Episode 137: The Lie That's Fueling Your Marriage Arguments
The Hidden Truth About Anger in Marriage
Why Your Brain Might Be Getting It Wrong
Most of us have been taught that anger is caused by other people.
Your spouse forgets something important. They say something hurtful. They leave a mess behind for the hundredth time. Naturally, you get angry—right?
What if that’s only part of the story?
One of the biggest misconceptions about anger is that it comes directly from the behavior of others. While certain situations can trigger strong emotions, the way we interpret those situations often determines how angry we become.
And nowhere is this more evident than in marriage.
When Anger Becomes a Relationship Killer
Many couples find themselves trapped in the same frustrating cycle. One person says or does something. The other reacts. Feelings get hurt. Defenses go up. Before long, the conversation turns into criticism, blame, or withdrawal.
Over time, those repeated moments create distance.
The problem isn’t that conflict exists. Every healthy relationship experiences conflict. The real issue is how we interpret what’s happening.
When our spouse behaves differently than we would prefer, our brain often jumps to conclusions:
“They don’t care.”
“They’re being selfish.”
“They should know better.”
“They’re doing this on purpose.”
The moment we believe those stories, anger follows.
But what if those stories aren’t completely true?
Your Brain Isn’t Always a Reliable Narrator
Think about a time when you assumed someone was upset with you, only to discover they were simply stressed or distracted.
The situation didn’t change. Your interpretation did.
The same thing happens in marriage all the time.
A spouse may express an opinion firmly, and their partner interprets it as anger. Someone may forget an errand, and it gets interpreted as disrespect. A simple disagreement becomes evidence that “they don’t care about me.”
The challenge is that our brains tend to fill in missing information. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate. Often, they’re not.
When we react to our assumptions instead of reality, unnecessary anger grows.
A Simple Example
One couple discovered they regularly became irritated during road trips—but only on the drive home.
After paying attention to the pattern, they realized the conflict wasn’t really about driving at all.
One spouse grew up in a family that drove directly home after a trip. The other grew up in a family that loved spontaneous detours and sightseeing.
Neither approach was right or wrong.
Yet each person viewed their preference as the “normal” way to do things. Once they recognized that they simply had different backgrounds and expectations, the conflict disappeared.
The trigger hadn’t changed.
Their perspective had.
The Power of Looking Inward
When relationships struggle, it’s tempting to focus on everything our spouse is doing wrong.
But personal growth begins when we ask a different question:
What might I be missing?
That question takes courage because it requires us to challenge our own assumptions.
It’s much easier to blame external circumstances than to examine our own thinking.
Yet some of the most meaningful breakthroughs happen when we realize we may not have the full picture.
Being willing to say, “Maybe I’m wrong,” is not weakness. It’s one of the strongest skills a person can develop.
Conflict Doesn't Have to Mean Fighting
Many people hear conversations about reducing anger and assume the goal is to suppress emotions.
It’s not.
Healthy relationships still have disagreements. They still involve boundaries, differing opinions, and difficult conversations.
The goal isn’t to avoid conflict.
The goal is to engage in conflict without destructive anger controlling the outcome.
You can disagree without attacking.
You can set boundaries without yelling.
You can express concerns without tearing each other down.
The healthiest couples aren’t those who never disagree. They’re the ones who learn how to disagree respectfully.
Try This the Next Time You're Angry
The next time you feel anger rising, pause and ask yourself:
What story is my brain telling me right now?
Am I assuming bad intentions?
Is there another possible explanation?
What perspective might I be missing?
How would my spouse describe this situation?
You may discover that your first interpretation isn't the only one available.
In fact, some of the wisest people intentionally examine situations from multiple perspectives before deciding what's true.
That practice creates emotional maturity, empathy, and healthier relationships.
The Marriage-Changing Question
Perhaps the most powerful question any spouse can ask is this:
“Could there be another way to see this?”
That single question shifts us from reacting to understanding.
It moves us from blame to curiosity.
And it helps us remember that our spouse is rarely the enemy.
Marriage thrives when two people stop trying to prove who is right and start working together to understand what is true.
The more willing we are to challenge our assumptions, the less power anger has over our relationship—and the more room we create for connection, compassion, and lasting love.
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0:00
Unveiling the True Source of Your Marriage Arguments
In actuality, I discovered 40 years ago that all of our anger is coming from our brain.
It's not coming from the behavior of things outside of us.
But no, you can step in and you can argue with your brain and decide what's true and what's not true.
In that moment, the anger will disappear immediately like you waved a magic wand.
0:15
I coined this model called the Double O 7 effect in marriages.
And what happens for a lot of people is they treat that marriage license like it's a license to kill.
It's like a license to kill their marriage.
0:28
Speaker 2
Welcome to Marriage IQ, the podcast helping you become an intelligent spouse.
0:34
Speaker 3
I'm Heidi Hastings.
0:35
Speaker 2
And I'm Scott Hastings.
0:37
Speaker 3
We are two doctors, 2 researchers, 2 spouses, 2 lovers, and two incredibly different human beings coming together for one purpose, to change the stinky parts of your marriage into scintillating ones using intelligence mixed with a little fun.
