112: Stop Making Conflict Worse in Your Marriage

Most men think conflict is the problem. It’s not. The real damage happens in how we avoid it, rush through it, or let it spiral when emotions spike.

This episode breaks down why difficult conversations with your wife feel so charged—and how learning to manage yourself in those moments changes everything. Conflict isn’t something to eliminate. It’s where trust gets built when you handle it well.

Highlights

• Why avoiding hard conversations only makes them heavier later
• The three ways men typically mishandle conflict: avoidance, escape, escalation
• The relationship cycle every marriage runs through—whether you like it or not
• How being “right” kills repair and connection
• The green / blue / red zones and what happens when you leave center
• Why trying to fix her emotions backfires
• A simple listening tool that stops arguments from spinning

Practical takeaways

• Notice when you’re triggered and pause before engaging
• Stay emotionally centered so you can actually hear her
• Focus on repair, not winning or ending the conversation fast

Conflict is unavoidable. Repair is a skill.
Listen in, then pay attention to the next hard conversation you want to avoid—and do it differently.

ADVENTURE TRIP:

Registration is open for our Yosemite trip this fall.

If you’ve been wanting something substantial on your calendar this is it.

Check out details -> https://www.tommygcoaching.com/yosemite-2026

Transcript

Today’s Topic: Navigating Conflict

Avoiding Hard Talks Backfires

Rushing Or Escalating Conversations

Conflict Builds Trust

Harmony, Disharmony, Repair

Core Skill: Manage Your Emotions

Don’t Engage When Triggered

The Attachment Spectrum: Green, Blue, Red

Comfort First, Fix Later

Listening Fades Outside The Green

Active Listening Tool That Works

Apply It Beyond Marriage

Key Takeaways & Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 0:54

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 is happening? Episode 112. I was at the gym the other day using a Stairmaster. I've never used a Stairmaster before, but it is part of the training program for our next adventure trip. And if you've never listened to this podcast before, I run men's adventure trips. We're going to the Grand Canyon in April, and we're actually about to launch a new trip in the next coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. But we bring 10, 15 guys to a beautiful place and do a really badass hike. And this part of the training program for doing the Rimda River trip in the Grand Canyon in April is adding the Stairmaster into the training program. I've never been on a Stairmaster before. This was my first time. I wanted to try it out because we're asking all the other guys to, and for the first five minutes, I was tripping over my feet. Um, and that's the reason we added the stairmaster in, is because if you're just on an incline on a treadmill or just walking up a hill, you don't have to pick your leg up as much on a lot of the wilderness trails that we take. You're stepping up four or five inches or seven inches, or you're walking on different boulders. So being able to lift your feet is important, and the stairmaster is a good way in the winter to get that training in. So I'm on the stairmaster, I'm doing my walking, and the reason I'm telling you this is because a buddy comes up that I haven't seen in a long time and says, Hey, and there's an elliptical machine right next to the stairmaster I'm on, and he hops on, and we have an awesome conversation for about 40 minutes. In that conversation, we talked about the topic of the podcast today, which is navigating conflict and having difficult conversations. He was telling me about a conversation he had with his wife, and we had a really good chat, and um, I get to talk about it with you guys too, because having difficult conversations, and we're gonna focus on having those difficult conversations with our wife is something that a lot of guys avoid. I was just talking to a guy last week who had a work trip coming up in a month, and he had been avoiding telling his wife about it because he had a work trip a couple months ago where he avoided telling her, and when he finally did, it conflicted with some stuff on the schedule, and she was frustrated, and it ended up being a longer conversation. So now he's avoiding telling her again, and I asked why, and he said because she might get frustrated, she might be upset. And when I asked him, so what? What if she is frustrated? Well, I don't like conflict, is what he said. That would definitely be a reason to avoid a difficult conversation if you don't like conflict. He doesn't want to sound like a jerk or sound like he doesn't care, but the longer he delays telling her, the more fertile ground he is creating for a bigger conflict and a harder conversation. So one of the things we do is we just avoid the topic altogether. That never works in our favor. And another thing that we do is once we're in that difficult conversation is we try to get out quickly. Brenda and I were getting ready for our eight-year-old's birthday party last week. Brenda was running some things by me, some ideas that she had. She was just needing to brainstorm a little bit. Not that it was a difficult conversation and a lot of tension, but I noticed myself wanting to get out of it, wanting to tell her, like, this is your thing, just do it. Yeah, that sounds perfect, go with it. Because I didn't want to be in the conversation. So sometimes, especially if the tension's a little higher, we try to get out of a difficult conversation right away. And that isn't helpful to our wife. Our wife can feel that energy that we don't really care, that we're not emotionally engaged with it, and that's not gonna help our relationship. That's not how we want to approach a conversation. The last thing we tend to do is escalate the difficult conversations. We blow it up, we get frustrated, we get angry, we get defensive because we're taking little comments as jabs and we're taking things personally, or we want to be right and prove our point and go back and say, This is what you said, and this is what I said, and tell me that I won this argument. That's not how we want to handle difficult conversations. So building the skill to be better in conversations with your wife is important because conflict is where trust is built. When there is tension, it's an opportunity to strengthen your relationship. And this stuff is unavoidable. There's a relationship therapist, Terry Real. He talks about the relationship cycle, and I don't think he created the relationship cycle, but he's the first person that I heard talk about it. And that cycle is three parts it's harmony, disharmony, and repair. Every relationship is just gonna cycle through harmony, disharmony, and repair. And there's nothing we can really do about harmony and disharmony. What we can focus on is that repair part of the cycle. We can get better at it, we can shorten how long it takes to repair. So you're not not talking to your wife for 24 hours or three days. We can get better at repairing. Harmony's awesome, but disharmony and repair are our opportunities to have a tighter relationship, have better sex, have more laughter, have more connection. So, what we want to do is we want to get really good at