Episode #943
Ever found yourself reacting in the heat of the moment—only to regret it later? Whether it’s frustration with your wife, your kids, or even a stranger cutting you off in traffic, anger can quickly take control if you don’t have the right tools to manage it.
In this episode, Doug Holt and TPM Advisor Christopher tackle a crucial question from a listener: How do you calm yourself when anger arises or when past issues resurface in your relationship? They break down practical techniques to help you stay grounded, process emotions, and avoid falling into the same old patterns.
You’ll discover how breathwork can reset your emotions before you react and why shifting your mindset can turn conflict into deeper connection. Doug and Chris also explore how to reframe past hurts so they don’t control your present, why unresolved issues keep resurfacing, and what you can do to finally break free. They introduce the “Clean Slate” method—a powerful way to wipe the past clean and move forward in your marriage without carrying old wounds.
If you’re tired of anger running the show, this episode is for you. Take control, build stronger relationships, and show up as the man you want to be.
🎧 Listen now and take the first step toward mastering your emotions.
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Transcription
Christopher Hansen 0:00
I always look at that, that mud on the glass as an opportunity, as fuel for the connection itself. You can shame spiral around it. You can just, you know, go to a place where there’s no possibility for the connection. I guess in your mind, I’ve been able to reframe and look at that mud. It’s like, “Oh no, this is actually the fuel to develop that relationship,” regardless of how much is there. Like, if I continuously look at it that way, it’s going to just deepen the relationship that I have with my wife, my kids, friends, you know, whatever it may be.
Doug Holt 0:46
Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of The TPM Show. Well, once again, we’re joined here by Christopher Hansen, one of our head advisors over at TPM, guiding you guys through. And Chris brought with him a collection of questions, and so today we’re going to answer one of the questions from you guys directly. Now, if you are interested in having your question answered on the podcast or on this show, simply email those in. It’s VIP@thepowerfulman.com. Or, if you have questions for an advisor, someone like Chris, that you want to talk to about The Activation Methodor the other programs and events that we put on for men all over the world, just use that email address, and those guys will get back to you guys, and women will get back to you right away. Chris, thanks for being here again, man.
Christopher Hansen 1:29
Thank you, Doug. So, I wanted to start off with a question again. This came out of our Facebook group, and it is another one that I think a lot of men struggle with, that I speak with. So, Shane submitted this, and his question is, “How do you calm yourself when anger arises or when a past situation resurfaces in the relationship?”
Doug Holt 1:55
Yeah, that’s a really good one. The first thing is your breath, right? So when you’re holding your breath, you’re creating tension in your body. When you get angry, you tend to either breathe much more shallow or you hold your breath. And so a practice that I used a long time ago when my wife would trigger me—and she still does—is by breathing. So, counting to 10. Ten was my number, and it was a totally made-up number. It’s a round number, sounded like a good number to go through, and take 10 deep breaths. And what that did for me, Chris, was it prevented me from reacting.
So back then, I didn’t know what DEER mode was, right? We call it DEER mode. DEER is an acronym we talked about a lot in this show, which is an acronym for Defend, Excuse, Explain, and React. And I was really good at the reaction one, right? Especially in those triggered situations. And so what I’d recommend to Shane to do and the other guys that are finding themselves trying to control their temper or their reactions is go to your breathwork. And a mindfulness practice, as woo-woo as that can sound to some people, is a really good way of also keeping yourself centered.
Now, for the guys that are in our programs right now, we have a whole course on Grounded Masculinity that Tim put together, and that’s a great place to start because that Masterclass Series is going to teach a man how to stay grounded. What I want Shane to think about is imagine an oak tree and having deep roots and feeling rooted. The wind doesn’t shake the oak tree when the wind, a gust of wind, comes down. Now, if you had a tree with shallow roots, the wind comes, it just gets knocked over. So we need to find practices that allow us to stay grounded, and it doesn’t just serve you in your relationship or your intimate relationship.
