The Fastest Way To Reset Her Nervous System

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This workshop is built from nearly a decade of working with men in marriage crisis, watching some recover their marriage and watching others fail. The patterns are predictable.

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So we're going to talk about how to reset her nervous system, which is part of creating emotional safety. The goal of this workshop today is communication that she feels from you, not what she hears. We're going to talk about understanding the female psychology, which is critical. If you don't understand the terrain, you're going to struggle. And we're going to give you the keys to accelerating recovery the best way possible here. So, what we're going to learn today, the objective, so to understand what a dysregulated nervous system feels like. This is going to be in you and hers. Both of you, right now, have dysregulated nervous systems. We're going to learn to identify that. We're going to cut uncover the behavior that has trained the dysregulation. We're going to understand what delays recovery in restoring the nervous system, and we're going to understand what rebuilds trust. So, why is this important to you? What's in it for you? Well, the first principle to learn here is that if her nervous system does not feel safe, it will not attach to you. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are, if she doesn't feel safe around you, and I'm talking about emotional safety, not physical safety, she is not going to emotionally attach to you. That's just the bottom line. That is why this is so important, because if we don't re-establish a baseline within her nervous system, your intentions don't matter. She's not going to attach to you. So this is the nervous system reality. Right now, you're dealing with a hyper-vigilant nervous system. So a good way to look at this is a soldier in combat. He is hyper-vigilant to his environment and what's going on. Your wife is the same right now. So that's why this is not about the 99 things or 99% you get right. It really is about the 1% that you get wrong. And by the end of this workshop today, you're going to understand that. So again, using the soldier in a combat environment, he's not worried about the 99 things that are right in the environment around him. He's looking for the 1% of things that are wrong that indicate that something bad is about to happen. This is exactly where your wife is. So this is not about how it should be or how we would like it to be or what's fair. We're going to deal with facts, we're going to deal with reality. And the reality is at this point, it really is a case of you have to get it right. So this is the critical understanding that you need to take away today if you're going to stand any chance of success. Her nervous system has been trained by you over years, if not decades. So this is not, it wasn't trained by one argument, one betrayal, one failure, one lie, one outburst. This is decades of learning that has gone into this. And in the same way that somebody who's been an alcoholic for 20 years who says, I've understand that this is bad and I've quit drinking now. Society and the people around that person do not believe that that person is changed by their words. They believe it through their actions. They've proven their dysfunctionality and their alcoholism over years and decades, and they have trained people around them to not believe when they say that they're changing. This is the situation that you're in, whether we like it or not, and that's the reality that we have to deal with. So I'm going to give you the tools today to actually navigate that terrain. So her nervous system was trained by you through repeated unpredictability, escalation habits, emotional volatility, and inconsistency in your behavior. And the psychological truth in this situation now is that her nervous system does not respond to your words, it is responding to patterns. This is subconscious and it's about pattern recognition, not vocabulary at this point. So let's just be clear and make a clarification here because some of you like trauma labeling and to give her names and trauma labels that absolve responsibility. This isn't about trauma labeling at all. This is about conditioning her nervous system through repetition. And also your own nervous system as well. Obviously, we're talking in the context of your wife is the one leaving, she has all the leverage at this point. But this is also about re-establishing a baseline in your nervous system as well. So the goal of these workshops always is not just to give you useful information and you to leave going, well, that was interesting. It's to give you some diagnostic awareness of where you are in the process so you can identify where you are on the map and use the map to move you forward. So this is what a dysregulated nervous system looks like in your wife or you or anybody, quite frankly. It can be in your child, can be in your employees, can be in co-work, it can be in anybody, it doesn't matter. Hypervigilance, emotional distance, irritability, shutdown, suspicion of nice behavior, testing, avoidance of future conversations. These are all symptoms that men bring to me