All right, welcome to The Man Talks show. I'm Connor Beaton, and on this midweek mini episode, we're

going to dive into part two of the You Ask, I Answer series. So these are Q&A. This is some questions

that have come in through Instagram. And if you are wanting to ask me questions, you can always hit me up, DM me on Instagram. It's at Man Talks. Or, you know, every once in a while, usually every week, I will pop up a little question of, you know, what questions do you have for me? And then I'll try to answer some of them on Instagram and dive into some of the topics that you have and then save some of the juicy ones for the podcast. So I'm going to

dive into a few questions. So here we go. How do I set boundaries with my partner when they get

reactive? So I've been with my wife for over a decade. And one of the challenges that I've realized over the years is that A,

I don't have very good boundaries and B, when I try and set boundaries or talk about boundaries

with my wife, she gets very reactive. Please help. All right. So first and foremost, one of the

things that I want to say straight up the gates is in every

relationship, you should have a code of conflict, okay, a code of conflict. And what I mean by this

is you should have rules of engagement for how you and your partner agree to engage in conflict.

Many of us have grown up in different environments,

different conflict environments in our family systems. So some of us grew up with families

where conflict was like a love language, right? It was just, you know, family was constantly

barbing, joking around, poking fun at one another, trying to get each other to be reactive.

And, you know, there's just a lot of conflict

within the family system. Lots of arguments, lots of drama, right? For others, we've grown up where

there's no conflict, where conflict was completely avoided in the family system. So we've never

really seen it. We don't know how to engage in it. It feels foreign for us and we feel

ill-equipped to deal with conflict. So when it comes up, we get reactive or we lose our cool or we take it

personally. And then for others, conflict was harmful, right? We grew up in environments where

conflict was abuse and, you know, trauma. And so when that conflict comes up in our relationship,

any number of things can happen. We can shut down. We can run away. We can get hyper-reactive

...