Why You Keep Having the Same Argument — Even When You’re Trying to Handle It Better l EP. 89 l

Same argument.

Different week.

And no matter what you try — staying calm, choosing your words better, giving her space — it still ends the same way.

Tension. Distance. Disconnection.

In this episode, I break down why that keeps happening — and why most relationship advice is completely missing the mark.

Because it’s not a communication problem.

And it’s not about finding the “right words” either.

We cover:

•  Why arguments repeat (even when you know better) 
•  Why scripts, communication tactics, and “I feel” statements don’t work 
•  The hidden patterns driving your reactions (defending, withdrawing, shutting down) 
•  Why by the time you're arguing… it’s already too late 
•  The real reason your wife escalates (and why you feel attacked) 
•  What’s actually happening beneath the surface of most arguments 
•  How to stop reacting and start leading the conversation 
•  The difference between surface-level issues vs emotional reality 
•  How to create real resolution instead of temporary peace 

Most men try to fix arguments by:

•  Saying things better 
•  Staying calmer 
•  Avoiding conflict 
•  Or trying to “handle it differently” 

But that’s just managing symptoms.

And it’s exhausting.

Because the truth is…

You’re not arguing about the garage, the dishes, or what was said.

You’re reacting from patterns that were built long before your relationship even started.

Until those change…

You’ll keep having the same fight.

Just with different words.

If you want to actually break the cycle — and not just survive conversations — this episode will show you where to look.

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Apply HERE 

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Transcript

Harrison Orr (00:03.682)
why you keep having the same argument, why you keep having, this is why you keep having the same argument, but a different week, even though you know better.

Harrison Orr (00:18.392)
You're listening to the Be Better podcast. I'm Harrison Orr. help, you're listening to the Be Better podcast. I'm Harrison Orr. I help successful men stop losing their shit at home, stop reacting, defending, withdrawing, and start leading themselves and the people they love. So let's rip in. You're mid conversation.

you can feel the energy starting to shift as your wife starts to push back, as she starts to escalate. You've tried to squash it down. You've tried to just calm her down, just get it to understand. And you feel it starting to head in that direction again. You're like, know where this is going. So maybe you slow it down. Maybe you try to recall all those, those tools, those techniques that you've heard about to help not have this same argument again. Maybe you try to take a slow breath. Maybe you try to

ground yourself. Maybe you try to just help her to understand anything that you've got in your arsenal to not turn this into another fight, not turn this into the same argument again. Maybe you just need to say it properly this time. Maybe you try to just let her talk or empty her basket, as some people say, and then it happens anyway. Her tone changes, you feel it hit instantly, and then you're just explaining yourself all over again, and then you withdraw.

you back down and then either she escalates trying to get something more out of you because she's felt you disconnect or she just rolls her eyes and just walks away. She gives up. Same argument, different week. And so many men will focus on what to say in these moments.

How do I handle these moments when they come up so that I don't have to have this fight again? So it doesn't end in all this tension, this distance, this coldness, and another thing that's been swept under the rug because we couldn't work through it. And when you look at it like that,

Harrison Orr (02:19.094)
It kind of makes sense that so many people talk about, you need to work on your communication. Like communication is, is the barrier here. That's the issue that you need to address. And then you go down that rabbit hole of basically looking up scripts, right? What to say, how to have these conversations and you maybe start with, well, I feel statements and like all this other stuff. But the problem with that is you don't need to communicate better.

You can say the same thing, but it lands very differently depending on the tone, the pace, the energy, there's so many other variables other than the words that are said. Maybe you've tried to just stay calmer. And if you're coming from a dysregulated place, that calmness feels more like a performance, which to her probably feels like abandonment. Probably feels like, he's checked the fuck out again.

So staying calmer isn't actually working and it's not even helpful either. It's more like a suppression or disassociation. And then maybe even just, I just need to handle it differently. But handling it differently is kind of like saying, well, I just need to steer the train better. Brother, the train is on tracks. You ain't steering it anywhere. It's already going where it's going, whether you like it or not.