in saying, well, she she she's just I'm doing my best to change my ways, but she's just suspicious of me. I've changed my behavior, but she's tested me. She's still I I I've realized what I'm doing wrong, but she still avoids talking to me. All of these things, these are the results of a dysregulated nervous system that's been trained over an extended period of time, and it's not going to change in a heartbeat, as you're going to see. So when you talk to a dysregulated nervous system, she's not evaluating your words, she's scanning for threats. So emotional safety is not something that is explained, it is something that is felt and experienced. You can't tell your wife that she's safe and expect your words to land in creating that safety. Safety is experienced. You either feel safe with me or you don't. You feel vulnerable with me or you don't. And again, looking at this as a soldier in a combat environment, he's not looking, he's not listening to the words of the people in the village in Vietnam that are saying there's no Viet Cong here, this is safe, this is a safe village, you're safe here. He's scanning for threats. He could not care less what the people in that village are saying. He's scanning for threats, and it doesn't matter how much he's told by people around him that he's safe. If he doesn't feel safe because that's what he's trained to feel, then it doesn't matter. He's going to act in a way that's dysregulated. So the self-awareness test here, the diagnostic tool is does she relax around you or does she brace around you? Now, rule number one, we talk about this a lot, right? Never grade your own homework. Ask somebody who will tell you the truth no matter what. And there are very few people in your life that will do that, and AI certainly is not that. AI will not tell you the truth under any circumstances. If you want to ruin your marriage, start using AI as your as as your advisor. So, quite frankly, whether you does your wife's ex experience relief around you, or does she brace? Many of you, when I talk to you, I brace. It's like here we go, I'm gonna get pushed back, I'm gonna get all of these things. It doesn't take very long for the nervous system to be trained to expect an outcome. And one of the best things you can do for yourself in any aspect of your life is to ask how you're doing. Ask somebody who cares about you enough to tell the truth. And here's what I say, right? The one thing that you need in your life, the one thing that I need in my life, which is actually the hardest thing in the world to find, you need someone who fears God more than he fears you. Somebody who fears the wrath of God on their own life for lying to you, and they they they value the respect of God more than they value your respect. And that's very difficult to find because, especially if you're a high-agency man in positions of authority, it's dangerous to question the king because you can lose your head, you can lose your rice bowl. If you're a business owner, very difficult to find someone who will tell you the truth because telling you the truth is dangerous, it can cost you your rice bowl. So let's talk about why increasing an intensity, which is the go-to response for most men when they're trying to save their marriage, they get more intense, actually makes the situation worse. This is the error that most men fall into. They attempt to have deep talks, they make emotional declarations, they push for breakthrough conversations, and they sell vision and they force and try and construct closeness that isn't there. All of these things create friction. And these are the two perspectives that are actually seen at this point in time. And remember, perception is reality for your wife. She is not judging the situation as it is, she is judging the situation as she perceives it. It really doesn't matter how you see the situation, and it really doesn't matter how the situation is. She only understands the situation from her perspective. Perception is reality for all intents and purposes. And from his perspective in this situation, from your perspective, you're trying. You're trying to save your marriage, you're making effort, you're doing what needs to be done, you're stepping up, you're leading the situation. You're doubling down on intensity because intensity is what gets results on the playing field, in business, in the boardroom, in life. Intensity is what works for you. But from her nervous system perspective, all this communicates is more unpredictability. She doesn't know what she's getting from you. Emotional declarations that she's not used to is unpredictability. Push in for breakthroughs. I hear it all the time from men. I've had a breakthrough, I've had a breakthrough, I've had a breakthrough. As you see as we go forward, no, you haven't. You haven't had a breakthrough. So the first principle here to understand is success in nervous system repair, it's boring. This is why when we push for intensity or we push for breakthroughs, breakthroughs are intense, breakthroughs are recognizable, they're not boring, they're entertaining and exciting. To actually repair your wife's nervous system, or even to repair your own nervous system, in many cases, you need predictability. The nervous system enjoys