So if it’s a past affair, an infidelity of some sort, lying, cheating, stealing, whatever it is, it also helps you with your kids. It also helps you with your friends. Or when you get cut off driving a car, and, you know, you’ve had a good day, and a guy cuts you off in the middle of the lane, you want to give him the finger and yell at him, and that’s all you think about the rest of the day. Is that guy cut you off, not the good day you had? So that’s one practice—go to your breathwork.
The second thing, and it’s a deeper practice that I use a lot, and I learned this from NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, is to revisit that scene in your head. So what’s going to happen for us guys, especially us visual people, is we picture the scene in our head happening. So I’m going to use this idea of your wife kissing another guy, right? No guy wants to—most guys don’t want to—see that scene. So what you want to do is, when that emotion gets brought up in you, that your wife is kissing another man, what I would recommend is take your breath. Do 10 deep breaths. Then what I want you to do is imagine yourself going into a movie theater, okay? And the movie theater is empty. And I want you to take a seat in that movie theater, and then imagine that scene coming up with your wife kissing a guy in black and white on the screen, okay? And then I want you to move further back in the movie theater, and then further back, further back, further back. So that scene becomes more blurry and blurry, and you’re going to get a third-person perspective. Then take your wife out of it, put another person in there, and so that kind of takes some of the emotion out of it.
Now, as a coach, I would walk somebody through a much deeper process with that that I can’t do on this show, but it can remove and we use Lili-ism, which is a third-person approach, right? And then that takes some of the sting away from—typically, not always, but it could, typically can do it.
So if you’ve done that, so you’ve now grounded yourself. This has happened in the past. Now you’ve taken a little of the sting away using Lili-ism or using an NLP technique. You can do it with a coach. That’s the best way to do it. You don’t have to do it with one of our coaches. You can do it with another trained professional. You definitely want to do it with somebody who’s got experience helping people with this because it’s a traumatic event. We’re talking about trauma here, is really what we’re talking about. You want to take them away from that, and then you need to take it back and say, “Hey, what does this mean to me? What am I reacting to?”
Right? So I’m going to use this example. So if Erin, my wife—if she kissed another guy and this came up to me, I’m going to get angry, and I’m going to get upset. Okay, I’ve taken my breathwork, I’ve taken myself out of it, but still, she’s kissed another guy. Why am I upset? Okay, am I upset because she lied to me, right? Or am I upset because she broke a promise, the promise that we wouldn’t kiss another person? Or do I feel disrespected? Or am I feeling like I’m less of a man because of this, right? What’s coming up for me in my world to do this?
So for me, if that happened, disrespect, I’m guessing, would be one of the first ones that would come up for me. But I think also, I think I would feel that—why is she kissing another guy? Am I less than this other guy? Am I not good enough? Right? And that brings up a whole other string of emotions, right?
So you start to go down this rabbit hole of investigation and really getting to know yourself better, your true self better, that allows you to open up to so many other things. And what I see a lot, and I wouldn’t excuse my wife for doing this, right? She broke an agreement, she made me sad, she hurt my feelings. Let’s call it what it is. But if I’m going to choose to be with her moving forward, that’s a choice I’m making. Yeah, right? And I can’t put her in purgatory for the rest of our relationship because it won’t be successful. It’s not fair to her.
What I think a lot of men want to do is they want to make their wife hurt as much or more than they’re hurting, and they want to see that. Women do the same thing, right? It’s just human nature, but you can’t do that. It’s not going to be successful.
Christopher Hansen 8:23
Yeah? Well, and you can’t, you don’t even know you’re punishing her for your past if you haven’t done that piece, right, that exploratory piece. And yeah, I love the work there of creating space from the emotion, observing the emotion, releasing the charge around it, and then, at that point, there is space for you not to react, right? And you can actually, you can actually dig into it and figure out where that’s coming from. What, what is that source?
