Understanding Your Wife Can Make It Worse (Do This Instead)

If you and your spouse are feeling distant in this particular moment, this video is for you. If you have times where you do feel close, you do feel connected, but when you are disconnected, you don't feel seen, you don't feel heard, you don't feel like your opinion or perspective is being valued, and because of that, you just feel alone with a person that you share a room with, and that's not a good feeling. This video is for you. You may think you know exactly what your spouse needs to do and you know exactly what's wrong with your spouse. So you're going to go on YouTube and start searching and start researching on chat GPT what exactly is wrong with your marriage or with your spouse that needs to be overcome. Do yourself a favor, shut off your computer, close your screen right now, uh, after you watch this video, of course, because you may feel tempted to search for your marriage problem and diagnose your husband who's making you feel lonely or diagnose your wife who's not taking you seriously. That's not going to help you. You'll be an expert in what's wrong with them, but is that going to make you feel closer or is that going to make you feel further? If you want to feel closer, spend le time time trying to figure out what's wrong with your spouse and trying to figure out why they might be a narcissist or why they might have ADHD or why they might. These are real issues, but that's not your job at this particular moment. If you actually want to feel close, if you actually want to feel close, you need to shift lenses. You both need to shift lenses and focus on identity. Who do you actually want to be together? I once got a call from a guy who told me uh that he had been meeting with his therapist for some time because he had been going through a very difficult time and his therapist concluded that his wife had narcissistic disorder. His wife was a narcissist. I don't know if his wife was or wasn't a narcissist. What I do know is that the therapist had never met met his wife. This was not a diagnosis. This was a guess based on secondhand information. He called me. He says, "My wife is a narcissist and because of that, we need to work on our relationship." I said, "Bro," I said, "Let me ask you a question. If you choose to follow that path and go down that rabbit hole and buy into that narrative, is that going to make you closer with your wife or further from your wife?" Says, "I guess further." I said, "Okay, well, does she want you to see her as a narcissist?" "No." Do you want to see her as a narcissist? No. Okay. How does she want to be viewed? How do you want to be viewed? How do you want to actually view her? How do you actually want to see her? I I don't know if she's a narcissist or not, but you're in this relationship. You're invested in this relationship. You're not questioning leaving the relationship. You're questioning how to handle the relationship. Well, the way you handle the relationship is not by seeing her as a narcissist and start reading narcissist books and start going through all this confirmation bias because that's not going to help your relationship. This was before we even started working together. He called me back a couple days later. He says, "I want to thank you." Before we even started working together, he says, "I want to thank you because dynamics has already shifted because I started approaching our relationship more from a collaborative perspective rather than a top- down perspective. And instead of approaching as this is what's wrong with my wife based on what I read in a book or based on what a therapist had guessed without even meeting her and therefore here's how I need to treat her and now she feels attacked or scrutinized. He switched to we're in this together. We want our relationship to take on a new identity, a more fundamental identity. Please do yourself a favor. If if you're in an unsafe environment and you need to get out, this video is not for you. Get out. protect yourself. But if you're in a safe environment, you're just not in a comfortable environment. In other words, you might not feel emotionally safe fully being you, the chances are your spouse doesn't fully feel safe being them as well, at least in those difficult moments. And I'm sure you have moments where you do feel safer. But if you want to expand to feel safer together, to feel closer together, then stop trying to figure out what's wrong with each other and figure out number one, what identity you want your relationship to take on that when your relationship is in a better place. What is different about it? What makes that relationship better? What is it about you, both of you, that makes it more possible? That's your personal identities. When you discover problems, that becomes your lens. But when you start searching for identity, that becomes your lens. And you start to notice transformation. You start to notice exactly what it takes to show up and create a relationship where there could be closeness and love and vulnerability and honesty and humility even in difficult moments. And whereas normally those are the situations that would pull you apart, you would actually find yourself coming closer together. And if you want to learn more exactly how to do this, I have a link in the show notes. You could book a consultation, a 30-minute consultation. I'll walk you through exactly how I do this with couples. But whether you work with me or not, I want your approach to healing relationships to not be I found on YouTube that my spouse has this or this wrong or I have this and this wrong. You are putting on the wrong lenses. You're adopting the wrong stance. Adapt the stance of who do I want to be? Who do we need to