predictability, it in it enjoys repetition. It likes the same thing over and over again. Nine times out of ten, the restaurants that I go to, and not the best restaurants. I I'm I'm a fine diner. I love fine dining, it's one of the things that I love. But the problem with fine dining is it's very unpredictable. A lot of people try it and get it wrong. It's experimental, and it's very hard to be consistent when you're pushing the boundaries. So nine times out of ten, I like predictable. I'll I would rather have a predictably okay experience and know exactly what I'm going to get than to expect or have expectations of a high-level experience and to be disappointed. Predictability is desirable. Repetition is desirable. Calm is very desirable, and uneventful is very desirable. These are the elements that nervous system repair consists of. These things cannot be present. So, bottom line here is that success is boring. It's ordinary things done repeatedly very, very well. Jim Rohn says something along the lines. Success is not doing extraordinary things, it's doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. And that is exactly true for this situation. To re-establish a nervous system, which is how your wife is ultimately communicating with you and connecting with you, her nervous system is connecting with you, not her mind. It's not about doing extraordinary things to re-establish that baseline, acceptable baseline. It's about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well, repetitive repetitively for extended periods of time and often with no feedback or at least no positive feedback whatsoever. You just do it over and over again. So here's the bottom line, man. If you cannot detach from the need for positive feedback, you cannot succeed in this task. Most men are willing to do what is required as long as they are being given a pat on the back, as long as there is a carrot or is there a or there is a positive response. But here's the truth. If that is what you need, if you cannot detach from that positive feedback, if you cannot just look at the situation in the same way that a farmer plants a seed and leaves it in the ground until it pops up, you will not succeed. You cannot plant a seed in the ground and dig it up 15 minutes later to see if it's growing. If you keep digging that seed up to get responses to see if there's positive feedback, you're gonna kill the seed and you're gonna kill the result. You have to plant the seed, you have to trust that it's gonna grow, and you have to continue to be consistent in your behavior. Water it, protect it, water it, protect it, water it, protect it. So, this is what productive success in re-establishing emotional safety with your wife and recreating that emotional baseline or the reset as most men want, it's about lower intensity, not higher intensity. It's about fewer emotional spikes, it's about creating ever smaller emotional reactions, it's about a stable tone, and it's about predictable responses. And what it absolutely is not is about the emotional highs, passionate reconciliation and big conversations. This is what men crave. They want that big conversation, that breakthrough conversation. They want that passionate reconciliation, and they want that emotional feeling. They want the woman to recognize that because they now see the error of their ways, they now understand that their behavior needs correction and they are making steps towards it. They want to see that in their wife's behavior. But the reality is the wife is she's not responding to your words, she's and she's not responding to you intellectually, she's responding to you emotionally and through her sympathetic nervous system. So here's the key psychological understanding. The nervous system stabilizes one way and one way only through repetition, through predictability, and here is the number one thing that is required threat under or time under non-threat conditions. I've known men that have come back from war zones and they've had to sit by a river literally for 15 years. That's how long it's taken. They've needed 15 years in non-threat conditions for their nervous system to stabilize again. It's about repetition, predictability, and time under non-threat conditions. It's not telling your wife that you've changed, and it's not even necessarily showing her that you've changed for a short period of time. It's about demonstrating that change without any feedback, or certainly without positive feedback, and very probably with negative feedback over an extended period of time, and there is no persuasion, there are no words, there's no script, and there's certainly no button that you can press that is going to cause her nervous system to stabilize. So let's talk about the time reality, which is probably the number one problem that most men suffer with in this process, and honestly, the number one reason why most men fail, this is the number one point of failure. Patience is a control attempt, or impatience is a control attempt, patience is leadership. So when a man says, I'm just doing this for my family, I'm doing this to save for my children's future, I'm doing this for, but ultimately they're demonstrating impatience. All they're doing is trying to control the situation and calling