Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
098: Positivity Isn’t Helping Your Marriage
Most high-performing men pride themselves on staying calm, staying positive, and getting through hard stuff fast. But when your wife is upset, that instinct to cheer her up or look on the bright side is doing more harm than good.
In this episode, we talk about why emotional reflexes—though well-intended—can actually push your partner away.
We’ll cover:
- Why men shut down or push past emotions—and how that breaks connection
- How the habit of fixing or reframing keeps you from being present
- What emotional strength actually looks like in a relationship
Your version of “being strong” cannot involve skipping over sadness, worry, or fear.
You want to get back into shape, but the gym isn’t motivating.
You need an extra push to lock in your diet and exercise—something to train for.
This is it. Check out the details - http//:www.tommygcoacing.com/ocr
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode number 98. We're going to dive right into it because my two-year-old is sleeping and I don't know when she's going to wake up and I really want to get this podcast to you.
Speaker 1:It's a good, solid topic, one of those topics that's come up in a few coaching sessions. Brenda sent me an article related to this exact subject, and what that subject is is the downside of being too positive. The article Brenda sent me was about toxic positivity, so the downside of being too positive. I was talking to a guy that is making a move to a new town. It's not far away from the current town he lives in, but it's to a new town and him and his wife were talking, and his wife was talking about how she's worried about the new schools and the kids transition and leaving her group of friends and trying to make some new friends. She was concerned about her work, because her work is a local business and not sure how it's going to work in the new community. So she was voicing these concerns and on the other side he's thinking what are you talking about? Like this is going to be great. Do was show her how all of those things that she is stressed about and concerned about are opportunities for positive things to happen. He wanted her to see the other side and he was telling me that he's a glass half full kind of person and when he gets into a topic like this with his wife or a situation where she's stressed and concerned and all he can see is the positive outlook, he feels helpless because trying to talk her into the positive doesn't work. He said he went online and found some different moms groups, sent her links to it or set up meetings with teachers at the school so they can get to know the school and be more familiar with it and take a tour trying to fix her stress, her concern, and after those things don't work, sometimes we'll dig our heels in and hold our ground on our side and we get frustrated because our wife can't see the other side.
Speaker 1:So why do we do this, especially if it doesn't work? Why do we try so hard to make our wife feel better when she's stressed or concerned or has some worry, and the reason is that we don't like feeling those types of emotions. We don't like stress, worry, concern, doubt. We don't like the feeling of helplessness. So we try to get the other person to feel better by painting a positive picture, and the problem is that it doesn't work. It doesn't help our wife feel better. If anything, it brings us further apart from our wife.
Speaker 1:And that's where this guy was at. He was done trying. He didn't want to just try to be positive anymore. He was aware that it wasn't working. It wasn't bringing them back together. What the hell else do I do? So this is his work, this is your work.
Speaker 1:You have to stop trying to change your wife's feelings and start to work on your capacity to feel your own negative emotions. Your ability to embrace your difficult emotions will make your marriage better, will make your marriage easier, more smooth. You become a better husband when you start to learn how to feel your own emotions, because you don't argue as much. You are more understanding, you're a better listener, a better communicator. And if you're not sure if this is you, some of the signs that you're being too positive in your relationship is if your wife's telling you that you're not listening to her or she says you just don't understand what I'm trying to say and you're thinking I'm just trying to help. Why can't you see my side of it? And if that's happening in your marriage, this is a sign that you're probably being too positive. And the longer we do this, the longer we try to minimize our wife's experience, then she's going to stop sharing. The longer we do this, the less she's going to share. The longer we do this, the less she's going to share. She'll start saying I'm fine and things don't really feel fine. You're emotionally aware enough that she's not really okay. There's something to figure out there. But the problem might be some of that over positivity. What you want to do to work on this?
Speaker 1:The first thing is you're going to ask yourself a few questions to bring some awareness to the emotions you're not comfortable with. So what emotions do you struggle to be around? When your wife's feeling a certain way or saying a certain thing, why is it hard for you to be around that? And then the next question is what's your typical response? When you don't want to be around your wife because of the big emotion she's feeling, do you feel the urge to fix it really quickly? Do you feel the urge to minimize it? You know minimizing it would look like maybe you connect for a second. She tells you about, uh, some issues she has with the kids and you'll say something like yeah, that's tough. And then you move on without asking her a question or trying to dig in a little bit. That's minimizing it. Or you just move past it quickly. You just don't say anything, wait for her to stop talking and then you move on to the next subject. So what's your bringing self-awareness to? What's your typical response?
