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53 - What Your Wife Means When She Says She Doesn’t Feel Safe · Masculine Containment

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how can you say you don't feel safe?
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That's the reaction that I had, the feeling I had, the frustration, the trigger, the response that I had when my wife, in a quiet moment, sat me down and said, I don't feel seen, I don't feel heard, I don't feel safe, and if something doesn't change, I can't do this anymore.
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I remember feeling like, how?
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How do you feel that way?
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I would never hurt you.
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I would protect you from anybody.
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I would put myself between you and danger without thinking twice.
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I provide.
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I'm here.
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I love you so much, so deeply.
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So how could you possibly say you don't feel safe with me?
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And I remember.
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I've heard this from so many men.
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You know, when I heard this, if you've heard this in your relationship, I want you to know something.
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I've spoken personally with over 300 men and so many of them have heard this and the feeling that we all had, so many of us, maybe not every single one, but so many have validated that we felt alone
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and isolated, and like we were the only person hearing this.
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And if you've heard some version of, I don't feel seen, I don't feel heard, I don't feel safe in your relationship, I want you to know, first and foremost, it's crucially important that you are not alone.
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This is a dynamic that occurs in so many relationships.
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It comes up over and over again.
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I've heard it from so many men.
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And it's because so many of us are defining safety as something physical.
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And what she is experiencing is a lack of safety relationally.
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She's experiencing a lack of safety in the relationship.
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And it means we're both using the same word safe to mean completely different things.
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One of the most confusing things we can hear from our wives is I don't feel safe with you.
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And again, if I'm honest, I was angry and frustrated and confused and I wanted so bad to fix it.
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And I knew that I would protect her from anything and she's,
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It took a while for me to figure this out.
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And I want to help you.
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If you've heard this, if you've felt those feelings, if you've had that come up for you, if you feel confused by it or irritated or angry, all of those are valid, real reactions.
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And it doesn't make you a bad person.
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And that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.
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Like I said, you are not alone and there's nothing wrong with you.
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Because what unsafe does not necessarily mean that you're abusive or you're dangerous or she thinks you're going to hit her or touch her or you're a bad husband or that every uncomfortable emotion she experiences is your responsibility.
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That's really important for us to understand because when we feel here, not feel here, unsafe as men, that is what rationally we go to.
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We start judging ourselves.
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We start thinking, where did I make this happen?
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How did I make this happen?
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I know I'm not unsafe.
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I know I would never do this to you because...
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One of the things we don't understand about women is that feeling unsafe and actually being in physical danger are not interchangeable.
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It's not the same thing.
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We need to understand this because when I talk about emotional safety, what I'm talking about is whether the relationship that you're in can hold truth, disagreement, emotion, vulnerability, any type of rupture and conflict without immediately creating punishment, abandonment, intimidation, chaos, volume.
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and unsafety for her.
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And this is what it took me forever to figure out about what was going on in my relationship.
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And I've seen this reflected in the relationships of so many men.
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So again, you are not alone.
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Because what I understood in my relationship is that
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she started calculating what was safe and what wasn't safe.
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She started thinking to herself, if I tell him I'm disappointed, he gets defensive.
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If I tell him I'm angry, he raises his voice.
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If I tell him I'm hurt, he tells me why I shouldn't be and uses all the logic to tell me that I don't need to be.
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If I disagree, he withdraws for a couple of days.
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If I reject sex, he takes it as a rejection of who he is.
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And I'll pause here for a second.
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I remember talking to a friend of mine a while ago, and he shared with me that in his relationship, they were having less and less intimacy.
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And to the point where he didn't bring it up anymore, he didn't initiate because he was afraid of rejection.
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And I said, what does that feel like?
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And he said, oh, it's really hard.
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And I said, brother, what does that really feel like?
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And he said, it's like the worst feeling in the world.
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He said, I want to leave.
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I start spiraling.
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I start judging myself.
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I start feeling unworthy, unwanted, uncared for.
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I start all of these feelings.
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And I'm sharing this because I want you to know those are the feelings we have as men.
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You know?
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And...
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This is those feelings, those reactions are why she may start editing herself.
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She might wait for the right time to tell you something, or she might try and make everything easier for you to hear, or add disclaimers, or she won't even bring certain things up, or she says nothing.