it virtue. Real leadership is patience. And patience, man, can only be demonstrated. It cannot be declared. You cannot say, I am being patient. Again, patience is something that is experienced by the nervous system. It's not something that's declared and communicated verbally to the conscious mind. I cannot tell you that I'm being patient with you. I can only allow you to feel that patience through my behavior. And the unfortunate truth for many of us is we don't get to decide how long this takes. This is why any any claim of do this in a week, four weeks, eight weeks, twelve months, twelve years, it's not legitimate because we don't get to decide. How long does it take for a nervous system to stabilize? Well, it's going to be different in everybody, and it's going to depend on can you actually be patient, or are you just pretending to be patient or trying to communicate patient? So the first principle here is there is no reset button. There is only retraining through repetition. You don't tell your wife something and she goes, okay. You teach her that you're safe through repetition and through time under non-threat. So remember here, if you want to speed things up, this is how you do it. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. There are no shortcuts, there are only wise paths to recovery here. And the more patient you're willing to be, the better the outcome you're gonna get. And the reality is the when you when you understand that it's gonna take longer than you think it's gonna take, it's gonna happen quicker than you expect. So she has an emotional baseline. This is how she feels about you. So if every man on this call that I have experience with, that I've done one-to-one calls with or have experience, if someone says to me, What do you think about Michael, or what do you think about John, or what do you think about David, I have an immediate response. And a lot of times it's just gonna be like, oh, or it's gonna be like, Yeah, John's call, man. It's not something that I think about. When a name is given and I associate that name with a person, every experience that I've had with that person is automatically evaluated in a split second, and that produces an emotional response within me that is not necessarily verbalized, but is most certainly felt. And ultimately the question is every time you're in the presence of your wife, do you leave her better than you found her or do you leave her worse than you found her? Do you leave her with more clarity or do you leave her more confused? Do you leave her feeling good about you or do you leave her feeling confused or disappointed about you? Communication is not about the things that we say, it's the emotions that we leave. And ultimately, all of you will have forgotten virtually everything on this call, unless you re-watch it, within a relatively short period of time, but you will remember the feeling that this call gave you. You'll feel frustrated, you'll feel happy, you'll feel clarified, you'll feel something. And when this call is, when you're reminded of this call, all that you will remember is the emotional memory of the call, virtually none of the words. This is an emote, this is what the emotional baseline is. What does your wife, what is her immediate response without any cognition whatsoever when your name is brought up? And this is the leadership shift. When you understand that, then it puts you in a position to where you are able to lead your household, or you're able to lead your business, or you're able to lead your family. So, what is this training not about? What is about resetting her baseline and nervous system about? Well, it's not about getting compliance from her, it's not about calming her down, and it's not about controlling her reactions. It's about becoming a regulating presence, it's about you. Becoming the most stable nervous system in the room. And it's about leading through calm predictability. How many of you in the workplace, whether you're an employee or an employer, like unpredictable clients or unpredictable co-workers, or an unpredictable employer? How many of us enjoy calm predictability? This is what it's about. If you want to regulate her nervous system, here's what you have to do: you have to regulate your nervous system. And you all hear it, right? One of my favorite phrases is you're a monkey with a machine gun. This is a dysregulated nervous system. If you are unstable, then she's going to be unstable because she does not know what she's going to get from you. She cannot reset and she cannot stabilize until you become the stabilizing force in the room, until you become that kind of predictability. So the core principle here is do not scale chaos. If your nervous system is in chaos right now, if you are dysregulated right now, which you are, regulate yourself first. How can she feel secure, safe, stable, and regulated around a nervous system that is entirely dysregulated? How can she feel calm and stable when she doesn't know what she's going to get from you? If you are dysregulated, you cannot regulate the environment that you're in. It's as simple as that. And this is why self-work, personal development, growth is critical here. Resetting her nervous system is not something you do to her or