0:59
Speaker 2
Hello everyone, welcome back.
We're excited that you can see us or hear us.
And join us today for another exciting episode of Marriage IQ.
You know, Heidi, I struggle sometimes with anger.
1:14
Speaker 3
Yeah, a lot of frustration, especially working in the medical field.
Yeah.
1:18
Speaker 2
With.
1:19
Speaker 3
Unexpected calls late at night or providers calling out.
1:24
Speaker 2
And sometimes it just hits me out of the blue, right?
I try and I try and I try to to do my best not to be a jerk.
And yet it still happens.
I think it happens less than it used to maybe?
1:34
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think you've got.
1:35
Speaker 2
Would you agree with me?
1:37
Speaker 3
Yeah, but we do have a guy with us today that says he has the life changing cure for anger.
1:45
Speaker 2
Interesting.
1:46
Speaker 3
And like you, he is a physician.
Dr. Mort Orman is an internal medicine physician and a 40 year anger elimination and stress elimination expert.
He has written and contributed to 39 books on how to eliminate anger and stress without using drugs or relaxation exercises like we talked about here on Marriage IQ sometimes and even more than other traditional anger management techniques.
2:14
He's the creator of the ultimate anger elimination system.
Doctor Mort has LED more than 100 anger and stress elimination courses for doctors, nurses, lawyers, entrepreneurs and other professionals and even the FBI.
He's also been the official sponsor, I think this is super interesting of National Stress Awareness Month in the United States every April since 1992.
2:40
His newest book, Doctor Orman's Life Changing Anger Cure, was just released in April of 2024.
So welcome to our show, Doctor Mort.
2:49
Speaker 2
Thank you.
2:50
Speaker 1
Thank you for having me.
I love talking about this topic and those particularly around marriage, and preventing divorce is really one of my passions.
I really would like to, in my retirement years as a physician, try and heal as many marriages, save as many marriages, and prevent as many divorces as I can.
3:07
From Personal Struggle to Understanding Anger's Roots
Well, we are on the same mission right there, so we're so grateful that you've joined us today.
3:14
Speaker 2
So Doctor Moore, you know, it's interesting.
You've been doing this for a long time, right?
Is there a reason?
Is this a personal thing that you kind of grew into, or did you start out thinking I'm going to be an anger expert?
3:29
Speaker 1
Oh, I didn't.
I was more an anger victim.
To tell you the truth.
I didn't grow up in an angry family.
My parents weren't angry.
But when I started to be a teenager and later on in college, medical school, medical training, I started getting angry at myself a lot.
I started having very high expectations of myself and I would get angry and frustrated if I didn't meet up to them.
3:49
And that would spread out in the other areas.
By the time I opened my practice.
I would get angry at my patients if they didn't follow my advice or stupid things which people tend to do, or just people in general behave badly.
I would.
I was really triggered very easily.
4:04
For example, I took up tennis in my late 20s and I don't know if you ever saw John McEnroe play tennis.
I was not as good tennis wise as he was, but I could yell and scream and throw my racket around and disturb the people playing on either side of me with the best of them and I just couldn't control it.
4:20
It really bothered me because I didn't like it.
I didn't like not being in control of my emotions and it was causing a lot of havoc in my personal life.
I had one failed relationship after another that I couldn't figure out how to stop that pattern.
So even though I was successful as a physician and saving lives, I couldn't save my own relationships and I didn't feel like a success.
4:43
I felt like in those domains of emotions and relationships, I was failing and I didn't like, I wasn't used to failing.
I didn't like it.
And then the other thing is, as Scott obviously knows, as physicians, when we take care of a large group of people over time, we easily recognize the angry people from the not so angry people.
5:00
And you can see what happens over time.
So you see that those people end up with a lot more problems.
They have more heart attacks and strokes and addictions.
And they'll come in and tell you that their spouse has for divorce or their kids won't talk to them anymore, or they just got arrested because they lost control or had a road rage episode or something like that.
5:20
So you see this nightmare of what anger produces in people's lives.
And you're sitting there as a physician, young doctor, I was at the time much younger than most of my patients that I inherited.
And I said, I don't want to end up like that, you know, I, I don't want to have all those bad things happen as a result of not being able to control my anger.
5:37
So that kind of put me on a path where I was seeking answers and I tried the traditional stuff.
It helped a little bit, but not that much because I would wake up every day and I was the same angry guy, which is interesting because I was born on Groundhog's Day.
My birthday is February 2nd.
5:52
And it's literally how it felt every day.
I was just the same angry guy.
Doesn't matter what you try, what technique you use, what breathing, what meditation, punching, punching bags, running 5 miles, doesn't matter.
You still get triggered.
6:06
Speaker 3
So where's your breakthrough then?
6:07
Speaker 1
Well, the breakthrough is I started doing personal development work after a while, and I started piercing things together from different programs.
And eventually I had this breakthrough where I was able to identify the internal causes of my anger, which I never really addressed before.
I had always blamed the outside sources, the triggers, the behavior of other people, and I had never quite inquired about what was going on inside me that was generating the anger.
