Second, we react emotionally to events. We feel angry, hurt, sad, peaceful, content, anxious, joyful, and so on. The event could be something like getting a promotion at work. We might feel happy about it, joyful maybe, possibly even anxious about the extra responsibilities that go with the promotion. Whatever our feelings may be, we are wired to respond emotionally to life.
Third, we often react behaviorally to the things that happen to us. We may yell, pace, cry, hit, hide, or whatever, but we humans often show what we are feeling by our behavior. Someone feeling anxious might bite his fingernails; someone feeling angry might slam a door; someone feeling sad might cry. The exception to this is that some people “stuff” what they are feeling and won’t show you through their actions that they are feeling anything. Someone could be very angry about something but put a smile on his face to throw you off the trail.
Here is what I want you to do. For one week, I want you to keep a journal of how you react to things. Make two columns. The left column has “A” at the top, and that is where you need to describe the event. The right column is the “C” column, and that is where you write down how you reacted physiologically, emotionally, and behaviorally. To help you along, I have presented some examples for you:
“A” (Event) “C“ (Response)
1. Got stuck in traffic 1. Physiological: muscles got tight, sweated some Emotional: felt angry, anxious Behavioral: honked my horn, rode people 's bumpers, cut in and out of traffic
2. Was told I did a good job on a report at work 2. Physiological: breathing got shallow Emotional: felt happy, proud Behavioral: called a friend and told him what happened
3. Received an overdue bill notice 3. Physiological: heartbeat got faster, breathing became more rapid, muscles tightened Emotional: felt worried Behavioral: bit my fingernails, ate a bowl of ice cream
These entries ought to give you a good idea of what to put into your journal for a week. The purpose of this growthwork is to make you more aware of how you are reacting to the events that happen to you. Pay special attention to any reactions that show up frequently and/or were way out of proportion to the event.
In keeping this journal, you will learn important things about yourself. You may realize that physiologically, you tend to respond to a lot of events with rapid and shallow breathing or muscle tension. You may come to see that emotionally, you worry quite a bit or get angry often. You may realize that you behaviorally respond to stressful events by overeating or working too much or watching television. Be careful not to use this information for self-condemnation—that only makes matters worse. Use this information for the sake of better understanding yourself so that you can make positive changes.
4
MARITAL LIES
To understand the realities of the marital relationship
it is essential first to recognize the unrealities.
—William Lederer and Don Jackson1
Joe and Carol had a storybook romance. He was handsome and attentive. She was stylish and smart. They became engaged and expected to live happily ever after. Then they got married. And instead of happily ever after, they were living unhappily all too soon. Where Joe once seemed handsome to Carol, he now seemed vain; where he once seemed attentive, he now seemed controlling. As for Carol, she no longer seemed stylish and smart to Joe, but materialistic and a know-it-all. Soon they were fighting more often than not and have been ever since. Two nice people who were very much in love turned into two unhappy people wondering if they had made the biggest mistake of their lives.
What happened? Nothing that couldn’t happen to any couple. Reality moved in. When Joe and Carol married, both had very unrealistic notions of what life together would be like that came straight from fantasyland. When real life didn’t live up to their dreams, troubles ensued.
Marriage is hard work. Yet blinding romantic notions keep us from seeing that. Many couples experience a great deal of heartache and misery after they walk down the aisle because they never understood how faulty their beliefs about marriage were before they walked down the aisle.
In this chapter, I want to explore six lies that wreak havoc on most marriages. Many couples would not admit to believing these lies because they are so clearly unrealistic ways to think. Yet if you look at the destructive way spouses actually act toward each other, it is clear that these lies are the underlying cause.
An old joke says there are three rings in marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and suffering. The lies we are about to examine are the primary cause of the suffering that many couples experience. They are also the reason why so many people divorce. If we want to save our marriages, we have to overcome these lies.
“All My Marital Problems Are My Spouse’s Fault.”
Have you ever heard the expression, “It takes two to tango”? Well, there are far too many married people who simply don’t believe that. They believe that it takes one to tango. They believe that the marriage they are in is in horrible shape solely because of the other spouse—that he or she is the reason that things are going badly.
It was clear from the very first minute of my initial session with Joe and Carol that they believed this lie. Joe sat with his body turned away from Carol, Carol with her legs crossed away from Joe. And each started into the “all your fault” tirade.
“Dr. Thurman, Carol never has a kind word to say to me. I want our marriage to be a good one, but how can it be if she stays on me like she does all the time? She always finds something to be upset with me about,” said Joe.
“That’s because you come home from work and complain about how little you think I do and how awful you think I am,” Carol answered.
Joe shot back, “If you did more around the house and treated me better, I wouldn’t complain so much.”
Carol sat up indignantly. “Yeah, well, if you didn’t complain so much, I’d feel more like straightening the place up and being nicer to you,” she countered.