Doug Holt 8:58
That’s exactly what it is. You’re figuring out the source, and none of us act our best ways when we’re in reaction mode, right? I mean, you have kids. I have kids. Our kids do stuff we don’t want them to do, and we yell at them, we snap—at least I do. I don’t know if you do, but sure I do, and a lot of times I regret that, right? I’m like, “Ah man, I could have handled that so much better.”
And when I stop and go, “All right, my daughter just spilled milk and cereal everywhere.” My daughter just turned five yesterday, so we have birthday cake for her. And she got up and looked at her seat, and it was just—it was like someone took the cake and just shredded it on her seat and put icing everywhere. Like, you couldn’t have done it if you deliberately wanted to, the way that somehow that seat was.
So I have this initial reaction of being like, “What? What’s going on? How could you do that?” And then I have the laughing reaction of, “How hilarious is this?” But it’s a choice. So when I take a breath in that moment and I curb that initial reaction of, “Oh, the house is a mess, and now I have to clean it,” I then get to the joy of looking at this five-year-old girl, just turned five, you know, eating cake like Cookie Monster—just shoving her face because she’s so joyous, yeah. And that’s a different paradigm, but it’s choosing not to be in that reactionary state and then making a choice of which way I want to go.
Christopher Hansen 10:24
And I love that. I always look at laughter as the best fuel for that emotional expression. If I can get to laughter, regardless of how I’m feeling around something, and I can choose to laugh about it, it shifts everything immediately. Yep, and that’s—I love that. I love that choice point, and what are you going to express in that moment? And yeah, I’ve experienced that with my kids a ton.
Doug Holt 10:53
Hey guys, sorry to interrupt this episode, but the reality is, if you are watching or listening to this right now, then you are looking to better yourself, and I applaud you. You’re one of my people, and I want to give you the opportunity of taking massive action.
So if you haven’t joined The Activation Method yet, it’s our flagship program. Do what thousands of other businessmen just like you have done and take action. Be one of the one percenters that actually does the work and takes action. There’ll be a link in the description that’ll take you right to a page that’ll just give you more information. There is no obligation. Just go check it out and see if it’s a good fit for you. All right, let’s get back to this episode.
Christopher Hansen 11:35
I had a pattern for a long time with my daughter where I would react, and, I mean, it would be within a minute of the reaction that I would go, “Oh, wait a minute,” and have to go revisit with her and have a conversation with her. And, “Hey, I reacted. She reacted that way,” you know. And we have a deeper relationship now—one, because she’s been part of that process. I didn’t just go hide afterward and, like, shame spiral or anything like that. I communicated with her, and we’ve been able to close that gap in our relationship because of that, and our relationship is better for it. And we laugh a lot at this point.
Doug Holt 12:17
That’s beautiful, man. Like, you’re doing what you’re doing with your daughter, and I’m assuming you’ve done it with your son too, is you’re repairing, right? And you’re doing just what we teach the men to do with their wives. It’s relationships, and as guys—at least, I was never taught how to do this as a kid. And so you providing that role model for your daughter is beautiful. You’re going in there, and you’re repairing with him.
And this is what Shane gets to do with his wife. So when he reacts, he can come back and say, “Hey, look, I reacted, and I want to clean this up.” We teach the guys there’s a thing we can teach called The Triadic Connection in The Activation Method. And when men go through that, they learn how to repair this.
And the analogy we use, Chris, is, imagine there’s a sheet of glass between you and me, right? A metaphoric one. And every one of those reactions is like me sprinkling some mud on that, right? And then you react, you sprinkle some mud, and eventually, we can’t see each other clearly, right? We know there’s somebody over there, but we can’t see who that is, and that’s where disconnection comes from.
So a lot of times, men will say, “Doug, you know,”—and this is my experience too—”I’m sleeping three inches away from my wife, but I feel like I’m three miles apart.” And a lot of that’s that disconnection. And then, as guys, we’ll come in and put the elbow grease on and try to clean that dirt off, spray some water, and it just becomes muddier and muddier rather than actually doing what we call Clean Slate Method or The Hidden Motives Technique. Either one of those. And guys can look that up in the show, we’ve done a lot about that.
