 2 minutes, and we're trying to avoid it and
yeah. Because it we don't want the feeling. We don't like
feeling ashamed. We don't like
feeling
frustrated. We don't like feeling
any type of disempowered,
feeling of dis of disempowerment.
And so we
turn to alcohol,
drugs, food, porn, video games, even sex
as a means to keep us from having
to think the thought
that will create the emotion that we need to feel.
We never face the thoughts that were that are causing us the disease.
And so we keep turning
to drink and we keep turning to drugs and video games and masturbation and porn and everything else
as a means to
do anything other than
experience a short little emotion,
a vibration that doesn't feel the greatest, but is not going to hurt you.
We are afraid that we're gonna die in sorrow.
No.
You're not gonna die in sorrow. You're going to you're gonna have an emotion and you're gonna feel sad. You're gonna feel heartbroken. You're gonna feel ashamed. Again, shame is one of those big ones because
it caps with what we're failing to do. Men hate to feel that we have failed
because if we fail, then are we are not good enough? We will always from the time we were young little boys, we looked to our dads and asked them, are we good enough? We wanna have that because that's the question we wanna answered is, are we good enough? And when our wife
tells us that,
we have failed in something,
we have that shame.
We wanna avoid that shame. And so we turn to other things, which makes us shameful, which piles on the shame. Instead of just allowing ourselves to feel that shame
and be able to climb up the next hill to the joy and the fun
that we want, we keep ourselves down in in the in the valleys of of sorrow. Now one of the other things that actually happens
is
when we're in a fight,
one of the goals we wanna do is to actually understand what our spouse is about,
understand
why our spouse is upset, why she is
is
upset for what, you know, for whatever the reason is. It doesn't matter whether we think it's it's a dumb reason or a good reason or not. It's just she's upset for whatever reason.
And there is a
method that you can actually come to understand. It's called the,
it's it's called the 4 pillars
of effective communication and it was created by or not created by, but, Tony Overbay of their virtual couch talks about
a lot.
And that the the 4 pillars are and I always there's always a dock in here. I can never remember all 4 of them.
But, it's
do not assume ill intention
that your wife did not wake up to try to piss you off. Alright. To have a fight. She didn't wake up that morning thinking, I'm gonna have a fight with you with with my hubby. Don't dismiss the emotions. Don't dismiss the the thoughts is the next one. And that is
don't go off saying you're wrong. Oh, you well, you don't understand what's going on here.
Don't you're every time you say something like that, do you
assume that she's doing it when she's doing it to piss you off or she's,
or you're telling her she's wrong. You're taking that line of communication and you're cutting it off.
And another
item that happens is when you
don't try to understand her.
So you wanna seek
to understand before being understood. I believe that is Stephen Covey from, for the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
You wanna make sure that you
understand where she's coming from. Come to, come to that, to that realization. Come to that understanding
before
you ever decide
to start voicing your thoughts about it.
Come to fully realize what your wife is talking about.
And it's like, well, what about me? Well, what about you? You'll you'll get your chance in due time.
You just have to allow you're you're being the bigger person right now. You're letting your wife have the floor.
Alright? You'll get your chance in time.
So just slow it up just a little bit. Just just just that much.
And then
don't go into victimhood.
Don't do be that guy that goes, oh, well, I can't do anything right anyhow. So why am I even gonna try?
That's
now you're making her have to come to come rescue you. And that, again, severs the connection that y'all are wanting. So understand your spouse, get to understanding her.
She will turn around and she'll wanna understand you at in at a later date. But right now, this very moment instant,
you're being present, listening to what she says.
Now, the other thing is
don't avoid
that conflict. Like I said, there's a lot of people who are conflict avoidance, but when you
when you avoid that conflict, what you're into and what you end up doing
is
you're keeping
the joy
and the reconnection
of resolution
from happening.
You are keeping the
the ability of people to
come together because when you have a disagreement, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff about makeup sex. Woo hoo.
But there's also
just the
reconnecting,
the both you and your wife coming back together
and having the
the reconnection
of the resolution
actually happening. And when you allow that to happen,
things become better. So this is why you wanna have that those arguments. You wanna have those tough decisions.
Don't just sit there and let resentment
build because you're like, oh, well, I'm not even gonna talk to them. Talk to her because she's just gonna blow it all out of out of proportion, and then we're gonna have a big fight, and then I'm gonna be angry. I'm gonna be sleeping on the couch again, and then I wake up in the morning, my back hurts. And we make this whole line of story
as to why we don't wanna have the fight
when we should go on ahead and have the fight. Control what you're doing because, I mean, you have the ability to react or respond.
If you react to to an emotion,
that's where things get out of hand. People start throwing stuff at each other and and and other things, and it starts getting physical, and that's never a good thing. You're never going to resolve the problem when you start doing going down that road. That's a horrible road to go down,
and it's full of pain and full of anguish, and it's not ever in of any benefit.
But
if you're present enough in mind that you can actually
be
respond,
responsible
or able to respond
to a to your thoughts and to what's happening,
you can actually
come together with what your wife is saying. Doesn't mean you're giving up your your autonomy and this and like that. It just means you're having
a discussion, you're having an agreement, and you're having
the ability to work the problem out.
Now,
if you are somebody who is wanting to figure this out, wanting to try to find a
way to have better
discussions and better,
means of communicating
with your with your wife,
then please, you can reach out to me. You go to relaxed mail, and that's males and the dude, relaxed mail dot com forward slash lovebirds, all one word,
and there, you can actually set up a time that we would actually have a discussion and see. Can we work together? Can we have a
have a a
ability to
a session of being able to coach with each other and have a better
relationship
with our with your our wives.
And so if you are interested in that, again, relaxed mail dotcomforward/lovebirds.
If anything in this episode,
ring a bell with you,
really resonated with you,
ask that you share it out. Share it on your Facebook,
Instagram, take it in and share it as a text message to that to that brother of yours that is
struggling with his own problems.
You can go to,
hit the share button on any of the podcast
apps that are out there. They all have a share button. Hit that share and share it out to them. Let them know that, hey. There's this this podcast out here that's helping men become better men
by helping them become better at their means of
building a relationship with their wives. So, guys, with that, I wanna say thanks very much for listening. Y'all take care and y'all have a great rest of the week and we will see y'all next Thursday. Till then.
Bye.