Ep 142: Your Marriage Doesn't Have a Communication Problem, It Has an Emotional Safety Problem

Most couples think they have a communication problem, but the truth is usually deeper: they have an emotional safety problem. Without safety, you’re just "rolling paint on a crumbling wall."

In this episode, Kameran Alareqi breaks down why emotional safety is the "psychological oxygen" every relationship needs to thrive. We explore how childhood attachment styles (anxious, dismissive avoidant, and fearful avoidant) shape your current marriage and why your nervous system might be physically rejecting your partner.

Inside This Episode:

• The Root System: Why emotional safety is the foundation for neural regulation and executive functioning.
• Attachment Theory 101: How we transfer our "secure base" from our parents to our partners.
• The A.R.E. Acronym: A deep dive into Accessibility, Responsiveness, and Engagement (from Emotionally Focused Therapy).
• Baseball in the House: Why you can’t "steal home" (physical intimacy) without hitting first, second, and third base (safety, connection, and emotional intimacy).
• The Soft Startup: How to use "I feel, when, because, I need" to end the cycle of criticism and defensiveness.
• Breaking the Cycle: Stop the "Wait and Bait" and learn to separate the person from the pattern.

Key Takeaways:

• Co-Regulation: Your partner and your children borrow your energetic state. If you aren't emotionally sober, you can't provide a safe harbor.
• Conflict vs. Connection: Emotional safety isn't the absence of conflict; it’s the presence of connection during conflict.
• The Arrogance of Change: Why trying to change your partner is a barrier to your own growth and maturity.

Resources & Links:

[WORKSHOP] Changing Your Marriage By Yourself Are you the only one trying? Join Kameran for a special workshop on May 19th at 7:00 PM CT via Zoom. 👉 Sign Up for the Workshop Here

[COACHING] One-on-One Intensive Kameran has 3 open spots for couples to start immediately. Have the marriage of your dreams by Christmas. 👉 Book Your Free Consultation

Email: coaching@recognizingpotential.com Community: Join us in the Skool Community for more resources and marriage series.

Connect with Kameran:

• Instagram: @Married.and.Connected
• Website: www.RecognizingPotential.com

Verafy your relationship! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What are you feeding your mind right now? If it's social media, are you tired of doom scrolling through the angry comment sections and political rants yet? What if you use that time to actually fix your marriage? Welcome to the free married and connected school community. It's like social media, but without the ads, without the judgment, and without the noise. Just real self-paced tools that get you out of that roommate phase starting today. Inside, you get an exact blueprint for a weekly State of the Union meeting with your spouse. We're cutting mental load, we're stopping miscommunications, and we're breaking that exhausting loop of doom argument once and for all. Plus, you get instant access to workshops on overcoming resentment and bringing the actual fun back into your marriage. We have a dedicated space just for guys jumping into forging fortitude. It's a 10-week intensive to help you step into your masculine leadership and become the husband and man that God called you to be. And for ladies joining Edifying Eden, we're stepping out of that controlling, nagging era into our soft, nurturing feminine era, even if your husband hasn't taken the reins yet. Either way, you can take responsibility for your side of the street. Stop scrolling the internet and start investing in your home. The community is 100% free with options to purchase certain courses. Click the link in the show notes and join the Married and Connected school community today. I'll see you inside. Marriage isn't supposed to feel like roommates, but it doesn't have to feel like a war either. Hi, I'm Cameron Alaricki, certified marriage coach and a relationship expert. Every week on Married and Connected, I bring you real talk, hard truths, and practical tools you can start using right away. Whether you've been married two years or 42, this is where you'll find hope, encouragement, and steps that actually work. So let's make your marriage feel good again, starting right now. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of the Married and Connected podcast. I'm your host, Cameron Alreiki, and this month for our marriage workshop, typically I do workshops for couples to come and they do exercises together. This month I'm actually and intentionally doing this a little bit different. I'm actually doing a workshop called Changing Your Marriage by Yourself. There are so many of you that listen to this podcast every single week that are trying to better your marriage and your partner's just not on board. They're not on board with getting help. They're not on board with changing. They've told you that you're the problem, whatever the case may be. This workshop is strictly for you. So if that is the case and you are trying to change your marriage by yourself, the workshop is going to be via Zoom, May 19th. That's a Tuesday, and it is at seven o'clock central time. So you can sign up for that in the show notes. And the second running option, when I put this on my Instagram and in the school community that was voted for was on emotional safety. And I didn't want to wait until next month because what I'm finding is that so many people that are coming to me for consultations, so many people that I'm just talking to out and about in public and whatnot, this is an underlying topic that is coming up repeatedly in marriages. And I say this a lot. I say the problem is not the problem. The problem is deeper than the problem. A lot of times the problem can be related back to emotional safety. It's a very pivotal topic that a lot of couples focus on. Well, we have communication issues. A lot of times it's not communication. We have been communicating for 20 years or more before we meet our partner. And it's not a communication issue. It is an emotional safety issue because without emotional safety, you're basically just rolling paint on a crumbling wall, hoping that the wall will look better. So as we get into this this week, of course, I'm going to be going through what it looks like, what it