And doing what you do with your daughter, it’s like Windex, almost, or a cleaning agent. You’re cleaning the glass so that you can see each other. Are you going to throw dirt on there again? Absolutely, right? But what you did is, you sprinkled some dirt on, and you went right away with the Windex bottle, and you cleaned it off. And now you and your daughter can see each other, and you can have those moments of connection.
Christopher Hansen 14:10
Yeah. And I always look at that mud on the glass as opportunity, as fuel for the connection itself, right? Because, again, I go back to, like, you can shame spiral around it. You can just, you know, go to a place where there’s no possibility for the connection—I guess, in your mind, at least I do or have—and I’ve been able to reframe and look at that mud. It’s like, “Oh no, this is actually the fuel to develop that relationship, regardless of how much is there.” Like, if I continuously look at it that way, it’s going to just deepen the relationship that I have with my wife, my kids, friends, you know, whatever it may be.
Doug Holt 14:57
And, you know, take this off of Shane. Shane, I know you’ve done this in friendships. You’ve shared with me before in the past, it’s a unique situation. It always brings people closer, even if you agree to disagree and part ways. Somehow, you become closer with that individual, and it’s so rarely done.
Yeah, right? And that’s the unfortunate part. And it takes balls, man, because you have to swallow some pride a lot of times when you’re coming in, you’re cleaning up stuff that you’ve done—especially as a father or as a husband—because none of us wants to look like we’re weak or we don’t know what we’re doing. But all of us are.
And to be that vulnerable and say, “Hey, I screwed up,” or even if you don’t screw up—what I find in my marriage is going, “Hey, what I said, I didn’t mean it to land on you this way,” and I’ll clean up the way it landed. Because I’ll clean that part up.
I may not admit that I’m wrong. If I don’t think I’m wrong, I’m not going to apologize, but I’ll apologize for the way it made you feel. Shane can do all that. But Shane also gets to sit down and have a conversation—not from a place of shame, I love that shame spiral he brought up—but with his wife.
If there’s something that keeps bringing Shane upset—and this happens, I hear this all the time from guys—”My wife keeps complaining about the same thing over and over again,” or “the affair,” or “something I did.” It’s because she isn’t clear on it. It’s not complete for her.
And what I would encourage Shane to do, and for the men that are on the other side of the shoe, right—that maybe they’ve had an affair, maybe they’ve done something egregious to their wife that their wife just won’t drop—sit down, have a conversation, and get 100% complete about it.
So I’ll use this, and Shane, I don’t know you, buddy, but I’m just gonna use the idea of your wife kissing another guy. I’m sure that’s not the situation, but let’s just use that. I would sit down and go—I would ask every question I needed to have an answer to. I would get 100% complete in that conversation with my wife so that I can move on.
And maybe I don’t want to know about the guy, right? Because what does that serve me? Maybe I just want to know why, right? “What is it inside of me that’s not good enough?” Or whatever the question may be, and get really clear on it so you don’t have to have it come up again and again.
Doesn’t take the hurt away. Then you can move on. And then you’ve got to make a decision, man. You have to make a decision that, hey, do I still want to be with this woman? The answer is yes. Then you have to love her for her warts, her scars, all the things, and you have to have a clean slate.
That’s what we call the Clean Slate Method. You have to have a clean slate in your marriage and your relationship so that you can move forward. And that means you cannot go back in the past and drag something out of the closet when it’s convenient for you to blame them.
Yeah, that’s out. That’s off the table. She doesn’t get to either, though. Yep, right? It’s, “Hey, are we moving forward or not?” If we’re not, I get it. Let’s part ways. But if we are moving forward, all of that stuff in the past gets to be wiped away, right? And we forget that.
Let’s move forward. Now, if she breaks my agreement again—you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me type of situation. But, you know, I might give her a pause.
