The Five-Year Yelling Problem
What Non-Regulation Is Costing Your Marriage
I was talking to a coaching client the other day. And I am not telling you about her to single her out… I hear the same pattern over and over. So, I am telling you about this to be illustrative of something that destroys many relationships.
She told me she keeps yelling at her husband… and he’s tired of it.
I asked how long she’d been aware this was causing a problem.
She paused. Then surprised me: “Maybe five years.”
Five years?
I asked, “So you’ve known for that long, but you haven’t changed anything?”
She admitted she hadn’t, because she “couldn’t help it.”
I told her she was telling herself — and believing — a lie. That she was choosing to yell.
She protested. So I did the test I often do with clients:
“Let’s say you’re in court. Maybe for the divorce. And you get upset. You’re standing in front of the judge. Do you yell?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why not?”
“The judge... I don’t want to get into trouble, so I wouldn’t yell.”
“Precisely. So when you DO yell at your husband, you COULD control it. You just admitted it.”
The Selective Regulation Problem
Here’s what that courtroom test reveals: You already know how to regulate your emotions. You do it all the time.
You regulate in front of your boss. In front of police officers. During job interviews. When meeting someone you want to impress. At your child’s school. In public places where strangers are watching.
You have the capacity. You demonstrate it regularly.
The question isn’t whether you can regulate. The question is: Why do you regulate for strangers but not for the person you claim to love most?
Because somewhere along the way, you decided — probably not consciously — that avoiding a judge’s contempt charge matters more than avoiding contempt in your marriage. That your boss’s opinion matters more than your spouse’s well-being. That strangers’ judgment carries more weight than your partner’s pain.
Your selective regulation reveals your actual priorities, not your stated ones.
What Non-Regulation Actually Costs You
My client had been yelling for five years. Five years of knowing it was damaging her marriage. Five years of choosing not to change.
What did those five years cost her?
The Immediate Damage
Respect erosion. Every time you dysregulate, whether that’s yelling, withdrawing in cold anger, using sarcasm as a weapon, or passive-aggressive punishment, your spouse loses a little more respect for you. Not because they’re judging you harshly, but because you’re demonstrating you can’t handle yourself. They may still love you, but they don’t respect your emotional maturity. And respect is a weight-bearing pillar of both attraction and partnership.
Safety destruction. Emotional safety requires predictability and trust. When you’re dysregulated, you’re unpredictable and untrustworthy in the moment. Your spouse starts walking on eggshells, managing you, self-protecting. The relationship becomes a minefield instead of a refuge. They’re constantly scanning for signs that you’re about to explode, withdraw, or punish.
Intimacy shutdown. You can’t have emotional or physical intimacy with someone you’re afraid might detonate. Dysregulation doesn’t just damage the moments when it happens. It contaminates the spaces in between. Your spouse stays guarded even in calm moments because they never know when the next eruption is coming. They protect themselves by keeping distance, and that distance becomes the new normal.
The Accumulated Damage
Resentment calcification. Each dysregulated incident adds to an invisible ledger. Your spouse might forgive individual events, but the pattern creates deep resentment. Eventually, they’re not responding to today’s yelling. They are responding to five years of yelling. The debt compounds with interest, and you don’t even know how deep in the hole you are.
Identity shift. Your spouse stops seeing you as partner and starts seeing you as problem. You become the unstable variable they have to work around. Your identity in the relationship shifts from “person I chose” to “person I have to manage.” Once that shift happens, almost everything you do gets interpreted through that lens.
Narrative rewriting. They start reinterpreting your entire relationship history through the lens of your dysregulation. “I thought they were passionate. Turns out they’re just volatile.” “I thought they were strong. But they can’t even control their temper.” The story of your marriage gets rewritten with you cast as the unstable one, and that becomes the story they tell themselves, their friends, and eventually their lawyer.
Where This Ends
Contempt. After enough time dealing with someone who “can’t help it,” contempt emerges. They stop believing you’ll change. They stop respecting your promises. They start viewing you with disdain. And contempt, according to John Gottman’s research, is the single greatest predictor of divorce. It’s also very difficult to reverse once it takes root.
The checkout. Eventually they stop trying. Not dramatically… just quietly. They stop hoping you’ll change. They stop caring when you dysregulate. They’ve built an internal life where you don’t have much access. You’re still married, but they’re already gone. They’re just going through the motions while they figure out their exit or resign themselves to a dead marriage.
The exit justification. All those years of dysregulation become the story they tell themselves and others about why they had to leave. “I tried for five years. They knew it was a problem. They just wouldn’t change.” Your dysregulation writes their exit script. Every incident becomes evidence. Every promise you made and broke becomes proof that change isn’t possible.
The Cost to Yourself
But here’s what my client was missing: She wasn’t just damaging her marriage. She was damaging herself.
Every time you dysregulate, you prove to yourself that you’re powerless. You reinforce the belief that you can’t handle yourself, that you’re weak, that you’re out of control. This isn’t who you want to be, but it’s who you’re practicing being. And practice makes permanent.
Every time you tell yourself “I can’t help it,” you make it more true. You’re training yourself into helplessness. The neural pathway that says “I’m not in charge here” gets stronger with every use. You’re becoming the person who genuinely can’t regulate, not because it’s impossible, but because you’ve practiced dysregulation so thoroughly that it’s become your default.