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If your partner, this is important, if your partner has to manage your reaction before she can tell you how she feels, that is data, that is information, that is feedback about the emotional safety she is feeling.
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And here's why this is so hard for us as men to understand.
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You know, I obsessed over this because I didn't understand it.
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And then once I started to gain an understanding, I'm like, hey, why couldn't I see this before?
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Because...
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When you're in a place of reaction, you're not thinking, I'm going to make this unsafe.
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I'm going to make her feel unsafe.
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What's really happening or what was really happening for me, I'll personalize this and you can see if you relate to it.
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is that I was experiencing a threat.
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Her disappointment landed as, I'm failing.
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Her criticism made me feel like I'm not enough.
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Her anger made me feel like I was being attacked.
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Her withdrawal made me feel like I was being abandoned.
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Her sexual no made me feel like I was unwanted, and I would spiral and get challenged and frustrated, and this is where my nervous system would step in to protect me.
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This is important to understand because those reactions we have, those feelings we have, they're automatic.
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We're not calling them up.
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We're not doing them on purpose.
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We're not saying, hey, let me have these reactions and feelings right now.
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And what happens so often when those feelings come up is we explode or we implode or we defend or we explain or we fix or we leave or we shut down or we get bigger with our energy or we go cold.
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I know I did every single one of these in my relationship at one point in time or another.
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And this is what I came to find out.
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I didn't feel safe inside myself and I had a hard time creating safety around myself, not just with my wife, with my kids, sometimes with people I worked with because when I felt a trigger, I felt threat.
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And when I felt a trigger, I would respond in one of the ways I just described.
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And this is important to understand because,
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There's a lot of men I talk to who say things like, I don't yell, I don't react, I don't explode, I don't do any of those things, so I don't understand why she says I'm not safe.
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Exploding and imploding or bringing too much energy to the situation or withdrawing both affect her sense of safety.
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And so explosion, I think,
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It's easy to understand.
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It's like what we all know, what we've seen before.
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A lot of us have seen it.
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It's more energy comes into the room.
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You raise your voice.
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There's an aggressive tone.
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You're interrupting.
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You're not listening.
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You have an intimidating posture, anger.
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Maybe you're overpowering.
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Her nervous system says danger is in the room.
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It's getting closer.
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I need to protect myself.
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I'm embarrassed to say it, but there's far too many times in my relationship with my wife that that happened.
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There's far too many times in my relationship with my two daughters that happened.
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There's far too many times in my relationship with other people that that happened.
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My default was kind of explosion.
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It was what I was trained growing up.
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Now on the other side, if you're one of those men who says, I don't do any of that, like, and I've met those men, I've talked to a lot of them.
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They say, you know, I don't explode.
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I don't bring too much energy to the situation.
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The opposite of that is implosion.
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It's shutting down.
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It's everything disappears.
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Your energy disappears.
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You're cold.
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You're silent.
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You're walking away without coming back.
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Stonewalling, which means just not being present, not being there, withholding affection, emotionally shutting down.
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And what that makes her nervous system say is not that there's threat present.
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It's I'm alone now.
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I'm abandoned.
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That triggers all the abandonment wounds she's had throughout her entire past.
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And every woman, every human has abandonment wounds.
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So one explosion creates danger, the other one creates abandonment, and both are felt and seen as a threat.
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Both can be felt and seen as a threat.
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And so the other option is masculine containment.
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Masculine containment is the practice of staying present and in the moment, feeling your feelings, regulating yourself.
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and not having to explode or implode, but being able to see the situation for what it is, and that is hard for us as men.
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I'm going to talk more about that in just a moment.
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But first I want to talk about some of our reactions that come up and the things that I hear from men, the dialogue that I have from men.
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Like I said, I've talked to hundreds of men, and I've trained hundreds in the Brotherhood Society where we train masculine containment, this martial arts-like discipline together.
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And what will often come up is a guy will say something like, hey, Alex, but she's not always right.
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You know, a lot of men hear emotional safety and hear what I'm saying and they say, so do I disagree with everything she says?
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Do I just roll over?
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Do I become a doormat?
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Am I a punching bag?
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I totally understand those feelings.
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I can see how it would feel that way.
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And the answer is no.
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You can disagree.
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You can set boundaries.
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You can say no.
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You can leave an unhealthy conversation.