And so maybe you try harder, maybe you try these other things and maybe you go to counseling, maybe you think it's like, it's a relationship thing. Like we need to work through this and it still doesn't work. Because by the time that you're having these conversations, by the time there's the escalation, there's the tension in that moment, it's already too late. Everybody's already reactive. And in that moment, you're more doing damage control than anything else.

what not enough people look into, look at, or even consider is why those moments happen. And I'm not talking about why that specific moment happened. I'm not talking about the, like that issue of what she came to you in the first place, you know, the thing that you haven't done or the issue that she had from the day or whatever it was, like why that happened. I'm talking about why you responded the way that you did.

Harrison Orr (04:43.052)
When she brings that to you, the part of you that responds by defending, by having to try to force her to see your side of the story, to maybe defend or explain or justify. And then when that's not working, when she's pushing harder to try and make you understand, make you listen, you feel that escalation. And then as that tension starts to rise, that pressure starts to rise,

You lose that confidence in that ability to articulate your point and you see where it's going. So you withdraw. You step back, you bite your tongue. You think, okay, I just need to keep the peace. It's not worth the fight. It's not worth the argument. And then you kind of walk on eggshells. Maybe you over apologize and just hope that it kind of clears things up. But that never works. Right? That.

that strategy never really works for a healthy long-term relationship.

So here's what I think actually does work. This has worked very, well for my marriage and all of the guys that I coach because it's not about learning scripts. It's about looking at the patterns as to why that shows up because when you understand the patterns that show up in these moments and then you change those, actually don't need to have, you don't need to memorize a script. Like your ability to navigate these situations comes naturally.

And I know that seems like a weird, maybe even foreign concept. You're like, what do you mean, man? Like I've never had these before. Like what do you mean it comes naturally? Yeah, it comes naturally. Like as a society, we focus so much on the symptom of things. We focus so much on lagging metrics.

Harrison Orr (06:41.152)
And so that's what we try to orchestrate. That's what we try to engineer is the symptomatic solutions. We address the symptoms rather than looking at the root cause. Like in this case, the fact that it escalates is not the root cause. The fact that you defend yourself, the things that you're saying in that moment.

The fact that you get frustrated, the fact that you withdraw, like in those moments, like the energy, the words, even the problem, you whatever she's brought to you, are not the problem. They're just the symptom.

And when we try to address those symptoms, we get exhausted, we maybe perform for a little bit, but then it eventually falls off and it doesn't last because you have to consciously be on your toes of what do need to say? How do I need to handle this? And it's exhausting.

when you address the root cause of these, when you dig into find what is the root cause and how do need to change that, then you can have these conversations naturally. You can handle your wife's emotions. You can then actually get to a point of understanding and resolution.

And that's not through scripts. It's not through forcing yourself to stay calmer or just trying to handle it differently. The cool thing about handling, changing the way that these conversations go is all up to you. Like you can do 99 % of the work here and massively change how these go.

Harrison Orr (08:26.978)
because look at the part of you that shows up. So think about it this way. There is a part of you that at some point in your life learned that if you are seen as wrong, if you are seen as incongruent, you lose something important to you.

You lose connection, you lose love, you are abandoned, you are made to, you're not made, you feel something which is so intense and undesirable that a part of you learned that sucked and I'm going to make sure that you never do that again, that you never have to experience that again.

And so in its attempt to make sure that you never feel that again, it will make sure you defend, that you explain, that you try to justify, that you have an excuse for, that you maybe even blame all other external factors, environments, people, anything that you can come up with to make sure that you are not the one at fault, that you are not wrong, you don't look like an idiot, and you can protect your self image.

so that you stay good. Ultimately hoping that in this situation with your wife that if you can be seen as, know, it's not your fault, you weren't to blame, you weren't the one who made a mistake, then she'll still love you and she won't leave you.

But as you're experiencing, if this is hitting home, that part of you that shows up when you defend in that moment, it's actually pushing her further away.

Harrison Orr (10:03.532)
And it's very common for these arguments to start with that part. And then another part that learnt, okay, if things start to escalate, if there's a fight, then it results in the same kind of thing. When things escalate, when there's tension, when there's screaming, when there's fighting, I lose something that I care about. I lose something that I need.

I again lose that connection, I lose love, I feel abandoned, I feel left out, I feel like the world is ending. Therefore, if I don't say anything, we can't fight. And if we can't fight, we can't break up. And then if we can't break up, then everything is good. I don't put myself in a position where I could lose any of those things.