6:32
How Your Brain Creates Emotions and Busts Anger Myths
But in in actuality, I discovered 40 years ago that all of our anger is coming from our brain.
It's not coming from the behavior of things outside of us.
It's how our brain tells us to look at those events and look at those circumstances and those behaviors.
And it tells us to look at it in a certain way, that when you do look at it in those ways and you believe what your brain is telling you, then the emotion of anger naturally follows.
6:56
And I didn't understand that mechanism.
I didn't understand my brain had a simple formula for creating all of its emotions.
So there's a formula for anger, there's a formula for anxiety, there's a formula for guilt, there's a formula for worry.
Take any emotion and the brain has a certain set of filters, ways of having you look at things that will produce that emotion if you look at that way.
7:16
And I didn't understand any of this at the time, but that's where the real controls are.
When you understand how you're internally creating the anger, then you can step in and do something about it.
And, and all those causes are invisible.
The external causes are very obvious.
You can see them, everybody else can see them.
7:32
But the internal things our brain is doing, they're invisible.
So unless you figure them out and know what they are, you're kind of at their mercy.
And that's where I was in my 20s and up to my mid 30s or so.
And then?
7:43
Speaker 2
Would you say you were more angry than like, say, most people?
Or would you say it's hard to?
7:48
Speaker 1
Say it's that was pretty angry.
I had a lot of anger.
Like I said, I got triggered very, very easily.
And you know, when you get angry at your patients, you know, there's a problem that angry and all my relationships suffered as a result of it.
So it was clear, it was clear that it was a big problem for me.
8:05
But I like I say, until I understood the internal invisible internal mechanisms, I couldn't do anything about it.
8:11
Speaker 2
How many years did it take you to get to that point of the aha moment?
8:15
Speaker 1
It took me about two or three years of personal development work before things came together, but once it did, it was like there was no going back.
I mean, once I saw the mechanism, it hasn't changed.
It's been 40 years.
It's been exactly the same mechanism all the time.
Whether I'm working with my own anger or whether I'm working with somebody else in their anger.
8:33
It's always the same story as your brain is giving you that makes you angry.
8:36
Speaker 3
I like that perspective because you're busting 2 myths right there with what you said.
The first is that my anger is because of someone else's actions and the second is this is just the way I am and I can't change that.
8:53
Speaker 1
And that's what I thought if you to ask if you to come up to me back then when I was struggling with my anger and trying everything under the sun to get rid of it and failing, if you just said you ever see a day when you're not going to be an angry guy?
I said I just think that's part of my personality.
I just think that's who I am.
I think I'm always going to be that way.
9:09
Incredibly shocked to to discover that, hey, I can make this anger go away whenever I want.
I didn't know I had that ability.
And then once you understand the mechanism, you realize I can do things people think are impossible.
Even today, most people think you can't make anger and just go away.
9:25
You have to release it or put up with it or do whatever you do.
9:28
Rewiring Your Brain to Become Less Reactive
But no, you can step in and you can argue with your brain and decide what's true and what's not true.
And then when you find out your brain's lying to you were misleading you, then the anger just disappears without you having to do anything else other than see the situation more accurately and more truthfully.
9:43
Speaker 2
So I want to drill down on that.
But first, just to back up your anger can't really be blamed on your upbringing, right?
Your parents.
9:53
Speaker 1
No I it was self generated in my case.
9:55
Speaker 2
All right, So I think that's an important point too, for people to understand and realize that it may not always be from a traumatic childhood, although there might be some trauma in there somewhere, but nothing like a big trauma is what it sounds like, right?
10:08
Speaker 1
No, not for me.
No.
It was a bunch of little self-inflicted anger itself, and then that metastasized.
10:15
Speaker 2
And then secondly, I want to drill down on the point of the anger itself.
My understanding is that the emotion of anger we can't necessarily help, but are you saying you can eliminate it from actually starting, or are you saying that you can eliminate it very quickly after it starts?
10:37
Speaker 1
That's a good question because there's a lot of layers to that and it's a yes and kind of a thing.
It's not an either or answer.
So I first made this discovery 40 years ago.
Then I started working on myself and I had a lot to work on because every time I got angry, I use it as an example to work on.
10:54
So I started digging in and saying is what my brain telling me true or not?
And then for any triggered episode of anger in the, when you have the opportunity to look at it, which is hard to do right if you're in the middle of it.
But when you're removed and you can little bit later can look at it.
I could go back and I could say, oh, I can see where I misunderstood something or my brain tricked me.
11:13
And in that moment, the anger will disappear immediately in the short term.
OK, so you can make triggered anger disappear like you waved the magic wand when you understand where your brain tricked you.
Now, that doesn't stop you from continuing to being triggered over and over again in the beginning.
11:32
But what happened for me is when I started doing that, and I did it hundreds and hundreds of times, and you do that over a period of months and months and months and maybe a year, year and a half, then you're actually rewiring your brain.
Every time you do that, your brain's telling you look at things this way and you're realizing, wait a minute, that's wrong.
11:49
This is the truth.
So you're building another pathway in your brain.