sounds like, why it's important, all of the things. So the root system, here's what we need to know is that emotional safety is like the psychological oxygen that a child needs to develop. Now, why is this important? Because not only is this going to affect your parenting, it's also going to make sense why you don't have it in your marriage. Because as children, when we have emotional safety from our parents, that is known in developmental psychology as a secure base or a secure attachment. I talk on here all the time about dismissive avoidance, about fearful avoidance, and about anxious, preoccupied. This means you did not have emotional safety as a child. Okay. Here is what it provides. Number one, neural regulation. Children are not born with the ability to calm themselves, contrary to popular belief. Until you are about anywhere between seven and 10, you don't have a nervous system that knows how to calm down. So if you grew up, or if you say the things like, um, stop crying, or I'm going to give you something to cry about. Okay, well, they already have something to cry about. This is the most oxymoronic thing that you could ever say in your life and drives me absolutely nuts. Saying that is just making the problem worse. You're pouring gasoline on a fire right now. When your child is throwing a fit because they were told no, or because they now they feel rejected, because they can't have something that they want. They do not have the ability cognitively to calm down. When something happens, they have made it mean something. And now their nervous system is on fire. So they use your nervous system to regulate their own. They co-regulate with you. Why is this important? Because if your nervous state, if you are emotionally unsober and you are losing your proverbial shit, they're going to be losing their shit. If you're calm, they will borrow calm from you. They borrow your energetic state. So when you get mad or embarrassed or you feel like the people in target are judging you for the way that you parent because your child is throwing a fit in the middle of the aisle, guess what's happening? More gasoline on the fire. Okay, so that's that's the first thing that it provides is neural regulation. When you are emotionally safe, your child is actually able to calm down faster, they're able to calm their nervous system better, and they're able to regulate themselves in a timely manner. Second thing that emotional safety provides is executive functioning. I just did an episode like three episodes back, I think, on executive functioning. When a child feels unsafe, their brain stays in survival mode. That means the amygdala. They stay in an emotionally turbulent state. Their amygdala, their emotion center, is what's calling all the shots. They can't bring it to the prefrontal cortex because number one, that prefrontal cortex is not even developed yet until they're almost 30. So when a child feels unsafe, they don't have the capability cognitively to say, oh, I'm gonna use my thinking brain here and develop logic and empathy and problem solving. So they rely on their parents for that. So here's the problem with this. If you don't have executive functioning, if your executive functioning is low, and again, if you aren't sure about that, go back and listen like three or four episodes back, and you can tell about all of that. But if you don't have the executive functioning in order to raise this child, then they're also not going to have the emotional safety. Now, what does this also do? It gives them the freedom to fail. They don't hide mistakes because they don't fear your withdrawal from love. A lot of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s, what's happening in our bodily systems is that we are performing for our parents just to hear, I love you, I'm proud of you, great job, any of that. We learned that in order to be loved, we had to earn it. We had to perform for it, we had to work for it, and we've taken that into our marriages. We've taken that into our parenting. Well, this is what I had, so this is what you're also gonna have. Validation over correction. When your child cries about a small problem or a seemingly small problem to you, you as a parent acknowledges the feeling before fixing the fact. That's what emotional safety is. Now, raise your hand if you had that. Most of us didn't because our problems that seemed big to us were minimized by our parents. That's not emotional safety. Our parents never acknowledged the feeling that we had. They acknowledged the problem, which we already knew was there. They never acknowledged why we felt the way we did or what we were making that problem mean. There was no validation there. In fact, most of the time we were invalidated. This isn't a big deal. Stop crying, or I'm gonna give you something to cry about, you're fine, that kind of thing. How this shows up as adults, we don't outgrow that need for that secure base. We simply transfer it. So as adults, our primary attachment figure that was our parent now shifts to our partner. Especially if you have an anxious, preoccupied attachment style or you're fearful, avoidant, and you lean anxious, preoccupied, what happens is that you don't know how to self-soothe. You're still that seven to 10-year-old kid. That's when most of your trauma happened, either before or during that time. So emotional regulation for yourself, you have no idea how to do it. You are using your partner to co-regulate. But most likely, because there has to be polarity in the relationship, you've married someone who is a fearful avoidant that leans heavily dismissive avoidant, or you married a dismissive avoidant. That dismissive avoidant learned to regulate on their own because they were sent to their room every time something happened. So they learned, hey, I don't have anybody else to rely on except for myself. So I'm going to regulate on my own. That's why they say things like, I need space. That's why they can't handle their own emotions. So they damn sure can't handle yours. So for you, as the anxious, sometimes you got emotional regulation from your parents, sometimes you didn't. Sometimes you got validation, sometimes you didn't. You never knew what to expect. Or you had a parent that was great at giving you emotional safety. And you had one parent that was probably a dismissive avoidant or fearful avoidant that leans