So even though that part of you is trying to protect you from losing that love and that connection, from losing your wife, it's actually doing the opposite. And now this isn't because this part of you is broken or because it's stupid. These parts of you learn these protective systems when you're a child, when you didn't have the capacity to...

handle things on your own, to handle these emotions, to become resourceful when if someone did leave you or didn't love you, like mom and dad do, then it was the end of the world. It was life or death. And so that part is still operating off that same protective strategy. Only problem is now you're an adult, you can handle things and your wife isn't your parents or teacher or the person that contributed to making that strategy in the first place.

And so we're still running the same pattern. So the process to updating these patterns is actually

Harrison Orr (11:53.807)
through understanding them, through understanding these patterns, where they come from, and then being able to get to a point of literally being able to say, that makes sense. I can see that if you believe this would happen if you didn't protect me this way, that you doing that would prevent that. Thank you, that makes sense.

And this sounds really weird if you've never had these conversations or you've never done this before, but these conversations with these parts of you are extremely insightful and very real. I don't know a single person on this planet that hasn't had a conversation with themselves, doesn't talk to themselves in their head, even out loud for that matter.

Harrison Orr (12:42.904)
But when we recognize these parts coming up, you can see how even though the surface level stuff, the topic of the argument or the conversation might be different, but the pattern that runs them is the same. So it doesn't matter about you didn't get milk on the way home or you didn't book the restaurant for the weekend or you left your dirty undies in the bathroom or you didn't organize the thing for the kids. The topic might change.

but the way that you handle it is still the same because that part is still there protecting you from the same thing, same emotion, with the same strategy, regardless of the topic, regardless of the person or the shit on top.

Harrison Orr (13:29.004)
And so instead of trying to work through every little surface level piece, when we get to the root cause, it makes it significantly easier and much more effective at addressing this long-term and widespread.

And now I walked the guys through, the guys in my group contained the Ground and Band Method, something today, which they all found extremely insightful. And this is, I think, going to help you get an understanding of in those moments, what is actually important. So we've got a couple of layers to this. So the first of all is understanding your parts, how they're showing up. So like I just walked you through, the defender and the withdraw in this context predominantly.

It's different for everybody, but those are two of the big main players in this. There's also an element of regulating your nervous system, like staying grounded as you're having these conversations. Because as soon as we start to get defensive, what happens to our physiology as well? We start to feel stressed as well.

maybe we start to speed up, we start to get flustered, maybe we start to get a tension in our chest. And when we start to enter that zone, we're very much going into fight or flight mode. And when we're in that state, we hone in on things.

So we're honed in on the threat, we're honed in on suppressing this thing that's causing the fight or flight, which is our wife, which is at this point, the story that she's telling and we're trying to disprove it to show that we are right, we weren't at fault and all the things. You know we're not doing in that moment is listening to her, listening and understanding.

Harrison Orr (15:27.842)
the words, the perspective, the reality that she is holding, that she is trying to communicate at this point, which further creates more distance and disconnect because you're not actually listening. You're just hearing her to respond to say, was wrong, that didn't happen and whatever else. So when you're finding yourself having the same old fucking argument,

Harrison Orr (15:56.203)
other than speaking into those parts, which will stop a hell of a lot of them. Like it'll, it'll help you to navigate your side of the argument, right? How you navigate them. But then this is the next stage because you can hear the surface level stuff and you can address that. But underneath that is actually being able to read between the lines, hear what's actually going on. Right? So there's the surface level, the words.

And then especially when it's coming from your wife or a female, there's, or anyone actually, I'll take that back, coming from anyone else. There's often not just the words. There's usually the emotion that comes underneath it.

Harrison Orr (16:40.024)
But most people don't get to that point, don't get to experience or understand that connection because they're just focused on the words. So I'll give you an example to make this resonate a little bit harder. If your wife says, have you cleaned the garage yet?

Maybe she's starting to get frustrated because you said you would clean the garage last weekend, last week, this weekend hasn't happened. And she's like, are you going to clean the garage yet? Have you cleaned the garage yet? And you're like, fuck, I'll clean the garage then. I'll clean it, I'll do it right now. And maybe she continues to escalate. She's a little bit more frustrated. And you said, what? I said I would clean it, I'll go and do it now. And you think logically, well, if that was the issue, I'll clean it, problem solved.