Speaker 1:When you're struggling to be around your wife because she's having a certain emotion, then the next thing you want to do is start naming those emotions. You answer that first question and then you're like all right, I get uncomfortable when my wife is stressed, when she's anxious, when she's aggravated, when she's in self-doubt. Those are the emotions, the conversations that I want to fix right away. Once you name those emotions, then you want to build the capacity to feel them without trying to fix them. So have all that negativity around inside of you without trying to fix it. And that's that's what I do with men. I teach them how to process emotions rather than compartmentalize them. Try to explain them away, try to push them to the side for later. We want to be with our emotions in the moment Because what I've learned is that if you can't handle your wife's fear or worry or concern, it's because you don't have the capacity to feel it yourself.
Speaker 1:Another guy I was talking to said when his wife is talking about finances, it feels like an avalanche of negativity coming at him, like, okay, what does that negativity feel like? Oh, it feels fast and my heart's beating. That emotion's actually inside him. It's not her emotions. What else does it feel like as the heartbeat slows down, feels like there's just a lead ball in my chest and I want it gone. That lead ball in his chest is an emotion. It's energy and energy. He says he wants it gone. That's the brain saying I don't like this emotion. So when we process emotion, we stay with that, Stay with that lead ball, we describe it and as you start to process it, that is building capacity.
Speaker 1:In the last few years I've had to build my capacity to feel sadness. That's a difficult, uncomfortable emotion for me because of my past and things that happened growing up and verbal or non-verbal messages that I received told me not to feel comfortable with sadness and not to be sad. Learning that sadness is a lump in my throat, it's a sinking feeling in my stomach. I can have space to let the sadness move around a little bit more, rather than bottle it up. So building that capacity has allowed me to be with my daughters more when they're crying, and not minimizing their tears and telling them to toughen up that scrape's not that bad or that's nothing to cry about. Their sadness is their experience and I shouldn't try to change how they're feeling. Change how they're feeling All right.
Speaker 1:So we want to build that capacity to feel negative emotions, because happiness is not the goal. All types of emotions are going to come and go. There's going to be sad, there's going to be happy Without sorrow, there's no joy, there's going to be fear, there's going to be excitement, and none of those emotions stick around. They all come and go. We don't want to grasp onto them and I use the words negative and positive a lot when I'm explaining emotions. But the truth is that emotions are neutral. When we put an adjective in front of any emotion, it implies that we have a bias towards it. So if there was an emotion to aspire to, it's not happiness.
Speaker 1:We don't want to be more positive. We want to feel more compassion, more love, and the way that I think about those emotions is that they're very expansive. Love is expansive, compassion is expansive, and that expanse gives you the ability to feel, to stay calm, to hold space. I might have said it before on the podcast, I heard this one monk visualize an ocean, and just a flat, calm ocean of compassion, and when someone brought a problem to him, it felt like a drop of water in a huge ocean. That's the kind of inner state we want. We don't want a really spiky, wavy, excited ocean going on and then, when a cloudy sky comes, we think that it's ruining our vibe and we got to get rid of that cloudy sky. We want to be able to let the rain come in and be okay with it. Summing this up, we don't want to be more positive, we don't want to find solutions. We want to expand our capacity to feel our own negative emotions and, in turn, we can be more steady, more durable for our wife in our marriage, for the rest of the people in our life.
Speaker 1:All right, this work is next level. For sure, if you want to learn how to process your emotions. Set up a strategy session with me. This is what I can do. I can teach you how to do it in one 50 minute session. Just set up a call and when you fill in the questions, just say I want to learn how to process an emotion, and we can do it. It's a skill that we can all learn and it's probably the skill that's helped me develop in my relationships, the most Brought me closer to my wife, brought me closer to my parents, to my kids. So that's it. That's what I got for you guys. Have an awesome week and I'll catch you next time.