They had played this game of verbal volleyball all their married life. Both admitted they had argued like this for twenty years, and neither seemed willing to call a time-out and look at his or her contribution to why the marriage had been so bumpy. When I tried to open their eyes to what each was doing to create an unhappy marriage, you would have thought I had spit on the American flag.
They were in no mood to look into their own backyard. Each clearly felt that the marriage was troubled solely because of the other.
The truth about marriage is that it is a relationship between two people who pool all of their strengths and weaknesses together to cocreate what happens. All of a marriage’s problems are never one person’s fault. Yes, a specific problem may surface between a husband and a wife that is caused by one person, but even then, how the offended spouse reacts plays a huge role in making things better or worse. It takes two to tango in marriage, even when one spouse may be stepping on the partner’s toes the most.
Think of marriage as playing mixed doubles in tennis. Individually, both players have some shots they hit well, some they hit okay, and some they are not very good at. Their respective strengths and weaknesses may differ—he may be good at volleys but bad at backhands, whereas she may be good at serving but not so good at lobs. One player may actually be better overall than the other (although, in general, people marry at the same “skill” level), but they are still playing as a team. We have heard something said many times in the sports world that is true in the marital world—you win as a team; you lose as a team.
The “all your fault” lie is basically the message that “I have my act totally together and you are a complete mess. If it weren’t for you, we would be getting along fantastically.” People, listen up: no one has his act totally together. All of us have flaws, and the flaws make our marriages less than fantastic.
Try telling all this to Patty, who found out two months ago that her husband had an affair. She feels crushed by this revelation, as anyone would, but she unfortunately takes this a deadly step farther. Patt
y is convinced that her husband’s affair is the reason their marriage is on the rocks and that he is to blame for all the misery they are now going through.
“What he did destroyed our marriage,” she spewed during our most recent session.
“How so?” I asked, knowing full well what she was saying.
“I will never be able to trust him again! I can’t even bear to look at him! I could just kill him!” she exploded.
“I know you are in a lot of pain over this, Patty, and understandably so. At the risk of sounding insensitive, though, I want to explore something with you, okay?”
“Okay,” she said with hesitation in her voice.
“We have been talking about what your husband did for a while now, and we have spent a lot of time focusing on how much you hurt and how much this has damaged your ability to trust and respect him. It is what I haven’t heard you say that concerns me,” I offered.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I haven’t heard you say anything about yourself yet.”
“About me?”
“Yes, about you.”
“What is there to say about me in all this? I didn’t have an affair. I didn’t break our vows. I didn’t betray him. What have I got to do with any of this?” she said defensively.
“Don’t you think it takes two to make a marriage what it is?” I asked.
“Yes, but are you saying it is my fault he had an affair?” She was almost yelling.
“No, not at all. That was his choice, and it was a very selfish, destructive one. What I’m saying is that I’m concerned about the fact that you haven’t said anything about the part you have played in the marriage not being a good one. From what you have said, his affair is the only reason the marriage is in trouble. From that, I would take it that you don’t think you have done anything wrong,” I stated, knowing full well I was on pretty thin ice.
“Sure, I have done some things wrong,” she begrudgingly admitted, “but nothing like this. He has wrecked everything, and I don’t know if I can ever love him again.”
“Let me ask you this. Before you found out about the affair, would you say that you were more loving toward your husband than he was toward you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you believe that you were more caring, supportive, attentive, affectionate, understanding, and so on?”
“Yes, I was,” she said without missing a beat.
“Were you all of those things all of the time?”
“No, but who is? I met a lot more of his needs than he ever met of mine,” she bragged.
“But there were ways you didn’t meet his needs when you could have, right?”
“Of course. I didn’t have an affair, though. He did. Should I just act like that is no big deal and sweep everything under the rug?”
“No, what he did was a big deal, and sweeping it under the rug only allows it to fester. I just wonder how your marriage is ever going to heal if you aren’t willing to do what he has already done.”
“What, have an affair?”
“No, come clean about what you have done in the marriage that has contributed to its being so troubled. You seem to have a pretty bad case of the ‘all our problems are his fault’ syndrome, and you are looking right past the part you have played.”
“What part have I played?” she asked incredulously.
“Let’s talk about that in the next session.”
Patty was in a lot of pain, and my effort to get her to examine her behavior in the marriage was risky, to say the least. Her pain was keeping her from being willing to look at herself. All she could see was what her husband did. Since she had been told about his affair, all she had done was hammer away at him for what he had done, spending little, if any, time looking honestly at herself.