That's not really the issue. Like that's something that needs to be done that you said you would do. But what's deeper than that, which if you don't understand this will create just, it will surface somewhere else is why she's so upset about actually having to remind you about that.

Because underneath the frustration of not the garage not being clean is also the frustration of you said that you were going to do it multiple times and you haven't done it. And she's had to be the one to remind you to do it. She's had to be the one to ask you to step up and do the things that you said you would. And so now not only is the garage not clean, but the man that she loves, the man that is probably the father to her children, the man that she is married to is not a man who was congruent with his word.

And so now she can't trust your word. And by extension, she can't trust you.

Harrison Orr (18:24.972)
And when she loves you to death, she loves you so fucking much, that hurts. That crushes her that she can't trust your word and can't trust you because you've given her this proof. You've given her all this proof to say that you do not follow through, that your word doesn't mean anything. And that doesn't mean that you're a piece of shit. It doesn't mean you're a horrible person, but it's crumbling the man that she...

holds you up to be that she wants you to be not because she's setting unrealistic expectations but she sees the highest version of you. Our wife and our partner is our greatest supporter. They see the best in us. They want us to be the best as we do them. And so imagine if you know.

Imagine if you could see the potential for your wife and her actions constantly just proved that wrong, that she's never gonna be that person, that she's not that person.

Harrison Orr (19:31.47)
That's hot.

Harrison Orr (19:36.067)
And so a lot of people have heard that in these moments when you're having these conversations, you just need to be calm. That's probably something that you've tried. Okay, I just need to breathe, just regulate myself maybe. And that's easy. It's easy for that to become a form of suppression.

If you're just breathing to, okay, I'm frustrated, just breathe, just breathe the emotional way and you never really feel it, you never really address it, you just kind of breathe it and then move on. It's just fancy form of suppression. Let's be real. But in those moments, when you're able to hear the surface, hear the words.

actually stay present, and this is how you'll know if you're actually able to stay present or it's just a form of suppression, is did you identify what the real issue was? Did you get to a point of understanding what the emotional need was, what the unmet need was, like what was driving the issue? Because if you didn't, if you just managed to just breathe and stay calm and then provide a solution to the surface level thing and then move on, like,

I'm talking about to your wife, right? At work, it's different, whereas all mostly logistics and stuff like that. We're talking about with your wife and your relationship. Then you probably just breathe and stay calm on the surface, which she didn't feel like she connected to you anyway, because nothing really got resolved. But when you can truly stay grounded in those conversations and in those moments, the first thing that happens is you truly get to lead the conversation.

you get to be the nervous system that regulates, co-regulates her nervous system. That enables her to calm back down. Not because you've said calm down, I need you to just chill out, just fucking relax. That your grounded presence, your importantly presence there.

Harrison Orr (21:38.53)
provides that safe space where she's able to calm down. Like she comes back down, she regulates back down to your nervous system instead of you being reactive and going up to hers. And then you actually get to a point of being able to understand what the real issue is.

Harrison Orr (21:59.659)
And you can even ask questions like, it sounds like you're pretty frustrated about the thing not being done, but it sounds like there's something more than that going on.

Harrison Orr (22:15.15)
Do you want talk to me?

And that's an invitation. Where you provide that space where they feel that they can share something. And now you've gotten to a point of understanding what's driving those service level issues. Because if there's certain things, like if you're not feeling acknowledged, you're not feeling seen or appreciated or anything, like either person, husband or wife in the household.

It's very easy for that feeling to come out in snarky remarks or passive aggressive comments or just shortness or coldness. And the other person can be thinking like, what have I done? What have I done wrong? What's going on?

and maybe you address each issue kind of on its own or in the moment, but until you get to that underlying piece, it'll keep coming back. And being able to identify this in other CDs and other people, how it's playing out, only comes from being grounded and regulated in yourself, but then also being able to relate and understand your parts and how they're showing up.

And then from the compassion and the understanding you have for yourself and your parts, being able to extend that out to her.