something you act upon. It is something that imitates you. She's highly dysregulated right now, and the reason she's highly dysregulated is because you're unpredictable, because you're a loose canon, because she doesn't know what she's going to get. She's imitating what she's seeing from you. She's following your leadership. She's following your example. So let's talk about the environmental conditions that are required. What are the steps to actually start to self-regulate and then by default help her reset her nervous system? So it absolutely isn't scripts or tactics, right? Men who say, Well, tell me what to say, tell me what to do, game over. If you're looking for a script or a tactic, or you're looking for a way to act upon the situation, it's game over. What changes the situation is predictability, reliability, emotional restraint or self-control, the absence of escalation, repeated repetition of calm responses, and lowered emotional volatility with you. When you escalate, she escalates. When you become emotionally volatile, she becomes emotionally volatile. When you become unpredictable, she becomes unpredictable. When you're unreliable, she's unreliable. In all of these conditions here, she's following your behavior. She will not show, she will not stop escalating until you do. She will not stop being volatile until you stop being volatile. She is not going to lead you out of this mess. You have to lead her out of it. She's not going to teach you self-restraint. You have to demonstrate self-re uh restraint predictably and reliably for an extended period of time. You have to change from being a man who escalates situations with high levels of volatility to a man who de-escalates with low or zero volatility. So your only objective is this: you are not calming her down. Don't think that I'm talking about your job here is to keep her calm. It is not. Your only objective, you have one and one task alone. Remove the threats that are causing her nervous system to destabilize. Remove the threats. Remember, this happens by time under or time in non-threatening environments. This is not about adding something, learning something, doing something. This is about removing the elements that her nervous system is considered considering a threat right now. So her nervous system will stabilize when the threat environment disappears for long enough for her to recalibrate. The soldier, the man that comes back from a combat environment from war, recalibrates when his nervous system is in an environment for long enough that has no threats in it. The longer he is in a non-threatening environment, the more stable and recalibrated he becomes. Every time that threat is reintroduced into the environment, the system is reset back to the level that you do not want it to be. So again, self-identity here. We want to identify where we are. We want diagnostics, not motivational advice here. We're looking for accuracy in thinking. We're looking for precision. So here's the question: ask yourself Are you stable or are you intense? And even better, ask somebody else. Are you stable? Am I stable or am I intense? Seeking that feedback and creating the emotional environment, emotional safety where somebody feels safe to give you that is key. Do you seek breakthroughs or do you commit to repetition? And I'm telling you, almost everybody watching this call right now, you're seeking breakthroughs. You're looking for the breakthrough in the marriage. Breakthroughs are intense, they're intense, they're emotionally volatile. And here's the thing to understand: the quicker the relationship comes together, the quicker it falls apart. If you meet a girl in a bar and you take her home that night, and the next day you're in a relationship, it took 12 hours for you to get into a relationship with that girl, that woman. That relationship can end in 12 hours. If you were lifelong friends, if you married a girl you were friends with since you were six years old, and you married her when you were 26 years old, and you were friends that entire time, that's a very, very stable, very, very secure relationship. She is not going to go to a bar and cheat on you or end the relationship. A relationship that takes 20 years to get into takes 20 years to end. The same with relationship, marriage, recovery here. If we seek breakthroughs, the quicker we get the breakthrough, the quicker it can end. The key here is to seek repetition, commit to repetition. So again, the landscape here, the terrain that we're in, male versus female psychology, men seek and crave dramatic recovery. Women need boring stability. We just want this done. We just want it over with. What where's the button, Cody? What do I do? Just tell me what I need to do. Let's get this show on the road, let's get this done, and let's get on with our lives. Men would happily recover this marriage in 12 hours. Women need that boring, repetitive, predictable stability for 12 months. So closing arguments here. Here's the sequence. Stability precedes safety. Safety precedes respect. And respect precedes vision. Vision being the vision for your marriage. If you want to get more into how to get to this point to where you're creating the vision for your marriage, I'll put that, I'll put that right here.