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12 - Why You Still Lose It (Even When You Know Better) · Masculine Containment

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  If you've been in a relationship for any period of time, there are probably moments, instances, where you react in a way that you don't want to.
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  You don't want to get triggered.
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  You don't want to escalate.
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  You don't want to say things you regret.
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  And yet it still happens.
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  So why?
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  Why does it feel like in the moment something takes over?
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  Why do you look back thinking like I did so many times?
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  That's not how I wanted to show up.
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  That's not what I wanted to do.
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  This isn't a pattern I want to keep repeating.
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  I want you to hear this first.
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  There's nothing wrong with you and you are not alone.
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  But there's something happening in our bodies in this situation that almost no one explains.
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  And once you understand it, it changes everything.
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  Not just for you as a man, but in your relationship with your significant other and in all your relationships.
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  Here's what's really going on.
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  In these moments, it feels like you're making a decision, but you're really not.
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  Your nervous system is taking over.
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  Your body's reacting before your mind has a chance to step in.
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  When we're triggered, we end up entering that place where adrenaline rises, our awareness narrows, our threat detection goes on.
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  We get into this fight, flight, fawn, or freeze, and for men, so often, it's fight.
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  And all of a sudden, you're not choosing how you show up anymore.
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  It's probably been built over years or decades.
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  It's probably a pattern that was demonstrated for you in your childhood.
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  I don't know about you, but a lot of men I know, myself included, didn't have really amazing examples of how to have a relationship when we were younger.
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  So this is why it's so frustrating.
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  Because after the moment passes, after we're triggered, we often look back and see what we could have said.
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  We see how we should have handled it.
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  We can even explain why it happened a lot of the time.
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  And most men think, there's something wrong with me.
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  There has to be.
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  Why do I keep doing this?
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  But it doesn't mean this.
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  It means that you, like me, for most of my marriage, have not been trained to stay in the moment.
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  And here's why I think we've actually been set up to fail.
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  Because a lot of the relationship advice out there talks about communication.
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  It talks about tools.
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  It talks about having certain skills.
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  And it really talks about repair.
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  In fact, so much of it tells you to get better at repair.
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  What to say after the argument.
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  How to come back together.
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  How to fix things once they've already been broken.
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  But what almost no one teaches and what changed my life and the lives of the men that I've worked with is how to understand the trigger.
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  How to know that it's there and slow things down.
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  How to regulate yourself in real time so you don't react in the first place.
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  We've been taught how to clean up the damage as though that is the solution, but we haven't been taught how to stop causing it, which is the real solution.
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  We've been taught how to repair after the storm, not how to become the man who actually calms the storm.
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  And that's the gap.
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  Because awareness is not the same as capacity.
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  You can understand your childhood.
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  You can understand your triggers, your wounding.
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  You can even explain your patterns.
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  But when you become activated without awareness to what to do, your body will default to what it's practiced, what it's observed, the patterns you absorbed in childhood, not what you actually understand.
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  Let me say that again.
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  Your body doesn't respond to what you know.
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  It responds to what you've trained, what you've done over and over again, what you've seen, what you've observed.
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  So here's what's missing.
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  For me, and for so many men, it's capacity.
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  The ability to stay in your body when triggered.
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  The ability to feel the emotion without reacting to it.
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  The ability to stay present, to breathe, to slow things down.
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  When everything inside you wants to escalate, withdraw, shut down.
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  Instead, staying right there, processing your emotions in the moment, transmuting them into something different.
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  That's a skill.
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  And unfortunately, most men have never even been told that that's what we should do, much less have actually trained this.
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  And when you start building that skill, everything changes.
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  I know it did for me.
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  You still feel the trigger.
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  You still feel the emotion.
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  But you don't move immediately.
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  You pause.
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  Slow things down.
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  You breathe, you stay, you listen, you respond instead of react.
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  You get curious instead of judging and escalating and feeling justified.
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  And in that moment, you don't just change the conversation you're having in your relationship, you change an entire relational pattern of feeling a trigger, escalating, causing rupture and damage, withdrawing until you can get back together and then trying to repair, which over time.
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  we know just doesn't work that great.
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  Over time, you feel your wife pulling away from you, or when you do go through this pattern, you feel it taking longer and longer to get to that place where you can repair and come back together.
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  And here's the truth.
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  You don't learn how to stop this by absorbing more content or consuming more or understanding yourself better.
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  You build this the way that we as men build anything that's real, through discipline.
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  through repetition, through practice, through staying in the moments that used to take you out of the moment, through catching yourself slowing down and doing something different over and over again.
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  This is real discipline.
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  This is real intention, real integrity.
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  Masculine containment, this process of slowing things down in the moment so that you're not exploding is a martial art.
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  And like any martial art,
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  When you develop it, when you put in the reps, when you put in the time, when you understand what you should be doing and you actually start doing those things, you stop surprising yourself.
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  You stop saying things that you regret.
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  You start feeling like you're in control, even in the middle of intensity.
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  And your relationship stabilizes because you can lead out of that intensity.
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  You can lead out of that reaction.
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  And what will happen is she responds differently and the pattern starts to break.
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  So if you've ever found yourself thinking, I don't want to react like this, but I keep doing it.
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  Again, there's nothing wrong with you.
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  You're not missing information.
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  You've just never been trained to stay and to calm things down and to breathe and to feel without exploding.
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  Awareness explains your behavior, but capacity changes it.
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  And if you want to start building that capacity...
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  If you want a simple way to interrupt this pattern in real time, I put something together for you so that you can understand this process of breathing, of transmuting, of slowing things down because it will change everything in your relationship.
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  When your partner feels emotionally safe and secure, you'll get everything you've ever wanted out of your relationship.
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  That's how it worked for me.
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  Once I was able to break this pattern and create emotional safety and security for my wife, Katie, not only did I get everything I ever wanted out of my relationship, I got more than I ever wanted because I didn't know I could want it to be as good as it is today.
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  closer to her, more attracted to her, more wildly in love with her than I ever had before.
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  And we connect and we talk and we work as a partnership and intimacy between us is extraordinary.
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  So much better than anything I knew it could be.
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  I want you to have the same thing.
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  So if you're ready to stop breaking this pattern in real time,
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  I put something together for you.
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  It's called stop the fight.
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  It's that simple.
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  Like, let's stop it before it begins.
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  Let's stop focusing on repair in that pattern of trigger, escalation, rupture, and withdraw.
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  And then we're at the last step and trying to come back and make things better.
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  Let's start creating stability instead.
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  You can do this.
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  I work with men every day.
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  who break this pattern in their relationships, and they start seeing everything change, and they start getting what they've always wanted, which is a real secure connection that you can rely on, that you can count on, that as a man, you can know will be there for you, regardless of what happens, because no matter what emotional instability you experience in your relationship, you can lead the two of you out.
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  of it.
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  If you go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com forward slash stop the fight, you can download my guide on how to break this pattern permanently and start experiencing an entirely new type of relationship.
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  And if this landed for you, please hit the subscribe button and leave a comment.
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  I read every one of them.
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  Thank you for being here today.