heavily dismissive. And so they, again, they didn't, they weren't regulated. So how can they regulate you? Do you see why this is all important to learn now? Do you see why the divorce rate's now 60%? All of these things that we were supposed to learn in childhood, we didn't. And now we're trying to get into a relationship, we're trying to get into a marriage and parent children of our own. So what's happening now is that if the base of our marriage, because we've transferred it from parents to marriage, right? If that marriage isn't safe, we revert to the same survival behaviors that we used as children, either shutting down or lashing out and being childish. Now, what does that do to our marriage? Tears it down. Because if you, again, going back to that anxious, preoccupied, and dismissive avoidant, and and I use this dynamic the most because two dismissive avoidants aren't usually going to be married to each other. There's nothing to make the relationship go. They're they're both avoidant. So nothing ever gets talked about. Everything is surface level, everything is, it's just kind of there. There's nothing that propels the relationship. Okay. Too anxious could be together, but it's going to be extremely toxic. One of the primary symptoms of being an anxious preoccupied is severe criticism. That's how you were raised. And so that is the primary characteristic that you take into your marriage then. If something isn't right, you are very quick to judge, you are very quick to criticize. Not to say that a dismissive avoidant won't, but anxious preoccupied are worse at it. They're also worse at reading all the self-help books, but we're not reading them in a mind space of, this is what I need to work on myself. We're reading it in a mind space of, oh, this is what they need to work on. Mm-hmm. Yep, this applies to them. Oh, yep, that paragraph right there, that's for them. We don't ever flip that around and look at it and be like, oh, yeah, I do that too. Yep, that was for me. Yep, that's exactly what I do and say. See the problem there? So, so a dismissive avoidant, like that polarity there is going to be more attractive to people than if you were anxious, anxious, or avoidant, avoidant. There is a very heavy possibility two fearful avoidants will be together, or either a DA, dismissive avoidant, will be with a fearful avoidant, or an anxious will be with a fearful avoidant, because a fearful avoidant can run the entire gamut of dismissive avoidant or anxious-preoccupied in a 10-minute time span. So if the partner is dismissive avoidant, you as a fearful avoidant will just take on the anxious-preoccupied characteristics. If your partner is anxious, you'll just take on the dismissive avoidant partnership uh characteristics. And this can also flip-flop. So if your partner has a moment where they're anxious, if like say you're two FAs, fearful avoidance, what will happen is you guys may flip-flop a lot. So in one scenario, you may be the anxious, they may be the avoidant, and in another scenario, they may be the anxious, and the other may be avoidant. Unless you find someone, and by the way, there's not a ton of therapists out there or counselors that are highly and heavily versed in this. So this is another reason why counseling or therapy makes marriages worse instead of better. Because you don't have someone that fully understands that. And if they don't fully understand that, they don't understand emotional insobriety, they're not able to help you fully. They're gonna be able to help you mask the symptom. It's a lot like Western medicine. Here's a pill. We're gonna we're gonna get rid of the symptom, we're not gonna get rid of the root problem. My coaching is different. My coaching is like uh dandelions. We're ripping the root out so it doesn't grow back in your yard, kind of situation. Okay, so going through this, this is really important. If your marriage isn't safe, so after everything that I've explained to you, if your base isn't safe, we're going to shut down or we're gonna lash out to our partner. We're also not going to be able to teach our children to have a secure base if we don't have a secure base. You can't teach what you don't know. Period, point blank, the end. Full stop. So the question is, let's start at the beginning. What is emotional safety? It is where your autonomic nervous system can relax. It is deep, deep cellular knowledge that you can be vulnerable, you can be messy, you can be wrong, and it's not going to be used against you. You're not going to be judged for it, and most importantly, you're not going to be abandoned or left because of it. It is the exhale. Your shoulders drop when you walk through the door. You don't edit your thoughts before you actually say them. You know your partner's heart even when you don't like their mood. You stop taking everything so personally, which is also emotional sobriety. But you're not able to look at that and be like, oh shit. Okay. If they act like this, then we're going to have a good night. If they act like this, we're going to have a great day. It's predictability. Predictability, transparency. You're able to be who you are without filtering it, just so that you don't get judged or comments aren't made, or your partner is not going to be snarky or sarcastic. They're not going to judge you for it. And they're certainly not going to leave you for it. So if you've ever heard your partner say you're not safe, this is what you're missing. They're not able to be transparent with you. They're not able to, they're not able to predict your moods. And they don't know that your marriage is okay, even if you're not okay. The next question is, how do we provide safety? And I'm gonna give you examples here and tools, even if you're in the trenches, even if it's like, well, we're just not in a good space right now, or well, I'm changing my marriage by myself here. This is some of the stuff that you can expect you can expect to learn in this workshop on May 19th. Is if you're looking to provide safety, one of you has to go first. Even if even if your partner's not growing, you still have to be able to go to sleep at night knowing that you did everything you possibly could to make that marriage good and to learn things so that you can teach your kids. So, how do you provide it? In general, we're going to follow the word R, A-R-E. It's an