Every guy’s got to make their own decision, depending on what is happening in Shane’s life. But if you decide to move forward, that’s the decision.
Christopher Hansen 18:31
And I think just knowing that that’s available, right? The idea of a clean slate, yeah, is extremely powerful. Just to share a little bit about my growing up as a kid, as I learned more about my own personal development, I looked back, and there were so many times in my life as a child that I wished I could have just had a clean slate. Could I just start knowing what I know now from this new place? So it is such a gift to be able to actually have that in a relationship. Yeah, it’s extremely potent to be able to introduce that and to execute from that place.
Doug Holt 19:16
I think it’s wildly important too. What I think a lot of guys do is they think their wife is the person they married, right? And I say that as a bad thing, really, because what I mean by that is, so I married—gosh, if I think about the man that I was when I married my wife, I wouldn’t let him sit in this seat giving advice, right? Or I don’t want him operating my life. I don’t want that guy raising my kids. Now, was he a good man? Absolutely. But I have so much more, you know, rubber on the road, so to speak. I have so much more wisdom and experiences in my life and things that I’ve changed and worked on and corrected at this stage. And I’d be foolhardy to think my wife is the same person, right?
I work really hard on bettering myself, not only every year but every week, and so to be a better version, to celebrate the journey, as we talk about at TPM. And so I gotta also assume that my wife is also doing that. And this is not the topic for Shane, but something I do—because I’m a guy—I have an alert come up in my project management. So Teamwork is what we use at TPM. That literally says, “What books is Erin reading right now?” And I’ll look at them. I’ll ask her about them, like, “Hey,” because I know she’s an avid reader. And so I’ll talk to her about the books she’s reading, and they’re wildly different today than they were six months ago, let alone a year or five or ten years ago.
And so I’m getting more into her world to understand what her world is, what’s her point of view. Same thing with me, man. Like, I jump all over the place. You know, personal development and business are the two areas you can almost guarantee are on my Audible. But every once in a while, a guy like yourself or somebody else might turn me on to something else. I’m reading a spiritual book, or I’m reading a book about the end of the world, right? Or these apocalyptic things.
And so for Shane and the other guys and myself, we get to remember that all of us are changing. All of us are morphing. And the Clean Slate Method allows us that opportunity of putting a line in the sand, or maybe a line in concrete, and saying, “Okay, this is us moving forward. We don’t have to live in the past choices that we’ve made, right? We get to make a new choice today or in this moment.”
Christopher Hansen 20:58
Yeah, such a gift.
Doug Holt 21:00
Yeah? I love it.
Christopher Hansen 21:02
I do too.
Doug Holt 21:04
Love these questions. Thanks for bringing them.
Christopher Hansen 21:06
Yeah, absolutely.
Doug Holt 21:08
Gentlemen, as I always say, in the moment of insight, take massive action. So whatever you’re getting out of this, take the action and do it. Become activated, become grounded. Use some of these exercises that we’re sharing within this episode, or the previous 950-some episodes that we’ve done here.
These are for you guys. And again, if you want—like Shane—you want your question answered, go ahead and email those into VIP@thepowerfulman.com. We do have a free Facebook group. We have several of our team members over there helping navigate that, and we do have our own app.
Eventually, we’ll be opening that app up to everybody so you can have the resources and technology at TPM. Our motto and our mission is to save the children by saving their fathers first. And we want to help you guys out as well.
So whether you come with our program or you go to another one, just do something. If you want to talk to a man like Chris, who’s got experience and has talked to thousands upon thousands of men just like you, you can also email VIP@thepowerfulman.com or go over to the website and book a call.
And it’s just a conversation. And it’s a conversation with men like Chris, who have had these experiences and can give you some insights into your particular situation.
As always, guys, be the best. You deserve more than average. And this is me calling you out. So don’t go from one show to another. Move in the direction of your best self, and we’ll see you next time on The Powerful Man Show.