Intense emotional pain triggered by something such as a spouse having an affair has a way of interfering with our willingness to do any honest self-examination. Yet I knew Patty had to do that to save her marriage. I pushed her for weeks to find the courage not only to honestly face what her husband did and what it said about him but also to x-ray herself to see what was cancerous in her own soul. I challenged her to examine all the ways she had wounded him over the years by not being loving. Patty responded to this by continuing to blame her husband for all of their marital woes, and a little more than a year from the time her husband told her about his affair, they ended up divorcing.
For a marriage to work, each spouse must take to heart the biblical teaching to look at the plank in his or her own eye before pointing out the speck (or plank) in the spouse’s eye.2This does not mean stuffing your feelings about what your spouse did, downplaying things, or taking any responsibility for your spouse’s destructive actions. It just means that until you honestly look at who you are, you will be unable to respond to your spouse properly when he or she messes up.
Can you imagine a marriage in which each spouse puts this one teaching into practice? Can you picture a relationship in which each spouse looks honestly at personal flaws and takes responsibility for his or her actions each day? Can you imagine a relationship that involves two people who stay in their own “backyard” rather than peering over the fence into the spouse’s? It would be something!
The next time you are tempted to blame your spouse for all the problems in your marriage, I want you to think about Patty. She is at great risk of spending the rest of her life bitter and alone, a pretty high price to pay for seeing herself as a problem-free person. If pride does go before destruction, she would be a classic example of that truth.
It takes two to tango. Say that to yourself a dozen times a day. Etch it in your brain. The next time your spouse does something you feel hurt and upset about, you will need to play that tape as loudly as possible in your soul. If you don’t, your chances of a good marriage are zero.
“If Our Marriage Takes Hard Work, We Must Not Be Right for Each Other.”
Back at the beginning of this chapter, I said marriage is hard work. Make that marriage is very hard work. Tremendously hard work. Underline it. Boldface it. Tattoo it on your forehead. Any marriage that has achieved intimacy through the years has been worked on. It’s a truth, though, that very few understand. So the moment marriage isn’t easy or smooth, a lot of couples begin to think, We must not be right for each other. Otherwise we wouldn’t have to work so hard.
As strange as it sounds, I’d argue that hard work in marriage often suggests you married the right person. The hard work reflects the fact that all of us have a lot of things we need to improve in order to be better people. Isn’t it amazing how often a person will complain that he has married someone who seems to “bring out my worst”? But I wonder if that isn’t the beauty of it? Someone bringing out our worst can lead to enough pain and unhappiness to make us more serious about working on “our worst.”
Lately, I’ve been seeing a couple in therapy who fit this scenario. Cheryl and Stan have been married less than a year and fight about something almost every day—large things, small things, anything. They have few interests in common and feel bored with each other. They spend little time together talking about how they feel because they find it painful. And their attitudes have spilled over into their sexual life, which is cold at best. They’d call it quits except that they’re both afraid to be alone and worried about how their friends and family would react.
They habitually sit in the two single chairs in my office, a king and a queen sitting regally, rigidly in their individual thrones—Cheryl, self-assured and immaculately dressed, Stan slouched and always in slacks and a rumpled sport shirt. Typically, they start each session blaming each other and wondering out loud if they’re hopelessly mismatched. I’ve tried to coax them to back off and look honestly at their personal styles.
“I know how frustrated you both must be with the problems in your marriage,” I said one day, “but I don’t think it necessarily means that you are wrong for each other.”
“Well, if it doesn�
��t, what else could it mean?” Stan shot back.
“Well, one thing your problems could mean is that both of you have serious flaws. Your fights are a symptom of how much both of you have to work on.”
Stan rolled his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Stan, you two fight over how often you watch sports, right? Is it possible that you are being somewhat selfish in how much time you spend doing that?” I knew he didn’t want to hear me say something like that.
He stiffened. “I love watching football. It helps me relax. You’re not asking me to give that up, are you?”
“Of course not. It’s not my place to ask you to give it up. It’s more important whether you think you should cut back some to help your marriage. It’s got to come from you. I’m just trying to get you to entertain the possibility that the fight you two are having over this issue could mean that you have some flaws to work on.”
“I have flaws. I know that! It just seems to me that our marriage ought to be easier than this. Why do we even fight over things like me watching sports on TV? That seems so stupid!” Stan groaned. “There has to be someone out there who it would be easier with.”
“Maybe, but all marriages are hard work,” I observed. “Looking for someone that it would be easy to be married to is an escapist fantasy. The painful truth is that your marriage brings out areas in both your lives that need to be changed. You’d just be taking those same flaws into your next marriage. I believe that you can grow the most in the marriage you are in.” And with that, I noticed neither of them was looking at me anymore.
For the time being, they are chewing on what I had to say. Their pain is so acute, their anger so intense, I worry they’ll divorce before the work they need to do is started, much less finished. I constantly remind them that their problems signal not that they should leave each other, but instead that they need each other’s help to work out respective flaws.
The Lies We Believe Page 7