acronym. This comes from emotionally focused therapy, accessibility. Can I reach you? Can I come to you and tell you anything I want to tell you? Whether it's that I saw a bird today, whether it's that I forgot milk at the store, whether it's that I accidentally side-swiped the pole at the bank, whatever it is. It doesn't matter. Can I come to you and talk to you about that? And again, not have it used against me, not be judged, and not be abandoned for it. That's the A, accessibility. R, responsiveness. Can I rely on you to respond to my emotion? Can I rely on you to respond to the emotion, not the circumstance? You're such an idiot. You ran over the pole at the bank. Who does that? Well, Jack, I already feel terrible about it. So thank you for making me feel worse. No. Are you going to respond? Ah, well, that sucks. But it also must have been pretty scary. Well, that sucks. Are you okay? Was anyone hurt? Were the kids with you? Are they okay? It's just a car. You're more important than the car. Oh, you forgot the stuff at the grocery store? Not a big deal. Either I can go get it myself, I'll put the order in and we'll pick it up later, or we can get it tomorrow. How do you respond in those moments? Are you judging? Are you using it against them? Are you making it feel worse? Are you criticizing? Are you threatening to leave or leaving? Okay, so A, accessibility, R, responsiveness, E, engagement. Do I know that you value me more than the situation? Do I know that you will stay close to me? That you're not just gonna abandon me and be like, well, you're an idiot. I'm out. I can't handle this conversation. This is too hard. This is too much. Even if you're not leaving the marriage, are you leaving me to sit in the pain and the hardship alone? Or are you sitting with me in it? Are you providing that accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement even when the relationship is strained? Yeah, I know we're in a struggle right now, but are you saying things like, I never should have married you? Or, oh my God, my parents told me this was a terrible idea. I should have listened. I shouldn't be with you. Are you threatening divorce? We should just get a divorce. This is just too hard. This is this is stupid. We do this all the time. A lot of times we don't separate the person from the pattern. We look at the person and see, okay, this is the marriage. The marriage is hard, therefore, this person is hard. The marriage is too much, therefore, this person is too much. The situation is too much, therefore, this person is too much. That is not the case. Two things can be true at the same time. This person is who you value and love and you want to be with. And the situation sucks. Yes, this person is wonderful and they're having a hard time. And the way that they're acting or the their response to the hardship that they're going through has nothing to do with me. Therefore, I'm going to sit with them in this until they're okay. Adults have temper tantrums too. So it is no different if your partner is struggling and they're throwing an adult temper tantrum and you're sitting next to them saying, I know this is hard for you. I'm going to sit with you in it. Then your three-year-old being told they cannot have the candy bar that they want in Target and they're throwing a fit in the middle of the aisle, and you are sitting right next to them saying, I'm here when you need a hug. I'm here when you can calm yourself enough that you can come to me. I'm sitting right here in this with you. And knowing that your temper tantrum does not make me a bad parent, does not make me a bad person. And that you are not giving me a hard time, you are having a hard time. Same exact scenario. We are little people in big bodies. That is it. Okay, so here's some tools. One, the soft startup. The way that I teach my clients, and if you've been a client, you know this will be a good refresher for you. You know that 90% of conversations are going to end the same way they start. So if you come to your partner and you're like, you always, you never, you suck, probably not gonna end very well, right? If you come to them and you say, I feel when, because I need, the conversation is going to go a lot better. The conversation is going to be like, okay, they're coming to me with a problem and a solution by telling me what they need. They're telling me they feel a certain way, not that I am a certain way. Big difference. This is the other thing. And especially for a dismissive avoidant, a lot of times, yes, if you are with an anxious preoccupied, they can be critical. But the other problem is that an anxious preoccupied can complain to you and you take it as criticism. So if your partner could, you got to listen to the words very carefully here. Because if an anxious preoccupied comes to you and says, I don't like it when this happens. I don't like it when you do or say these things. They are not criticizing you. If they come to you and say, you are a terrible person, you are blah, blah, blah, when you do X, Y, and Z. Now they're criticizing. Criticism is directed at you as a person. A complaint or a soft startup is directed at a situation or a specific behavior. Very wildly different. Sounds the same when you are emotionally unsober and you are triggered, not the same. Now, de-escalation. This is a really big point. If things are getting heated, somebody has to be the one to say, whoa, hold on. I am really feeling overwhelmed here. And I don't want to say something that hurts you because I love you. Can we take 20 minutes to cool down? Can we come back to this later? Can we get a good night's rest and readdress this in the morning before work? I am not the coach that's going to tell you, never let the sun set on your anger. Sure, you can pray for them. You can regulate yourself before you go to sleep. Doesn't mean that everything has to be solved that night. Sometimes, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes you're gonna go to sleep. And the next morning when you wake up, you're gonna be like, that was stupid. That was the dumbest fight we have ever had. All because you got a little rest. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, sleep, food, water before you start fighting. Sometimes hangry is a real thing. Dehydrated? Chronically, I think, especially in Americans. 