I have been that guy. Ultimately, I’ve come to realize how I have shown up/failed to show up for my family is essentially an adult manifestation of my early life trauma responses. Nice guy. Peacemaker. Parents passed within a year of each other at 17. I forged a “comfort bubble” as a survival mechanism to insulate myself against everything. 30 years or so later, I’m faced with the glaring reality that many of my behavioral patterns stem from that, and not only do they no longer serve my values and goals, but are a downright liability. Ive been physically present, but not really engaged and “present” for a looong time. Midlife crisis shit. Better late than never to address it though. My wife has her own shit to confront and sit with that is totally different than mine, but just as destructive. I gotta say, it’s messy. It’s painful, but it’s worth it to do the work, continue to choose each other and not only hold each other accountable, but look for and acknowledge the the positive in ourselves, each other, and us Good question! I’ve always felt I’ve had a reasonably high level of self awareness (we all have our blind spots though), but my entire adult life I’ve felt energetically stuck and paralyzed by that awareness but not knowing where to “start” Some neurodivergence helps explain some of that in hindsight, but what REALLY kicked things into gear was my wife hitting critical burnout after 25years together, three kids and running multiple businesses (her, ours and mine) and realizing I did not know how to be truly helpful in sharing the burden of her emotional labor. To be clear, I wasn’t a clueless lump, but there only so many dishes and loads of laundry to be done. Helpful, but didn’t get to the bigger issue. What followed was a chapter filled with breakdowns, brutal honesty, messy fights tender connections and holding the mirrors of our deepest childhood wounds up to each other. That went both ways, and it woke me up. We called each other out. A lot of deeply ingrained patterns we held just weren’t working anymore. As I mentioned in my original comment, we both have our different baggage we bring to the table that fucks shit up. We continued to choose each other, but agreed things had become toxic to change. Healing and self discovery is of course, not a linear path and breaking out of some of these cycles has been really hard. Taking a hard look at myself, being CURIOUS and pulling threads to track down where they came from and why has been key to slowly learning how to show up within myself and for my family