Harrison Orr (23:35.107)
just to be able to understand what's going on. What's bothering her, what's up? Like being able to actually call this into the light. Like I was voice messaging one of my clients before and he was saying they were supposed to go out on a date night on Saturday and you know, on the way there, know, were having this, you

bit of an argument and there was this tension in the car and they're just sitting there, you know, the air so dense that you could cut it with a butter knife and they just kind of sat in it.

And I remember being in that space in my relationship, like, okay, I can feel the tension. I don't know what to do. I hate this. I don't know what to do about it. We're trying to go and have a nice night. I don't want to play out things like this, but I can't force her to just tell me what's wrong, talk about it get over it. And then we know we move on. You you want to say, you know, can we just put this behind us? Can we just forget about this and have a good time? And you know, you want to move on, but you're sitting there kind of stuck in your head. What do I say? How do I navigate this? And honestly, being

Being calm and grounded in yourself enough to be able to speak into those moments and actually whatever that emotion, that tension that's kind of lurking in the dark, being able to call that forward and say, it feels like you're really frustrated right now, or it feels like this is going on.

Harrison Orr (25:03.97)
And then the invitation for them to then share what's going on. So I can feel you're not okay. I can feel something's going on. Do wanna talk about it? Like bringing those things up and having that level of attunement to your partner can only come from having that attunement with yourself.

And it's natural in those moments for maybe that self doubt or that people please over all the, you know, the part that doesn't want to get it wrong. It doesn't want to be rejected. Doesn't know how to handle these conversations to just, you know, just shut up. She'll tell you if she, if she wants to share anything like, and just create these stories and these reasons for, you know, just staying silent.

but then you stay silent and either she brings it up and she probably feels, unless she is specifically asked for, or she needs space to kind of work through whatever it is, unless she's asked for that, she's probably gonna feel frustrated that she has to be the one to bring it up.

that she, not for her emotions, like we're all adults here, everyone can speak their own piece. But if there's an issue between you guys and you're never the one initiating that conversation to lead that, to get the resolution to kind of move on, she's doing all the leading here. Like that's something that as the men, we have the privilege of doing.

And instead of, and sorry, and if that does stay silent or it doesn't get brought up, it just gets swept under the rug and neither finds another argument or topic to kind of pop up through. Or you just have this pile of stuff that's been swept under the rug and can't talk about that. Cause that ended in a fight. Well, don't pull on that thread because that'll unravel all this other shit that we haven't dealt with. And it's not.

Harrison Orr (26:55.872)
It's not constructive for a long-term marriage. I'm go into this into another episode, into a little bit more depth, but I strongly believe that the strength of a marriage is not what people, not how most people measure it. I think a lot of people measure the strength of a marriage by usually two, maybe three things. Usually by, how often do we fight?

How often do we have a screaming match or do we actually argue or fight? Which if one of you is playing this part of the nice guy of the avoider of the withdraw, then that's why you measure it that way because cool, if I don't say this, then we can't fight. If we don't fight, then we're good. Lack of fights doesn't mean a presence of connection and love, just quietly. Or maybe you measure it through, through longevity. It's like, we've been together, you know, 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. It's like, cool.

I know plenty of people that have done shit for that long that doesn't mean they were good at it. Doesn't mean that they liked it in their marriage. Doesn't mean that they were happily connected. They learned to tolerate each other. They learned to coexist, to co-parent. But I wouldn't look at them and say, have marriages that I'd love to model. And I don't think they would pride themselves on that either.

They're the type of people that might give advice like oh happy wife happy life the old ball and chain You know and just kind of talk shit about each other not healthy either or maybe they measure the strength of relationship by how often you have sex or things like that and Again, that's not really a it's a metric, but I don't think it's a leading metric and so how I think you measure the strength of a relationship is

by how well, two things, how well you can navigate hard times and by extension of hard times, hard conversations. Like the conversations that you don't wanna fucking have.