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You can correct facts, challenge behavior.
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You can even end a relationship if necessary.
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And in some cases, men have.
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They've stepped into masculine containment.
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They've realized they're not being met there.
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One of our members very eloquently said he realized his lack of containment got him in his relationship in the first place.
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And so he left.
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But emotional safety does not mean that a woman gets whatever that she wants.
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This is key.
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Safety doesn't require agreement.
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It requires that disagreement does not automatically become danger.
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Safety requires that our reactions are not weaponized and create a feeling of unsafety.
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Because containment gives you the ability to hear her
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Stay in the moment and decide whether you agree with it or not and reply in a way, respond in a way that's not a reaction, a way that it doesn't bring too much energy or take all the energy away, a way that it doesn't create threat or abandonment.
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You know, one of the simple explanations for me is,
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in my relationship, and I've used this before because it's relatable to a lot of men, is Katie and I pulling into a parking lot, and she would say, hey, there's a parking space right there.
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And as I learned this work and I became more contained, I would hear that from her, and I would have a reaction.
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And then I'd have to slow things down and feel that reaction in my body and then hear the story that that reaction is bringing up.
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And in that case, the story would be things like, she doesn't trust me.
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She doesn't respect me.
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She thinks I'm incompetent.
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She doesn't think I can drive.
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Can't she see I can see that parking space?
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Like, why does she feel like she has to control me?
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Why is she coaching me?
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And I'm reacting to this entire story that she didn't even say.
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She's just saying, hey, there's an easy space right there.
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And she probably thinks she's being helpful.
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And my wife had a lot of trauma in the car with her.
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She had two dads, a stepdad and a father, and both of them created a lot of trauma around driving.
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One would road rage and lose control, and the other one would talk at her so she felt like she was in a prison.
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And so the car's an uncomfortable place with her.
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I didn't know that for most of our relationship.
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When I finally did, I started seeing these things completely differently.
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You know, what I realized was the trigger happens in my body.
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I feel it before it becomes a story in my mind.
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And I have the time to slow things down and not lean into the meaning that's being created, the story that's being created, because the meaning, the story is what creates the reaction.
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And here's what I think we need to understand as men.
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When this happens, often our childhood is in the room.
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And to say it, not to use therapy speak, but I think it's important and the concept is real and it's changed my life, our inner child is in the room.
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And what that means, our inner child, is that there's a part of us, a young part of us, that has been traumatized and wounded and conditioned to see these things as a threat.
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And
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For those of us who grew up in situations where mistakes meant shame, I know I did, where anger meant danger.
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I had a dad that would rage.
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Like the second he got angry, everyone in the room was in trouble and we were in danger.
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Where being corrected meant humiliation.
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I remember my father, like corrections came across so punitively and so challengingly.
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I felt so small and I felt unseen and unheard and unheard.
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You know, my emotions when I was a kid weren't welcome in a lot of situations.
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And love could disappear.
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My dad would withdraw for days and weeks at a time.
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And so a normal relationship conversation, like, hey, park over here, and me saying, okay, like, who cares?
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I'll park over there.
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Or me saying, I'm parking over here because I think it's better.
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can activate something much older, much younger in you, like older in time, younger in your body.
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And you're not just responding to your wife in that situation.
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I wasn't just responding to Katie.
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You may be like me responding to every previous moment that taught your body, this is dangerous.
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This is an unsafe situation.
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Protect yourselves, protect yourself.
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And if
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What I now know for me and for so many men is that we can react as though there's danger present even when we're actually, what we're experiencing is the echo of danger from the past.
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The feeling of danger from the past.
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The trigger of danger from the past.
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The conditioning of danger from the past.
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The good news is anything that's been conditioned from our past, anything that's been wired into our nervous system and taught to our nervous system can be reconditioned and retaught.
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And this is important.
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You know, when these things happen in the moment, we have to understand as men our intention over our impact.
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Because here's what I know in these situations with Katie, when something would come up,
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And I would try and explain it away.
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I'm thinking intention is just I'm explaining.
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What she experienced was you're telling me my experience is wrong.
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My intention when I would walk away is I need some space.
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I don't want to be in this situation right now.
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She would experience you disappeared again.
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My intention might be I'm trying to solve this problem to show you why we don't need to have it right now.