Now that's a weaker in the beginning than these ones that you've been using for many years have been conditioned.
But over time, as you do that work, you become less reactive.
12:04
So now it takes a lot for me to get triggered to get angry.
In my 20s and 30s, it was at a drop of a dime.
You can eliminate anger in the short term, just like using an anger management technique, you know, a deep breathing technique or a tapping technique or some other technique.
12:19
You can dissipate the anger immediately.
But the neat thing about this approach is that over time it makes you a less reactive, less angry person, really changes who you are as a human being.
And the change comes from how you see the world, how you understand the world, and that's what changes you as a human being and you become a less angry person.
12:39
Speaker 2
So it sounds like to me then you're reducing those triggers, but I I don't know if it's possible to completely eliminate all.
12:46
Speaker 1
You're not eliminating triggers at all.
The triggers are going to be the triggers.
People are going to say what they say.
The government's going to do what it does.
Politicians going to do what they do.
The media is going to say what it says.
TV is going to do what it does.
You're not eliminating the triggers.
You're what you're doing is taking control of what's inside and where the real power is.
13:03
As a human being, our ability to control our emotions comes from inside.
It's not external.
And that's where you wield that power.
You can't wield that power if you don't understand how your brain is driving the emotions.
But once you do, then now you've got an opportunity to take control whenever you want to.
13:20
When a Marriage License Becomes a License to Kill
So how do you see this showing up in marriage most often with those that you work with?
You said that's kind of a passion project of yours.
13:28
Speaker 1
Well, I think marriage is a Crucible for getting angry.
It's so easy to trigger when you're two different human beings.
You have two different upbringings, two different brain conditioning, two different sets of likes and dislikes and what you want.
And then there's the control issues and all that stuff tends to can trigger your brain telling you that person's not behaving in a proper way or they're doing something they shouldn't be doing, or all the stuff your brain tells you that can make you angry.
13:54
So it's not a surprise that there's a anger in relationship.
It's actually predictable and guaranteed to a certain degree, but that doesn't mean you have to have anger in relationship.
And that's one of the myths we have today as a lot of people think that if they're not fighting and arguing, they don't have a good relationship.
14:09
But I don't think that's true.
Fortunately, I got rid of most of my anger before I met my wife.
We've been married 41 years now and trust me, that would not have happened.
14:18
Speaker 3
Congratulations it.
14:19
Speaker 1
Would not have happened if I had not made these discoveries back 40 years ago and continued to live from them.
But she didn't have a lot of anger in her personality and I had gotten rid of most of mine.
So in the course of our 41 years, we rarely fight, we rarely argue.
Occasionally we will have a conflict about something, but we don't believe that fighting is what you should do in a marriage.
14:39
We believe the opposite, that you should be supporting each other, building each other up, being positive towards each other.
I I coined this model called the Double O 7 effect in marriages.
14:49
Speaker 3
OK, tell us about that.
14:51
Speaker 1
OK, so you know, when you get married, you go down, you have to get a marriage license, right?
So everybody gets a marriage license.
And then what happens for a lot of people is they treat that marriage license like it's a license to kill.
It's like a license to kill their marriage.
15:07
You know, we're married now.
So I can criticize you.
I can berate you, I can tear you down.
I can get angry with you and you're stuck with me.
You have to stay with me and get to do all that.
And you get to do those things to me.
And you know, it's like their marriage license gives us this license to kill our relationship.
That's what a lot of people do.
15:23
They behave badly towards each other and negatively towards each other and criticize and blame, make the other person wrong.
And after a while, one party says, I'm done, I don't want to do that anymore, you know?
And it literally kills the marriage.
And for some reason, we've been sort of brainwashed into thinking that this is OK behavior.
15:42
You know, it's the way you should behave in a marriage because that's what married people do.
But to me, it's all crazy.
15:47
Neutralizing Anger Before It Becomes a Problem
Well, so there are a few things here Doctor Moore and I'm thinking of, and 1 is that some people would say, well, I want to go totally to the opposite side.
I don't want to yell and scream, so they end up internalizing everything.
They sweep everything under the rug and you have something.
16:05
Speaker 3
That's.
16:05
Speaker 2
Just as bad in the end.
16:08
Speaker 1
They come into our office.
16:09
Speaker 2
Right.
So I think that when we teach on this subject, when we educate people, it's really important to talk about perspective because people might take away from this, you know, maybe the answer is just to shut everything down, which we've spent so much time saying that's equally as bad and, you know, fighting too.
16:31
Like, how do you define that?
Because some people would say, well, that might just be conflict.
Every marriage is going to have conflict, even the very, very best marriages.
16:41
Speaker 1
Conflict is just you've got two different agendas or two different desires or the likes or wants or needs or whatever.
So there's going to be that in any two people.
Doesn't be a marriage, could be a business partnership, could be anything.
16:50
Speaker 2
So it's learning how to to do it well, to do conflict well so that we don't feel shut down or we don't feel as you're teaching over reactive, right.
17:03
Speaker 1
And another distinction that I find very helpful is I look at upstream.
I look at upstream and downstream.
So what I call upstream is you get triggered and you get angry.