Harrison Orr (28:54.562)
the tough stuff, the things that are emotional, the things that you don't have a script for, that you're like, I don't wanna bring that up because I have no idea where it's gonna go. And if it goes a few ways, I don't know how I'm gonna handle that. That's scary as shit. Uncertainty is scary as hell for every human being. That's why we do our best to make predictions for the future and to avoid it at all costs by making stuff up.

but being able to navigate those conversations and those hard times, remembering our macro agreements that we are on the same team. We love each other. We're raising these kids together. We want this same style of life together. And we're working towards all this amazing stuff together. We're on the same team against this phase of our life, through the newborn phase, through the financial stress, through COVID, through whatever it is that comes up. We're on the same team.

Harrison Orr (29:56.621)
And I think part of that comes from like alert, need a level of ownership to be in that space, right? Cause hard conversations, I don't like the word hard conversations, there's just conversations. There's conversations with more emotion or less emotion, high stakes, low stakes, really. I think calling them hard conversations only creates more friction in us being able to have them first and foremost. And then also creates a level of...

friction in how we approach them. Because think about it, like anything that you label as tough, as undesirable, as painful, as negative in some capacity, instantly you have a feeling you have a somatic or a bodily response to, I don't want to have that. A rejection, an avoidance, tensing up. And it's easy for them to find stories of, it's not that bad, it's not the right time. And like we push this down the road and we just...

try to avoid it, naturally, because we want to avoid pain. It's part of our survival strategy. So they're just conversations. But in those conversations, we get to learn and understand, learn about and understand each other a hell of a lot better. And what if instead of these conversations always being like, oh, it's gonna be the end of us, we're gonna not like each other, it's gonna be all these horrible things. What if they were just moments for connection?

Like we now get to say that we navigated this and it was fucking tough, but we worked through it together. This wasn't easy, but we still stayed on the same team and navigated. But for a lot of those, it takes a lot of self ownership and responsibility to be able to look in the mirror and say like, well, I did that. I contributed to us being in this situation. I played a part in.

in the way that you felt in the outcome that happened and I need to own that.

Harrison Orr (31:57.488)
It takes lot of maybe even vulnerability, ownership to have that.

Harrison Orr (32:05.966)
So those conversations don't always have to be hard. And I'll give you an example of something, maybe a reframe that might help you in these. And this changed my perspective on this massively. And that's why I use that frame of I don't call them hard conversations, they're just conversations. Is when last year I was a part of...

a coaching group, was myself and three other coaches, and we had made some agreements. If we didn't hit these metrics, these are the consequences moving forward. And we kind of set those and move forward. And we had this business mentor who was gonna guide us through this. And it got to the timeline and kind of nothing was said. And then a week later, he steps in and he says, we need to have this conversation. We all agreed on this. This is what happened.

This is what hasn't happened. We need to have this conversation. End.

that was quite a high stakes conversation for that point in my life. it's one of the few times where, in having that conversation, it gave me a new reference point for having these uncomfortable conversations, for having these types of conversations, because it wasn't spiteful, it wasn't full of blame, it wasn't full of guilt, it wasn't...

anything that you might assume would come up in those type of conversations. And so now it created a baseline or a new reference point for me in being able to not only have those conversations, but for me being able to give to someone else that experience in having a hard conversation so that they have that new reference point as well. Because think about the things you deem as a hard conversation. Think about those conversations that you've had in your life.

Harrison Orr (34:01.071)
Have you ever thought, I really don't want to have that conversation. It's going to be scary. It's going to go this, it's going to go horrible. And like all these things, or, know, they're going to be mean about it or something negative is going to happen. And then you had the conversation and sure as hell that thing happened. It created this massive argument, this fight instead of connection, it created, you know, distance and it was the worst thing ever. And that's your recurring theme for how these conversations go. Well, it's no wonder that you want to avoid those like the plague.

But then on the other side, imagine you had an experience where, yeah, you weren't looking forward to it. You weren't sure how it was gonna go. was gonna be like, the future was gonna be uncertain after this. Like all these things coming up, all these, you know, what ifs, all the anxiety and everything. But then the person you were having it with was able to guide you to help you to regulate, help you to think clearly, and then navigate it as if you're on the same, like not as if, like from both of you being on the same team.

You're not coerced into anything, you're not manipulated into anything. Each person is able to express their reality, their thoughts, their feelings, their desires moving forward, what they like, what they don't like.

and each person feels heard and seen. And on the back of that, you feel like you've connected, you feel like you've got a resolution, you feel like everyone's needs have been considered and spoken to, and you have a path moving forward.