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And she would experience you're not hearing me.
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You're not listening to me.
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And I would intend oftentimes, like, I'm passionate.
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I care about this.
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This is important to me.
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And I would think to myself, I'm not yelling.
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I'm just expressing.
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But what she would feel is, you're overpowering me.
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And here's what's important.
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Like your intention matters.
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Like intention is a lot of the equation.
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But so does the experience your intention creates.
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And when you can line up intention with experience for her, that's where you will be seen and heard and stop challenges in your relationship and create emotional safety and security for her, maybe for the first time in her life.
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Because this is what emotional safety actually feels like for her.
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She can tell you something that you don't like without you immediately having to make it better or change it or without her regretting having told you.
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She can be emotional without needing to make the emotion disappear for you or for your comfort.
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She can disagree with you without feeling retaliation or abandonment.
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She can say no.
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She can ask for something.
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She can tell you that you hurt her.
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She can be imperfect.
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And she believes that she can do all of these things
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And the relationship can stay intact in those moments.
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Because here's something so important for us to understand as men.
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Emotional safety is not the absence of difficult conversations.
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In fact, emotional safety requires difficult conversations.
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It's the confidence in her that the relationship can survive them.
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It's the confidence in us that when we are having a difficult conversation, we can stay in the moment and stay present and be with that difficult conversation with our emotions without exploding or imploding.
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Because this martial art-like discipline that I practice every day and that I teach men around the world to practice, masculine containment, is first creating safety inside yourself.
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Because most of the time, not some of the time, most of the time, when we experience a trigger, we are responding to something that isn't present in the moment.
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You know, one of the examples that I've shared for years before I even understood this work
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And before I even started teaching this work, I used to share this in my business coaching mastermind.
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And you know, I would say,
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You know, for people like us, when there's a trigger present, everything in our lives can change.
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And the example that I used to share was if I walked into my office and there was a stack of mail and I flipped through it and one of the return addresses was from the IRS.
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Those three little letters could send me into a reaction in the moment and it didn't matter if it was a check or a notice of some kind that meant nothing.
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but because I'm remembering every challenging correspondence I ever had around taxes.
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I'm remembering every check I ever wrote.
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I'm remembering when I had a tax lien, when I had an accountant that didn't pay my taxes right, and for years I had to pay it off.
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I remember feeling like I was an indentured servant to the IRS.
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I remember just how challenging that was and frustrating it was, how hard it was to make the payments, the struggle that I went through.
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So I was responding to all of that in the moment.
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Now today, I'm happy to say...
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I can get an envelope from the IRS, and I might have a little bit of a reaction, to be honest, but it's nothing like it used to be.
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Because when I feel that reaction come up, I breathe.
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I feel my feet.
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I feel my stomach.
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I get in touch with my body.
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I feel the emotion.
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And then I feel the story.
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Like, in the past, I see the IRS, and I think, oh, here we go again, and this is going to be a challenge, and there's a problem, and they're going to notify me of something.
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They're coming after me.
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They're going to take my money.
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It's going to be forever.
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And now, when that type of reaction happens, I remind myself, I'm here, I'm safe.
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I don't have to react yet.
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I don't have to react to that envelope.
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I can open it up and see what it is.
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And if there is a challenge in there, I can continue breathing, feel my feelings, and start taking proactive measures to go like move past that challenge.
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Same thing with Katie.
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When there's a challenge present and a trigger present, I stay, I listen.
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I connect with her and I get curious.
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You know, I ask like, hey, what's going on for you right now?
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What's happening for you?
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Is there something that's making you uncomfortable?
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What are you afraid is going to happen here?
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What do you need me to understand?
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What can you tell me about your experience right now?
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not because she's automatically correct and not because she's always right and not because her feelings are more important than mine, but because the first person a man learns to create safety for is himself.
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And for me, in these conversations with Katie, in my relationship, I want information so that I don't have the reaction.
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I wanna understand what's going on so I'm leading with curiosity so I actually know what's going on for her.
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when I got to the place where my body no longer needed to treat her emotion like an emergency, not only did I become more emotionally safe to be around for her, this is so important, I became more emotionally safe for myself.
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Because every reaction that I would have, every time I was triggered, every time I would go into story, every time I overreacted to an envelope, I was actually taking myself out of the moment.