Your brain tell something happens, that's the trigger.
Your brain tells you look at it these ways, This is how I want you to look at it.
17:20
And you do.
And then you get angry.
OK, Now, from that point on, everything that happens is downstream.
So do I express that anger?
Do I suppress that anger?
If I express it?
How do I express it?
Do I manage it?
17:35
You know, what do I do with it?
It all comes from the fact that you've got it in the first place, OK?
You are stirred up.
Whether you feel it or not doesn't matter.
Your body, if we could measure your Physiology, it would be stirred up.
So something that you stirred up inside.
17:51
And now you have a problem of what am I going to do with that?
And there are good things to do with it and bad things to do with the things make it things worse and things that make things better.
So there's all these issues related to the downstream once you get angry.
What I'm more interested in is can you show a person how to turn that switch off so they don't have the anger anymore to have to worry about what they do with it?
18:11
Suppress it, not suppress, because so either way is a problem.
When you express your anger, that can be a problem.
When you suppress your anger, that can be a problem.
It's better not to be angry.
18:19
Speaker 2
Or to neutralize the anger.
18:21
Speaker 1
Yeah.
And let me say I'm only talking about destructive anger here.
I'm not talking about anger that has positive value in.
18:27
Speaker 2
Right.
Because I think one thing that might be hard is as a human being, let's use the Dalai Lama.
Like there's going to be things that can get him angry.
And I think that's probably just something that we all probably have to realize at some point or another.
18:43
There are things that are going to cause anger in US, and maybe it's neutralizing that anger.
18:49
Speaker 1
Whenever you get angry, it's first thing to do is realize, OK, my brain made me angry.
Now how did it do it?
OK.
And when you understand that, then you can decide whether the anger is reasonable anger, not reasonable anger.
You can go in and if the anger is flawed in any way or coming from a flawed source in any way in your brain, then you can step in and correct that or appreciate what's the truth versus what your brain is telling you to do.
19:14
That's true emotional intelligence when you understand that that's how emotions get generated.
And there have been some neuroscientists who are supporting this view in terms of the latest research and how the brain works and creates emotions.
19:27
Resolving Conflicts and Setting Boundaries Calmly
So Doctor Mort, can I go back to when you were saying that we need to just tell our brain what it's doing wrong and evaluating that.
Could you give us a real life example of things that you see when couples or individuals want to work with you?
19:43
Give us a real life example.
What does this look?
19:45
Speaker 1
Like so here's an example, my wife.
So remember I said, my wife and I, we don't fight and we don't get in arguments.
But when we first got married, there was this one situation that where we would really get a little bit edgy with each other.
And it was weird because our baseline was like 0.
So it really stood out when it happened.
20:01
And I noticed it was a pattern.
And it only happened when we would go on a car trip somewhere weird, you know?
And it was even weirder because we would never argue or fight when we were driving to our destination.
We would never fight when we were at our destination.
It was only when we drove home way back.
20:17
Yeah.
And usually I'd be driving and my wife would be in the passenger seat and we'd be driving home and at some point my wife would say, oh, there's something over here.
It's only like an hour off of our path.
And I've always wanted to see that.
Let's go do that.
And I would go like, no, we're not doing that.
I didn't realize that time, but I had like a tone.
20:33
And it was a very derogatory, you know?
Yeah.
And then she would react like, what's with your attitude?
It's like I said, we're not doing that.
I said, why?
She said why not?
I said, because we're driving home.
And after it happened like two or three times, I said to myself, OK, I'm angry.
20:51
I got to figure out why I'm OK, let me go through my thing.
OK, so let me go through my understanding of how my brain makes me angry.
So I realized the first thing is, well, I'm thinking that she did something bad wrong by making this request.
And I said, is that true?
As soon as I asked the question, I realized, well, technically it's not wrong, it's just she's got a different preference than mine.
21:11
In my family, we go on car trips.
When we drove home, we drove directly home.
We didn't stop except for gas or food or something like that, or bathroom breaks.
In her family, they took side trips all the time.
That was their normal way.
So it wasn't like she was doing anything wrong.
We just had two different backgrounds and two different preferences.
21:29
And as soon as I saw that, I realized that was my brain tricking me into thinking she was doing something terrible by making this request.
And in truth, she wasn't.
That thing died because the next time she said, let's go over here, I say, sure, honey, if you want to go over here, let's go.
21:47
It's not, you know, you're not.
It's a fine, legitimate request.
And if that would make you happy, we'll do that.
I no longer saw it as a sin or as a wrong thing to do.
I had retrained my brain to stop doing that and it ended that problem in our relationship.
22:03
We've never had that problem again.
22:05
Speaker 2
But what if it's a request that you really, really don't want to do after you've thought about it?
22:11
Speaker 1
Then you say, I don't think you should do that.
And that's happened.
There was one particular incident where an old boyfriend of hers came back from that of nowhere into her life.
And she was excited about not rekindling the relationship, but just getting back in touch with him.
And he had said to her, I'm going to be nearby and I have a houseboat that I rented.
22:31
Why don't you come and spend a couple days with me on the houseboat?