handling conflict, leaning into difficult conversations. Sounds fun, right? You guys really want to learn this stuff. It's a universal thing. So many guys, so many women have problems with this. It's a topic that I teach classes on, and I'm going to tell you how to do it. And the first thing, the biggest thing to learn in managing conflict the best way possible is to manage your own emotions. Manage your own triggers, your own nervous system. When I was talking to this guy on the treadmill next to me, and we were talking about this conversation he had to have with his wife. She has her own business, he does all the numbers for it, and it just hasn't been growing or making the money that they expected it to, and she was gonna have to shift some things around. I asked him, like, what tools or help did you have going into the conversation? And he said, funny enough, my company just did a class on how to have a difficult conversation. So this is a topic that companies are having and going over. He was able to take that class at work and bring some of the practices back to the conversation with his wife. The number one thing he learned, and the number one takeaway I want you guys to have is that you don't engage when you're triggered. He was like they talked about taking a time out and taking a breath and pausing the argument, not to engage when you are triggered. There's this book called Secure Relating that really explains this topic in depth of why it's so important to stay emotionally centered when we are having a conversation with our wife. And you can call it stay centered, stay calm, stay level, feel secure. They paint the picture really well with what they call the modern attachment regulation spectrum. And that is a mouthful and it sounds really technical, but if you saw it, it would make a lot of sense to you. So Google it, Google modern attachment regulation spectrum or just the attachment spectrum, and there's some good images on it. I'm gonna try to paint the picture with my words because this does help a lot of the guys that I work with when they are thinking about engaging in a hard conversation with their wife or with anyone. Imagine the spectrum, it's green in the middle. So that's your green zone, and you can think of your green zone as secure, as feeling safe, as feeling calm. And if you look to the left, it the spectrum turns blue. And blue is gonna be that avoiding, that dismissing, that trying to get out of a conversation. That's the blue end of the spectrum. If you go to the right of the green, you're gonna get into the anger, you're gonna get into the anxious, the very emotive, the emotions are raised and high, and you're speaking with your arms a lot, and your voice gets louder. So this is the spectrum. You have green in the middle, to the left is blue, to the right is red, and your goal, the skill you want to build is to recognize when you leave the green area and be able to draw yourself back in. That is when everything changes in the conflict in your marriage. What we typically do to manage that when we notice we're moving into blue or we're moving into red is we try to change the other person. Back to the guy at the gym. He's having a conversation with his wife about finances in her business, and he's gonna have to break some tough news to her. And when he did, she got upset. She was bummed, and typically he said what he would try to do is fix her. He had some ideas to solve the problem. Yeah, this isn't working, but we could do this, but we could do this. But instead, he noticed he was feeling blue, went to that like blue end of the spectrum when she got bummed. He was feeling like he wanted to run away, like he was worried about this, like something was wrong. But he took a breath, centered himself, and when he was able to center himself, he was able to comfort her. He didn't have to fix her right away. He was able to tell her, like, yeah, I know this kind of sucks. It's not the place that we want to be right now. You've been working really hard, and like we're gonna get through this. He was able to be the sturdy one, and then they can start talking about fixing. All right, so that's one of the ways that staying in the green zone, managing your own emotions will change a difficult conversation. The other thing is that when you leave the green zone, go into blue or go into red, you don't hear the other person anymore. You start worrying about yourself, getting your point across, figuring out the best way or the fastest way to end this conversation and get out of there, and you stop listening to the other person. And that is one of the big keys in handling a difficult conversation and handling conflict and repairing disharmony is to listen. And there's an active listening tool that you can use. Brenda and I use it all the time, and whenever she pulls it out when we're having a difficult conversation, I have frustration like, why are you doing this? Not right now, and that's another signal that I'm not in my green zone. And the the tool is this what Brenda or I will say to each other is explain to me what you think I'm saying. And what this exercise does when I try to explain what Brenda has been saying to me for the last minute or two is getting us on the same page. The formal way to do this is you say, Hey, what I hear you say is bum bah bam bah bah ba bum. Did I miss anything? That is a skill that is like extra credit ninja work because the only way you can decide to hear the other person is if you're in the green zone. Just on this podcast, I've taken you from a guy that doesn't like conflict, avoids conflict, to this point where now you're in conflict and you're feeling secure and calm enough to say, so what I heard you say is that is a lot of growth. That is that is masterful conflict navigating. Where I want you to start is just managing your own emotions. I was just talking to a guy about this the other day. We were coaching on his teenage son, talking back to him, being a little shit, and typically his reaction is to flame the fire and yell back. And we talked about stopping in that moment and not engaging with him with more anger, with more frustration. And after he did that, I asked him how it went. He said it was perfect. I didn't engage, he was trying to bait me, I didn't step in. He did what he was supposed to do, and I didn't even have to get mad. Being able to pause, control your own emotions changes every type of conversation, changes every type of conflict that you're in. So that's what I got for you guys today. I'm not gonna go any further on this topic. Having a difficult conversation, we tend to avoid them when we're in that difficult conversation with our wife. A lot of the times we just want to get out of them or we escalate them and blow them up. But those difficult conversations, when there's tension, those are the opportunities to strengthen our relationship, to build trust, to remind ourselves that we're on the same team. And the first way to do it is to manage your own emotions. Notice when you're triggered and when you are, don't engage. So take what you heard here, go apply it. Have your wife listen to this podcast, have a buddy listen to this podcast, and then you get on the same page. You're talking the same language. All right. Hope you guys have an awesome day, and I'll catch you next time.