Now, if that was your experience, how differently would you then feel toward and even view these type of conversations? Probably pretty significantly. And so that's one of the beautiful things about doing this work for ourselves is we then get to be the ones to have to give that experience to someone else, whether it's our clients, whether it's our wife or our kids or anyone else, the conversations that they want to avoid, but...

Harrison Orr (35:56.597)
we know we need to have, we can give them a different experience of what that's like.

we get to, and this is broad terms, like I hate generic terms, but I'm sure we've all heard people say like, you need to hold space for your partner and create a safe space and all this stuff. So many people just use that as broad bullshit. This doesn't mean anything, but.

This is what that essentially is. Like when you're having those conversations and you can stay present and you can stay grounded enough that the person you're communicating with feels safe enough to be honest and truly honest. Like honest to the point where they know that you can hold it. Like that they can share their feelings, that they can share anything and you're not gonna take it personally, you're not gonna get reactive, you're not like nothing horrible in this moment is gonna happen, but they can share what they need to share. And that doesn't.

mean that people are allowed to be rude or disrespectful or anything like that. It just means that they can share what's on their heart without an immediate negative response from you. Like you guys are on the same team here. And so you can hold that space, hold that, like they create that safe space where they feel safe enough to share what they're feeling.

Because what this requires is having the ability to hold your truth and somebody else's truth collectively. Being able to hold, like, I know what my intentions were. I know that I'm not a bad person. I know how I intended these things. And.

Harrison Orr (37:43.479)
You're still allowed to be upset by my actions. You're still allowed to be frustrated by the things that I said. You're still allowed to not like me in this moment for what I said or what I did. Both of those can exist.

I know that feels like a weird concept, but this is not being able to hold both truths is exactly why people often need to defend and explain and prove people right in arguments so often because it's like, well, I meant this and you took it that way. So one of us has got to be wrong and it's not going to be me. When in fact they can have their perspective and I can have my intention.

and they can both exist. The point, I guess for my intention in those moments is to get to a level of understanding of I wanna understand what made you feel that way, why you feel that way, why what I said was interpreted that way. And then literally until I get to the point of being able to say,

that makes sense that you would feel that way. If you thought my tone was off or I meant this or you've had this kind of day so you perceived it this way, whatever it is, that makes sense. I would probably feel the same. I'd feel pretty attacked or pretty upset, pretty disappointed, whatever it is. And then I get to share my piece. And then we both get to a level of understanding and we get to slightly calibrate our frames of the world.

But what this requires is you to slowly loosen your grip on your view of reality. Because the way that we view it, everything in life, is subjective to our reality. Through our parts, our experiences, what we've been rewarded for, what we've been punished for, know, like everything in life contributes to our perspective of the world.

Harrison Orr (39:51.791)
our biases even, and everybody else has the same. So that's why I think it's pointless for me to say like, well, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't do that. Well, if you had lived that person's life, every single experience, every single tear, every single smile, up until that moment, there is zero, absolutely zero evidence on this planet that you would not have said and done the exact same thing and interpreted it the exact same way.

And so it's not about saying, I would do this and just be better. When you want us, when we understand our own parts.

It's easier to then say.

I can see why that would affect you that way. Like we have compassion or maybe even curiosity to understand. Like I wanna understand what was, like why that came up for you? What's going on to bring that to be your world? And from a curious and compassion angle, not a judgemental and...

I guess patronizing view.

Harrison Orr (41:08.59)
So I wanna circle back. I know we've gone on quite a few tensions today, but circling back, because I didn't finish a couple of things. At least one. The first thing I didn't finish was the second component of what I believe a healthy marriage contains, the metric of a healthy marriage. So the first one I said was how you handle hard times and hard conversations. And then the second one, I believe, and you can audit your marriage right now.

how authentic you can be.

Give yourself a percentage or a number out of 10, how you can you be in your marriage? Or how much do you have to feel to yourself? How much can you show up as?

version of you that you like to be, the version of you that doesn't run through these patterns, these parts, these filters of, I need to say, do I have to look out for their mood? What do they want me to hear? What do they want to hear from me? What do they want me to do? I can't say that because I'll get upset. just having to audit yourself all the time versus how just naturally you can you be.