So she said to me one day that she was thinking of doing that.
I said I don't think you're going to do that.
22:40
Speaker 2
Without you.
22:41
Speaker 1
I don't think that's a good thing for everybody.
She wasn't thinking I was going to lead in anything.
But I'm going to like, hey, you don't want to jeopardize what we've built.
And I put my foot down.
I said you're not doing that.
And so it's not that you don't ever stand up for what you think is right and what is wrong or create a boundary.
22:58
A lot of times people think you have to get angry to create the boundary.
No, you just say this is what I will do and what I won't do or what I will stand for, what I won't stand for.
And I wasn't angry that she was doing that, but I was very clear that it was not a good thing for our relationship.
23:14
She was less clear at the time because she had reasons why she thought it would be OK and that wouldn't be harmful.
But I had a different point of view and I asserted that my point of view without anger, and she agreed because she didn't want to put a rift in the relationship.
23:29
Speaker 3
OK.
23:30
Uncovering How Misinterpretations Fuel Our Anger
You talked a little bit about emotional intelligence.
I want to talk a little bit about just repairing after angry outbursts forgiveness.
23:39
Speaker 1
Yes, again, these are all the downstream things.
Different people will express anger and react to anger differently depending upon how you grew up and what you've learned to do.
Some people grew up in an environment where it was taboo to be angry, so they had to suppress their anger.
23:54
Other people grew up in families where it was all about expressing anger, and so they got very expressive about it.
Some people punch things.
Some people to simmer with it themselves.
But we do feel guilt.
We do feel shame when we're sitting by ourselves 3:00 in the morning.
24:10
We can't sleep when we look back over what we did and what we said and how it hurt the other person.
And we don't like it.
You know, we wish we could stop it, but we don't know how because we don't have the missing pieces of what our brain is doing.
So we're kind of stuck.
24:25
And that's why a lot of people believe that you just stuck with anger and you can't really get rid of it because they're missing the most important puzzle pieces.
So it's still work involved, but it's doable.
And you can make the last thing permanent changes in your activity, how often you get angry, whether you blow up other people, whether you hurt other people with it.
24:44
You can get rid of a lot of that stuff that I consider is very damaging, not helpful at all.
Part of what I'm out here doing is just trying to make people understand, hey, this is you can do it and it's not hard.
By the way, you don't have to be a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a rocket scientist.
25:01
The only difficulty is that what your brain does is invisible to you and to other people.
25:05
Speaker 3
I have a question for you.
So sometimes when I feel personally like I'm not angry, I'm just being a little bit more healthy assertiveness, giving an opinion that might be different.
And Scott interprets that as me being angry and then it might trigger something in him.
25:28
Speaker 1
Well, there you go.
Right there.
You just said it.
25:30
Speaker 3
How do you work that through?
25:31
Speaker 1
His brain looked at your behavior and told him it was coming from anger in you.
It wasn't coming from anger in you.
His brain got it wrong, OK?
25:42
Speaker 3
So do I tell him that?
25:43
Speaker 1
Well, that's a different issue.
The first thing is, I understand that he got angry because his brain made an assumption about where your behavior was coming from.
That was incorrect, OK?
And he's sitting in there saying you really have no reason to be angry with me.
25:58
It's wrong of you to be angry with me in his brain, OK?
But he got the diagnosis wrong in the 1st place, OK, But didn't realize it.
Because that's what brains do.
They trick us, and we're not so quick to catch it all the time.
All right?
But that's essentially demonstrating the point we're talking about here is that we get upset and angry a lot of times because our brain makes us think something's true that isn't true.
26:22
Speaker 3
OK.
So the first question is, is what they said bad and wrong?
Is that what you said?
The first question is that we ask ourselves.
26:30
Speaker 1
Is what they did.
Could be it could be they said something, they did something they forgot to do something.
Whatever the 1st that story our brain tells us is that whatever that other person or thing did was bad and wrong.
For example, you're working at your computer one day.
You've just done 2 hours of glorious but the best work you've ever done.
26:47
You're so proud of it and you're just so happy.
And then all of a sudden your screen goes blank and now you feel like you've lost everything, right?
And you feel like you want to just punch the computer.
Yeah.
26:58
Speaker 2
All right, I've been there.
26:59
Speaker 1
Why?
Your brain told you the computer did something bad and wrong it shouldn't have done.
And then it tells you a couple other stories, including that the computer was totally to blame, you didn't have anything to do with it.
27:11
Speaker 3
OK.
27:12
Speaker 1
And that's part of where anger comes from.
I was educating a a gentleman about that not too long ago, teaching him, yeah, how the brain makes anger.
And he said that same thing happened to me just the other day.
I was working on my computer, and the computer went out on me.
27:27
And I got so furious with my computer.
And then I realized I had dislodged the cable from the power source to the laptop, and I hadn't recognized that I did that.
So he had.
His brain told him it was the IT was the computer's fault.
27:44
Speaker 3
But then when he realized that, did his anger turn toward himself?
Or was he able to just say I'm just human it?
27:49
Speaker 1
Went off of the computer.
He was no longer angry at the computer.