80% of Americans are dehydrated chronically. How do you think that that affects your arguing? And as we talked about in a couple of episodes back with Andrea Vitz, Dr. V says if you've been drinking alcohol, if you're hopped up on caffeine or any other drug, you're going to be on more on edge. It's going to be a problem. You cannot control their safety, but you can control your atmosphere. Are you hangry? Have you had enough sleep? Are you dehydrated? Do you need 20 minutes to regulate yourself before you come back to this? Do you need a hug? How many times could an argument have been solved or calmed down just by you saying, hold on, I'm really feeling flooded right now. Can you just hug me? Can you just hold me and let's not talk right now? I know looking back, for me, hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of arguments could have just been solved if I would have just been held. If I would have just been hugged for five minutes. Not talk. Don't don't try to fix anything. Just hold me. Hundreds. Another way to provide that emotional safety is to stop the retaliation. This, and I hear this so often is well, I was just responding to you when you were losing it, then I started losing it, or when you did X, then I did X, or if you snapped, I snapped. That's childish. That's childish. This is why it's so important to learn how to regulate your emotions and to learn these habits and these tools. Because if you don't, this is what it leads to. It leads to the childishness. So when they snap, instead of snapping back, start asking yourself or even ask them, hey, you seem really stressed right now. Is there something deeper going on? Is there something that I can help you with? Are you struggling right now? It seems like you're struggling right now. What can I, how can I show up for you? How can I help you? The consistency in this, this is what, as an anxious reoccupied, this is what you were lacking as a child. There was no consistency with your parental figures. Remember, sometimes you got your needs met emotionally, sometimes you didn't, or that one parent was emotionally safe and one wasn't. So this is what emotional safety is all about in your relationship is consistency. The safety comes in knowing how your partner is going to respond. If you spend $300 out of the account, are they going to lash out at you? Or are they going to be like, okay, well, that was inconvenient, but I still love you. I'm still here. Let's figure this out together. One of the biggest green flags that especially women talk about most because women need love and safety more than men, men need respect more than they need love and safety. For women, we consider being respected part of that love and safety. Whereas for men, it's two different things. Like they're not going to say, if we walk, if I walk up to a man and say, Would you rather be loved or respected? They're going to say respected almost every time. With that, the consistency, the green flag is knowing how your partner is going to respond. If you know that they're going to lose their mind every single time something happens, that's consistent, but it's consistently in the negative. You want to know that your partner is consistently going to respond in a certain way and that it's going to be positive and safe. One of the most attractive attributes to someone is that you know that when they say they're going to do X, Y, and Z, that they are going to do X, Y, and Z. It's the same thing here. You want to know that they will consistently be a safe harbor, even if you are currently a storm. And vice versa, they want to know that if they are currently a storm, that you are going to be the safe harbor. A lot of times, a partner's lack of safety is a defense mechanism. And we've talked about defensiveness so much. The lack of safety is protecting your ego. You are not a safe person for them because you can't handle your own emotions, therefore, you cannot handle theirs. When you stop attacking them, then they are actually going to calm down more because they are going to know that you are a safe person. When you become emotionally sober, you get rid of the filters that make you feel like you're attacked all the time. When you become emotionally sober, and we talked about this with Dr. V, you actually love your partner so much more. And I'm speaking from experience on this, you love your partner so much more because you see them completely different. Instead of seeing them with a filter of your own filters, of like, well, if they say this, then it's because I'm not pretty enough. If they say this, it's because I'm too fat. If they say this, it's because I'm not good enough or I'm not enough or I'm too much. If they say this or if they do this, it's because I'm not enough and I'm never gonna be enough. No. If they say this, it's because they have a filter of this. They think this. They see this, they need this. Has nothing to do with me. But I now know how to stand up next to them and stand up for them in a way that I didn't before. And that right there is the impact on the marriage. When you have a buffer effect, safe couples survive external stressors so much better. Job loss, illness, pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility. Because your home is a sanctuary, not a second battlefield that they're coming home to. When your home is that sanctuary, it is the difference between, okay, so so we talk about this a lot. I tell you a lot that there's three things that a marriage has to have in order to thrive. And I also tell you to play baseball. I wouldn't normally be the one to advocate for playing baseball in the house, but in the proverbial sense, you are going to play baseball in the house. You have to have the commitment and the trust in order to hold your house up. But the friendship is what makes the house a warm home. But in order to have that friendship, you have to have the baseball field, emotional safety, first base, connection, second base, emotional intimacy, third base, and a great physical intimacy that comes after having all of those other three is getting to steal home. You're going to play baseball in the house. That's what you're going to remember all the time. I've got to play baseball in the house. In order to have the friendship, in order to have a sanctuary as a marriage, you have to be best friends. But in order to be best friends, you have to be emotionally safe