And you know better. That’s the part that corrodes your self-respect. You know you could regulate. The courtroom test proves it. You know you should regulate. Five years of knowing it’s a problem proves that. But you don’t. That gap between what you know and what you do destroys your integrity with yourself. You can’t trust yourself. And if you can’t trust yourself, why should your spouse?
The Lie Underneath It All
“I can’t help it.”
That’s the lie. And it’s not just a lie you tell your spouse to excuse your behavior. It’s a lie you tell yourself to avoid the harder truth:
You are choosing this.
Not consciously. Not maliciously. But choosing nonetheless.
You’re choosing to discharge your discomfort onto your spouse rather than process it yourself. You’re choosing temporary emotional relief over long-term relationship health. You’re choosing familiar patterns over the discomfort of change. You’re choosing to protect yourself from vulnerability by weaponizing your emotions instead.
Those choices might feel automatic. They might happen so fast you don’t notice you’re making them. But the courtroom test proves they’re choices. Because when the consequences matter enough to you — when there’s a judge who could hold you in contempt, or a boss who could fire you, or a police officer who could arrest you — you make a different choice.
The question isn’t whether you can regulate. You can. You do it all the time.
The question is: Why isn’t your marriage worth the same effort you give to strangers?
The Fork in the Road
My client sat with that question. I could hear it landing. There was silence.
Five years of knowing she had a problem. Five years of doing nothing. Five years of watching her husband’s respect erode, watching safety disappear from their relationship, watching intimacy die.
And now she was at a fork in the road.
One path: Keep telling herself she can’t help it. Keep dysregulating. Keep accumulating damage. Watch her husband move from resentment to contempt to checkout. Watch her marriage die slowly, or watch him finally leave. Spend the rest of her life knowing she could have changed, but didn’t.
The other path: Stop lying to herself. Acknowledge that she’s been choosing this. Face the reality that regulation is hard but possible. Do the actual work of learning to manage herself instead of demanding he tolerate her dysregulation. Build new patterns. Repair the damage. Save her marriage while there’s still something to save.
She had a choice to make. Just like we all do.
What If It’s Already Too Late?
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ve been dysregulating for years too. Maybe longer than five. Is it too late?”
I won’t lie to you: The longer you’ve been dysregulating, the more damage there is to repair. The deeper your spouse’s resentment, the harder it will be to rebuild trust. If you’ve crossed into contempt territory, the road back is steep and narrow.
But here’s what I know: One person changing can change everything.
Not instantly. Not magically. But consistently choosing regulation over dysregulation creates new patterns. New patterns create new experiences. New experiences can, over time, create new stories about who you are and what this marriage is.
Your spouse might not believe the change at first. They’ve likely seen you promise before. They’ve likely watched you try and fail. They’ve likely learned not to hope. That’s fair — experience has trained them to expect dysregulation.
But if you actually change — not just promise to change, but demonstrate consistent regulation over weeks and months — they’ll notice. They might not trust it immediately. They might test it. They might wait for you to revert. But if you don’t revert, if you keep choosing regulation, the feedback loop starts to shift.
Small changes create small softening. Small softening makes regulation slightly easier. Slightly easier regulation creates more safety. More safety enables more connection. More connection creates positive momentum.
It’s not guaranteed. Some marriages have too much damage, or your spouse has already made their decision. But the only way to find out if yours can be saved is to stop dysregulating and start demonstrating that you can actually manage yourself.
The alternative — continuing to dysregulate while hoping your marriage survives — isn’t hope. It’s denial.
The Real Question
You’ve known dysregulation was a problem. Maybe for months. Maybe for years. Maybe for a decade.
You haven’t changed it because some part of you believed you couldn’t.
But now you know: You can. You regulate all the time for other people. You have the capacity.
So here’s the real question, the one you need to answer honestly:
Is your marriage worth extending that capacity to your spouse?
Not “Can you regulate?” — we’ve already established you can.
Not “Is it hard?” — of course it’s hard. Everything worthwhile is hard.
The question is simply: Is this marriage worth doing the hard thing?
If the answer is yes, then the lie of “I can’t help it” has to die. Because that lie is what’s keeping you stuck. That lie is what allows you to keep choosing dysregulation while pretending you’re powerless.
You’re not powerless. You’re just practicing the wrong thing.
You can learn to regulate. You can build new patterns. You can become someone your spouse respects again, someone they feel safe with again, someone they can connect with again.
But only if you stop telling yourself you can’t.
The work of learning actual regulation — not just white-knuckling or suppressing, but real emotional self-governance — is what comes next. But first, you have to stop lying to yourself about whether it’s possible.
It is possible. You already do it. The only question is whether you’ll extend it to the person who matters most.
If you’re ready to learn how to actually regulate — understanding what’s happening in your brain during crisis, building the skills of pausing and choosing your state, and making sustainable change instead of just promising to try harder — I’ll be walking through that framework in upcoming articles and in my VIP program. But it all starts here: with facing the reality that you’ve been choosing this, and choosing differently starts now.
And if your marriage is in crisis, and you don’t even have a starting point, do grab my Save The Marriage System by clicking here.