But then he yeah, he could be angry at himself.
But then the cure for that is to realize, well, wait a second.
Is it realistic to assume that as a human being, you're never going to make a mistake like that?
Beat yourself up for doing something innocent like we all do?
28:04
But they're ways out of that one, too.
But again, you know, you argue with your brain a little bit because your brain's going to say, oh, it was a horrible thing that you didn't recognize it and you should have and blah, blah, blah.
But that's caca.
But that's what our brains do all the time.
28:16
Speaker 2
Some of us don't naturally do this though, right?
28:20
Turning Inward for Breakthroughs with Objective Help
Like, no, to have these conversations with ourselves, we lack maybe some insight to ask ourselves these questions, and we just live in a reactionary state.
I mean that that's really hard.
I think we all come from there.
28:36
I don't know where I lie on the spectrum.
Maybe I'm just average.
I don't know.
But it's taken years for me to speak to myself and start just challenging myself and my thoughts.
28:47
Speaker 1
That's where the power is.
That's absolutely where our personal power is.
I've had a number of absolutely life changing breakthroughs in my life, not the least of which was going from 1 failed relationship after another predictably OK, to being happily married for 41 years.
29:07
That doesn't happen without self reflection.
And not just self reflection, but actually turning the gaze inward first, and then being able to pinpoint the exact patterns of behavior and thinking that were contributing to a lot of those failures in the past.
29:25
And then correcting them, recognizing the ones that were faulty or leading to failure in the relationship domain and replacing them with better ones.
That's the power of taking that first step in asking what's going on inside me that's producing these results that I don't like instead of blaming.
29:46
And that's what I did every time one of my relationships with a woman failed.
I identified what I thought the source was in that woman's personality so that the next time I wouldn't pick somebody that had those characteristics.
And I and I was conscientious about making sure to do that.
And sure enough, I would pick slightly different women, but the outcome would always be the same because that was a wrong diagnosis.
30:07
Speaker 3
Wrong common denominator.
30:09
Speaker 1
It was more than my fault than it was there there if I had stuff that I didn't realize about myself and how I approached relationships, how I thought about relationships, how I was conditioned to believe men and women operate in relations, which was all like totally bad, wrong stuff.
30:24
That I didn't know it at the time because I hadn't identified it and I hadn't looked inside.
But turning the gaze from outside, which is so tempting and society so encourages us, just focus there and don't look anywhere else.
The real power in life comes from, OK, what's going on within me that's creating the things I don't like them I'm experiencing.
30:43
Can I pinpoint the causes within me and then I can do something about them.
And that's exactly what we're talking about with anger.
I couldn't get rid of my anger until I turn my gaze inside, said, how's my brain creating the anger and then identifying ABC.
So I had these series of major breakthroughs in my life, including relationships where it all came from identifying the patterns within me that were causing a lot of the mischief and the difficulty.
31:07
And yes, it is hard and it is not usual for people to do that 'cause we're everything in our world just has us look out and think that's all there is.
31:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's hitting really hard on our third cornerstone of insight today.
31:20
Speaker 3
And also what we say every week that to make a change in our marriage first requires a change in ourselves.
We're going to change those stinky or stale rest of our marriage.
We need to look internally.
31:31
Speaker 2
Also, we talked about sitting with ourselves and having a conversation.
Part of that conversation is challenging ourselves, right?
Like is this correct or not?
31:42
Speaker 3
And the best time to do that is maybe right when we feel that intense emotion.
31:47
Speaker 1
It's great to have the the inkling, that's a good thing to do and it's a productive thing to do and it'll pay off in the long run.
But it's hard to do when you're sitting by yourself with your brains very good at what it does.
It's very protective of its mechanisms, doesn't want you to find out how it's tricking you.
32:02
It's got cloaking devices.
You often need help from other people in the beginning to Pierce through and be able to tell the truth and practice with a coach or a confidant or somebody you trust or somebody who's good at doing that so that you get some experience recognizing where your brain's misleading you and seeing some of the patterns and to sit there and try to figure them out on your own.
32:28
I didn't figure that stuff out on my own.
I went through all these personal development courses and had all these different people give me input.
That eventually crystallized.
I did the crystallization and putting stuff together, but I got a lot of input from other people and how to look at myself and what might be in there.
32:45
It's very hard to just sit by yourself like in a cave and do that.
It's and a lot of times you'll try and do it and you won't get anywhere and then you'll conclude it's not possible.
32:52
Speaker 2
Well, it's definitely possible.
32:54
Speaker 3
You let people know this is what I'm working on.
Can you be an accountability partner with me that I can just run things off of?
And I don't want you to just support everything I'm saying.
I want you to help me look at it objectively and recognize did the other person do anything inherently wrong or bad.
33:12
Speaker 1
And you know, it's funny, you can do that with AI.
Now there's some AIS where you can have a personal one-on-one.
Help me see what I'm not seeing.
Here's my situation.
I'm looking at it this way.
Can you help me look at it in different ways?
What am I missing, you know?
33:27
Speaker 2
Tasha Urich would call that external self-awareness.