first. That also helps with the sexual and emotional intimacy because without emotional safety, you don't want to have sex with someone who's not safe. Your body is going to re and trust me when I tell you this, I have been through it. Your body will re, especially if you're a woman, your body will reject that man a hundred times over. You will have anxiety attacks. You will have, you will feel like an elephant is sitting on your chest. Not because you're having a heart attack, but because you can't breathe. Your body is physically rejecting that partner because they are not safe. That is your nervous system. Your vagus nerve runs almost all the way through your body. That vagus nerve absolutely make you pass out. That vagal nerve will absolutely make you pass out if you are not with the right person. And your body senses a threat. It senses that your partner is not your person if they are not emotionally safe. They might absolutely be your person, but they need to be an emotionally safe space for you in order to be the right person for you. And that is why I say it has to be learned. Safety allows for unmasking. That unmasking is required for deep connection. Otherwise, it's just sex. It's just sex. And there's no depth to it whatsoever. It is surface level. It is no different than having a one-night stand over and over and over again for 45 years or however long you're married. You won't be married for 45 years if there's no emotional safety. The way that a lack of emotional safety tears down a marriage is that without safety, partners begin to scan for threats constantly. You're in fight or flight mode. You interpret a neutral look as a glare, or a late text as a sign of neglect. Or, and I mean a late text as in like it took you two hours to do it. Maybe you were in the middle of a really important project at work. We start filtering things. Oh, that tone, mm-mm, that tone is very unsafe. The tone's the normal tone that he uses every other day. So it's this distant slight cycle that we get into that we're scanning for threats and pulling away. Chronic stress is another one. When you are living in an unsafe marriage, this is so depleting. It is so depleting. You're constantly on because you are worried about being judged and having it thrown back in your face and being abandoned. When you are living in an unsafe marriage, it keeps your body in high cortisol, which also leads to belly fat, which then leads to unattractiveness for your partner, which then leads to even more things being thrown in your face. It leads to physical burnout and a ton of emotional resentment. Ton of emotional resentment because you have expectations that they're going to be one way and they're not. But you keep pushing for them to be different and they're not. So then you're in, you're constantly scanning for threats. You're constantly, you're you're constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall. That is not a way to live a marriage. This is what I help couples with every single day. The key though is this is, and this is really important, is you also have to look at your part in this too. If you've been in a marriage for 20 years where this has constantly been a thing and the lack of emotional safety is there, you have to look at how you've abandoned yourself, how you haven't been emotionally safe for yourself, how there's been a lack of self-trust, a lack of self-respect, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of, you know, self-image, probably, a lack of boundaries, a lack of communication, a lack of realistic expectations or realistic preferences, even. I mean, there's a lot of lack on your side too. It's not just your partner's fault. And that's really hard to look at. But that emotional safety, if you don't, if you don't have the vocabulary for it and you just tell your partner you're not safe, that means nothing to them. They don't know how to fix it. This is why this episode exists. So here's the thing I know, and I've gotten a lot of feedback on this. I know that most of you deal really well with examples. So the next couple of segments, I'm just going to give you examples of how this works, what it looks like, what it sounds like, things like that. Um, emotional safety sounds like, but let's say that you have like a moment where your partner says something that hurts you. That's when you look at them and you say, Did you mean for that to hurt me? That gets them thinking. That gets them to stop and actually look at what they're doing, at what they said. Then they have to check their motive. That's a that's a really big part of emotional safety is checking your motive. You can also say, hey, when you said that, it really hurt my feelings. Are you in the headspace to talk about that? Now, an emotionally safe partner is going to respond with, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Tell me more. Not, not uh seriously, that hurt your feelings. It was a joke. You can't take a joke now. That's not emotional safety. That's defensiveness. That's you still being a jerk, you still being emotionally unsafe. You admit your weaknesses. Man, I just feel like a failure at work today. Can you just listen? Like, I don't need you to fix anything, but do you mind if you if I just vent for a little bit and get this off my chest? Now, I will say venting is from a point of weakness. It's not going to make anything better. It's just going to drive the marble tracks in your head deeper and deeper and deeper. But if you just want to share that with your partner and you want them to listen, say that before you start the conversation. Hey, I just need you to listen. I don't need you to fix anything. I just need you to listen. Is that okay? Are you in the headspace for that? That also tells them how they need to listen. Do they need to listen to fix it? Do they need to listen to get involved? Or do they need to just hear you? These are very common mistakes, but this is a lot of times what I hear that an unsafe partner would sound like. And a lot of these mistakes are rooted in the four horsemen of the apocalypse that Dr. John Gottman talks about: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. So if you are weaponizing vulnerability, then your partner is doing something or saying something, and you're coming to them after they've said, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed or whatever, this is how you're throwing it back in their face. When you say things like, God, no wonder you're stressed at work. You're always disorganized. No wonder that's happening. You're always, you never, always and never are two words that you have to eliminate out of your vocabulary. Invalidation. Again, remember going back to your childhood. This was a lot of times what we got. That didn't hurt. It wasn't a big deal. Get up, you're fine. You're overreacting. It wasn't that big of a deal. You're being so dramatic. You're crazy. I don't know why you're so mad about this. Invalidation. Here's another one. You wait and you bait. If you are waiting for a fight just so that you can bring up a mistake that happened three months ago, that is also being unsafe. One of the biggest ways that people single-handedly tear their marriages down, and in the past, I was absolutely guilty of this too, is that you use something that your partner said to you in a moment of vulnerability against them later. And I'm gonna be straight up honest with you. If you're doing that, it's one of the worst attributes that you can have as a spouse. You are not a safe person, and it makes your partner feel like they have to have a level of perfectionism that's unattainable just to be with you. Now, there's also visual comparisons. So an emotionally safe person is going to use eye contact that is soft and focused and like, yeah, I'm with you. I am with you, like I am here. Okay. Unsafe eye contact is gonna look like rolling your eyes or staring at your phone when your partner speaks. If your partner or your child is speaking to you, the moment you hear their voice, put your phone down. Full stop. The moment you hear their voice, you put your phone down. Because nothing is more important than that. Your work emails can wait, your mother can wait. Sorry, mom, is what it is. Your best friend can wait, the Facebook post can wait. Your body language, your body language can also be safe or unsafe. Open, facing each other, uncrossed arms, that is open body language. Here, let me receive you. I would love for you to talk to me. I would love for you to be open. Uncrossed legs. Okay, crossed arms, crossed legs, back turned, or even slightly turned, physically leaving the room, or even worse, physically leaving the house is unsafe. Some responses that are very helpful are things like help me understand. Those three words are like aquifer to an open wound. Help me understand your point of view, help me understand your perspective, help me understand why this is important to you, help me understand why you're struggling right now. Okay. Responses like, well, here's why you here's where you're wrong. Well, you did fine until this. Okay. Conflict. When you come at things as a um, we are a team and we're gonna solve this together, you are being safe. When you come at it as you are a problem that I have to deal with, your stupidity is a problem that I have to deal with, you your mistake is now my problem. No. If they have a mistake, you have a mistake together. If they have a problem, you have a problem together. What's mine is yours, and what's yours is mine, not what's mine is yours and what's yours is yours. That's a really big point in marriages. And if you're in the school community, you may have noticed under classrooms, under resources, I have posted a couple of, well, it's not even a couple, it's several church services that are all deal with marriage. One of them is Southland Church in Lexington, Kentucky. One of them is Life Church, that is our lead pastor, Craig Gershall, is out of Edmund, Oklahoma, but he has a lot of satellite churches. Those church services, and I'll add more as I as I find them and as I watch them and view and review them, but a lot of a lot of churches don't talk a lot about marriage. There's a lot that that talk about divorce, but not that have really good series on marriage. And that being said, that's why I put that in the school com the school community, because especially the one about life church, it talks a lot about selfishness. When you are going first, when you are dating, you are setting that expectation of marriage of I'm going to go first. I'm going to be a leader in my marriage. I'm going to take care of my partner. As we get married and we we go, you know, years of being married, it becomes less of a I'm going to go first, and more of a, I need to get what I want. More of a, you're a problem I have to deal with, versus this is our problem together. And that is where the problem lies. Emotional unsafety is selfishness. It's judgmentalism. It's childish. You're acting like a child. Well, I can't give you what you need because it's gonna infringe on what I want. Notice I use the words need for my partner and want for myself. It's selfish. We think the world revolves around us instead of the world revolving and orbiting around our partnership, our marriage, our household. If your partner is having a hard time, they are not giving you a hard time. We don't wake up in the morning and be like, hmm, how can I just royally screw up my partner's day? I think I am going to grieve the loss of my parent. That'll get them. I think I'm going to have a hard day at work. I will ask for some validation in there. Yeah, that'll just really screw up their day. Come on, guys. That's not what we think. Nobody actually wants to have a hard time emotionally, but emotions can be hard, especially if we grew up in the 80s and 90s and never knew what they were besides happy, sad, mad. There are thousands of emotions that we can feel. Thousands of feelings that we can feel. And no, they are not the same. Feelings come in and go out like waves in the ocean. Emotions are what gets stuck in our bodies. These are things that are just now being studied. There's so many parts of the medical system and our anatomy that haven't been studied over the years or haven't been studied enough. And the more that we learn about it, the better we can get. But only if we want to. And this is the biggest problem I think I see with a lot of marriages is when you don't want to grow, you're essentially saying you don't want to be married. Because growth is the reason for marriage. God puts you together with someone who is going to absolutely trigger the crap out of you. One, I think it's part of a sense of humor. But number two, it's to make you