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I was leaking my capacity, my capability, my ability to be present, my ability to be right here.
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I was in a place where instead of solving something or moving something forward or creating momentum in my life and making something happen, I was retreating, reacting, or exploding.
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Either way, I was disassociating from what was really going on.
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And so creating emotional safety and security for Katie had the byproduct of me actually creating emotional safety and security consistently for myself, which is so crucial for us as men.
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Safety can't be demanded from her or from ourselves.
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Like we can't just tell ourselves, hey, feel safe right now.
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And we certainly can't tell her, hey, I'm safe.
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You should feel safe with me.
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I've never done anything to you.
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Those things are all going to do the exact opposite.
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You can't argue someone into feeling safe with you.
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You can't argue yourself into feeling safe in the moment.
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If you have to demand someone acknowledge how safe you are, you are probably proving the opposite and trying to solve an experiential problem with logic.
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And slow things down.
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Can you do that with yourself?
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Can you really just click and make yourself feel safe when you're in a trigger?
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Probably not.
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So slowing things down and taking a new route and looking at your behavior and changing what belongs to you and in your relationship with your partner and yourself, creating repeated experiences that change emotional safety and security, that create emotional safety and security.
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Now, I want to say something that's really important.
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And this comes up often in my work.
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It comes up in criticism of masculine containment, but it also comes up with the men that I talk to.
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I've seen it over and over again.
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And it's challenging.
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Men tell me things like, I think my wife is using, I don't feel safe to control me.
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And here's what I want you to understand.
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Like, I don't feel safe cannot become a veto over every boundary that you have.
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That doesn't mean that when you bring something up, it's wrong.
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She can actually feel unsafe because of her own trauma, her history, her wounded inner child, her projections, patterns that existed long before you, or...
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It may even be that she's actually trying to control you.
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So your job is not to organize your entire life around preventing another adult, your partner, from ever feeling activated.
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Instead, what I would take on as a responsibility, what I would encourage you to look at as an opportunity, is creating as much relational safety as integrity in the moment allows.
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And what I mean by that is, you're not responsible for making sure another adult doesn't feel uncomfortable.
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You're responsible for staying in your body and for being present and for not escalating the situation and for cleaning up your side and creating clarity.
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There's one thing I want you to understand is that containment creates clarity.
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When there's an escalation and feelings become present and there's an explosion, that creates chaos and a lack of clarity, not just for her, but for you, for everyone present.
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And so when you start changing your behaviors and you stop exploding, you stop disappearing, you stop breaking promises, you stop intimidating, you listen, you actually create clarity.
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And a big part of that clarity is you create clarity around what's hers and what's yours.
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This actually happened in my relationship.
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I've been practicing containment with Katie.
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in a way that I understand it now, in the way that I show other men since December 26th, 2024.
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And there was a time where I changed my behavior.
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I was contained.
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I was in my body.
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I wasn't reacting to her.
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I wasn't creating emotional pressure by exploding or imploding.
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And I had done both before.
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And many times throughout our entire relationship, over and over again.
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And then I stopped doing those things.
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And she still would have reactions.
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And sometimes those reactions would be consistent around the same subjects.
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And it gave me an opportunity to say, hey, I know I'm not causing this reaction now.
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And it's come up for you several times.
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And it's difficult for both of us.
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And I think this is your work to do.
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And this is a place where you can lean in and where you can change things too.
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And because I was contained, because there was clarity, she agreed with me.
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And when I brought things like that up, she does her work and she does her processing and she sees an EMDR therapist and she talks to friends and she gets it out in the open.
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The same things that I did to understand containing myself, she does the same thing to process her side of the street and her side of the relationship.
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And that, both of us on either side, me creating clarity and her understanding, has created an entirely new level of connection in the dynamic of our relationship.
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It's stronger than it's ever been in every way and stronger than I ever could imagine that it could be.
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So the questions for you are, when my wife tells me something difficult, what happens in my body?
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These are questions about...
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Am I creating safety or am I creating a lack of safety?
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Can she disagree with me without me punishing her?
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Can she say no without me becoming cold and withdrawn?
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Can she tell me I hurt her without me immediately trying to correct her or explaining what I was trying to do?
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Can she bring me emotion without me needing to fix it?
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And when I need space, do I communicate that I need space in return or do I just disappear?