And our own conversations with ourselves, that's an internal self-awareness.
And she says that really, to do both equally well creates that really insightful person.
33:46
Speaker 3
Emotional intelligence.
33:47
Speaker 1
Yeah.
33:48
Speaker 3
That's great.
33:49
The Dalai Lama's Tip for Shifting Your View
Do you have some final tips for something that our couples could practice if they really want to dive in and challenge themselves this week?
34:00
Speaker 1
They can start with that first part of the anger chain.
Whenever you get angry, realize that your brain's telling you that you're looking at things through in terms of people's behavior or an object's behavior or something, that it's bad and wrong and that may or may not be true.
Can you play with that a little bit and see if you can see it in other ways?
34:21
One of the Dalai Lama's books I was reading called The Book of Joy, where he sits down with Desmond Tutu and they have this week long time where they just riff on each other.
And Desmond Tutu asked the Dalai Lama one day, what do you do when you get stuck?
When you come up on a problem and you can't, you don't know what to do and you're just stuck.
34:40
And the Dalai Lama says the first thing I do, I try to look at the situation from at least seven different perspectives.
34:46
Speaker 2
Wow.
OK, that's.
34:48
Speaker 3
Awesome.
34:49
Speaker 2
I love it.
He's speaking my language right there.
34:52
Speaker 1
Again, that's not normal.
It's not something we normally do, but you could look at things from multiple different perspectives and you'll see from different perspectives different pieces of truth that you don't see when you're just locked into the one that your brain gives you automatically, whatever that one is, you know, we tend to just stay right there with that one channel.
35:10
Speaker 2
If I were to define the purpose of my life with one word, it would be perspective.
35:18
Speaker 3
OK.
35:18
Speaker 2
What do you think about that?
35:20
Speaker 3
Well, we've talked about this a lot.
35:21
Speaker 2
That doesn't mean to do anything.
35:23
Speaker 3
Different perspective.
35:23
Speaker 2
But that's what I want to do.
Like, I want to be like the Dalai Lama.
35:27
Speaker 3
But we mess up a whole lot on our road to changing the way that we see things.
I mean, I think the first step is recognizing that we're wrong sometimes or that we messed up or that we didn't handle things right.
But then I mean, come at it again.
So Doctor Mort, if they practice that this week and they get that down, then would you next send them Doctor Orman's life changing Anger cure book?
35:51
Speaker 1
Anybody that wants to end their destructive anger patterns, either it's already caused destruction or they're afraid it might.
This book would be great.
We'll give you a lot more detail of the stuff that we've been talking about today.
But another thing I would recommend, and one of the things that we have cock eyed in our society is we're definitely afraid of being wrong.
36:10
We don't see any value in being wrong.
Yeah.
36:13
Speaker 2
There's a lot, a lot of that, Yep.
36:15
Speaker 1
It's funny, the best things that have ever happened to me in life came from me realizing that I was wrong.
The way you have breakthroughs in your anger, you have to be willing to be wrong because your brain is making you wrong to get you angry in the 1st place most of the time.
And if you're not willing to admit that, if you're not willing to embrace that and confront it and then deal with it, you're trapped.
36:37
You're going to be stuck in that anger for.
36:40
Speaker 2
Right.
Yeah, Well, on time.
Being OK with being wrong, but not going overboard, right?
Like I am wrong, everything I do is wrong, right?
So there's that healthy balance, right?
36:52
Speaker 1
As doctors, we don't want to make the wrong diagnosis, write the wrong prescription.
We got to be real perfectionistic in the work that we do.
But when you take that home in your personal life, then it can cause problems because that's where you got to be willing to be wrong and realize that you your perspective might not be accurate, might not be the best.
37:11
And, you know, biologically we don't see all the frequencies of radiation and light.
We don't hear things, other animals here.
We can't see what's behind us because our eyes are pointing forward.
There's whole ways in which biologically we are never in touch with the truth about stuff.
37:28
Speaker 2
Because we don't see their perspective, right, or experience their perspective.
37:33
Controlling Your Emotions for a Scintillating Marriage
Hey, this has been really good.
It's been a great conversation.
Yeah, thought provoking, right, conversation from a medical point of view on anger and what kind of how it gets triggered, what we do with it and how to gain emotional intelligence and insight from that.
37:52
Speaker 3
Yeah, what our brain is telling us and how we can turn that around.
37:56
Speaker 1
Emotional mastery is what the end result of all that is.
When you can control your emotions aside, when you want to have them.
When you don't want to have them and when they get how long they last once you get triggered, that's emotional mastery.
38:10
Speaker 2
Wonderful.
And so your book is Doctor Orman's Life Changing Anger Cure.
38:14
Speaker 3
Complained on Amazon.
38:16
Speaker 2
Oh, well, hey, thank you so much, Doctor Moore, for joining us today on Marriage IQ.
38:21
Speaker 1
Thanks for your great questions.
38:25
Speaker 2
And to our audience, remember that to change from a stinky to a scintillating marriage first requires a change in ourselves.
And we hope that you look us up on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, like us, and we will see you on another exciting episode of marriage.
38:46
Thank you.