And I think a lot of people seem to say when they think like, you know, naturally you think of the version of you that's there when nobody's watching and people go to the gross version, you know, the version that picks his nose and farts and is gross and all this kind of stuff. that's not what we're talking about. The version of you that is so present that he doesn't think before he acts. He's maybe he's funny, maybe he's witty, maybe, you know, he's just, he's just calm, but he's just present.

Harrison Orr (42:52.962)
He's not thinking about what do have to say? What do I have to do? Like any of these other things. Cause I've had an experience recently. I've been living in that space more recently and not that my, my marriage was ever, I was never not authentic in my marriage, but because of a lot of these parts as, most guys that see them, see the nice guy traits within themselves, like the people pleaser, the conflict avoider, the defender, the withdraw like

the one who struggles to say no and set boundaries, that's not really to do with our wife, right? That's not from the relationship, it's an us thing. And those parts ran my life for most of my life, up until the last few years. And so it wasn't just my marriage, it was everywhere that they were kind of running the show. But more so recently,

I've been spending more and more time in what I would call my most authentic self.

the parts that usually may have stepped into have to worry about what I need to say to my wife, the part that would try to manipulate things that would the part that was anxious or stressed or worried about making money or worried about what people would think of me online or having to do all these things just.

haven't been there.

Harrison Orr (44:26.262)
It's been the most freeing experience of my life. And naturally the conversations and the connections with people, not just my wife, but other people have felt so much more intentional and so much deeper because I'm actually present. I'm actually being the version of me that I like to be. And that sounds really weird.

to hear, but think about the last time that you were actually you, that you were so present that you were just in, I Stephen Kotler refers to it as in flow, right? You're just in that flow state where you're not really thinking, but you're still moving, you're still interacting with your environment and everything. And how good that feels.

Now imagine being in that state as you're playing with your kids, as you're navigating difficult conversation with your wife, as you're playing with your wife, as you're showing up with your clients or at work, as you're just moving through life, just being in that energy of you. That's the power of this work when you understand and validate and update all these different parts of you that they no longer run you.

and life becomes effortless.

which is by far the biggest payoff for me. Cause naturally everything else is downstream of that. My marriage has grown, my business has grown, my connection to my son, my presence with my son, like everything in life has significantly increased and I feel a fuck load better operating from this state.

Harrison Orr (46:09.992)
I'm excited for challenge, for growth, for everything. I don't feel, I feel like I could go for years on this. I don't feel like I'm burning out or like it's a mask that I need to put down at the end of every single day.

Harrison Orr (46:29.346)
So I hope I haven't rambled. I hope, I know we started on why you keep having the same conversations. We dove into some parts. We dove into the layers of communication with the surface and then, you know, the being present and grounded, but then also getting to the root cause of understanding the emotions behind the behavior. Then we went into what makes a strong marriage, what doesn't make a strong marriage, how to kind of navigate some of those.

those situations, those conversations, but also how to look in the mirror at the parts of you that are showing up. And then also how to be your most authentic self and not in a motivational spiritual like, you know, Instagram quote bullshit kind of way, which doesn't really have any tangible like no one really knows what that feels like, but to actually just put those masks down that you've been wearing all these fucking years.

Harrison Orr (47:23.946)
Now, you've probably already heard the mid-roll ad for the workshop coming up, but just in case, next Friday, the first of May at 8 a.m. Sydney time, or I think it's sometime on Thursday, the 30th of April, if you're over in the U.S.

I'm running a workshop, the married men update. I'm go into why and how these patterns are formed. These parts are formed like the defender, the withdraw and what actually needs to change to resolve those. So if you've tried therapy, you've tried counseling, you've tried maybe some staying calm with the communication stuff and nothing has worked. I'm go into detail as to why those things have not worked and what you need to do to actually change it. And then on the workshop, I'm gonna give you a live experience of what that feels

like to access that state and go through that work so that you have a felt experience and you can carry that into the conversation you have with your wife later that night. So if you want access to that, the link is in the show notes. You can sign up there. It's absolutely free. It'll be about 90 minutes and I can't wait to see you there. So with that, don't be sorry, be better.