better. Iron sharpens iron. This is what this means. When you are with someone who says, I don't like it when you do this. This makes me feel unsafe. They are requiring you to grow. And sometimes that means that they're requiring you to grow up, to become more mature. So instead of getting defensive over that, thank them. Hey, thank you for the lesson. Thank you for loving me enough to help me grow into a better person. But instead, we want to protect our ego. It's just like Thomas Ebert said last week. You have to let your ego die. When you become an adult, your ego has to die, especially if you want to be a leader in your marriage or anywhere else. I recently had a couple that I was working with that my husband said, Why is it that my wife and children are my hardest relationships to work with? I get along with everybody at work. I get along with all my friends, my family. Why is it that my my wife and kids are the problem? Well, what's the common denominator there? You. And it's because we start to take for granted our partner after we get married. We stopped looking. You know, if our partner would have come to us crying or upset or mad when we were dating, we absolutely would have taken the time to stop and be like, hey, what's going on? Let me help you. Help me understand. But now that we're married, it's like, well, we're married. You're not going anywhere. So what? What's the problem? You're an inconvenience of my time now. Instead of, you are the best part of my day. I am grateful for you, to whom much is given, much is required. Your marriage and your family are your biggest blessings. So why are we more grateful for things outside of our home than we are for the things inside? And for the people, especially inside. We have to take better care of it. And that means being a safe place for them to land, being a safe place for them to come to about anything that they want to talk about. Being a safe place to accept them as they are and stop trying to change them into somebody that we want them to be. So I want to change you. I'm sorry, what? That right there is the mindset that we subconsciously have in our marriages. That was probably one of the biggest lessons emotional sobriety taught me. Was the arrogance in that. Because I didn't think he was good enough. I didn't think he was right. I didn't think he said things correctly or did things correctly. To whose standard? We all have preferences. And yes, I will I will admittedly say that a lot of times he wasn't emotionally safe. So in those ways, yes, but I wasn't either. Most of the time when we say that our partner's not safe, we're not safe either. That's one of the things that I have looked at in the hundreds of couples that I've worked with over the last eight years. So many times hypocrisy is one of the biggest problems that I see. A wife will come to me and say one thing, a husband will come to me and say something completely different. Well, she did this, while he did that. You guys are both saying the same thing. It's just a different flavor. I hope that helps with emotional safety. I want you to know that emotional safety as we wrap this up is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of connection during the conflict. It's that belief that I was talking about earlier that's, hey, we're okay even if one of us is not okay. We as a whole, as a marriage, as a union, as a team, are okay even when the other person is not okay. Because if you've only got 10% left to give, I've got 90. I see that you're struggling and you've got zero to give today, so I'm gonna give 100. Because in six months, I might have zero to give, and you're gonna have to give a hundred. We've got to do better in our marriages, folks. We've got to. The divorce rate's 60 freaking percent. And it's not just about getting a divorce, it's about living happy, healthy lives and doing better for our kids. We want to give our kids better than what we had, but we can't do that if we don't know how. We can't do that just by guessing. We can't do that just by hoping. Hope is not a strategy. Guessing is not a strategy. Learning the lessons is the strategy. And that's what I'm here to help teach you. I hope this episode has helped. If you and your partner are struggling in this area to have more emotional safety, to be emotionally safe for each other. I want you to remember that this is a very difficult but vital component to learn. I have three open spots right now for couples for one-on-one coaching to start immediately. I work around your schedule. I only work with a handful of couples at a time, so that this is high touch. It is one-on-one, it is intensive, and you will be done within seven months. So it's May right now, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. You could have you could have the marriage of your dreams by the end of the year. Christmas. If you want a better marriage, you can have it by Christmas. If you start right now. Email me at coaching at recognizingpotential.com or you can click the show notes and book a free consultation. If you are trying to better your marriage by yourself, again, don't forget to sign up for the workshop that's happening May 19th at 7 p.m. Central. That link is also in the show notes. Until next week, stay married and connected. We've all seen it. The messy social media messages, the public tea spilling, and the absolute embarrassment of finding out that your life is a lie through a Facebook post or an Instagram message that your spouse thought was hidden. What if it didn't have to be like that though? What if you could find out before their affair got too deep? Statistics show that over 20% of marriages deal with infidelity. And most affairs last for years because they thrive in the dark. It's time to turn the lights on. Verified.com is the world's first searchable relationship registry. It's not just an app, it's a digital boundary for your marriage. When you register your spouse on Verified, you are claiming your relationship on a global scale, whether you're talking, you're dating, or you're married. 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By listening to this podcast, you acknowledge that neither I, Cameron Thompson Al Ricky, married and connected, or recognizing potential coaching are responsible for any outcomes related to what you apply from this show. Especially if you are not a client of mine.