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If your wife is starting conversations with, I don't know how you're going to take this, or please don't get mad, or I'm afraid to tell you this, those are data points.
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Those aren't judgments against you.
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Those are data points that she doesn't feel safe.
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And so the key here is, if your wife says she doesn't feel safe, or you can feel her not feeling safe, don't immediately ask or default to, what have I ever done to you?
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Okay.
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Instead, ask, think to yourself, maybe say it out loud, what happens between us that makes you telling me your truth feel unsafe or risky or challenged?
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Because what happens inside me when she tells me something I don't want to hear is the most important data that I have.
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I can feel it.
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I can feel that inner child.
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I can feel what's going on.
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I can feel the past and the triggers that I've experienced in the past.
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And by staying with them and feeling them, I actually am able to move past them instead of suppressing them and feeling them over and over and over again to where I feel like I'm threatening conversations.
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I feel like I'm threatened by an envelope.
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You know, me stepping into a place of containment with Katie.
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and listening to her, and leading with curiosity, and staying with the conversations, has helped me show myself that emotions are safe.
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And that I can feel them.
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And that I can feel them at the deepest level, because the more you feel the emotions that are present, the more you're transmuting them, the more they are moving through your body, the more you're feeling the depth of them, the more you're releasing them, and stepping into an entirely new reality, where every trigger doesn't have to become a reaction.
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I spent years believing that Katie's safety meant I would physically protect her.
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And I would.
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And I'm hypervigilant around her.
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You know, I often tell people like funny stories of walking in a downtown area.
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I can remember when we were in Seattle a while ago, walking in a downtown area, and she's just walking and having a great time and doesn't really pay attention to the world around her.
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And I'm constantly scanning and looking what's coming up and,
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seeing if there's a threat on the horizon.
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And at one point, I remember in Seattle, we're walking along and I look out in front of us and there was a person who probably was homeless and looked pretty dangerous and was yelling at every person that walked by them.
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And as I was watching him, he made eye contact with Katie.
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I could tell he was looking at, not eye contact, he made contact, like looked at Katie.
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Didn't look at me, looked at her.
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And moved over to the side of the sidewalk where she was.
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And I knew as we went forward, like there was a threat there.
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And without saying anything, without making her feel it, I just calmly moved from one side of her to the other, put myself in between her and this guy, and I created physical safety.
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So I would protect my wife in any situation.
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And I'm hypervigilant about it.
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And I'm proud of it.
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But eventually, I had to understand that the man who would protect her from anyone else, me, could still create an experience she needed to protect herself from emotionally.
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It was painful.
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It was frustrating.
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So challenging to know that I was creating emotional and safety for her emotionally.
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But here's the opportunity.
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It gave me massive power and capacity because what I realized was if my behavior was contributing to the problem and my behavior could change, which I knew it could, I could actually change this.
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And I didn't create safety by convincing her that she shouldn't be afraid of my reactions.
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I created safety by changing the reactions she'd learned to anticipate.
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I created safety by no longer exploding or imploding.
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I created safety by staying with her and listening and seeing and hearing her and understanding that she could have her truth and I didn't have to correct it.
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And if I listened and I stayed with her and I was in the moment with her,
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things would get infinitely better and I could lead any situation in my relationship to a positive conclusion.
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What I now know and I wish I learned when I was younger is that the highest expression of masculinity is presence.
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A lot of men say things to me like, I don't know how to be a man.
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I don't know what masculine means.
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You know, I don't know what this masculine and feminine and how do I do this?
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The highest expression of masculinity is presence.
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Not explosion, not anger, not screaming, not yelling, not taking everything over, not control, not domination, none of those things.
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Those are all wounded, unhealthy masculine expression.
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The highest expression of masculinity, healthy, grounded masculinity is presence.
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And when you can stay present with yourself, you're far more capable of staying present through any situation, especially those with her.
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If you related to this and you feel like you want to do this work and step into a new level of masculine presence, a higher level of masculinity, a higher level of understanding yourself and a higher level of belief in yourself, go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
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It's the group in which we train masculine containment together, this martial art-like discipline that will change your relationship, increase your capacity in the world, and
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and it might just change your life.
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I'd be honored to walk this path with you.
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Go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
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I look forward to meeting you in person.